Posts by author: Brian Whetten, Ph.D., M.A.

Hi there,
It’s Brian here, from Selling By Giving.

Gratitude. First off, thank you.  I received quite a few responses to the last email I sent to you (the 5am one) letting me know how it connected with people and provided them with value.  I’m all about feedback, and I greatly appreciate each email I receive.  While I don’t reply to nearly as many as I would like to, please know that I read pretty much every single personal email I receive, and I value them highly.

Inspiration. In the last two weeks (ever since the SANG conference) I’ve kept waking up in the early hours with different ideas I want to share.  Now, my friends know that I’m anything but a morning person, so this has come as a bit of a shock to the system.  Perhaps its training for the new baby that’s on the way.  And at least today I got to sleep in to 7am before things started up.

So, here are a few more (hopefully not random) thoughts again…

A question. When was the last time you broke out of your daily routine in a major way?

In the last two weeks, I attended a 3 day conference and a 1 week family reunion/vacation, and I’m astonished at the results.  I didn’t realize how stuck in a rut I’d gotten with some of my work stuff.  Now, it was a great rut.  It was familiar and productive, and while it was stressful at times, even my stress felt rather comfortable.  But it was a rut, and a lot of stuff was starting to feel like “have to’s” instead of “want to’s.”

It took immersing myself in two radically different environments (a retreat and a vacation) to shake me up – and OPEN me up.

Then in the Practice Building Academy call the other day, someone asked about  breakthrough-level retreats I’d recommend.

Here are my top 3.

1) Anything put on by the University of Santa Monica (www.gousm.edu)
2) Byron Katie’s school for the work (www.thework.com)
3) Insight seminars (www.insightseminars.org) – particularly Insight I and Insight II.

Love and light,
Brian

I recently started working with a gifted, committed, passionate coach. Like many, she moved away from a more traditional career in order to follow her heart and make a difference. And like many, she’s invested years developing her skills and expertise so she can offer exceptional value to her clients.

But then she did something most practice builders don’t do – she gathered her courage, took a leap of faith, and hired a consultant to help her build the business side of her practice. She realized that in order to be successful, she needed to develop as much competency in selling her services as in providing them. So she found someone who had a lot of experience with small businesses, paid him $36,000, did everything he said to do for six months…and generated virtually no new clients.

In fact, it was even worse than that.

This consultant didn’t just waste her time and money. He actually guided her to do things that were the exact opposite of what would make her successful. He pushed her to do things that felt out of integrity, that turned off potential clients, and that pulled her away from her purpose – all at the same time.

In response to her story, I realized there’s one thing, more than any other, I wish I could help every practice builder understand. If I could wave a magic wand, and give just one piece of information to every purpose-driven coach, counselor and healer in the world – this would be it.

Most standard business practices don’t work for purpose driven practice builders.

They don’t work practically and they don’t work energetically. They don’t generate the results we want and they don’t feel good when we try to do them.

Here’s why.

Your services are not an impersonal commodity.
Traditional business is based on selling the same thing to everyone. If you buy a Toyota Prius, you can customize a few things like the color and options, but you’ll still be one of 1.6 million people driving this car. Traditional business is a fundamentally impersonal process.

However, you’re not selling bananas, cars, or cheap plastic toys. You’re selling services that change people’s lives. You’re selling the equivalent of heart surgery. As such, what you’re selling is based on intimacy, which is the opposite of what most sales and marketing techniques create. (Imagine if you were to receive a coupon for heart surgery – Buy One, Get One FREE! Ridiculous – yet that’s what we often think we have to do to sell our services.)

Your value is not based on offering the cheapest prices.
Because traditional business is based on selling commodities, the primary way retailers can offer value is by selling things at a cheaper price. But that’s the opposite of what works for us. With coaching, counseling and healing, the number one thing that creates exceptional value is the level of commitment your clients bring to the relationship. If you have a client that is 100% committed to their growth and healing, you could read the phone book to them and they’d get value. If you have a client who is 100% committed to resisting their growth and healing, nothing you can do will make a difference.

Commitment creates value. And in our culture, one of the most powerful ways we commit ourselves is with our money. If you try to compete based on offering the lowest prices, you end up decreasing the value you offer – not increasing it. You end up doing a disservice to your clients and to yourself. Again, this is the opposite of how most business works.

