Business Coaching How to make $100,000 to $1,000,000 per year by helping small business owners succeed
Steve Chandler & Sam Beckford
Business Coaching. Copyright © 2006 by Steve Chandler and Sam Beckford. All rights reserved. No part of this eBook may be reproduced or copied in any form without permission from the publisher, Maurice Bassett:
[email protected] ISBN 1-60025-009-2 ISBN (13 digit) 978-1-60025-009-5 Published by Maurice Bassett http://www.ReinventingYourself.com Steve Chandler http://www.SteveChandler.com Subscribe to Steve’s Blog in a reader Subscribe by email Subscribe to Steve’s Podcast in a reader Subscribe by email
To learn how to shift the mind, visit: MindShift - The Ultimate Success Course
Bonus Materials on Page 211.
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Contents Introduction: Is your life not working? Chapter One: Can you really make a million dollars coaching? So how did I make $1,074,379? Chapter Two: Coaching requests will keep coming Always coach the top people E-coaching to e-wealth Chapter Three: Why choose coaching as a career? Getting clients out of their own way Chapter Four: Coaching activates your own potential Chapter Five: Every leader needs a leader Chapter Six: Show them that you mean it The fastest way for you to prosper Then why is my client not succeeding? Where do these lies come from? Coaches tell these lies, too? Chapter Seven: Truth to set coaches free Coaching Lie #1: I just need to know how to make this coaching venture successful Coaching Lie #2: It takes money to make money Coaching Lie #3: I just need to get my name out there! Coaching Lie #4: Experience will benefit my business! Coaching Lie #5: Lowering fees boosts business! Coaching Lie #6: You have to be tight-fisted Coaching Lie #7: Clients are hard to locate Make coaching referrals easy Then make the hard part easy Coaching Lie #8: I don’t need any help Coaching Lie #9: I am a victim of circumstance Chapter Eight: Anything we can do you can do better Always create a psychological end point! Where else did the $1,074,379 come from? The fifteen minute coaching session! The four secrets to coaching wealth Now the bad news How do we make it the best? Secret #1: You need to have an original magnetic lure that makes high-value clients call you
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7 8 10 13 14 17 20 23 26 28 30 31 31 32 33 35 35 36 38 40 41 42 43 46 47 50 51 53 54 57 58 61 64 65 65
Secret #2: You must reveal a radical “turn-around” concept to your potential clients Secret #3: Become affiliated with proven credibility to avoid the “guidance counselor” syndrome Secret #4: You need to be part of something bigger than you, and sell prospective clients on being part of something bigger, too Chapter Nine: Coaching gets your life in gear Chapter Ten: Get in this for the money Wake up to making money Chapter Eleven: Invest in yourself Chapter Twelve: You are the cause of your success as a coach Appendix A: Chapters One, Three, and Five from: 9 Lies That Are Holding Your Business Back... and the Truth That Will Set It Free Chapter One: “I just need to know how to do this” Chapter Three: “We just need to get our name out there” Chapter Five: “Lowering prices boosts business” Appendix B: “The hands-off manager as coach” from: The Hands-Off Manager Appendix C: “Coaching with incredible, life-changing power” A COACH’s Excerpts from: The Hands-Off Manager Appendix D: How to double your income as a coach
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“The old thought that one cannot be rich except at the expense of his neighbor, must pass away. True prosperity adds to the richness of the whole world, such as that of the man who makes two trees grow where only one grew before. The parasitical belief in prosperity as coming by the sacrifices of others has no place in the mind that thinks true. ‘My benefit is your benefit, your success is my success,’ should be the basis of all our wealth.” — Anne Rix Miltz
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Introduction
Is your life not working? "Either you will make your life work, or your life will not work." — Nathaniel Branden We get contacted by a lot of people whose lives are not working. Their businesses are not working. They want coaching. They want their lives to work again. But they don't see the problem. When we ask them to describe what they think is wrong all we hear about is other people. Other people disappoint them. Or scare them. Then we hear about circumstance. The competition. The economy. Their location. We know right away why their life is not working. A life of expectation is a life of disappointment. A life of trying to win the approval of others is a life of fear. Our job as coaches is to restore the creative life. Because a creative life is a life of action and huge energy for achieving large and small goals; it's a life of happy flow. It's never your life that's not working. It's always just you. But that's the best news there could ever be. A coach’s job is to get the client to see that and act on it.
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Chapter One
Can you really make a million dollars coaching? “All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination. Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.” — Napoleon Hill This chapter is a personal message from me, Sam Beckford. In it I speak directly to you about the underlying factors in my own success as a coach: In this book’s subtitle we say this book is about how to make $100,000 to a million dollars per year as a business coach. A lot of people think a million dollars per year is an outrageous, unrealistic figure that we just made up to give our book title and seminars some pop. To play on people’s hopes. Not true. We’re just writing about what we know how to do because we’ve done it. Isn’t that what you want to know from us? Rather than some theory? Aren’t most other business books just theories by authors who have never really done what they write about? I’m 36 years old. I live in Vancouver, Canada. My wife Val and I have two kids, Isabella & Benjamin. In 2003 I started coaching small businesses and made over $250,000 at that by working part time from my home office. In 2004 and 2005 I was able to double my coaching practice by doing group seminars and my gross revenues for 2005, as I’ve said, were over a million dollars.
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I myself do mainly telephone coaching rather than in-person coaching so I’m able to get clients from all over North America that just call me toll-free on an 800 number. My partner Steve Chandler has been coaching longer than I have. Steve is an internationally-known bestselling author (100 Ways to Motivate Yourself, The Story of You, Reinventing Yourself) and he commands big time coaching fees. Steve has been paid up to $20,000 a day to coach and train Fortune 500 companies’ top people. Steve does a lot of face to face coaching as well as telephone and email coaching of clients. Steve will routinely get an up-front fee of $20,000 to meet a client face to face for one half-day and then do follow up phone coaching for nine months. Steve and I are very different people and we have very different business models. Steve is 61 and lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Steve has more high level clients that pay big chunks of money up front for his coaching. My clients are smaller, independent business owners that pay smaller monthly ongoing fees that I bill to their credit card automatically each month. Despite the differences we have in delivery, the principles we use for success are the same. That’s the beauty of coaching: once you understand the core principles for success, you can do it any way that suits you. Steve also does a fair amount of coaching with small companies and individuals to supplement the work he does with bigger coaching and training assignments with Fortune 500 companies. Even though our business approaches are different the thing we have in common is that we have each generated millions of dollars from business coaching. Steve’s books have been used by other coaches worldwide as lead-generators and coaching “textbooks” for the last 10 years. Both Steve and I have been featured on national TV as guest coaching experts and have been interviewed countless times on radio stations across North America to discuss our business coaching secrets. Together, we’ve spoken to many hundreds of business owners in Phoenix, Vancouver and San Francisco. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed
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our partnership delivering live seminars together and also recording CDs together and doing teleseminars together. Many times people write to both of us simultaneously about the results they get from following the business principles and motivational strategies we teach. We’ve both experienced coaching success, although the routes are completely different. That’s good news for you. Because it proves there’s no one right way. There are a multitude of ways and you can choose the way that fits your own style best. The point is to truly enjoy yourself every step of the way. (As the great quarterback Fran Tarkenton used to say, “If it’s not fun, you’re not doing it right.”) We also know (with certainty) that if you will learn the core principles we are teaching you here, you will succeed. Every coach we have coached has done so thus far. Since we’ve made millions doing this, we would like to show you how to do the same thing. In 2005 I did $1,074,379 in revenue from my business coaching practice.
So how did I make $1,074,379? To begin with, I did it working mainly from home. There was a little bit of traveling, but not much (two times a year). Did I have a large staff? Not really. I had two part-time employees and neither of those two employees were coaches. One was an administrative assistant and one was a technical assistant that did tasks like website programming and helping me make CDs and record and create information products for the clients I coached. My work isn’t something that’s been leveraged and franchised and syndicated. It was just me. I was just being who you or anyone else could be. It wasn’t pie in the sky. It was very simple. It wasn’t 10
something that couldn’t happen for you—it was something that almost anyone who enjoys coaching could do. So how did I get my coaching practice up to the million dollar mark? It didn’t take a long time. The first year I seriously started coaching was in 2003! It took two and a half years! Before coaching, I was running a regular, ordinary small business, a music and dance teaching studio. (They are not known for being great money-makers. The old cliché about the starving teacher and the starving artist are often applied to music and dance studios.) But I decided to start learning every thing I could about business and motivation. I knew I had to, because the previous five businesses I was in had failed and I was at the end of my rope! I knew the formula to succeed in business was out there, and I was determined to find it and learn it once and for all. So I read a lot of books, and took a lot of courses and listened to a lot of audio products. I devoured everything I could find on business success, and applied it to my little studio. And the more of it I applied, the faster my business improved. It was funny because sometimes I would talk to business owners that said they had read some of the same books that I had read, but they weren’t becoming as successful as I was. My business just kept on improving! We would do better every month and soon I realized it wasn’t just a matter of knowing the information. It was a matter of applying the information. So a key success principle arose: it wasn’t good enough to just have the business information on “how to” succeed. I had to increase my self-motivational skills and “want to” succeed. I had to want to do the application every day. I had to embrace ongoing daily improvement. And I had to value execution. I had to consciously execute the good ideas I was learning.
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Many people go to seminars and read books and get excited about the ideas they learn but fail to execute. That’s their fatal mistake. So, when you see something in this book you like, highlight it, and copy it into a separate notebook you label, “EXECUTION.” Don’t make the same mistake. Don’t leave good ideas in your mind. Put them into execution. In your mind, they will rot away and be replaced by guilt and regret. But when you put them into action they will give you results. It’s a cause-and-effect universe, but you must be the cause. Decide today that you will be the cause of your huge success. That’s half the battle right there. That one decision you make. Put this up where you see it every day: BE cause. In 2003 I started coaching other businesses in my same industry. I sent out a mailing piece that said that I’d done really well in this business and that I’d taken it from scratch to these big numbers and if you want to learn how I did it, I will show you how. From that one mailing piece on, I started coaching. As we go along I’ll reveal more about how and what I did. By the end of the book, I’ll have shared everything important. Not one thing I share will be superhuman, or beyond what you can do.
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Chapter Two
Coaching requests will keep coming “Why wait? Life is not a dress rehearsal. Quit practicing what you’re going to do, and just do it. In one bold stroke you can transform today.” — Marilyn Grey
This chapter is written in the first person by Steve Chandler. His route to coaching success is completely different than Sam Beckford’s, which dramatizes how many ways are available to you to succeed: I did not intend to be a coach. My work was in the field of corporate training and public speaking and writing personal growth and business books. My own coaching career grew almost accidentally. About 15 years ago I was conducting motivational, sales and leadership training with large companies like Motorola, Intel and Texas Instruments. Soon the training and keynote speaking led to requests for one-onone coaching sessions with the same clients I was giving seminars and speeches to. Some days I would speak in the morning and then do five or six one-hour sessions that afternoon. Building coaching hours into a speaking contract was originally an unexpected way to add value. If a client questioned the large speaker’s fee I would often add some coaching in as a way to increase the value of my visit. Quite by accident I found that my coaching was doing the client at least as much good as the seminars and speaking. Working with people one-on-one was freeing them up to really change their
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thinking. It was allowing them to share their fears and limitations, and it was amazing to them how untrue all their limiting beliefs turned out to be. Soon I was booking full coaching-only days for clients I’d begun as a trainer to. So this is yet another option for you on your road to business coaching wealth. Train first, coach later. Speak first, coach later. And I have coaches on my coaching client list who do the same thing—they enter into a speaking or seminar relationship with a large company and then coach a large number of people inside that company. Now some of my larger companies book me in advance for a day of coaching. They set aside a small conference room and bring people in to meet with me for 45 minutes each, with 15 minute breaks for me between sessions. This is a good example of what Sam Beckford always tells his clients about — the inverse proportion of time and value: less time, more value! When I first started doing my full days of coaching at a company location I would charge by the day and then want to give them as much as I could for their fee. Whether it was $3,000, $10,000 or $40,000 (if a large keynote audience was part of the package) I did full hour sessions and ran them all day back-to-back without a let-up. Later I was startled to see that clients were even happier when I told them sessions were 45 minutes, not an hour. That meant less time lost per employee meeting with me—and when I started taking it down to 30 minutes they were even happier.
Always coach the top people When you coach companies like this, make sure you coach as high into the food chain as you can. That will deepen the value of your sessions and the higher up you go the more impact you can have on 14
the company’s success and evolving culture. This took me a long time to learn to do because years ago I was intimidated by top executives. But now it’s easy. It will be easy for you, too. And if the top leaders are shy about getting coaching, you can approach it this way: “I want to make certain that you and I get one of those 45-minute sessions while I’m there—or at least a working lunch—so I can brief you on coaching progress with your people—and so you can brief me on who you’d like to see receive the coaching on my next visit, and where you’re taking the company.” They always love that, and will readily agree. You will be surprised to see, once you’re in a “briefing” session with a top officer, how badly they want and need coaching! So you accomplish two wonderful things: 1) you get their buy-in to the work you’re doing with their other people; and 2) you get them personally hooked on the coaching process for themselves. Quite often the higher up a person is in a company, the less feedback he or she receives on their performance. And the feedback they do receive is often suspect. People in their company all come to them with an agenda, and they know it. As a coach, you have no agenda, so you can tell them the truth and they love hearing straight talk. It’s a refreshing change for them. If a CEO or VP of sales mentions a monthly or weekly meeting she or he is having with their people, you can offer to monitor and evaluate that meeting as a coach to that company. I’ve done a number of things like that to expand my value to a company I’m coaching. Once you are inside a company and trusted, you can keep your relationship fresh and vital by adding new people to the mix. With a major utility I offered to meet with all new employees to coach them on the owner-victim distinction. So every time they had accumulated 30 new employees I’d meet with them for an hour and give them a core Ownership Culture session. It became a regular part of their orientation process. (The owner-victim distinction from Reinventing Yourself is a session I teach coaches how to deliver in our business coaching wealth seminar.)
