Posts tagged ‘Coaching’

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

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.

Hello,
It’s Brian here, from Selling By Giving.

The current financial crisis has created a real “sink or swim” opportunity for hundreds of thousands of coaches, counselors, healers, financial advisors, real estate agents, and other self-employed service providers.  In the face of increased challenges, many people are losing clients or even closing up shop.  But some are actually growing their practices, often by $20,000, $50,000 or $100,000 a year.  What’s the difference between these groups?  Support.  The later group keeps reaching out for help, and keeps using each challenge as an opportunity for growth, rather than buying into the story that “I should already know how to do this.”

Lots of people are seeking that support.

We’ve decided to do something radical to help them.

And we’d like your help.

We’re giving away $1,000,000 in free practice building services this year, in the form of 10,000 life-changing practice building kits.  These $100 kits are powerful.  They come with 150 minutes of cutting edge content, a powerful diagnostic assessment, a 90 minute live teleclass, an e-book and e-coaching.

One woman told us she listened to the first CD over 20 times, because she got how deeply it spoke to a core challenge that had been holding her back.  Last week, she emailed me telling me she’d had more clients in the last two weeks than in the previous three months.

Another man just emailed me today, thanking us for his new level of inspiration and faith, “I have been having turmoil over the business and money, fears, etc. But now, after simply reading all of your websites, I am confident to the point where my fear is fading fast, I am not concerned with money nearly as much and I know I am on the right path FOR ME.”

This stuff works.  It can help people make a radical shift in their response to the crisis.  It some cases, it can make the difference between succeeding at their dream vs. closing their business.

Will you please help us to help others?  Will you please help us give away $1,000,000 in practice building kits?

To do so, please pass this email along to your friends.  And if you haven’t done so yet, please go to www.sellingbygiving.net to claim your free kit.

Thank you!
Brian

During these busy holidays, it’s easy to either skip over gratitude, or hold it as a “should.” Particularly during the current crisis, it’s all too easy to get caught in an inner conflict between the piece of ourselves that says “I need to be afraid, in order to keep safe…” and the piece that says “I should be grateful for what I have, if I’m to be a worthy person…”

So let’s talk about the power – and joy – of gratitude.

Gratitude – like honest service – is one of the highest vibrations on the planet. Fear and judgment are two of the lowest. So it doesn’t work very well to try and “should” our way into gratitude. It’s like trying to use darkness to create light. Instead of forcing gratitude, we find that it’s something that naturally occurs within us. It’s part of our truest nature – when we open to it, and let go of the fear and judgment that has been keeping us in the dark. Gratitude is joyful. It’s a song of thanks.

And it’s also powerful.

The spiritual law of attraction dictates that like attracts like. Put another way, “where you focus is where you go.” While we often think that the way to a happy life involves focusing on the things we want to avoid, or the things we’re doing wrong, negative focus creates negative results. Over the long run, the more we focus on what’s wrong, the more we’re going to experience the exact things we’re trying to avoid. Because of this, a core key to life is to focus on getting more of what we do want, rather than avoiding what we don’t. It involves holding a positive focus, particularly with our inner thoughts and judgments. This tool is illustrated by the following Native American story, as told by Ether Acosta.

“A grandson told of his anger at a schoolmate who had done him an injustice. Grandfather said: ‘Let me tell you a story.’ ‘I, too, have felt a great hate for those that have taken so much, with no sorrow for what they do. But, hate wears you down and does not hurt your enemy. It is like taking poison and wishing your enemy would die. I have struggled with these feelings many times. It is as if there are two wolves inside me: one is good and does no harm. He lives in harmony with all around him and does not take offense when no offense was intended. He will only fight when it is right to do so, and in the right way. But the other wolf is full of anger. The littlest thing will set him into a fit of temper. He fights with everyone, all the time, for no reason. He cannot think because his anger and hate are so great. It is hard to live with these two wolves inside me, for both of then try to dominate my spirit.’ The boy looked intently into his grandfather’s eyes and asked, ‘Which one wins, Grandfather?’ The grandfather solemnly replied, ‘The one I feed.’”