Your value is not based on helping people hide from their issues.
When you’re feeling insecure or lonely, how do you deal with this? For most people, the answer is to consume something. Feeling bad? Eat something. Watch a show. Pop a pill. Buy new clothes. Drink a beer. Go on vacation. Buy a couch. Traditional business does a great job of enabling our addictions. It loves to help us numb out and hide from our issues by offering us sugar highs that feel good for the moment but come with a long term cost.

In contrast, our services are based on helping people embrace their issues and work through them. This isn’t quick or easy, and it automatically brings up deep, unconscious fears. In fact, the more value you offer, the more likely it is that people’s defenses will get triggered during the enrollment process (usually without them even realizing it). And when this happens, people automatically start thinking “I don’t have enough time or money to do this.” This usually isn’t true, and being of service involves learning how to lovingly work with this instead of helping enable their fears.

Your paradigm isn’t based in stress and scarcity.
Not only don’t traditional business practices work for us practically. They also don’t work energetically. They don’t feel good, or in alignment with our core values. So no matter how many times we tell ourselves that we “should” do more to build our businesses, we often find ourselves procrastinating or getting sucked into cycles of meaningless busywork. Or we’ll waste money paying others to try and find our clients for us. These patterns don’t work. Yet virtually every purpose driven practice builder I’ve worked with has them, because at the deepest levels, the energy most business runs off of isn’t compatible with the energy we’re committed to living our lives from.

Traditional business is based in stress and scarcity. Stress is the fuel source most people in business use to keep themselves motivated. They amp up on caffeine, deadlines, and endless to do lists. But what is stress? It’s a polite name for fear and self-judgment. Plus, the foundational principle of modern economics – the law of supply and demand – is based on the assumption that prices are set by competing over scarce resources.

Yet we seek to live from a paradigm of abundance, and we seek to be motivated by purpose and inspiration rather than fear and unworthiness. And when we try to do business in a traditional way, we naturally find ourselves procrastinating – consistently – because of this core energetic conflict between how we want to be and how we feel business is “supposed” to be done.

So how do we work with this?

Being successful as a coach, counselor, healer, or other type of purpose driven practice builder requires learning a new, different, more caring way of doing business. It requires letting go much of what we think we know about business, or how we think business “should” be, and learning what it means to do business in a way that works for us, both practically and energetically.

Selling By Giving provides a complete system that you can use to learn how to do so. It teaches what it means to do business in a new, different, more loving way. One that empowers you to make money and make a difference, while doing what you love.

And rather than try to sell you on why you “should” buy something from us, our goal is to build a relationship with you, based on a set of stair steps of trust and commitment.
Hopefully you’ve taken advantage of the first, free step – the $197 Practice Building Kit you can claim (for free) at www.sellingbygiving.net

Then the next step is either the Home Study Course or the 6 Month Practice Building Academy. Not sure which one would be best for you? If so, we’ve made it so you can’t make a wrong choice. If you start with the Home Study Course and then upgrade to the Academy, your HSC tuition pays for your first month at the Academy. And if you jump in to the Academy and decide it’s too much too soon, you can leave after the first month and keep your HSC.

Plus, both programs are covered by our exceptional value guarantees. So what have you got to lose? (Except any limiting beliefs about business that have been holding you back?)
Love and light,
Brian

After decades where we increasingly bought in to the idea that “what’s good for Wall Street is good for America,” the financial crisis is causing many people to question the nature of business. Is greed and corruption merely “business as usual?” Or can business be a force for good?

In the bubble, a lot of people got rich gambling with other people’s money. And when those bets turned sour, the losses were paid for, not by the people who made the bets, but by taxpayers and by millions who lost their jobs. When combined with the cases where big businesses have contributed to ecological devastation, Enron-style fraud, and childhood obesity, there’s a lot of anger about the way business is being done.

But here’s the thing. Capitalism is far and away the most powerful system ever developed for creating wealth and raising our standard of living. Over the last 190 years, the real per person income level in the US has increased from $1,200 to $31,000. Our level of wealth has increased so much that we now drive to our protests.

Capitalism creates wealth – enormous wealth – and this wealth pays for our homes, education, health care, social services, and the many non-profits we donate to.