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As you coach various people inside a company you can also spot trends and opportunities for the leaders to act upon. So then when you’re coaching the leader you can move decisive breakthroughs forward from your unique vantage point as an outside coach looking in. The prestigious magazine The Economist reported that back in 2003 executive and business coaching was already a one billion dollar market, and Harvard Business School reported that it had doubled that figure in 2005. By the time you read this, you will no longer need to convince larger companies that coaching has value, they are already investing heavily in it based on the results it gets. A recent study conducted in the UK, and cited by Sean Weafer in The Business Coaching Revolution, showed that training improved effectiveness by 28 per cent whereas training plus coaching improved effectiveness by up to 88 per cent. When you introduce yourself into a company as their coach you have a great opportunity to give them a crystal clear understanding of what coaching is, versus managing. There is a place for both. But companies have come to realize that managing a project is not enough. There are people in that project not playing up to their potential, and coaching is required to shift their behavior. The old-style models of management-by-intimidation are not effective in the modern workplace. The military hierarchical paradigms that lead to bossing people only produce push-back in today's world of sensitive and creative information workers. But without a clear understanding of what coaching is, and how to do it effectively, the mere word "coaching" is used to mean everything from delivering unsolicited advice to threatening an employee's job status. You are now there to demystify the entire process and build the employees’ confidence in their ability to coach and be coached. The greatest impediment to coaching success occurs when the coachee clings to a "victim" position, and will not open to
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responsibility and ownership. This fundamental behavioral issue is usually ignored in companies but is addressed head-on by coaches who learn to coach the Owner-Victim Choice, which we outline in the 9 Lies book.
E-coaching to e-wealth Another wealth-producing activity for coaches can be done with email. Especially if you enjoy email, as I do. (Some coaches are not comfortable writing emails. That’s fine. Work to your own strengths — that’s always where the money is anyway.) For example, when I take on a coaching client I will add an email option. They will then receive my weekly Steve Chandler Message. (Some companies pay thousands of dollars per year to receive these messages.) The messages are from one to three paragraphs long and they contain an upbeat informative and inspirational lesson for recipients. Selected clients who have an additional e-coaching option can email me with questions any time during the program’s duration. It is pleasantly surprising how respectful people are of their coach’s time. Their questions are very pointed and poignant and lead to many useful exchanges. But they are brief enough for me to handle easily every day at the end of my workday. I look forward to them. The e-coaching option is yet another way to dimensionalize your coaching program so that you are not billing by the hour like a masseuse. You are now billing by the program — or by the overall contract. Your contract can include many things and e-coaching is a valuable aspect. Many clients love having that 24/7 connection to their coach and know that that kind of committed relationship is a deeper form of professional retainer than a mere hourly fee can embrace. It is your committed relationship to each other that provides the most value in a coaching relationship. It’s what your client is really
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paying for. The commitment that flows both ways. What do you charge for that? (Not enough.) What is it really worth? (It’s priceless.)
_______________________________________________ “We are all of us failures - at least, the best of us are.” — James Barrie _______________________________________________
James Barrie, who wrote the Peter Pan stories, has hit on something here. He has linked failure to being the best kind of person there is. And what he uncovers is that people who are not failures are people who have never gone too far. Who have always kept things safe. Who have figured out how to succeed within the narrow confines of their goals and then just stayed there, like riding the luge through a narrow turn. Where else can you go but through that turn? Sam Beckford talks openly about his five failures in business before learning the true principles of success and applying them. My own books talk about the profound failures I suffered in life before finding my way. Don’t think for a minute that anything you have failed at disqualifies you for coaching others. On the contrary! Failure suggests that you flew into something unknown to you and got rudely rejected. Like Elvis was rejected by the Grand Ole Opry who, at first, told him to give up this singing career because he was just too weird for country. Elvis also failed early in his career to make an impact in Las Vegas. Vegas was used to the glitzy rat pack crowd, and when he first went there Elvis was down and dirty rhythm and blues and rockabilly. He “failed.” One of the wonderful things about failing is that you can re-gather yourself, pick yourself up, dust yourself off and proceed. Now you know more. Now you’re wiser and stronger. And now you are losing your fear of failure because you know you can take it.
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James Barrie identifies a deeply profound mind shift when he says, “We are all of us failures - at least, the best of us are.” It’s a tectonic shift to think that the best of us fail and the worst of us have never failed at anything. It introduces the concept known in the Olympics as, “Degree of difficulty.” Your “failures” will help you and the people you coach.
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Chapter Three
Why choose coaching as a career? “Wealth is not a matter of intelligence. It's a matter of inspiration.” — Jim Rohn
Coaching has now become a multi-billion dollar industry, surpassing consulting as the preferred catalyst to small and large businesses. There are many reasons for this. But it is undeniable that business coaching is the hottest new career for intelligent people to get into. This may be the best reason we know of to choose this career: In business coaching, you have a continually replenishing market of prospective clients. At this writing, there are more than 20,000,000 prospective clients for you in North America alone! That’s how many small businesses there are. And the number is rapidly multiplying. You won’t be able to keep up with it. Finding potential clients should never be your problem. Especially once you learn our principles for bringing them into your practice. This book teaches you our principles. These principles have worked for us and every coach we have taught them to. They will also work for you. You can buy books about business coaching that are virtual encyclopedias. They are like textbooks. We’ve read those. But we’ve found that they are encyclopedias of the obvious. You already knew what they had to say. No big secrets are revealed.
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This book is not designed to be one of those. This book is designed to be unusual. Very unusual and surprising every step of the way. We have no interest in being the encyclopedia of coaching. We are only interested in telling you exactly how we ourselves have succeeded at this profession, and why our methods work when we give them to other coaches. Here’s the primary principle behind coaching success: You get what you give. That’s the key to your wealth. In any endeavor. You receive back exactly the value you deliver outward. Most coaches do not spend a very high percentage of their day delivering value outward. They spend their day spinning their wheels doing all kinds of things that do not result in client acquisition. Because no value is being delivered. If you spend a day or two making a brochure are you giving any value to anyone? If you spend days cold-calling is that the delivery of value? Or are you repulsing people with an overt attempt to GET value for yourself without giving any? If you want money, give it. If you want love, give it. If you want companionship. Give it. If you want more energy, expend more energy. Whatever you give to the universe you get back. If you can give your client the kind of turn-around that brings him a financial breakthrough, your own life will receive a financial breakthrough as a result. Most coaches do not do that. They don’t give financial turnarounds. They don’t know how. They give advice. They give their time. They give hand-holding. They give emotional support. But they don’t deliver a true turn-around to the small business they are coaching. Even though that is their fastest route to success! Can you see how valuable it is to know how to do this? Even “life coaches” would boost their earnings if they would take the time to learn to do small business transformations. Life coaches
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coach people who have businesses, too. What do they do when the person they are “life-coaching” is having a bad life because of a failing business? Can they help their client in that most important area too? Not really. Not usually. So what is the value of life coaching if the client’s business is failing? That’s why most coaches are still frustrated financially. If you are a success coach, it is unacceptable for you to be unsuccessful in business matters. It is not okay for you to be clueless about how to turn a business around. When you use our system, all that will change. You will know how to deliver prosperity and receive prosperity as a result of that. To dramatize this kind of coaching turn-around in the simplest, most dramatic way we could we wrote The Small Business Millionaire. (We are not saying this to sell you the book. But we would like you to read it if you haven’t, so go to our website and tell us if you would like a complimentary copy.) That little novel we wrote was based on what the two of us have been doing for many years: coming into troubled businesses and turning them around. We should have put this on the cover: “Based on a hundred true stories.” (As a side note, since that book has been released we get many emails like the one from a business owner we will call Susan. Susan wrote, “I read your book and halfway through I realized that my business needs a Jonathan (the book’s main character). Can either of you come do that for my business?”) Well, of course. That’s the whole point. Is there really a reliable, repeatable way to do what our coaching character Jonathan did in that business novel? Can you, as a coach, actually turn someone’s business around? And can you become wealthy doing it? Yes, yes, and yes.
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We’ve proven it. Jonathan is made up of true case histories. We have the evidence. Give wealth: get wealth. What our work in coaching has taught us is that there are nine potential energy blockages that stand between a business and prosperity. Free those blockages, and a business succeeds. Try it, and you will see the truth of this. When we first talk to a small business owner, our job is to listen for, probe for and let them reveal to us those blockages. So we and our clients can get the blocks out on the table. We have called those blocks “the nine lies.” _______________________________________________ "I never cease to be amazed at the power of the coaching process to draw out the skills or talent that was previously hidden within an individual, and which invariably finds a way to solve a problem previously thought unsolvable." — John Russell Managing Director Harley-Davidson Europe Ltd. _______________________________________________
Getting clients out of their own way And this is what our work has taught us: if our client can free himself from these nine lies he will prosper. But he has to get on friendly terms with the truth. He will win at business once he grasps that truth and reality are on his side. The free enterprise market is pre-set to propel a small business to success. The game of capitalism was designed to enrich each participant. No other outcome is possible
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once you get past the disabling and dispiriting lies that prevent success. So, why, then, do four out of five small businesses fail? The failure rate is actually even higher than that…it’s closer to 85%. Why is that? If the market is set up for success, why do so many people fail? The answer is similar to one your chiropractor might give you: a failing business is out of alignment. It is in dire need of an adjustment. It needs to operate on more friendly terms with reality, not on the twisted, false terms most people operate from believing lies to be true. Businesses fail because their internal system is flawed. They do not fail because of external circumstances. All that is needed is for the inner workings of a business to be realigned with external circumstance so that there is harmony. Yet most businesses, eight out of 10, do not see that. They, instead, keep focusing on external circumstances as the source of their problems: finding good employees, the cost of advertising, the competition, the mystery of customer behavior, bad location, economic climate, etc. etc. Once you learn the system we use, you’ll be amazed at how quickly you can help a client get on track to success. Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs occur in the first sessions you have. (Which is why you must learn to charge by the result and not by the hour.) And sometimes the turn-around takes a longer time, but your client can feel the new direction from the beginning. Typically not all nine lies are being swallowed at once by your struggling client at the same time. When we wrote The Small Business Millionaire, which was a composite story drawn from many success stories we’d gathered over the years, we had our fictional business owner suffering from five of the nine lies. And that was more than enough to put him in danger of going out of business. Sometimes the belief in just one of these lies is enough to put you out of business.
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(If you believe that something not true is true, you are immediately crippled. Your ability to get from point A to point B is gone! If you believe, for example, that a car engine runs on water, and you put water in your gas tank, that belief will keep you from getting to grandmother’s house for dinner. The truth is a necessary prerequisite to success. If a coach can come show you that it’s not true that cars run on water, and that it is true that cars run on gasoline, then you can now get from point A to point B. The truth will set you free. Always.) The ultimate secret of business coaching success is that you grow your business by growing your clients’ businesses. Once you learn a reliable method to grow your clients’ businesses, your own worries will be over. You’ll have a base coaching practice that is bringing in an easy six figure income, and your only pressing question will be how soon do you want to escalate that income. Steve Chandler’s coach is Steve Hardison. Steve has written about how Hardison’s coaching has turned his life around. He wrote about it in many of his books. Steve Hardison makes an easy seven figure yearly coaching income, and charges clients five and six figures up front to coach with him. Despite his large fees, clients all say, “I made that back many, many times over while working with him. He showed me opportunities I never knew were there.” Once you’ve mastered confidence in your ability to get results, there is very little limit to the fees your clients will be happy to pay you.
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Chapter Four
Coaching activates your own potential “If we did all the things we were capable of doing we would literally astonish ourselves.” — Thomas Edison When people tell you that they hope you reach your potential, they are usually talking about the future. Maybe you’re new to coaching, and your friends and former business associates are telling you that they think you will do very well in that field. You are so good at solving people’s problems, you’re such a generous listener and you are so committed to action. You have great potential! But haven’t you always heard that? Haven’t you always had great potential? Aren’t you a little tired of having nothing but potential? It’s time that you learned that best use of your potential is not in the future. It’s now. Because your potential is just another word for your talent. And the best use of your talent is right here, right now This whole “potential” syndrome has a lot of people annoyed and depressed. Picture them on their death beds without ever having reached that potential that so many people saw. It was always like a distant star, or a brass ring on the future’s carousel. (It’s like super coach Byron Katie says, “If you want to be miserable, get yourself a future.”)
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Your potential is not serving you if it’s always thought of as being associated with your future. Bring it home. Recognize its true nature: it’s in you now. When people see your potential, they are seeing something that’s already in you. Otherwise they couldn’t see it. People can’t see into the future. But they can see something in you. Your true potential is not on some faraway star in a distant galaxy out there in the future. It’s right here. Right now. You can use it today. You can read this book and get your coaching practice elevated to a new prosperity today. As fast as you can coach someone else to turn it around, you can coach yourself to do the same thing.
