Do you ever find your hand rising up to your forehead to try to coax your coaching business ideas out into reality? Whatever answers you’re trying to figure out rarely come from cognitive processing alone. True creativity is a much more open, organic process that starts with a spark of inspiration. But where to find that spark?
Here are three places to find reliable and quick inspiration that will catalyze ideas for your blog posts, coaching programs and products… maybe even your coaching business model.
Music & Art
To help my right brain engage when I’m generating anything – writing, planning or developing ideas into something usable – I stream Pandora online radio from my computer. With this online app, you can customize your musical taste. Consider buying it for $16/year – it’s well worth it to get rid of the ads.
Choose calming, wordless music – whatever works best to slow you down and keep your creativity flowing. (I like Karunesh, George Winston or David Darling.)
Anything you do to feed and exercise the artistic side of your brain will also help you bring more creative juice to your task list.
Nature
Nothing helps you get out of “monkey mind” like the natural world. I planted gardens and put up bird feeders right outside my office windows, and do my best to look away from my computer to rest my eyes several times each hour. If you have a window, watch the clouds roll by and the weather change. If not, take yourself outside more frequently.
During complex left-brain activity, human beings tend to breathe shallowly. If you’re feeling “stuck”, you might simply be out of oxygen, which is critical for creative process. So take a walk, and breathe in the outside world with all your senses. Moving your body helps you sequence out stress. And you’ll be resourced for what’s next in your coaching business.
Other People
Being a successful entrepreneur begins with realizing that you can’t get far in a vacuum. Observing and listening to other people is my favorite source of inspiration. Most anything you want to create for your coaching business can be informed by tracking:
- Your clients
- Competitors
- Mentors
- People you admire
If you’re targeting a viable coaching market, your clients will teach you most of what you need to know about to attract them, serve them well, and keep them coming back for more. And not only when you’re getting started, but as you continue to work with them, you build layers of understanding and appreciation for who they are. That’s how you experience a truly co-creative relationship.
“Competitors” are simply potentially collaborative peers. Your aim is not to compare yourself to them or copy them. Instead, pay attention to what they do, at certain times help promote them, and most importantly, allow them to show you how you can stand out in the crowd differently from them. There’s room out there for your authentic way of doing things.
Follow mentors and other people you want to emulate in social networks. Read their blogs and ezines, and pass them forward, not only for their content, but also as a model. Observe their product and program models, their delivery style, the different ways they promote and earn more.
- Save ideas for articles, programs and products in a “swipe” file (not to plagiarize but simply to spark your own original approach to the same topic, if it’s appropriate for your market). Immediately write a paragraph or two to get you off the blank page.
- Bookmark squeeze pages and share them with your webmaster to catalog ideas.
- If you read an email blast or auto-responder that really grabs you, notice what words and phrases kept you reading.
You will always do everything your own way, but why not get a seed of inspiration from your environment? You don’t have to implement everything now. Let these ideas wash over you and watch as a spark ignites inside you.
Observing thought leaders and experts in your field without attachment helps you switch on your originality. And if you put a bit of weekly attention toward cultivating this skill, you will very quickly discern what concepts, models and approaches best fit your own sensibilities and values. And then you can codify a way of doing things in your coaching business that’s perfect for you.
Staying inspired in the day to day building of your coaching business will bring you more joy and prosperity, and a greater positive impact on your clients as well. Please share here the ways you like to get inspired.
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