Gratitude is one of the most positive vibrations there is, and so connecting with our gratitude is one of the most powerful practices there is – not just as a way of being thankful for what we already have, but also as a foundational step in opening ourselves to more.

Interestingly, like with discipline, many of us have gratitude paired with judgment, scarcity, and fear. For example, I’ve found myself regularly thinking that “I should be grateful for what I have instead of wanting more” and “If I’m grateful for what I have, then this means I’m resigning myself to how things are right now, and I’ll never get anything more from life.” However, these statements aren’t accurate. Like Love, gratitude is not a choice between either being thankful for what we have or receiving more. Instead, it’s one of the fastest ways both to be thankful and to open ourselves to receiving more.

As some concrete tools for practicing gratitude, you can keep a gratitude journal, make a regular gratitude list, or create a family ritual where you teach the abundance that comes from gratitude, and then invite each member to state three things they are grateful for. Or you can work with the five core disciplines of spiritual psychology – acceptance, loving self-discipline, self-awareness, healing and self-forgiveness – as taught in the soon to be published book (really!) Love Beyond Belief.

“If the only prayer you say in your whole life is ‘Thank you,’ that would suffice.” – Meister Eckhart

Happy Holidays!
Love and light,
Brian

P.S. These nuggets are now available all in one place.  ecoaching.corecoaching.org – check it out!

I worked with someone this week who had become trapped by her yeses. In the name of friendship and caring, she had been giving away so much of her time and energy that she wasn’t taking care of her own practice and her own needs.

When we looked at this pattern, the challenge wasn’t that she was doing the wrong things, or that she was doing things she didn’t want to do. She loved what she was doing, and she loves giving to others. The challenge was that she wasn’t being honest with herself about what she was giving up with each yes.

She was pretending she could say yes to as many things as she wanted to, instead of realizing that every yes comes paired with a no – the no we’re silently saying to the other things we could be doing with that time.

This is fine if the things we’re saying no to are less important. But how often have you said yes to something just because it’s urgent, or because someone asked you to? How often have you said yes because you were afraid to say no? How often have you said yes out of fear of the voice that tells you “I should do this…”?

When we look at each request as a choice between saying yes or doing nothing, this allows us to avoid facing our fears and conflicts over all the things we “should” do. We ask ourselves, “Oh, it’s no big deal…I can just add one more thing to my plate, right?”

But in doing so, we’re lying to ourselves.

Because that one more yes is often the thing that shifts our motivation source from the loving self-discipline that comes with “I choose to…” to the pain based motivation that comes from overload and “I have to…” It’s often the thing that shifts our energy from love to fear, and shifts our choices from being based in freedom to being based in addiction.

It’s like sweets at the holidays. The challenge doesn’t lie in that first taste. It lies when we go for the tenth helping in a week. It lies in the tenth yes, where we commit to doing something we know is going to stress us out, because of our fears of what it would mean if we said no. (And what is stress? It’s simply a polite name for pain, fear and guilt.)

And notice the wording here. “The challenge lies…” Literally. To one extent or another, most of us are addicted to stress. And addiction always comes paired with denial and self-deception. It’s based in the lies we tell ourselves.

So as a practice, when you’re about to say yes to something, try asking yourself an honest question – “what am I really saying no to, if I say yes to this request?”

Or create a not to do list. And practice putting one thing on that list every time you put something on your to do list.

Because often times, what we do is much less important than how we are as we do it.