_______________________________________________ "Coaches motivate people to action. They help them prioritize their projects and goals. They help them plan their work and work their plan!” — Janet Switzer The Success Principles _______________________________________________
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Chapter Five
Every leader needs a leader "Between 25 percent and 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies use executive coaches." — Recent survey by The Hay Group, International Every owner of every company is flying blind without a coach. With no accountability and no one to answer to, the boss is at sea without a paddle. Every boss needs a boss. Every mentor needs a mentor. (Even one-person, home-based companies need someone to lead the leader.) Without a coach, the boss soon allows his own (or her own) emotions to run the show. Fear and euphoria whipsaw the boss’s mental state throughout the day. Finally, thanks to widespread acceptance of coaching, that problem is being solved. With the surging enthusiasm for coaching as the only truly responsible way for a boss to know she’s optimizing her own potential, small businesses are becoming even more of a force than they were ten years ago when they began to take over the world economy. Even larger businesses, like Home Depot, are realizing the power (and necessity!) of coaching. Home Depot’s CEO Bob Nardelli recently said, “I believe that without a coach, people will never reach their maximum capabilities". Do you like that quote? Become a collector of quotes like that. Keep a scrapbook. Have them handy. Deliver quotes and studies about coaching at the right time to interested parties. Know more about the effectiveness of coaching than anyone else on the planet. Make it your passion and mission to be expert in what coaching has done and can do. 28
_______________________________________________ “If you are playing to win, you will have a coach because the coach is there to help you win. This is one of the problems we have in our culture. It’s a beautiful thing, but it’s also a challenge. The beautiful thing is we’re self-motivated, can-do, we say, “Yes, I can do it and I can do it myself.” But the way the world is today, you can’t do it alone. You have a big vision, you have a desire to do something with your life that is very meaningful and you can’t do it alone.” — Dave Buck CEO, CoachVille _______________________________________________
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Chapter Six
Show them that you mean it “Formal education will make you a living. Self-education will make you a fortune.” — Jim Rohn Rule number one in successful business coaching is to get yourself a coach. There are three good reasons you will want to do this: First Good Reason – Your coach will help your coaching business expand, multiply and prosper. He (or she) will be able to show you perspectives and opportunities you can’t see yourself because you’re too close to the action. Tiger Woods has a coach. So does anyone who is passionate about great performance. Second Good Reason – Your clients will be reassured that coaching is really the way to go. Knowing that you yourself have a coach — and use a coach — will be the ultimate sales closer for you on the value of coaching. Third Good Reason – By experiencing coaching first-hand on a regular basis your own coaching will get better. You will have a role model. You will be a continuous apprentice, always learning and growing (and charging growing fees to your clients accordingly). You will be doing your own continuous improvement. You will be learning at the feet of a master.
One of the reasons we entered the process of coaching coaches was to provide this role of constant mentoring to coaches. Coaches prosper from coaching.
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The fastest way for you to prosper “Abundance is not something we acquire. It is something we tune into.” — Wayne Dyer The fastest way to reach prosperity as a coach is to keep learning how to make your client prosper. We have no interest in the kind of “life-coaching” that features a lot of handholding and ultimately becoming “therapy lite.” Our passion is teaching clients to succeed in measurable ways. We like to move numbers with our work. The more confident you get that you can actually help small businesses turn their fortunes around and succeed, the easier it is to elevate your fees and prosper yourself. Our own system for success in helping clients succeed is to walk them through “the nine lies” and lead them to the truth about the power of business. The truth is, anyone can succeed in business. Anyone can turn a failing small business around. But your job as a coach is not to just show them how to do that. Your job is to also show them that they already know how they can do that. Your job is help your client find the truth for themselves so they own each and every breakthrough. Anything your client realizes for himself is going to be a lasting adjustment toward success. So you, as a skillful coach, are there to lead them to self-realization: they do have the power to succeed.
Then why is my client not succeeding? That’s where the nine lies come in. If your client is not working with reality, he can’t win. If he thinks New York is south of Orlando, he can’t get to New York. By walking your client through each lie like
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that and allowing the underlying small business truth to emerge, the client, with your guidance, finds his own way out of the struggle and into the light. Peter Lynch ran Fidelity's Magellan Fund for thirteen years, from 1977 to 1990. In that period, Magellan was up over 2700%. He retired in 1990 at the age of 46. People marveled at Lynch’s success and when they asked him about how he did it, he explained his process when he said, “The person that turns over the most rocks wins the game. And that's always been my philosophy.” The nine lies exercise is a surefire way of turning over the rocks. Does it always work? Well, check it out for yourself. We will start by applying the lies to your own coaching practice, so you can turn the rocks over for yourself and see the truth under each one. Remember that the person who turns over the most rocks wins.
_______________________________________________ “Hope is not a strategy.” — Rick Page _______________________________________________
Where do these lies come from? We have been coaching businesses and individuals for many years. We’ve not only coached businesses but we’ve also coached individual professionals — writers, other coaches, golf pros, public speakers, therapists, seminar leaders, actors, CEOs, major account sales reps and many more varied careers where prosperity was the objective. Where each person was a personal, individual version of a small business. 32
In our coaching practices we have found that people are always (and every single time) their own worst enemies. They hold themselves back with limiting beliefs about money, marketing, relationships, success and business. We’ve called the most common and fatal of those limiting beliefs “the nine lies,” and we wrote a book called 9 Lies That Are Holding Your Business Back… and The Truth That Will Set It Free as a tool for people to use to save their businesses. When prospective clients read that book it wakes them up. Many times the book itself is enough to drive a turn-around. If you go on Amazon and read the customer reviews of the book, you’ll see that people are already doing that. Also true with the customer reviews for the fictional version, The Small Business Millionaire. (Take a minute to read these reviews.) But most of the time the book is just a start. Clients still need a living version of the book. (They need you.) We live in a society where money triggers deep emotions. Ever since the Great Depression, our grandparents and parents have passed along deep fears to us about money and wealth. These fears are irrational, and they lead to the dark and destructive mythology reflected in many of these nine lies. If your client knew the truth and operated from that power, your client would succeed at business. Why? Because business is a logical process. It’s as logical a process as learning how to get from Orlando to New York. You make a reservation, buy a ticket, pack your bags, set your alarm, drive to the airport and you arrive in New York. You succeed in free enterprise in just the same logical way, if you don’t fall for the lies along the way that cripple your car or hijack your plane and throw you off course. One of the side benefits of coaching your clients to success is how quickly you also learn to eliminate these lies in your own business.
Coaches tell these lies, too? 33
Oh, yes! When we coach coaches we see as many of the nine lies pop up as when we coach business owners in other categories. And that’s when our fun begins. It’s really fun to expose these lies and realign coaches with the truth. The truth is, wealth is unlimited for coaches and if you’re a good coach you will tune in to great wealth once you see the truth. So, to get you familiar with the lies before you start using them to turn around your clients, let’s try them out on you.
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Chapter Seven
Truth to set coaches free “It was character that got us out of bed, commitment that moved us into action, and discipline that enabled us to follow through.” — Zig Ziglar
Coaching Lie #1 – I just need to know how to make this coaching venture successful. All you need to know is how to do this, right? No. Knowing “how to” succeed is not all you need to know. Much more important than knowing how to succeed as a coach is wanting to succeed as a coach. So many times we see our coaching clients chasing one marketing method after another to build their practice without tuning-up their basic instrument: their inner desire. Your desire to succeed is the most important factor of all. Without that, no method will work. And once that desire is strong enough, any method will work! So without a way to keep yourself motivated and to feed the fire inside daily, you will eventually fall victim to the other eight lies. And you will struggle. Knowing that your level of desire is your most valuable asset will allow you not to just hope for success, but rather to make it your conscious purpose.
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There are many ways to refresh and rejuvenate your desire. One of them is to receive coaching yourself. If you have a great coach that you have regular sessions with, he or she will gently lead you back to your wholehearted desire in each session. Another way is spiritual. By honoring your spiritual practices you keep returning to the big picture and preventing yourself from being trapped in petty worldly fears and manipulations. Soon you are making your own practice a part of your sacred mission. However you do it, finding a reliable, enjoyable system to stay motivated is the most important part of coaching. When Sam found Steve’s 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself in a grocery store in Canada four years ago he knew he’d found the missing link. He now knew how to link the “how to” with the “want to” for himself and his clients. Now when we coach coaches we use that same self-motivation over and over to keep our clients’ core energy alive as well as our own.
_______________________________________________ “Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.” — Napoleon Hill _______________________________________________
Coaching Lie #2 – It takes money to make money. Never was this lie so not true as in the profession of coaching. It takes no money to make money in coaching!
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Never did a profession that had the ability to propel you to a six figure income virtually overnight require less money up front to get started. Yet. Yet! We have worked with coaches that have suffered dearly by throwing money at their start-up problems. If the practice stalled, they would create new marketing pieces. Brochures even. (Have you ever entered into an important, life-changing relationship because of a brochure?) People choose and value their coaches based on the difference their coach can make. Not on the money he spends on marketing. Spending money is not the answer. Making money is the answer.
_______________________________________________ “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” — Thomas Edison _______________________________________________ You want to succeed through communication, not money. If you are thinking about going into the coaching business, or expanding your business, money is not the answer. In fact, money will forestall your success. Because you always have to pay it back. Many of our coaching clients began their coaching part-time while they held other good jobs. Soon the power and expertise they developed as coaches allowed them to take the full-time coaching plunge. But it was not money that did that. It was power and expertise. Any time you catch yourself trying to use money to make money, stop. Some people have challenged us on this and said, “Wait a minute, what about your coaching? What about your seminars for coaches? Aren’t you saying to a coach, ‘spend money with us to make money.’?” That’s a good question, but we reject it. Many coaching affiliations will ask you for $75,000 to join a franchised operation. We don’t do 37
that. We never ask for anything our teachings won’t make back for you the first day after our seminar. (In fact, we’ve had people get on their cell phones during the lunch break at a seminar and use our ideas to make back their seminar fee with one call. Often.)
Coaching Lie #3 – I just need to get my name out there! Getting your name out there is not valuable. Getting your name “in there” is valuable. Put your name back in to the network of clients and associates and professional relationships you already have. Do not always think in terms of new people and winning over strangers and cold calling and getting your name “out there.” Go inside. Sell to your own inner circle. Let the circle expand by working it from the inside out, not the outside in. Do you have an accountant? He is part of your inner circle. Meet with him and talk to him about his own clients. His clients would benefit greatly from coaching. He sees their numbers. He knows they could be doing better. He can refer you. He can get them in with you. In. In. In. Get your name in there, not out there. Sam created a niche for himself in the category of music and dance studios. That became an immediate in-crowd, so when he communicated through mail or the Internet, he had already defined an inner circle of specialized expertise and information. He was
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already a credible insider. So even though he put mail pieces “out there” about his programs and seminars and ongoing coaching, he had already created an inner circle. Expand the circle you already have. Don’t keep starting your life all over. You’ve done the work already. Now cash in. That’s where your power is. You already have credibility in that circle. Your accountant? He’s already read your book or listened to your CDs about how people and businesses reinvent themselves to prosperity. When you talk to him you tell him what you do and why it works. He’s already sold. Use the relationships you have already invested time in. _______________________________________________ “All human beings are interconnected, one with all other elements in creation.” — Henry Reed _______________________________________________
All human beings are interconnected! The people you talk to today know people who know people who know the people you would most love to know. Don’t forget how you talk to your existing clients. They already love your work. Let them do your marketing. You should not have to do all your own marketing. You should not have to “get the word out” about who you are and what you do. So many coaches frustrate themselves doing that. They break their own hearts in labor that is not necessary, and often counterproductive. They could be getting endless referrals, but they choose to break their hearts by being rejected by strangers instead. Remember what your mother told you: Don’t talk to strangers.
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Coaching Lie #4 – Experience will benefit my business! Experience benefits me? Not necessarily. If your mechanics are bad, you don’t get better just by adding and increasing experience. Look at Shaquille O’Neal. One of the worst free throw shooters who ever lived. And you can see how bad his mechanics are. So the fact that he adds a year of experience every year does not benefit him at all! In fact, it deepens his bad shooting habits. A coach who works his or her practice dysfunctionally will not benefit by just letting a couple more years go by. We know this from experience. We know coaches who contacted us two or three years ago about being coached and decided not to be coached and have not improved their income at all in the time that has passed. In fact they’ve lost ground. They don’t know why. But their shooting mechanics are off! They are still missing their free throws. They keep telling themselves, and their family members, “Just give me some more time. In a year or so I’ll have this down. My coaching practice will have to get better. I’ll be more experienced, won’t I?” Experience won’t help at all! Not if you don’t have a system you can rely on for growing your business. Without a system that you know works, success itself drops into the world of the unconscious. You feel you have lost control. You keep hoping that time will heal the financial wounds, but time doesn’t. (If you owe a lot of money, does time heal that wound? No! It makes it worse!) Soon you begin to discover that problems don’t age well. You wonder why you can coach a client to total reinvention while you yourself still struggle. You begin to think, “How come I can teach it but can’t do it?” Soon you think there’s something wrong with you. But there’s nothing wrong with you. There’s something wrong with your thinking. You are believing thoughts that are leading you astray. And those thoughts are not true. And you are relying on experience alone to pull you through, and it’s a lie that it will.
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_______________________________________________ “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” — Albert Einstein _______________________________________________
Coaching Lie #5 – Lowering fees boosts business! People get what they pay for. They know that. They go around thinking, “You get what you pay for.” The more they pay you, the more they get from you. They know that’s true. Let’s look at this truth in a simple way. Let’s say you lower your fee for someone. Instead of $250 for an hour of coaching you are only going to charge $50. (We don’t recommend hourly billing, but we’ll get to that later. This is just a simplified example.) In your client’s mind you have just become a $50 coach, giving $50 worth of advice. Your ability to make a difference has been diminished. But even if your client likes the results he’s getting, you still lose because he’s now telling three other people that he has this great coach who has turned his business around and “he’s really reasonable! Fifty dollars!”. Soon you’ve got more and more $50 clients, based on that one decision to lower your fee to boost business. Lowering your fee won’t boost your business. It will starve it. And it will kill it with ineffective activity. Here’s yet another way this lie harms your prosperity curve. When you charge a low fee, your own energy dips. You don’t bring as much to the table. You’re only human. You realize you gave this client a 41
great deal so you only half-coach him. It’s not intentional. It’s subconscious. But the lack of effort is still there. Whereas the more you charge, the more you put into transforming the client’s business. You bring a different you to the coaching session. So you get a different and better result. Soon your clients are saying the words to other people that are music to your ears: “He’s expensive but he’s worth it.”