The problem isn’t that business is bad. In its own way, business is already a tremendous force for good.

The problem is that most of this good is being done unconsciously. It’s being done almost by accident, rather than as part of a consciously defined purpose. Relentless, ruthless competition creates profits – lots of profits – but these profits come with a price.

As its most commonly practiced, traditional business has three core problems.

It’s short on purpose.

It’s long on fear.

And it’s unsustainable.

Purpose. A colleague of mine does a lot of work with boards of directors. These men (and yes, they’re almost all older, white men) have lots of grey hair. They’ve risen to the top of their competitive ladders. And yet their biggest question is usually, “is this all there is?” They’ve often sacrificed everything to their careers, only to find a sense of emptiness and a lack of fulfillment.

The reason for this is that traditionally, we’ve compartmentalized money and meaning. For-profits are supposed to make money. Non-profits are supposed to make a difference. And that has left many people in business feeling successful put unfulfilled.

Fear. At its core, traditional business is fueled by scarcity and stress – two polite names for fear. Why do people get corrupt and greedy? Because they’re afraid there’s not enough to go around. In daily life, we don’t get greedy for air. We don’t try to hoard it, or store it away, because we trust that there’s enough for everyone. But capitalism is based on relentless, ruthless competition over scarce goods and services – and that creates fear. Feeling stressed about work isn’t something special. It’s an automatic consequence of being part of this system.

Sustainability. Capitalism’s greatest strength is its unparalleled capacity for economic expansion. And capitalism’s greatest challenge is its addiction to that expansion. Our entire financial system is predicated on the assumption that GDP will always keep increasing. Stock markets, debt and retirement funds all depend on this. So does our monetary supply. But continuous exponential expansion is unsustainable, and we’re rapidly reaching its limits.

Capitalism is a system with tremendous strengths – and with equally tremendous challenges.

So the real question is not “can business be a force for good?” The real question is “how can business be more of a force for good?” How can it provide more purpose, less fear, and more sustainability? And how can it do this more consciously, rather than as something we try to just fit in the cracks?

Now, that’s a question worth investing in.

GM’s bankruptcy. Goldman’s bonuses. AIG’s collapse. It’s easy to look at what’s going on and say “How Stupid!” And this is true – but perhaps not in the way you think. This is because study after study shows that the core problem in business is not a lack of cognitive intelligence. It’s a lack of emotional intelligence.

Yet almost all of our focus, education and training misses this point.

Think about your work for a minute. What – or perhaps who – are the biggest challenges you face? What are some of the tactics you have tried so far to fix them? Do these issues seem stupid sometimes?

Well, they are. Not because the people involved are stupid, but because the core of these issues is usually emotional in nature, and can’t just be solved in our heads. People seem irrational sometimes because the roots of our issues aren’t rational.

The simple truth is this: at their core, 80% of unresolved issues are not intellectual or ideological, but emotional in nature. And while we receive many years of schooling for our minds, very few of us are ever given classes on how to work with our emotions and the emotions of others.

Emotional “blind spots” are often the most prevalent – and most crippling – at the top of the company. Think about Enron. The executives there were known as “the smartest guys in the room” yet they managed to do some remarkably stupid – and illegal – things. Now we could look at them and say they were bad, evil people, and we’d never do such things. But is that really true? In my experience, everyone is doing the best they know how to get their needs met. It’s just that sometimes, our best isn’t enough. And most of the time, this is because we haven’t yet developed enough emotional intelligence to deal with the challenges we face.

In Developing Management Skills, David Whetten and Kim Cameron summarize this research.
“A study of UC Berkeley Ph.D.’s over 40 years found that EQ was four times more powerful than IQ in predicting who achieved success in their field – even for hard scientists. A McBer study comparing outstanding managers with average managers found that 90 percent of the difference was accounted for by EQ. In a worldwide study of what companies were looking for in hiring new employees, 67 percent of the most desired attributes were EQ competencies. In a study of highly emotional intelligent partners in a consulting firm … the high EQ partners contributed more than twice as much revenue to the company as did the low EQ partners.”

Think about GM. From 1984 – 1999, GM was the #1 company in America. In 2009 it declared bankruptcy. For decades GM was able to hire from among the smartest graduates our schools had to offer. If we were to test the IQ of its people, it would surely be well above average. But over time, it developed a culture that was more and more dysfunctional. The conflicts between labor and management kept getting worse, escalating bureaucracy made change increasingly difficult, and a creeping sense of entitlement sucked away its competitiveness and creativity.