Love and light,
Brian

I received two nuggets this week that were particularly valuable to me. Even though my life is great and business is booming, I’ve felt myself getting pulled into fear this last month, around all the “market” events. As always, I find that I teach what I most need to learn…

Gratitude and Fear
“Notice the abundance of what you do have, right here right now, and let it in, really let it in. You may lose it all later, but for now, while you still have it, can you relax and be still, be comforted in what you do have in this moment? Worry when you have lost it all. Losing it all later is to long for what you have right now. Later you will notice that you didn’t appreciate it when you did have it. It would be nice to think, later, ‘I really appreciated it when I had it, I didn’t waste being grateful for a moment.’ … We could wait gratefully for years to lose it all and notice to the end of our lives that losing it all never happened. To open to what is reality right now is to see options that are unimaginable to the frightened, living-in-the-future, I-know mind.” ~ Byron Katie

Coaching When the Market is Down
“Individuals are eager for coaching…actually, the demand for life coaching goes up in ‘tough’ and scary conditions. People want to learn to depend on THEMSELVES from now on and not some company or their government or an investment gamble. Therefore coaching and training desires go WAY up…I had a field day during the financial plunge right after 9-11…when people are scared, they want coaching…they want to STOP depending on other people and institutions and start depending on themselves…” ~ Steve Chandler

Love and light,
Brian

Ever since my early high school battles with homework, I’ve sought to understand why I procrastinate – and what I can do about it. For decades, I assumed that procrastination meant either that I wasn’t trying hard enough, or that something was wrong with me. It’s only recently that I learned that this just isn’t true.

Procrastination is NOT a sign of laziness, cowardice or unworthiness. Procrastination is the natural result of using fear and guilt as primary motivators.

Procrastination happens because our body-mind has learned to be afraid of certain activities – and so when we think about engaging in those tasks, it shuts down our motivation or tries to distract our attention.

In some cases this happens because of genuinely physically painful experiences. For example, I’ve had a lot of painful dental work done, starting when I was 10 years old. As a result, my body-mind has learned to fear going to the dentist, and scheduling an appointment always seems like something that would be better to do next week.

In some cases procrastination happens because our mind has created negative stories about what that activity might mean. For example, if we believe that selling means taking, the thought of selling our services will often cause us to start procrastinating (i.e. “I’ll just work on these brochures instead – see, I’m working on my practice, right?!”)

However, the most common cause of procrastination is our addiction to negative motivators – it comes from our habits of using fear and guilt to try and push ourselves towards success. For example, when I first sat down to write about this, I told myself that “I have to get this done by next week.” And hanging off that thought was a silent “or else…” – a silent threat that if I didn’t get it done I was going to punish myself with feelings of guilt and unworthiness. Without realizing it, I was attempting to use the Cattle Prod of Guilt to push me forward – I was trying to shock myself towards success.

But after years of using the Cattle Prod as a way to motivate myself to get certain tasks done, my body-mind has learned to associate those tasks with pain (i.e. “work = cattle prod = pain = run away!”) So it naturally responds with procrastination as a way of trying to help me avoid that pain. And my natural response to this only makes the pattern worse. For I tend to respond by judging myself for my procrastination and “lack of motivation” (i.e. “I shouldn’t be avoiding this! If I wasn’t so lazy, I’d be working right now.”) In other words, I up the stakes and bring out an even bigger Cattle Prod. This causes my body-mind to associate even more pain with those activities, and over time I find myself having to get more and more stressed to get anything done.

Love and light,
Brian

“What is the meaning of life?” This is one of the great philosophical and theological questions. People have wrestled with this one for thousands of years, debating and arguing over their different ideas. And people will likely continue to do so, because this question isn’t one that our minds can really answer.

But when we move out of our heads, and into our hearts, we actually find that it’s pretty simple.

The meaning of life comes from growth and giving. It comes from growing, evolving, learning and changing. It comes from embracing our challenges, while also putting in place a level of support that’s equal to those “difficulties” so that we can learn from them rather than crumple in the face of them.

And it comes from making a difference, from giving love, and from serving others. When we give from a place of “I should” or “I have to,” we may experience our giving as a sacrifice, and deplete our own cup in the process. But the more we’re able to give freely, from a place of overflow – the more we give from a place of “I choose” – then we find that the more we give, the more we receive.

