Coaches: Are You Doing What’s Comfortable Rather than What’s Successful?

When you’re not coaching clients, how do you spend time on your coaching business?

Left to our own devices, most of us will choose to do first whatever is easiest. Nine times out of ten, that task will have the least impact on our success. It’s the way most of us are wired — to spend most of our time within our comfort zones. It seems the gentler approach, but is it really?

Successful business people spend 80% of their time on what will have the highest impact on their success. In fact, whenever possible, they delegate everything else. They know how to determine, in any given moment, what action will give them the highest return on their energy right now, and they do that first. It’s a winning habit.

How do you decide what your highest payoff action is in your coaching business?

Well, here’s the thing. You instinctively know… it’s the thing that makes you squirm. It’s the stretch. It’s the task or project that requires you to get centered, focus, take a risk, use your creativity or develop new skills. For example:

• Directly asking a potential coaching client to hire you.
• Doing research on your coaching niche market to determine what’s most important to them.
• Setting revenue projections and creating a marketing funnel to achieve them.
• Creating a coaching product and implementing a leveraged marketing plan to sell it.
• Asking readers to buy your coaching products or services in your ezine or blog.
• Presenting your key message to your target market and following up in a timely way with prospects.

Make your own list. Check each task for that squirm factor — that’s how you know you’ve hit the mark of a high pay off activity that will get you closest to meaningful contact with ideal coaching clients or increase your profit.

If a task is mostly mindless and requires little creativity or confidence – if it feels comfortable, then it’s most likely a low or no payoff activity. Getting caught up in email or administrative tasks are classic examples.

Short Listing High Payoff Actions

Are you ready to shake things up and get better results for your coaching business from all of your efforts?

Try this new daily habit:

1. At the end of each day, choose 1 – 3 high payoff actions for the next day.
2. Schedule time at the beginning of the day for those tasks.
3. The next day, after exercise and breakfast, focus exclusively on those high payoff tasks. Don’t even check your email first. Push aside all distractions.
4. At the end of that day, acknowledge your accomplishments.
5. Schedule your short list for the next day.

At the end of one week, notice how much more progress you’ve made. It might be helpful to have a mentor coach hold you accountable and help you adjust focus as needed.

Gradually, over the next few months, shift those no or low payoff activities over to a virtual assistant so that most of every day is spent on high impact efforts. Over time, your comfort zone will expand. You’ll naturally take bigger risks, leap higher and your coaching revenues will show it.

Warning: this new habit will bring you satisfying success!