Because here’s the thing. Emotional problems breed. Once an emotional issue has taken root in a company, it grows. It spreads. It infects others. Like a cancer, it eventually metastasizes, to the point where it can kill a company. Saturn was created as a way of reinventing the way GM did business. For a while it worked brilliantly. But eventually the emotional diseases in the parent company took over.

This is why companies report such incredible returns from coaching. Great coaching is all about training people – in direct, pragmatic, applied ways – on how to increase their emotional intelligence. It supports companies in curing the root of their problems, instead of just focusing on the symptoms.

One study of 140 companies showed that they received $5 for each $1 spent on coaching. Another study measured an ROI of 600%. “Asked for a conservative estimate of the the monetary payoff from the coaching they got, these managers described an average return of more than $100,000, or about six times what the coaching had cost their companies.” – Fortune, 2/19/01

In my work as a coach, I’m regularly amazed by the level of hard results that occur when we focus on the “soft” side of the business. As Roger Enrico, a Vice Chairman of Pepsi stated, “The soft stuff is always harder than the hard stuff. Human interactions are a lot tougher to manage than numbers and Profits and Losses.”

So how do you work with this? In a series of upcoming columns I’ll be walking through 7 Secrets of Emotional Intelligence. Or if you want, please feel free to jump ahead and download the whole article.

Additional resources are available at http://www.corecoaching.org/resources.html.

Do you have any questions on this topic? If so, please feel free to send them to corecoaching@corecoaching.org and we may answer them in a future column.

The financial industry is based on trust, and in the last year Wall Street has lost a ton of it. So what are we to do about this? In the face of all that’s going on, who can you trust?

The bad news is that large pieces of the industry aren’t all that trustworthy. Not because they’re liars or cheats (or at least not necessarily). But because so many people have bought into a series of lies – a set of widely held myths that cause individual investors to lose hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

The good news is that there’s a terrific new book, The 12 Investment Myths by Jack Calhoun, that exposes many of these lies and gives terrific guidelines for knowing who to trust. It’s short, simple, sweet and powerful. Ideally, it would be required reading for anyone with a 401(K) or stock portfolio.

From 1987 – 2007, the average stock-fund investor made 4.5% per year, while the stock market’s return (as measured by the S&P 500) was 11.81%. Why the huge difference? Because so many individual investors buy into these 12 myths.

In particular, studies consistently show that a blind monkey throwing darts at a list of stocks would do better than the average mutual fund, yet much of the industry’s profits are based on pretending this isn’t true.

Here are three key excerpts from the book, reprinted with the author’s permission.

“MYTH 1: A Savvy Investor Should Be Able to Beat the Market

FACT: Hope springs eternal for investors that they can find the market-beating guru to lead them to easy riches. But active managers have a nearly insurmountable hurdle to overcome due to the high costs associated with frequent trading. Those few managers who beat their benchmarks are usually flashes in the pan and don’t sustain their winning ways for long. Investors who fall prey to the siren song of the market-beating guru usually end up experiencing only disappointment and lost potential earnings as they migrate from one high-flyer to another just as the managers are poised for a return to mediocre performance.

SOLUTION: Learn to joyously accept the fact that the market is your friend to be embraced, not an enemy to be vanquished. Earning market rates-of-return is hardly accepting “average” returns, because historically the market beats more than 80% of active managers.”

“MYTH 2: Brokerage Firms Are Built on a Client Service Model

FACT: The big brokerage firms are not built on a client-service model; they are built on a product-distribution model. The endless, massive fines those firms keep incurring for violating their investors’ best interests testify to this fact. Brokers who are compensated by the products they sell cannot claim to be objective and do not meet a fiduciary standard of care for their clients.

SOLUTION: If you want to work with an advisor, find one who is an independent, fee-only Registered Investment Advisor. Such RIAs cannot accept commissions and act as fiduciaries for their clients, meaning they are required to put their clients’ best interests ahead of their own.”