Does your life feel empty at times? If so, seek out your learning edges, seek ways to connect with the love you have inside, and seek to give from the overflow of love that is always within you.

Love and light,
Brian

As we grow up, we tend to develop a deep association that discipline means punishment. And when it’s sourced out of judgment and fear, this is accurate. Yet we all tend to believe that we “should” have more self-discipline. And so we end up in a battle between the parts of ourselves we believe need to be fought and punished – and the pieces of us who fear that punishment.

The way out of this dilemma is to learn how to shift from pain-based discipline to loving self-discipline. Because when it comes form a place of care and free choice, we find that discipline is one half of love. While love involves being accepting, it also involves holding loving boundaries for ourselves and others, and enforcing them when necessary. One of the biggest keys to this is learning how to be impeccable with our word. And when we do so, we discover that when sourced from a place of love, discipline means freedom.

We tend to resist these ideas, because we’ve been trained that our “bad side” needs to be punished or destroyed. If we look at our movies, books and stories, we find a steady stream of good guys killing bad guys, of heroes slaying dragons, and more recently, of heroines joining in the fray. Our earliest forms of morality are based on an “eye for an eye”. Some of our deepest instincts crave a justice of punishment and retribution. And some of our most basic aspects delight each time John Wayne delivers justice through the barrel of a six gun.

However, as Joseph Campbell illustrated in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, there’s a deeper meaning to these many versions of the archetypal “Hero’s Journey.” In the hero’s quest, the purpose of each trial comes not from the form of each triumph, but from how the trials push the hero to grow. For the real “dragons” the hero (or heroine) must overcome are their inner doubts and fears.

Similarly, our real tests are inner, not outer. And while we can choose to be ruled by a justice of retribution, we can also subscribe to a higher law. We can choose to grow through a justice based on restitution, forgiveness, loving boundaries, and grace.

Love and light,
Brian

P.S. If you are finding value in these e-coaching nuggets, please feel free to forward them on to others, or invite them to subscribe at www.corecoaching.org

The vast majority of formal education is based on teaching through models – intricate, tightly interconnected, hierarchically layered webs of ideas that come together to form tools of great power. These models can be smaller in size, like a 4-quadrant grid, or larger, like the field of calculus. In contrast, distinctions are one of the fundamental building blocks that models are made of.
If we picture a model as an “intellectual web,” connections are the strands of the web and distinctions are the nodes these strands tie together. For example, one of my nephews is currently learning his alphabet. This is a process of taking an undifferentiated soup of shapes and creating distinctions between each letter (i.e. this is an A which has the sound “ay”, and it is different than a B, which has the sound “bee”). Switching analogies, if a model is like a building, distinctions are like raw materials and tools we can use to build or remodel different pieces of these constructions.
The primary advantage of learning through models is the potential for rapid construction of new cognitive tools. Continuing with the building analogy, when we learn a new model, we’re adding a new construction to an existing landscape. Since we’re using blueprints that someone else has already created, we can quickly erect a new home, drop in a strip mall, or top off an existing skyscraper with a new penthouse. The challenge with models comes as we think we already know something. And particularly when it comes to personal and spiritual growth, unlearning is often much harder than learning.
The primary advantage of learning through distinctions is that a distinction can be easily applied and integrated wherever it’s most needed. If we send trucks of paint and brushes to a dilapidated housing project, they can easily be applied to the walls that are most in need of repair. Instead of building a new skyscraper, learning through distinctions allows people to upgrade their existing mental structures.
Both are important, but where models are heard as knowledge, key distinctions are heard as wisdom. Where we’ve been trained to teach through models, key distinctions are often more powerful, particularly when it comes to questions of deep growth and change.

Love and light,
Brian

P.S. This nugget came from the paper I’m presenting at the Integral Theory Conference on August 9, on the four keys for moving from theory to practice. For more on this topic, see www.corecoaching.org/TheoryToPractice.pdf