Coaching Lie #6 – You have to be tight-fisted. Sam gives cars away as incentives to clients. Steve sends books and CDs out to people who’ve contacted him. This Open Hand approach always pays off and comes back to prosper the giver. So don’t be stingy. Don’t cut corners. Don’t be tight-fisted. Don’t hassle your clients with all kinds of nit picky add-ons to your billings. Don’t send extra complicated bills for travel. Don’t get petty. Build all that into your original strong fee. Think big. Don’t be tight. You will grow your practice faster that way. _______________________________________________ “The person who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar instead of how little he can get for a dollar is bound to succeed.” — Henry Ford _______________________________________________
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Coaching Lie #7 – Clients are hard to locate. This is the coaching version of the small business lie number seven that says customers are “hard to figure out.” Coaches believe the quest for clients is the universal coach’s struggle, so they always make it hard. If I want my coaching practice to really flourish I have to embrace reality and accept this truth: I can make it hard or I can make it easy. It’s my choice. We recommend making finding clients easy. First of all, start your day in this realization: people are already seeking you. What you are seeking is seeking you. People are yearning and longing for what you offer. They just don’t know you yet. What you are seeking is seeking you! Aldous Huxley said, “It’s not very difficult to persuade people to do what they’re already longing to do.” So the challenge is one of communication and revelation. You must reveal to the right people who you are and what you do, and to do this well it must be done in ways that don’t suggest any neediness on your part. Neediness repels clients. The universe hates it. It’s a form of stalking, among the creepiest of crimes. One very easy way to attract clients to your practice is to use a book instead of a business card. If you give someone your business card you are now like any other needy, greedy schmoozer networking for business and inviting sales resistance in return. Look at the difference in your prospective client’s expression when you hand her a book instead of a card. Ideally, this is a book written by you! But it doesn’t have to be. It can be a book written by your friends or mentors. Or it can be a book written by Tom Peters or Tracy Goss or Michael Gerber. Have it be a book that you know about and believe in, and that relates to how you coach people.
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You will find that people love to grow. People want to get better and more successful. Coaching is a relatively inexpensive way to do that. Given what it offers - personal transformation and success in the business world - coaching, no matter what you charge, is alarmingly inexpensive for your client. We have coached literally hundreds of people from stagnation to success in their businesses. What was that worth? People know up front what the potential of coaching really is, and if they don’t, that book you give them will open it up for them. It will show them the possibility for growth. We have initiated many a coaching relationship by simply sending someone the 9 Lies book or The Small Business Millionaire and allowing them to already begin the revolution in thinking that will turn their business around. In fact, we wrote those books for precisely that purpose. We took all the coaching we had done over the past few years - coaching that worked - and we simplified it and compressed it into readable lessons in the books. People will read a book, start having breakthroughs, and want more. You can also make a CD. Some people today simply don’t read books… they’re too impatient. But they do get into their vehicles, so they are glad to pop your CD in and listen. Or they go to the health club and put their head phones on. Any coach can make a great CD. You can, too! Make sure it’s not too scripted. Make sure you’re not just reading. Have a few bullet points and ad lib and get loose and get excited about what you’re saying. What are you going to put on your CD? Anything that excites you about coaching. Ideally, you’ll tell some stories about yourself and about people you’ve helped and how. Don’t make it too sales-oriented. Just share with the listener so that they want more of you. Clients are as easy to find as you choose to make it. Why make it hard? Most coaches already have a debilitating belief system in place that says: This is the hard part of the business. But look at this email we just received from a coach we are now coaching. She had decided that she wanted to get her coaching income up to $15,000 per month.
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It had been close to that once before, but after she took a lot of time off to travel the world she had let the business drop a little:
Hi Steve, Thanks for your follow up… $15,000 is a very realistic number and I am on track for hitting it very soon. I will be happy to send you the number every week for accountability. Raymond, my assistant, and I have a referral prospect tracking sheet that we use each week. I am on top of this Project 15 totally, and with tremendous grace and ease. NO promotion, simply asking a few people and it is showing up. VERY grateful for how this works for me. My current monthly number is now up to $11,750, and I should be up to at least 14K by the end of the month. I have another client from Google, and two others that should be getting on board in the next two weeks. We’ll see. I have taken on 3 new clients in the past week. I also have couple prospects who will be starting in July and August. Things are looking good. Again, thanks for your support. I really think it is very realistic that I will be at 15K by the middle of July at the latest. Then we’ll work on something even more exciting!! I’ll update you again next week. Have a great rest of your week, and weekend.
This client was communicating through her existing inner circle of clients and friends. Another easy way to acquire coaching clients is to stage an event if speaking is what you like to do. Sam has acquired hundreds of coaching clients through the two-day seminars he puts on in his niche for music and dance studios. If you have a niche or a specialty, staging an event can be a very easy way to upgrade a good percentage of your attendees into more ongoing coaching relationships. Whenever you’re asked to give a talk, pepper the speech with coaching stories that emphasize what you do for a living and the 45
breakthroughs you create for people. You’ll be amazed at how many people afterward ask you to coach them. Some of the coaches we coach never thought to do this. They would give a keynote speech that made no reference to coaching. Then they would hand out flyers that said to the people in the audience, “I also do coaching!” It’s like saying, “I also give piano lessons and repair bicycles on the side so call me.” In our seminars we demonstrate for people how to weave coaching into a keynote in seamless ways that don’t look like selling at all and that create a craving for coaching after the talk.
_______________________________________________ “The reason most major goals are not achieved is that we spend our time doing second things first.” — Robert J. McKain _______________________________________________
Make coaching referrals easy “Attempt easy tasks as if they were difficult, and difficult as if they were easy.” — Baltasar Gracian When we take on the easy task as if it were difficult, we slow down and look at the task differently. We bring more consciousness to it. We see more opportunity in it. We look for hidden potential in the task. We dance with it a little more slowly and have more fun. Most people rush through their easy tasks just “getting through” them without “getting anything from them.”
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Answering a non-client’s email question can be easy. But you might want to take your time (as if it were difficult.) You might want to pause and ask yourself, “What can I communicate here to this person that will inspire an urban legend about me and my coaching and my love for my work and my excitement about turning lives and businesses around?” We have opportunities for growing our coaching business every day that we let slip through our fingers. Phone calls to return. Emails to answer. Each one of those communications can move our coaching business forward if we take that extra moment to create. Create rather than react. Create your story. For everyone who communicates with you. The inward flow of business to your coaching practice will amaze you.
Then make the hard part easy Now, let’s make the hard things easy. When we take on the difficult tasks as if they were easy, it makes them more fun to get started on. With an easygoing mindset, we can just waltz right in. The hardest part of a difficult task is starting it, because our thoughts have clustered into a negative, resistant story. Now what stands between the task and us is our story about the task, dark and dreary. That’s why Baltasar Gracian is brilliant in his formulation above. Difficult tasks are only difficult because of what we think about them. Therefore, if we can treat the task ahead as easy, and enter the task in an easy way, we’ve bypassed the thinking that was in the way and can get some early relaxed momentum going. Some people tell us that coaching referrals are hard to ask for, but are they really? Only if we think so. Referrals can be the easiest thing in the world. The more you do it, the easier it gets. Like a piano piece that’s hard to play at first. Each time you play it, it gets easier. Soon it
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just flows. Soon you can play it without even thinking. You can play it drunk, even. (A valuable skill at social events.) Referrals are the same way. The first thing you want to do is truly and deeply get (and we mean to really get this at the level of your deepest soul) that referrals benefit the person referring and the person being referred more than they benefit you. Most people don’t get that. Most people don’t like to ask for referrals because they have slipped back into that old mindset that says “I shouldn’t ask for something that leads to me getting money. It’s rude. It might look greedy.” And that mindset will do more to forestall your coaching wealth than any other single factor! Before asking for the referral get your head on straight! Remind yourself (and the person you are asking) of the great breakthroughs that coaching produces. Realize that you are about to help another human being get their life together. You are offering to save someone who has lost his way. You are agreeing to assist someone in becoming happy and prosperous. Why be shy about that? Also remember to acknowledge, in a humble way, your own limited and very precious time. You have a few openings left for the coming months, and would be willing to help a family member, business associate or friend of your client if they have anyone they know of who can benefit from the work. Believe us, they know of people! They already know of many people who would benefit from your work! You just have to learn, through practice, to get comfortable with this subject and stop making it hard for yourself to do. Another aspect - widely neglected - of referral-gathering is how you treat the person who refers someone to you after the referral. This is a major secret key to business coaching wealth so pay attention: If Mary refers John to you as a coaching client, and now you are coaching John, a very important catalyst to more referrals is how Mary comes to feel about having referred John. You can give her good
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feelings about it or no feelings about it. It’s up to you. So how you thank her is important. And how often you thank her is important. Your thank-you communication might include a very, very strong declaration of commitment by you to treat John like absolute gold. Mary ought to hear a very sincere and passionate commitment from you. This makes Mary feel very good that she referred John. When John thanks you for a session, and when John experiences the breakthroughs that you deliver, make sure you talk to him about Mary and how she played a big part in getting you together and how Mary’s commitment to John is what led to this. At your prompting, John then thanks Mary again for putting the two of you together. When John is happy about all of this, you have an easy opening to discuss referrals and how you have grown your practice that way. John listens carefully and before you can even finish he says, “I’ve got somebody for you. I’ve got someone who could really use this work.” You write that name down and promise John that that person will be treated like gold. When you get home there’s a phone message from Mary. Mary has another client for you. If you will stay with this, and keep the referral conversations relaxed and alive, you will be amazed at how fast your practice fills up. One of the reasons we decided to coach coaches and teach coaches everything we know about coaching is because we can no longer serve all the requests we get for coaching. By doing things as simple (although unusual) as the John and Mary scenario cited above, we quickly over-filled our practices. And because our books about small business coaching have become bestsellers, and because our business associates love referring to us, (we make it easy), we are now overwhelmed with prospective clients. We could always just say “no!” to them and hope that they found someone good. Or we can teach and train other coaches our methods and know they’ll find someone good! So that’s why we got into coaching-the-coaches.
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Coaching Lie #8 – I don’t need any help. It’s the ultimate irony to hear a coach talk about his or her solitary, isolated struggle in the world of coaching. How tough it is to wake up every morning all alone in the unforgiving universe trying to venture forth to make a living as a coach without any support or partners. Coaches have told us that sometimes they long for the good old days when they worked in a big, bustling, backbiting office. At least then they had people there to cheer them on and gossip with them about their profession. Why do people do this to themselves? Why do people try to go it alone? What is their aversion to getting help? Can you see the irony? I am a coach, but I don’t need coaching. It’s like saying, “I’m a doctor but I would never go to one.” There are many ways to connect to other coaches. To be a truly great coach, always growing in your skill you must get coaching. At the very least, get yourself a coach. Find a coach who is coaching successfully and let him or her coach you. Some people think that’s a sign of weakness. But it’s the opposite! It’s a sign of strength, because you are putting excellence ahead of ego. You care more about feeding your family than feeding your ego. You care more about being good than looking good. There’s also a surprise in store. Your clients will love it that you yourself get coaching from other successful coaches. It reassures your client that they are connected to something bigger than just you. And they see that you believe deeply in the transformative power of coaching. You yourself pay good money for it.
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_______________________________________________ "What's really driving the boom in coaching, is this: as we move from 30 miles an hour to 70 to 120 to 180... as we go from driving straight down the road to making right turns and left turns to abandoning cars and getting motorcycles... the whole game changes, and a lot of people are trying to keep up, learn how not to fall." — John Kotter Professor of Leadership Harvard Business School
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Coaching Lie #9 – I am a victim of circumstance. When you tell yourself that you are a victim you have just pulled the plug on the whole deal. You’ve disconnected from your power source. One of the many beauties of the coaching profession is how basic the profession is. How simple. How powerful. How much leverage you have in every moment to shape your outcomes and create your financial future. Think about it. You don’t have a product that might go out of style. You don’t have competition moving in across the street to funnel off half of your business. (It’s actually the opposite: if the person across the street decides to become a coach, that will increase the likelihood of business for you because it will raise the awareness of coaching and its benefits. If he’s better than you, he’ll give coaching a good name and you’ll benefit. If he’s worse than you, you will benefit by comparison. You can’t lose.)
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You are the captain of your ship, the master of your destiny. The future is yours. Yet, the victim thinking still creeps into a coach’s mind. It enters like a virus, and it can consume the whole brain. “My spouse doesn’t support me in this. At least not in a way that really feels right. And the economy around here is stagnant. People don’t have money to spend on coaching. And I’ve been dealt a bad hand. By my childhood. To begin with. There are things I’m not good at that other coaches are. I don’t have time to market myself. And I have too many debts to do this right. My personal life isn’t so great these days, and that pulls me from my business. I’m not getting any younger, either. (A variation on this is: I’m too young to get credibility.) I don’t have the credentials. I don’t have the education. I don’t have this or that. I’m a victim of circumstances. Circumstances are powerful. I am not.” When you coach your own clients one of the first things you do is re-direct them out of this tempting victim mindset and re-connect them to the power they have to succeed. But do you do this with yourself, too?
