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.

Continue reading Sources of Inspiration for Your Coaching Business

It takes ample courage to be an entrepreneurial coach. There are critical decisions to make for your coaching business, such as choosing your niche or hiring a virtual assistant. Every day you get up the gumption to connect with prospects and enroll coaching clients. And there are so many learning curves to ascend.

Here are three ways to raise courage on demand, for all the leaps you need to take as you build your coaching business.

1. Realize That You’re in Good Company

There are millions of intrepid coaches and other business owners who have traveled this path before you. They have done and are doing exactly what you’re attempting now. And they felt just as spazzy about it as you feel now. But they did it, and thrived.

Tap into that collective fortitude. You can do it too! And you’ll not only live to do it again, you’ll become good at this (whatever it is that inspires fear today). Bank on it.

Continue reading 3 Ways to Find Courage for Your Coaching Business

There’s a vital business asset that almost never gets talked about, because it’s so hard to define. You could call it reserves, staying power, bandwidth – or resilience. Resilience is:

• When your computer crashes, you know who to call to help you recover.
• When your workshop doesn’t fill even though you worked hard to promote it, you focus on the lessons that will help you fill the next one.
• When something just isn’t working, you get twice as interested in how to make it work.

Whether you can define it or not, you can cultivate resilience. And you’ll be glad you did.

The Importance of Being Resilient

Almost everyone who starts their own business will get pushed to their limits, not once but many times. Face it, this stuff is hard. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.

To a large extent, the ones who succeed will be the ones who are the most resilient – the ones who can go to their limit and find that they still have something more in reserve.

Life’s not fair, and some people have been given a stronger constitution than others. But as always, the more interesting part is the part that is in your control. What are you doing to build your resilience today?

Continue reading Got Resilience?