“MYTH 3: It’s All about Performance

FACT: It is one of the great ironies of investing that the more you make investment decisions based on performance, the more likely you are to experience poor performance. The reality is that the performance of stocks, funds and managers is usually attributable to what market sectors have recently been in favor. Since those sectors cycle in and out of favor quickly and unpredictably, investors who chase returns usually miss the run-up and arrive just in time for the downturn.

SOLUTION: Since you can’t control which segments of the market are going to be hot going forward, select investment vehicles based on factors that you can control in the investment process: sales charges, expense ratios, and trading. Keeping such expenses to a minimum (or, in the case of sales charges, avoiding them altogether) is much more predictive of future success than chasing returns.”

The bottom line? If you want to know who to trust, a great start would be to learn these 12 myths and avoid those who buy into them.

Love and light,
Brian

P.S. At root, many of the financial industry’s challenges come out of the same core conflict we address in Selling By Giving. Jack Calhoun’s investment management company is a great example of a conscious business, in that they’ve figured out how to cleanly integrate sales and service and have a tremendous commitment to providing exceptional value.

Deep down, most service professionals don’t really want to build their practices. They wish their clients would just show up. They wish they could just provide their services without having to sell those services.

Not because these professionals are lazy. Or unworthy.

But because of a profound inner conflict. A conflict between their feeling that selling means taking while their services are about giving.

This conflict isn’t irrational. It’s the natural result of growing up in a culture driven by mass marketing. Think about it. When you open your mailbox, what do you get? Unwanted advertising. When you turn on your TV? Unwanted advertising. Receive a call from a telemarketer during dinner? Unwanted advertising.

We naturally learn to feel that selling means taking, because mass marketing is based on interrupting people. It’s based on taking your attention away from what you care about, and redirecting it to something the marketer cares about. It’s based on a subtle but persistent form of violence.

This leaves service professionals feeling like they’re caught between a rock and a hard place. Either they embrace mass marketing as a necessary evil, or else they suffer along without a lot of money or clients. Either they build a business based on taking or else they sacrifice themselves for their calling.

Because of this, most practice builders struggle. 80% of coaches make less than $20,000 a year. It takes the average therapist five years to build a practice making at least $50K a year after getting their license. And 95% of new businesses fail within five years or else limp along as a continual drain on the founder’s time and energy.

But here’s the thing.

Mass marketing is dying.

Interruption based marketing is being replaced by permission based marketing. Indiscriminate advertising is being replaced by web of trust marketing. And selling by taking is being replaced by Selling By Giving.

In the words of Seth Godin, mass marketing is being replaced by people who are willing to lead a tribe.

This isn’t just pie in the sky. The most successful company in the Internet is based on permission based marketing. Google grossed over $21 billion last year, serving us with advertisements we want to see, when we want to see them. In contrast, newspapers who built their businesses on interruption based marketing are dying out, even though they provide a crucially valuable service.

If you feel that selling means taking, it doesn’t matter how pretty your web site is, how many marketing consultants you hire, or how good your services are. You’re still going to feel like you have to choose between selling out – or not selling at all. You’re still going to feel like you have to pick between creating a business that creates money or meaning. (Besides, it turns out that mass marketing never really worked for service professionals anyway.)

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Instead, we’d love for you to come join the movement of service providers who are pioneering a new, more loving, more successful way of doing business.

Love and light,
Brian

P.S. I was awed by the results from the most recent graduates of the 6 month Selling By Giving teleclasses. For example, one student created $20,000 of new income during the second half of the class and many students reported transforming their relationship to sales. If you’re interested in being part of the next set of classes, starting June 2nd, please visit http://www.sellingbygiving.net/teleclass.php and then call Scott at 310-722-1028, so he can help you determine whether or not it would be a fit for you. The classes are already more than half full, and the waiting list may start as early as next week.

If you’re a fish living in an aquarium, it doesn’t take a whole lot of ingenuity to discover things like food, rocks, bubbles, and other fish.

But it takes a genius to discover water.

In response to a recent article on conscious business, someone asked me “so, what do you mean by conscious?” And I got stuck. I couldn’t provide a concise answer. The whole notion of consciousness had become so core for me that that I was at a loss for words.

Then in my morning meditation today, I realized that the defining genius of some of my favorite teachers (such as Ron and Mary Hulnick, Steve Chandler, Ken Wilber and David Hawkins) is that like a fish explaining water, they’ve learned how to explain consciousness to other humans.