_______________________________________________ “When you blame others, you give up your power to change.” — Douglas Noel Adams _______________________________________________
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Chapter Eight
Anything we can do you can do better “Shallow people believe in luck. Wise and strong people believe in cause and effect.” — Emerson This chapter is a direct message in the first person from Sam Beckford who continues revealing the details of his success as a coach: I originally started from the lower end of the scale where I just charged $150 a month for very basic coaching. Clients would talk to me once a month and I would do some group seminars. I gradually increased the fees and now my range on my low end is about $300/month and on the higher end it is $800/month. Sometimes I also take on private coaching clients at $3,000 a month as well. And although I began coaching within my specialized niche - music and dance studios - I now coach people in all kinds of professions. The nine lies are everywhere. What works for a music studio works for any business. Business is business. Truth is truth. My total coaching income is on target for a million and a half dollars in 2006, pushing into the $2 million mark in 2007. I don’t tell you this to boast or be indiscreet. I share this personal information for one reason only: to inspire you to do the same. You can see that making a large yearly income is definitely possible. I can testify that it’s also enjoyable work. You can leverage the success of your clients into getting more clients! And you can use the success stories of your clients to create more interest in your coaching. And that’s one thing I’ve done a lot of.
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In fact, that’s a principle you can use from this moment on. It will improve your client-attraction rate tremendously: become good at telling your clients’ success stories. Those stories will sell your coaching faster than any other communication you can think of. Most coaches, when they have an opportunity to communicate, talk about the benefits of coaching and roll out their own biographies. Those approaches are very weak, and often even off-putting. Especially when you compare them to the absolutely mesmerizing power of a client success story.
Always create a psychological end point! I really believe in the usefulness of something I call the “psychological end point.” Most coaches we’ve worked with don’t even begin to understand this concept. But all people in life operate with psychological end points. They move from one end point to another, subconsciously respecting them deeply, and basing a lot of decisions on them. For example, the reason most relationships end in December and the reason that most people fire people or lay people off in December is because December is a psychological end point in our society. The end of the year is when something finishes. In school, the psychological end point is June. Kids start slacking off and getting out of the mindset around May because they know that school is almost done — “We’re in the clear now!” A lot of coaches never establish a psychological end point with their clients. I’m not talking about setting goals with clients — I’m talking about an actual time line. You have to put your client on a psychological end point level where they are progressing toward a certain sense of completion. They don’t feel finished until they get to x number point.
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That’s why it’s never powerful to be imprecise with your client. It weakens your possibility for transformation when you say, “We’ll just keep this coaching thing going until you don’t want to do it anymore. We’ll just keep it going. Is it still useful to you?” That’s a very weak conversation. You have much more power to transform your client when she knows an end point is near and she’d better get in gear if she wants to maximize this disappearing opportunity to work with you. (I realized that the car giveaway was just one of an infinite number of ways to do this.) Even if you are coaching a person one-on-one, you’ll want to learn and implement this now! You will want to generate your own psychological end point so that the person knows that when your coaching program approaches its end, there are a lot of things that you are going to see her accomplish by then. Watch, near the end your client will start using the sessions more seriously. The other added benefit of the psychological end point is that it makes renewal more attractive and precise. Once they face the coaching being over, clients will think “I just can’t face the fact that this is ending, and I know the next session is our last so I’ve gone to the bank and I’ve got a little extra that I found and I want to renew for a year.” In 2003, I decided I would stand out from all other business coaching by offering my clients the chance to win a car! Why not? (Never be afraid to innovate and be unusual. Your clients love that. They want you to lead the way in unorthodox, out of the box thinking.) So one of my clients was going to win a car by improving their business with the ideas I had given. I decided to give away a Volkswagen bug convertible over an 18 month period to the business I coached that had made the most improvement over that time. The final decision was done by a vote, all by clients, who voted on who was most improved. The final candidates stood up in front of the crowd of people and told their before-and-after story covering the 18 month period. The votes were then calculated and the car was given away. And that giveaway did a few beneficial things. First of all, it motivated people to implement the ideas I was teaching for business success (there are certain basic ideas that - when implemented - will almost guarantee business success in the world of small business). 55
People can have internal motivation from just wanting their business to succeed, but having that extrinsic motivation of winning a car provided a real extra boost. I really believe people are hooked on reality TV and they want to win things and they want to compete and want their lives to be exciting. That’s one of the elements most missing in a small business: the game element and the excitement that goes along with it. So the car giveaway gave them that motivation but it also kept people focused on the contest and focused on the objective for a whole 18 months, which is nice because a lot of people in coaching have clients who start strong, but over a three, four, or five month period start fizzling out. The coach doesn’t seem as exciting and allknowing to them after that time. That car giveaway is an unusual example, and most coaches won’t use anything like it. However! Don’t miss the point! Because you must do something to eliminate that fizzle-out factor that hits all coaching relationships. I’m about to give you the key insight to avoiding that factor: When I was first doing my 18 month thing, I thought “Oh, oh, what’s going to happen? I’ll keep these guys in for 18 months with the psychological end point but after that what’s going to happen?” But over a three year period I have 70% of my original clients with me! That’s a really high figure (when you have hundreds of coaching clients as I do). After six months to a year into the process, people realized that the extrinsic motivator of the car wasn’t all that important. It wasn’t about the car. It was about something much bigger than that. It was about them. It was about their improvement. It was about their lives! I had so many people say, “You know I started competing for the car and after a while I realized, hey wait a second what I got is so much important than a car because I saw that I can actually be successful in my business and I have control over my life and I actually feel good about things for the first time in a long time, so I’m approaching my business with the same excitement that I had when I started! It feels like I’m starting a new company and I think that’s something that’s terrific.” So the car giveaway created the power of the psychological end point for me. By saying this is an 18 month process, people knew this transformational thing was going to take 18 months, they couldn’t quit on it sooner. 56
With colleges and universities the psychological end point is usually four years. So you have to keep your learning going for the whole four years until you get a complete education. Psychological end points give structure to the coaching experience. They create a higher level of conscious participation from your client.
Where else did the $1,074,379 come from? There are different levels of coaching I do. I have one level of coaching which is just a group program. That’s done using teleconferences where I can get up to 500 people on a phone line at one time. I usually give them either a monologue or a mini-seminar on a certain topic. Those topics will be generated from the questions, the information and the stories that I get from my private one-on-one coaching clients. How I create my teleseminars is how you can create yours: I sit there with a book (just a binder) and when I am coaching people one on one, they’ll ask me questions and I’ll give them answers. And I quickly jot down things and say to myself, “OK, if one person is asking about this, 100 more people will also want to know the answer, so I’ll make it generic.” So the teleseminar is just me going through the Q & A and expanding on the questions that people ask me in private sessions. And the great thing about the group coaching is that I encourage a lot of interaction — not just a cold, non-reactionary lecture that goes out to people. I encourage people to join in. If my private consulting clients have a really good success story I tell them to be on my group call and I make sure they are on there. I’ll then do a mini-interview with them and say, “Well, tell me what happened… tell me about the breaks you created” and I’ll recap some of the things they told me and get them to expand on them. It’s a great system for teleseminars. It gives me endless content, for one thing. For another, it motivates the
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other people in the group to think that because other people are getting results, they can, too! The teleseminar also serves as a testimonial for the coaching I give at the personal level while reminding people that the 9 Lies system really works. If they’re having a bad day or having a hard time and tune in to the call they immediately hear that someone is getting results! Most of the people you and I end up coaching have been functioning in isolation. They have a small business opportunity and they try and they try and they’re trying to battle all these business lies, which doesn’t work, and finally they think “This business doesn’t work and it’s useless!” When they say that to themselves, there’s no one there to say anything different. Unless they have a coach. That’s the beauty of coaching. You are there to say something different, and steer them back to the opportunity that was always there for them.
The fifteen minute coaching session! A lot of coaches coach every client for an hour or more at a time. Then they start thinking, there are only so many hours in a day and if I get too successful I’ll hit a ceiling. So they stop being optimistic about building their coaching wealth. Business coaching wealth cannot be built with ceilings and limits and strains and strictures binding you up in limitation and projected scarcity. Building your coaching wealth is all about imagination, creativity, and leveraging results for your clients. It’s not about billable hours. Keep finding creative ways to introduce more high-paying people into your coaching process. Stop brooding on the limitation of billable hours.
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One way I gave a boost to my own coaching practice was to create the art of the 15 minute session. A lot of coaches will immediately think 15 minutes is not long enough. They think you need a lot more time. But I’ve been doing 15 minute sessions for the last three years and getting very good results. In some respects, they work even better! First of all, you have to be organized. And your client has to be organized and prepared. You’re not going to be dealing with every question under the sun. But my belief is that you don’t want to take that much time talking anyway. I mean, you want to get at least two or three specific problems solved and you want to give them action steps they can take on those problems. If you have too long a session, my belief is that the information gets diluted. I’m not saying don’t do long sessions, but I think the information can get diluted and the session can wander around into places that lead the client away from the breakthrough he had in his first 15 minutes. On the other hand, if you give them two action items to do in a 15 minute session, they are going to remember those and they are going to do those because those are simple priorities. Fifteen minute coaching (and I’m not saying you have to do it, I’m just offering it as one of an almost infinite list of options open to you to increase your business coaching wealth) is just like a four minute mile. Before Roger Bannister ran the four minute mile, no one thought that you could run a mile in less than four minutes — it was physically impossible, (that’s what the doctors said). But once Roger Bannister did it, people started doing it more and more and now it is commonplace to get under four minutes. The reason most coaches are afraid of 15 minute sessions, is because the only way they know to bill is by the hour. They can’t with a straight face get over the internal dialogue of worry: “Oh, I have to give an hour coaching session because how can I possibly charge someone enough if they don’t feel they are getting enough time out of it.” They think of coaching in the same terms of a massage or some kind of session that is based by the hour. However, your wealth increases once you realize that successful people, or potentially-successful people, actually like it when you save them time. Start training yourself to realize that there are a lot of 59
people out there who actually love the thought that you might be able to get this done for them in less time. Coaches who want more money just automatically talk about increasing their time. So they offer a more expensive, more-hours option. But the client is not liking that. The client is soon thinking, “Am I going to talk to this guy five hours a month? I don’t even talk to my own family members that much!” and it just becomes oppressive to them. Realize that most successful, enthusiastic people are real go-go! You don’t want to get them excited and energized about transforming their lives and businesses and then bog them down in coaching for excessive hours just because you could only think to bill in terms of hours. Steve has a coaching client, who is an excellent coach, who delivers five-minute base-touching coaching sessions with clients! His clients love it! They get a certain amount of those per contract. “You just call me and we talk for five minutes about whatever’s primary for you and then we are gone. Check in with me, account for yourself, and we’re finished until our next regular 45 minute session.” And he says that his clients love those because they think “Wow, how efficient is that guy that he can nail something for me in five minutes!” Much of the value of coaching is the accountability. The knowing that you have a spotter, making sure you lift the weights that are in your workout plan. It’s like the personal trainer story we tell in our 9 Lies book. The trainer says to her client, “I’ll work out with you at the gym. You meet me there. It’s going to be Monday, Wednesday and Friday and I’ll be there in person one of those days but I won’t tell you ahead of time which one.” If you had a car that was broken down and it was towed into the shop and the mechanic said, “We can fix it in three hours or we can fix it in half an hour,” which would you prefer? You would want the car back! You would want to get on the road. Remember that time is the new money. But coaches think that thought backwards! They think time is the new money and it’s all I can bill. I make money by selling my time so I should try and sell as much time as possible! But that is actually a flaw in thinking that’s going to hold the coach back. You can’t sell just time to a person, you 60
have to sell the result. You have to be willing to be an unusual coach and not just bill by the hour. Your key statement is, “I can get the transformation done in half the amount of time or a third the amount of time!” Clients will know the value they are going to get from you. So you will retain clients longer if you are on a less time-intensive plan. If you are meeting for four hours a month, after a while it can become wearying, rather than inspiring, to meet with you. Soon your client is saying, “Oh, I’ve done so much with this person.” Soon clients start missing their sessions because they can’t imagine pulling a full hour out of their day. Whereas with 15 minute sessions, or even the five minute accountability sessions, any client has time for that. They can’t be too busy for that. They can be in their car driving home on their cell phone. Here’s your client: “I did my check in! I’m feeling great!” Most coaches will never do this. And that’s a real problem for them. They bill by the hour and they see the immediate limit to their income! After they get busy in their coaching practice they think, “Boy do I really want two more clients? When I think of all the time that takes?” And they can’t get it into their heads that you’re better off billing by the transformation - billing by the result.
The four secrets to coaching wealth: Now I am going to tell you our four secrets to making a very large income as a business coach. First, I’m going to fill in a few more details about my business and personal life and about Steve’s business life and personal life, not to brag but to tell you how good being a business coach can be if you know some key pieces of information.
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I don’t know you yet, and I don’t what your goals for your business and life are. But I do know that reading this book will make you think about the future of your business and personal life. You may already be a very successful coach making a high income who is just reading this to get an extra edge and take your practice to the next level. Or, you may be like thousands of coaches who make an okay living but are not building any real wealth and equity. Maybe you’re new to coaching and are looking for a way to make a solid, predictable full-time income instead of making a part-time income and taking clients and jobs you know you shouldn’t take. Before I tell you the four secrets we have learned that have given us our success in the coaching business I have good news and bad news. First the good news. Being a business coach can be the absolute best profession to be in if you know how to do it effectively. If you’ve been in the coaching business for a while and it hasn’t been as successful as you have wanted, I want to reinforce a couple of points just in case you’re losing faith. The demand for business coaching is growing at an astonishing rate. The small business market itself is exploding! There are 20 million small businesses in North America and millions of people start new businesses each year. The self-improvement movement is also growing at an unstoppable rate. People are becoming more aware of their need and ability to set big life goals and get expert advice on how to reach them. The age of the brainless worker is over. Humans are becoming businesses unto themselves, whether they want to or not! Large corporations are falling apart and small businesses are blossoming all over the world. That’s why there is such a growing need for coaching.
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And it’s going to increase with each passing year. Two heads are better than one. If someone in a small business has a coach she has a huge, synergistic advantage over her competitor who doesn’t. That gets proven every day. Baby boomers retiring form the workforce are starting businesses in droves. They are anxious, willing and able to pay top fees to advisors who can help their businesses succeed. As far as the day-to-day business of coaching you already know the benefits: You can set your own hours. You can work from a home office if you choose with very low overhead. There’s no inventory or stock to carry. You can get paid up front before you do the work and not have to deal with collections. You have the potential to make a lot of income per hour of work. You will be well-respected as a professional in your community. You can make a genuine difference in people’s businesses and in their lives. You can decide who you will work with and who you will turn away. You can set your own rates and give yourself a raise any time you want. The coaching business is a great business if you know how to do it right.
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Now the bad news The coaching business can be the absolute worst business to be in if you don’t know how to do it effectively. You can make very little money, even though you’re helping your clients to do the opposite. Sadly, according to the latest statistics the average coach makes less than $20,000 and coaches only part time. Most coaches are only part time not because they don’t want to work more, but because they haven’t figured out how to get enough clients to make a decent full time income. Coaching is such a new profession that they don’t know where to turn to get advice on how to be effective and prosperous. The average new coach can be wasting all their energy chasing clients and worrying about losing clients. Worry takes away more of your precious energy than any other mental activity. A lot of coaches live in this stress zone, because they don’t know how many clients they will have six months from now and they are terrified of pushing clients too hard for results for fear of losing them if they rub them the wrong way. Your income can fluctuate wildly from month to month. You can feel forced to work for free just to prove you can get results. I don’t know about you but working is not one of the things I like doing for free. If I work I want to get paid well. Even fast food workers get paid for each hour they work. Unfortunately a lot of coaches feel like they have to give away their time just to get a client on board by proving their worth. So those are some of the reasons coaching can be the best business or the worst business to be in.
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How do we make it the best? So how do you make it the best business in the world? To Steve and me being the “best” is defined by making a consistently high income, having more clients than you can handle, and being able to pick who you work with. It means being able to say “no” to bad business and being able to raise fees and quote higher fees without worry of rejection. There are many factors to being successful in business coaching but here are the top four secrets to our success:
Secret #1 – You need to have an original magnetic lure that makes highvalue clients call you. Here’s a fact: most people are not actively looking for a business coach. They may need a coach, but they are not actively looking for one. But, BUT! People are looking for a solution. That you can be sure of. The vast majority of business owners out there are confused. They are struggling along looking for a solution to their struggling. They don’t realize yet that you are the help they need. They don’t know it. And you have to accept the fact that you can’t help people that aren’t aware that they need your help. As you may have experienced by trying to “cold call” or just running small ads that say “business coaching.” It does not work at all! Who knows they need it? When you use our systems you’ll never, ever cold-call again. So the enlightenment is this: You need to give people a unique reason to call you: a hook that gets them interested. 65
The best hook we know of is a book or audio product that by itself begins to solve their business problems. Once they see solutions happening, they are hooked. Remember this: people are always looking for a solution. Several business coaches offer free copies of books like: Think and Grow Rich, The E-Myth, Reinventing Yourself, Good to Great and other books that address specific business and personal success problems. When the prospects read these books, they become hooked on the idea of further growth. If you are lucky enough to actually write a book like that, then the process becomes even easier. Steve Chandler’s 11 books have provided him with a steady supply of coaching clients, most of which he now has to turn away (more on that later). The books Steve and I have coauthored, 9 Lies and The Small Business Millionaire have also generated a substantial amount of coaching clients that Steve and I cannot personally coach them all any more. Let’s just say we practice what we preach. We advise that coaches open their prospective client relations by giving away a book and allowing the client to connect and get started working the process. There are a lot of ivory tower types in the world of business who write books about things they don’t do or can’t do. They’ll tell you why people fail at business, but they themselves have not failed at business. (I have failed at five of them!) Most of the business authors who write business books haven’t run businesses! They especially haven’t made any real money running businesses. So they take a safe academic textbook approach. We don’t take that approach. We just share with you what has worked for us. Take it or leave it. Steve and I have been interviewed on hundreds of business shows - TV and radio - by business experts and business authorities who spend all their time interviewing people - they don’t actually transact business. So we’re going to show you exactly what we do and have done to succeed at business and at coaching. We’re going to show you the
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processes that we do and we’re going to do it, so you can see it from the inside and the outside proof that this system works. The biggest problem that most business coaches have is not that they lack knowledge and not that they don’t have the skills and abilities to actually help people, it’s that they can’t convert people. Even people with a huge need for coaching. They can’t convert someone with a need into a paying client. We’re going to show you how we can take you - someone with a need, or at least an interest in this - and convert you into someone who is interested in both our seminars and books (assuming we do!) not based on our greed, but based on your need. So you can either be skeptical, or you can learn all the secrets from the inside out. Books are great client magnets, and audio products like CDs (which you yourself can easily and inexpensively make) and teleseminars are also extremely powerful ways of attracting clients if you know how to use them powerfully. In my distance coaching practice, all of my clients (clients that have generated for me over $75,000 per month in predictable, automatic credit card billings) were brought into my coaching practice by my sending a free CD and directing people to a live pre-scripted coaching telephone seminar which I deliver about six times per year. You are probably familiar with teleseminars, but in case you aren’t they are basically a large group conference call that you get prospective clients to dial into. You can have 10 people or potentially a couple of thousand people on the line at the same time. You can mute out all of the listeners’ phones so you can deliver a coaching session without interruption and then open the lines for Q & A. I personally like to use teleseminars as the unique hook to attract potential clients. Books and CDs can be as effective but I believe that a live Teleseminar has a few distinct advantages that even books and CDs don’t have: 1. The Teleseminar is at a specific, predictable time so it speeds up the selling cycle. It is impossible to “skim” a live teleseminar. If someone is on the line they will hear it from start to finish.
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2. The Teleseminar gives prospects a taste of what coaching will actually be like. I like teleseminars because they give people an experience of what coaching can be for them. It is hard to sell a live spoken experience with a written letter. The warmth and emotion can come through in a spoken event. 3. The teleseminar can be tailored to capitalize on specific timely events. For the last two years Steve and I have delivered our “New Year’s Business Resolutions” call. The calls were scheduled in early January and the listeners were all interested in getting the most out of the upcoming year. There’s a reason people flock to the malls in December and to the health clubs in January. All of us are driven by events. A properly planned teleseminar can bring in new clients who are already motivated to act by an event. The next unique hook Steve and I are testing in the future is the “webinar”. A webinar is essentially a teleseminar over the internet delivered live by you. It has the advantage of being able to show powerpoint slides and samples on screen live while you are talking. In three years I believe this technology will change the way coaching is done worldwide. If used properly, the teleseminar can be one of the most powerful and easiest ways to attract new pre-qualified clients. Books, CDs and teleseminars are all ways that we have perfected to optimize secret number one: creating a magnetic lure - a hook that gives your prospects an experience that they have a deep desire to repeat and continue.
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Secret #2 – You must reveal a radical “turn-around” concept to your potential clients. Well-known books like Good to Great, the E-Myth, and 7 Habits of Highly Effective People have built huge coaching and consulting businesses around them because they have delivered a turn-around for their readers. For example, the E-Myth taught people to work “on their business, not just in it.” One of Steve Chandler’s key turn-around concepts has been the “Owner/Victim” distinction from Reinventing Yourself which he has taught world-wide to more than 20 Fortune 500 companies and over 200 smaller businesses. When you read the 9 Lies book, you will see our own turn-around concepts which have attracted huge numbers of clients to our coaching practices. Some of our key concepts like: “the open hand,” “combining how to and want to,” and “time is the new money” are all principles that are radically different from what traditional books are saying. We found that the primary reasons why four out of five businesses fail can be turned around and corrected by eliminating the nine lies from a business owner’s thinking and replacing them with the truths that bring him profit. When you are the coach that reveals a turn-around concept to a business owner, you automatically win their attention and desire to do business with you. Your concepts must be radical and eye-opening. You can’t just cruise in with “It’s just common sense” and hope to impress your prospects. Successful coaching is a process of turning around a client’s belief system. You are there to reveal surprising truths that can be used as tools for turn-around. The most important factor in this secret is the turn-around itself. Do you - right now - know how to turn your client’s business around?
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Do you have a proven, systematic way to do that? Or are you just a good listener? An intuitive coach who may try this and that? There is no more powerful way to grow your business than to learn a specific transformative process. In the book 9 Lies, you will learn our own process. You will see exactly the nine steps we take clients through to transform their businesses. (You can check out the effectiveness of this process by applying it to your own coaching business! Many coaches have!) Your clients’ success is what ultimately guarantees yours. And there is nothing that serves a coach more than a fundamental philosophy and process for turning a business around. This letter was just posted in the Henry-Griffits newsletter. HenryGriffits is the premier golf club fitter in the world, and one of their partners, Andrew Machray, wrote from Australia: “My biggest issue when starting to club-fit and retail HenryGriffitts was overcoming the price tag that I was accustomed to seeing on the equipment in the Pro Shop that I had been teaching at. One thing did strike me about the equipment where I was, and that was that the equipment, the color and the price tag were a direct reflection on the manager of the store, and the more he filled the shop with the same low price points, the less he sold. He stocked the shelves with what he thought he would buy if he was going to purchase some golf gear. He should have stepped out from behind the counter, as I did, and seen what these Public golfers were carrying in their bags. The golfers might have been complaining about the price of the coffee but they wanted to play better golf and their bags were full of equipment well above the price points the Pro Shop was offering and not getting. “After reading the book recommended to me by Barry Miles called 9 Lies That Are Holding Your Business Back… And The Truth That Will Set It Free by Steve Chandler and Sam Beckford, I started to see the price point from a different angle, and since I am now in the service of selling golf equipment with no equal, as far as fitting and assembly, it makes a lot of sense to be adding value and raising prices and attracting the customer that will be of repeat business, and a customer not worried about the price tag as long as the value is there. And that is exactly what the whole HenryGriffitts philosophy and experience is all about. ‘We Deliver Confidence’ (we add value). A 100-day fitting warranty (we add
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value) and a lifetime lie angle warranty (we add value) and at least 1 back-up fitting (we add value) not to mention the teacher’s own input into the student’s enjoyment (we add value). I have never sold high-end equipment and had the customer thank me for the experience as much as I do with Henry-Griffitts. I still marvel at that. If this sounds like an ad for HG, well it probably is, by word of mouth.”
_______________________________________________ “Focus on what the customer wants, then focus on what you can do to add to that, to address a further and deeper want. That will keep your prices climbing right along with your value to the customer. And the good news is once you convert from a low price focus to a strong price focus your business will thrive.” — From 9 Lies That Are Holding Your Business Back… And The Truth That Will Set It Free by Steve Chandler and Sam Beckford
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Secret #3 – Become affiliated with proven credibility to avoid the “guidance counselor” syndrome. I’ve been to networking meetings as guest speaker and have talked to business coaches who were networking to get clients. The coaches were nice people, but it wasn’t difficult to see why they were short on clients. They looked and sounded very needy as they handed out their business cards. It was hard for them to convince people that they were really “success coaches” if their own coaching businesses were not that successful! Can you picture a top brain surgeon handing out cards at a chamber of commerce meeting trying to get more business? 71
A lot of the coaches I met at these networking meetings were actually very good coaches with solid training and techniques, but none of that mattered because their credibility was suspect. The very fact that they were there to schmooze and network and build their Rolodex told you that they were hurting. Who does that who is not hurting? (Maybe Harvey Mackay, but who else?) If you can’t get clients to trust that you yourself really know how to succeed, it’s not going to work. It’s always going to be an uphill battle getting clients. The problem a lot of business coaches face is what I call the “guidance counselor” syndrome. When I was a teenager I remember sitting across the desk from the high school guidance counselor thinking: “why should I take career advice form this guy? He’s a low paid guidance counselor that has to deal with bad-attitude teenagers like me 40 hours a week. What does he know about finding a good profession?” I thought I would have been better off getting career advice from a doctor or CEO or at least the school principal. If you haven’t written a bestselling book or aren’t a wealthy business owner it’s hard to get taken seriously by business owners who are potential coaching clients. It can be tough to convince a business owner that you can help them increase their personal income from $100,000 to $200,000 or much higher if you haven’t taken your own income into that territory. The easiest way to avoid the guidance counselor syndrome is to be a well-known success yourself! And the next easiest way is to be affiliated and partnered with that kind of success. There are a couple of ways to do this. One way, of course, is to be an employee of an established training and coaching company. But, if you’re reading this right now that’s obviously not the route you want to take. You want to be a sole practitioner, calling all your own shots.
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And I’m with you all the way. I believe that the advantages of being an independent coach greatly outweigh the drawbacks. The other way is to become a licensee or franchise of a coaching organization. I’ve seen coaching franchises that charge $75,000 to coaches to use their system. The system may work well, but I think that the restrictions and costs of a franchise make it an impractical choice for a lot of independent coaches. The best way, in our opinion, is to become affiliated with a credible source without giving up your independence. To have an affiliation that provides the credibility of an established coach or author, but lets you operate and bill the way you want. What you want is an affiliation that lets you have the upside of transferred credibility and recognition without the downside of high costs and restrictive operation requirements. When Steve began his coaching and training career he became affiliated with well-known corporate motivator Dennis Deaton and Quma Learning Systems and immediately inherited clients like Texas Instruments, Motorola, Intel, Bank of America and American Express. As an associate of Dr. Deaton’s, Chandler had instant credibility and power to teach. It is this kind of affiliation we are both recommending and offering. You can get it with us or with someone else, but whomever you affiliate with will put you on a faster track to success.