The picture below shows the ladder of consciousness. At the bottom of the ladder is death. As Steve Chandler points out, you’ve got to be a pretty good salesperson to close a deal with a dead person. And death makes it a lot harder to hit the quarterly numbers.

Just slightly above death is fear, along with its partners judgment and pain. Fear makes us stupid. It makes us un-conscious. At a physical level, it literally sucks the blood from our brains, reverses tens of thousands of years of evolution, and puts us into “fight or flight mode.” When we’re feeling scared, angry, hurt, stressed, guilty or unworthy, we’re in a very low state of consciousness. Most violence comes from this level of consciousness, as do most of the deeper challenges in relationships and business.

At the top of the ladder is the power of the human spirit. Think Gandhi, Chariots of Fire, and the firemen at 9/11. Think “yes we can.” This is where creativity lives, as well as inspiration, joy, love and peace. When we’re living life from the top of the ladder, we’re at the top of our game. Ideas flow, synchronicity connects, and we’re able to see how even the most painful challenges in our lives have been gifts for our learning and growth. This is a place of profound but grounded optimism – what Jim Collins calls Level 5 Leadership.

This grounded optimism makes a huge difference. According to Dr. Martin Seligman, “I have studied pessimism for the last twenty years, and in more than one thousand studies, involving more than half a million children and adults, pessimistic people do worse than optimistic people in three ways: First, they get depressed much more often. Second, they achieve less at school, on the job and on the playing field, much less than their talents would suggest. Third, their physical health is worse than that of optimists.”

When we’re at the top of the ladder we live life much more consciously than when we’re at the bottom. We see how interconnected life is, and we treat other people and our environment with care and consideration. Not because we “should,” or because we want others’ approval, but because we genuinely want to. From this place, we naturally shift our focus from a single bottom line to a triple bottom line (of profits, society and the environment.) We create businesses that provide both money and meaning. We create conscious businesses – organizations that are aware of the ladder of consciousness, and focus not just on what they do, but also on how they are.

Organizations which are not only aware of the other fish in the tank, but also of the water they swim in.

Small business is big business. In the United States, more than half of all jobs are in companies of 100 people or less and more than 10% of all people are self employed.

Yet most small businesses fail.

Why is this? And what can you do about it?

The biggest problem is that most small business owners don’t really own their businesses. They act like employees rather than entrepreneurs. They love providing their services, but desperately wish they didn’t have to do all that “business stuff” that goes with it. They assume that 80% of their success will come from the quality of their services. When in reality, 80% of success comes from the quality of your business systems. It comes from the quality of your recipe for success.

Building a business is like baking a cake. It requires a set of ingredients and a recipe. If an ingredient is missing, or a step is left out, it doesn’t work. Yet most practice builders focus all their energy on just two or three of the ingredients, and don’t even realize they need a recipe. Then they wonder why business always seems so tough.

Small business guru Michael Gerber says that the fatal assumption most service providers make is: “if you understand the technical work of a business, you understand a business that does that technical work.” In other words, we assume that all we really need to do is offer a great service and have great intentions, and clients will beat a path to our door.

But this simply isn’t true.

An employee asks “what do I need to do today?” A business owner asks “how’s my recipe for success doing today?”

An employee gets caught up in doing what’s urgent, and measures success according to how busy their day was. A business owner focuses on doing what’s important, and measures success according to the goals and key metrics of the business.

An employee builds a business through trial and error – by making all the mistakes themselves. A business owner constantly seeks to learn from others’ mistakes – by learning which recipes have worked for others, and which ones haven’t.

This challenge is particularly critical for coaches, counselors, healers and other service professionals. In fact, most practice builders have a hard time even admitting that they are a business owner.

If this resonates with you, here are three key questions to ask yourself.
1) Do I really want to be a business owner or an employee?
2) What challenges are standing between me and the business I want to own?
3) How can I get support with those challenges?

During the boom times, many people with employee mindsets managed to keep their small businesses and service practices afloat, without having to really learn how to own their businesses. That’s no longer working.

The good news is that there are tremendous resources available for small businesses and practice builders, to help you take this challenge and turn it into an opportunity. Here are two.

The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber – Required reading for small business owners
Selling By Giving – Conscious practice building for service professionals