Secret #4 – You need to be part of something bigger than you, and sell prospective clients on being part of something bigger, too.
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One of the key breakthroughs I made in my coaching practice was when I decided to sell more than just me. When I gave my coaching clients access to the ideas of other top experts and consultants in addition to myself I was able to attract more clients. And more importantly, I began to differentiate myself from other small-time coaches and thereby charge more! I used people like Dan Kennedy, Julie Morgenstern, Michael Gerber, Steve Chandler and many more well-known success experts who had national bestsellers and were already widely admired by my coaching clients. (In fact, that’s how I met Steve… I brought him to my clients as a guest expert in self-motivation.) One of my favorite sayings is “No one of us in smarter than all of us.” These days because of technology it is easy to be connected to a group of colleagues and associates in your field and tap into that synergy. What if you could sit down with a potential client and not just offer them your advice, but, through you and only you, you could give them the advice of other top authors and coaches as well? In the past that would have been impossible, but with today’s advances in communications and the Internet it is easy. Business is full of universal problems. Fortunately, it is also full of universal solutions. The limit to being an independent coach is that none of us will live long enough to experience every possible situation and solution. As a coach it is important to be connected to other coaches for your own ideas and for ideas for your clients. If you were a personal fitness trainer wouldn’t it be easier to sell your training if clients got access to a full gym membership as a bonus when they hired you? That’s the type of perceived value you want to create in your coaching practice.
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There’s another huge advantage in being part of something bigger than yourself and connecting your clients to something bigger than yourself. Duplication! One limitation of coaching is that you are basically trading hours for dollars. If the only service you offer as a coach is your hourly service, then you are automatically and immediately capped at the amount of income you can generate. You don’t want that. You want your potential income to be unlimited. When I figured out the principle of connecting my clients to a program bigger than just myself I was able to accommodate 400 clients that pay $187 per month! That was my base level program that gives clients 15 minutes of private consulting time with me each month and other benefits of a group program. If I was just selling personal time with me, there is no way I could have broken out of the trading hours for dollars cap. I also have a high level program with 24 spaces where clients pay $10,000 per year to be a part of a higher level networking group and get face to face time with me. Building a coaching practice that is bigger than just your personal input is a key that can even out your income, help you retain clients longer and help your coaching business prosper. In a nutshell, those are our four secrets to making a large income from your coaching practice while still having a life.
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Chapter Nine
Coaching gets your life in gear "Coaches are not for the meek. They're for people who value unambiguous feedback. All coaches have one thing in common, it's that they are ruthlessly results-oriented." — FAST COMPANY Magazine Many people think there’s no security in coaching. As if security was the only good thing in the world. But the kind of security they are talking about is really stagnation. It’s a kind of dependable, slow decay. A predictable wasting away! If that’s security, you don’t want it. _______________________________________________ “When you have the security of a TV series like ‘Remington Steele’ or a franchise like Bond, you can become complacent. To have the hunger and bite again and to have that desire and need to give a performance, that’s a good feeling to have.” — Actor Pierce Brosnan on life after James Bond, on VNU Entertainment News Wire _______________________________________________ Pierce Brosnan could have played the victim. He could have gone around complaining (as so many actors do) about being typecast by previous roles, or he could have groused about how older actors get dumped from great roles like James Bond. But he shifted up to the level that gave him the most energy and adventure instead. The shift that takes you up to higher energy and adventure is just like shifting gears in your sports car. You’re not putting in a whole new gearbox, you’re just shifting gears.
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Yesterday our friend Robert was at his computer dealing with “unpredictable” coaching prospects and getting more and more down on his work. He knew he needed a shift in perspective, so he got up and took a walk outside. While he was on his walk, he looked up into a tree at a bird’s nest he had noticed when he came into work and he saw a little bird peek its beak and eyes out of the nest. Robert laughed and walked back inside and took a seat at his computer. He felt better. Much better. When he started answering emails, he did it with a lighter touch, giving out more thoughtful and compassionate replies than earlier in the day. What had just happened for Robert? It’s important to see that Robert shifted his mind; that he did something deliberately to move his perspective on up to a slightly higher level. Every step up from victim thinking feeds you with energy. The physical element is important here. The mind and the body are part of the same organic whole. So if you lift your body up and walk it outside you are moving the interior of your mind at the same time. A body shift will facilitate a mind shift. Even closing your eyes and taking a deep breath can shift your mind. Closing your eyes will more than likely take your brain waves from excitable Beta into a more orderly relaxed Alpha state — especially if you can close your eyes for 20 seconds and picture a peaceful scene. Alpha. The point here is to know you are in control of your physical sports car. Some people live their whole lives stuck in low gear, not even realizing they could shift up and out and watch their vehicle glide. If we extend the metaphor we realize that most coaches who are just beginning don’t even want to learn to drive a stick shift. They want to stay with their automatic transmission. The car that shifts for you. So their mind’s version of that is to simply buy into permanent lists of what is bad news and what is good news and then just let the shifting be automatic.
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Therefore, if you find out you’re not getting a client you really wanted, that’s “bad news” and your automatic transmission just downshifts for you. You didn’t even have to think about it. You hear “bad news” and go into a bad mood. If Pierce Brosnan had been on automatic like that he would have been in a bad mood the moment he found out that the studio was going to go with a younger James Bond - or the moment his TV series Remington Steele was canceled. Automatic downshift. But that’s not what he did. He shifted up instead of down and now he’s gliding into all kids of interesting movie roles. This is something you can do, too, anytime you choose to. Just be like Robert and walk outside to look at the bird in the tree. Just getting up from the chair, stretching and walking and then going outdoors and breathing the fresher air so much more deeply and looking up, up into the tree and making that connection with the bird, that eye contact with another living being on the planet, that is shifting! The body leads the mind. We think it’s always the other way around. That the mind leads the body around like an old hound dog. That the mind has to talk the body out of bed every morning. Well, all that’s true but one of the secrets to mindshifting is that you can do it the other way. The body can move the mind into a higher gear. Like Robert’s did. Like yours will today when you go for a long swim or a long walk or play that fast-paced game of racquetball with your friend. Your mind will not (and can not) stay in the same gear after that. You hold the key. You are in charge. You can choose any response to life you want. You are not a victim of anything.
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Chapter Ten
Get in this for the money “You never suffer from a money problem, you always suffer from an idea problem.” — Robert H. Schuller Don’t get confused about why you are in coaching. If you are a business coach, or a success coach of any kind, it’s perfectly all right to focus on your own success. By which we mean the money you make. Almost every coach we coach who is faltering has an insufficient focus on making money. Let’s look at the example of Barry, a coach who signed up with us for coaching so that he might increase his coaching business. “I love this profession,” Barry said, “It’s just that I’m having a hard time really growing my business.” “Then why do you love the profession?” “Oh I love helping people,” Barry said. “I love people, and I love helping them solve their business and personal problems and break through to greater achievement.” “You need to change your focus. You need to change what it is that you love focusing on.” “To what?” “Money.” “I help them make money already.”
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“Not their money, your money.” “Why?” “Without that focus, you’ll fail. And you won’t end up helping anyone. You’ll become less effective because of your own lack of money. You have to turn that around. Because the more money you make, the more power you have to help others.”
_______________________________________________ “I don’t want to do business with those who don’t make a profit, because they can’t give the best service.” — Lee Bristol _______________________________________________
Wake up to making money “The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.” — Willem De Kooning When we seek to help you create more wealth through coaching we’re not trying to make you more self-important or encourage you to seek ego-gratification by the accumulation of material objects. Our intention is to give you a rare and strange freedom - the freedom to move freely in life, go where you want to go and do what you want to do. The wealth we are referring to is freedom itself. As Ivan Illich said, “Man must choose whether to be rich in things or the freedom to use them.” We seek to help you find the freedom to help your loved ones, and to help the people you want to help. Many people shake their heads
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when they hear about conditions in Africa, but can’t do anything but complain about it. Then they curse people who have the power to help, but don’t. Why not have that power yourself? Why not be one of the people who has the freedom to send money and dig a well in Africa? We are talking in this book about earned wealth: the kind of wealth that comes from serving the greatest number of people in the most preferred ways. Creating wealth is therefore a different concept than “discovering” a way to get rich quick, or a finding way to take advantage of some “hot” or “opportune” external circumstance. We’re talking about creating wealth from within yourself. When Napoleon Hill wrote Think and Grow Rich his book’s point was that all the rich people he studied got that way through their thinking, not through external circumstance. They learned to direct the power of their thoughts and point those thoughts in the direction of great riches. Hill was correct that wealth starts in the mind, but he only took us halfway there. Sam Beckford takes it a step further when he describes becoming wealthy as a logical process that works when followed but comes undone when emotions worm their way into the equation. Becoming wealthy is a logical step-by-step process! The blueprints and instructions for becoming wealthy in the free enterprise system have been given many, many times. They are sitting in every library, and they are at your fingertips on the Internet. You can follow them for yourself and you can coach your clients in the same direction. Those logical steps are, in fact, right here in this book. The problem is, emotions get inside the logical plan, and infect it like a virus, finally kill the organism. Four out of five small businesses fail. And it was always an emotion that did it. Fear is the most dangerous emotion on the way to wealth because it builds up and then mutates into resentment and anger and affects all business relationships negatively.
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We’ve heard employees at a small restaurant complain that they’ve had a bad day at work because for some reason they were “slammed” all afternoon. “What do you mean by ‘slammed’?” “People. Just slammed us. Wouldn’t stop coming. We thought we’d catch a break in the afternoon, but we didn’t.” Notice that these workers were actually emotionally working against wealth. Most people in business work against wealth. Just as most employees in companies work against promotion. They fear and resent their employers and therefore they do not advance. Or if they do, it’s painful and with a lot of reservations. If they were able to take all that negative emotion out of their work and just work on in good, neutral spirits, they would win big. But emotion creeps in. When the great novelist Jonathan Swift said, “A wise man should have money in his head, not in his heart,” he was on to something. Once you have making money as your primary thinking objective, your clients will benefit and your practice will take off. Why? Because you are finally living the truth! You are finally in alignment with reality. You know where to focus when you wake up. Most coaches don’t know where to focus when they wake up. They don’t allow themselves to wake up into thoughts of money. So they wake up into thinking obsessively about the day’s challenges and their clients’ problems. Therefore they wake up into confusion about what their priorities ought to be. There can be no confusion in coaching success! Your priority today is to make money coaching. It’s time to wake up.
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Once you start waking up to that, you adjust your day accordingly and soon your long-neglected prospecting and referral programs are sailing along beautifully and you are adding business every week.
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Chapter Eleven
Invest in yourself "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival." — Dr. W. Edwards Deming People are fond of reminding you that “Money isn’t everything,” but here’s the point: money is everything if you don’t have enough of it. And most beginning coaches don’t. And if you don’t have enough of it, money influences every choice you make. It holds you back everywhere. It keeps you limited and worried, when you want to be free and powerful. Free and powerful works better for your clients, too. They like knowing you are successful at what you do. If you can’t take a coaching call from them for two weeks because you are vacationing in Tuscany, your clients smile to themselves knowing they have the right coach. Money is worth focusing on. Even as much as your health, because it becomes your access to all the expanded choices that determine what level of health you can achieve! It becomes the main factor in choosing where you’re going to live. It becomes the key to whether your kids are going to have access to a better education or not. It’s not that important to you, you say? Pretending that money’s not important to you will harm your coaching practice and your life. Money even influences whether you’re going to get to see family members or not. It also determines whether you can help people who are in trouble, or just kind of uselessly watch things happen.
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So money - if you don’t have enough of it - soon becomes everything! Creating wealth through coaching others will positively affect every area of your life. It will continuously widen your choices. The kind of choices that only financial power will bring to you. Therefore it makes the most sense to invest in the resources that will allow you to learn how to earn more money. Go back 100 years and picture that you’re living on your farm and there’s a well where you get all your water. It would make a lot of sense for you to take the time to make sure that the well is working, to make sure it’s clean, to make sure that the pump is functioning every day. Because if you don’t have water for a couple of days, you’re dead. So it is in our powerful global economy with wealth. It’s the same dynamic. It’s very difficult to actually exist with no money whatsoever. So you can think of it as your water. So let’s take care of the well. Let’s invest in the well. Let’s invest in the well known as knowledge. Knowledge is your ultimate power. It is your well and your water. There is a teachable, learnable knowledge about becoming a wealthy coach. People have gone before you on this journey and kept a record. So your investment will be in the education of how to make money as a coach and keep it. You can begin by investing in getting your skill set up higher. Continuously learning to be a more powerful coach for your clients. Some business coaches are so good they can infuse success into a failed part of someone’s business in a fifteen minute session on the phone! You can learn to do that. Continue to invest in professional strength. It’s a better investment than any stock or bond you can find. It pays more back to you. And it pays off immediately. You can go to one good seminar (we recommend our own, but there are many others! - even the lesser
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ones will help you grow) and learn tools that you can start using the very next week! Not only to grow your business, but to grow your clients. “The reason why most people are so pathetic is that they will not take the time to develop and refine their skill,” writes Stuart Wilde in his excellent book, The Trick to Money Is Having Some. “There is such a headlong rush to make it in life, to acquire the accoutrements of a fancy lifestyle, that people tumble out and try to merchandise themselves before they have any real experience and while they know little about their chosen field.” Contrary to the movies and the media, wealth is not all about luck. It’s about what you can provide for the people you coach. Wealth is about what you know about. If you are willing to go to a seminar in how to make a small business successful, for example, a seminar like Michael Gerber’s E-Myth seminar, that’s an investment in you and your ability to turn your clients’ businesses around and make money for yourself. Sam shakes his head when thinking about how few people access the information highway to riches: “I’ve had conversations with sales people who are in my office selling me something,” he says, “and I’d mention a couple of sales books I’ve read, and I’d say, ‘Have you read this book or this book or this book?’ - books by really well-known sales trainers, who anyone - or everyone - in sales should know – and they’ll say, ‘Oh, no, I’ve never heard of them.’ These are people who spend the majority of their waking hours selling and they’ve taken no time and no effort to learn from the masters - people who’ve become millionaires and are sharing their systems - they could have gone to the library and picked up some of these sales classics and at least have been aware of them. But there’s no commitment to investing in themselves.” That’s because they don’t see themselves as the primary source of wealth. They see wealth as something that exists outside of themselves - something that has to be coaxed in. Wealthaccumulation to outside-in thinkers always becomes a painful process. Maybe they even flash back to when they were children and had to ask Dad for money. How frightening that could be. They never
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got over it. So even now, if they’re in coaching, they see wealth as being the possession of their clients! It’s always “out there.” But we want you to get that it’s not out there. It’s in you! Sam continues being surprised when he says, “It’s the same way with business owners. It always amazes me when I talk to people in the restaurant business and I ask them if they’ve read the book by the McDonald’s founder, or the guy that started Domino’s Pizza, or - and this one just kills me - when I’m talking to someone who owns a coffee shop, and I ask them if they’ve read the book by Howard Schultz, who owns Starbucks. And they say, ‘No.’ What excuse do they have? I mean, they’re not investing in themselves at all! And now they’ll blame the fact that their coffee shop’s not working on the economy, or on competition. When the blame lies with them. They’ve made no investment in their own skill at succeeding.” Howard Schultz, Chairman of Starbucks, said in Fortune Magazine, “I’m always stopping in our stores - at least 25 a week. I’m also in other places: Home Depot, Whole Foods, Crate & Barrel. I was just in a great home improvement store, Tokyo Hands, in Tokyo; it’s fun and it grabs you. I try to be a sponge to pick up as much as I can. The airplane is my time to read, which I do voraciously.” So, too, as a coach you’ll want to be willing to invest in your own knowledge. People that have the most wealth have also spent the most time learning about how to create it and how to keep it. Steve recalls, “Many years ago, I made my living solely by public speaking, and I took time and money aside to invest in an acting class so I’d be better in front of a room. And at the time, it didn’t look very smart. Some might have said, ‘You’re not making enough money to actually spend it to take an acting class… why not pay off all your debts first?’ But it was one of the best things I did, long-term, for my career, because it added dimensions to what I was able to do as a speaker that I didn’t have before. And the new dimensions were immediate. I had the confidence and power in front of a room to double and then triple my fees! The common sense wisdom would be, ‘Take that money and put it in a savings account, and wait until you 87
can afford the luxury of an acting class.’ But, really, the class was a better investment because I made it back hundreds of times over in increased speaking skills and fees.” That’s a great example of investing in something that you will use every single day to generate more wealth. People that are in beginning coaching careers, or maybe just doing a little coaching on the side until they can “afford” to leave their day jobs, think they’re stuck. But there are always ways they can immediately train, upgrade, and improve. Once you start investing in you it really settles it that this whole thing is up to you. It establishes the connection between what you do and whether you succeed or not. Instead of trying to figure out if you have picked the right business for this time and this economy, you take power away from circumstance and put it back inside your own biocomputer. Your brain. Continuously upgrading what it can do. You can be in charge of getting new software for your biocomputer continuously. Most beginning coaches still want to have wealth-accumulation be about some external brass ring they’ve grabbed or not grabbed. Was this the right profession to get into? But if you take on the principle of “Invest in You,” it emphasizes the fact that this is going to be about you, this is going to be about your skill level as a successful coach. You’re going to be the one who makes this happen, or not, so you might as well invest in you. It changes the whole mindset away from “I hope I picked a good profession, I hope I was right to do this.” Sam says, “I still remember, with myself, when I had the five businesses that didn’t work out, I read a total of four books. And then business number six, which worked out very, very well? I read seven hundred books. So I’m guessing that it was probably something in some of the books that made the difference.” Coaching is no different than any other route to great wealth. You’re not different than a world class surgeon, or a world class athlete. The ones that are at the top of the game have also dedicated the most time and money towards developing their skills. 88
_____________________________________________ “Don’t be miserly with your strengths, with your intelligence, and with your creativity. Look for outlets. Look for challenges. Find out what makes you feel most alive and figure out some way to earn your living doing it.” — Nathaniel Branden _______________________________________________
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Chapter Twelve
You are the cause of your success as a coach “Let your plans be dark and as impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.” — Sun Tzu This chapter is in the first person from Steve Chandler: There is a valuable shift that coaches can make in their minds when they want to do better selling themselves in any free market encounter. Whether they are selling coaching on the Internet, group coaching, phone coaching or one-on-one coaching, they do better when they shift their attention from themselves to the recipient of the coaching. When they become solvers of other people’s problems. Success comes from shifting your attention to the fun and exciting problem to be solved. I was talking to Allen the other day about his move out of investment banking into personal coaching. He was very worried about his brochures, his business cards, whether he should acquire certification as a life coach, and a host of other things that featured Allen focused on Allen. As long as Allen was focused on Allen, nothing exciting would ever happen. He needed to shift his mind to the client. I tried to alter his mindset. To show him how to shift. He asked what he should call himself, a life coach or an executive coach or a career consultant. He wondered how much certification he would need. I asked him, “Who do you want to help?” “What do you mean?”
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“You will bypass a lot of these branding and marketing steps in your equation by asking yourself, Who do I want to help? And then, Where are they now?” “Oh my goodness. I’m just thinking of how I’m coming across.” Exactly. Wrong focus. George Hamilton III had a song back in the ‘50s I always liked called Break My Mind. It was also sung by Linda Ronstadt and more than 20 other recording artists. I love it because it captures the image of how we freeze frame ourselves in a belief system. Those beliefs crystallize and the mind becomes a sheet of ice. I remember growing up in Michigan and after a freezing rain you could lift sheets of ice, about the size of record album covers, up from the sidewalk. And they were transparent and crystalline. You would hold them in wonder, then fling them against a maple tree and shatter them, or break them over the bucket on the tree that is capturing the syrup. That’s how our minds get! Our minds are like ice when we can’t shift. Like a picture frame full of ice. That’s when we need to break our minds. Allen’s mind was frozen in the belief that he himself had to be impressive and credible and worthy. That all focus would be on the approval he would be winning at any given time. Coaches make that mistake because they believe they have to win approval to succeed. There’s a better, faster way, and that is to compassionately engage yourself in solving someone’s problem for them. That works better and faster, but you have to shatter that old belief like ice. Most of this book is about shattering old beliefs and getting into pure, direct action. Knowing you’re good, and going for it. Knowing you’re good is vital. Most don’t go for that. They go for making other people believe they’re good. Just know you’re good and jump on that problem and solve it. Wendall was a company president who was struggling with his company and his clients as well. He was struggling because he was into struggling. His belief was that life was a struggle, so he struggled
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all day, and like a professional wrestler, he found opponents and wrestled with them. Sometimes he got payoffs for this. His insecurities about not being a good president or running the company well caused him to start each day in a defensive stance, almost like a wrestler or boxer would. Crouched down with his hands splayed out, ready to grapple. I often thought his company might better be named Grapple Inc. Someone would suggest something and Wendall would find a way to counter it. Someone would suggest a price or a fee, and he would counter the price. A wrestling move and his counter move! He would struggle with that person until he got a better price, then he would feel like he won. Not only that, he would later trash the person he struggled with for not offering that low price to begin with. To battlers like Wendall, the world is full of opponents. Who can you trust? You have to fight for every inch of ground you can get. I told Wendall I would not coach him because he had twice come back to me with lower fees he wanted me to charge him for the work. Move/counter move! He wanted his relationship with me to be a victory for him rather than a partnership. He wanted the struggle. I walked away because I did not want to feed his struggle. I didn’t want to feed his habit. He was offended when I walked away. Actually I might better have written that he “felt” offended rather than to say that he “was offended.” Because you can’t really be offended by anyone, just as you can’t really be rejected. Those are feelings, not realities. You can feel offended and feel rejected, but those feelings are caused by your own thoughts. Your thoughts are the only things that can reject and offend you. No one else can. Knowing that as you venture forth to offer your services as a coach is very valuable. It clears the mechanism and keeps you focused on creative action at all times. Here’s an example of how that mindset works for you. Let’s say you are in a foreign land and you are taught that the people there, if
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they like you and are attracted to you, will always refuse your first offer. That’s their way. That’s their playful sign that they like you. So you learn this custom from your guide and you ask a young lady to tea and she says, “No, thank you. I’d rather not.” Inside, you are feeling very good because this is a sign she likes you! So you go back to your hotel on cloud nine, ready to talk with her again tomorrow. Were you offended? Were you rejected? No! It felt good! But what if your guide later laughed and said he was having you on. That there was no such custom, and the lady really meant what she said. What would you feel now? Anger at the guide? Rejection? You only feel what your latest thoughts tell you to feel. No one can offend you. No one can reject you. Because those feelings are generated inside yourself by your own thoughts. Stop believing those thoughts! Do not believe any thought that brings you down and discourages you from becoming a great and prosperous coach. All you need to do to get your coaching business going is to engage in a few conversations. Talk to people who have small businesses and ask them questions. Ask them what they are achieving now versus what they would like to achieve. Ask them what’s in the way. Talk to them. Get them to see that their limiting beliefs are usually what’s in the way, and as their coach, you will free that up for them. Michael Gerber revolutionized the way small business owners approach their jobs and we recommend his books highly. Sam has brought Gerber in to speak to various client groups, always with great, transformative results. Gerber’s work dramatizes the fact that the biggest mistake made by people who start their own small businesses is that they end up working IN that business instead of working ON the business. These people have become victims of their own creation. (Like the madman
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in the insane asylum who is given crayons in the morning to express himself with, draws a horrific monster on his pad, then looks at the monster, screams, jumps up from the table and runs out of the room. Is your prospect’s business like this?) When you use a book like 9 Lies to help a business owner transform their business you will help them see how they have been victimizing themselves. Your job as a coach will be to return them to true “owner” status. When your client is a true owner, his business is like a racehorse. An owner buys a racehorse, and trains and cares for the racehorse, and then derives great pleasure from seeing the racehorse race and win. Your work is to transform victims into owners. Victims are victims of almost everything, most especially their self-victimizing thinking. The victim has also bought a horse, but the victim straps himself to the underside of the horse (his business) and then is taken for a terrifying ride. The owner uses his business to obtain wealth. The victim is used by his business, in fact used up by his business, leaving it at the end of the day worn out and wondering “What was I thinking getting into this business? It’s such a drain.” The owner takes full responsibility for his business’s success. Full responsibility! The victim blames circumstance for the business’s struggles. The owner lives from the inside out, going deep inside to connect with his or her goals and dreams each day. The victim lives from the outside in, going to work and fighting off fires and solving outside problems pressing in on him, as if the business employed him instead of the other way around. Owners take ownership of their energy and creativity as it is applied to their business. Owners own their businesses! Owners own their business numbers, while victims often don’t even want to see them.
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Most people who will be your clients have no real objectivity in their lives. No one to bounce ideas off of. Oh, yes, there are people all around them, but those people all have an agenda. Those people all have some emotional ties to that business owner. You do not. You are pure reason. You represent the truth. That alone makes your fee worthwhile. Then you add in a second factor: you can see the owner’s strengths and draw them out. You can get the owner to stop focusing on problems and start focusing on the customer. Your fee is earned 10 times over every time you get your client to shift his attention from what he doesn’t want to what he really wants. You are in charge of his attention! It will become amazing to you as a coach that your client can increase whatever she wants in her life if she only remembers to pay attention. She "pays" attention because she "invests" it. My friend Jim Blasingame hosts a popular nation-wide radio show called The Small Business Advocate. He recently told me that the first year he was on the air with his show he directed all of his attention to the worries and problems of the show.... and the show really struggled. Then over next three years he began to pay more and more attention to the audience.... and the audience grew! Whatever he put his attention on would grow. Anything you pay attention to expands. It grows. Pay attention to your house plants and they grow. Pay attention to your favorite sport, and your passion for that sport grows. Attention is like that. Anywhere you point it, the object of that attention grows. When you have your initial conversations with your client or prospect, you will notice that their attention is fastened on problems and obstacles. Your work will be easy. Shift that attention to the goal. Shift it to the customer. As we say in the 9 Lies book, your prospect can stop being a victim and take ownership at any moment. It is a miracle when it happens (a miracle we observe every day), but it is not all that difficult. It does not require new traits and characteristics on the part of the owner, because it is a choice. The owner-victim distinction lives at the level of 95
choice. Make the choice and you can choose ownership. Refuse to choose and you’ll be a victim by default. Victims no longer can see that their businesses are a creation of theirs! They can no longer experience the business as a personallycrafted ongoing work in progress. Instead they see it as a fixed entity that they have to go be a slave to. The creator has become a creature! Victims feel beat up. They feel beat up by their customers and frightened by their competition. They feel betrayed by their employees. Victims soon feel misunderstood and under-appreciated by their spouses. “If she only realized what I go through every day to keep this thing afloat!” Victims live a life based on fear. (“What do I dread today?”) Owners live a life based on love. (“What would I love to make happen?”) Victims wake up and ask themselves, “What do I hope doesn’t happen today?” An owner starts the day consulting her goal sheet. “What would I love to produce today?” Anyone can live like a victim, and anyone can live like an owner, it’s just a matter of the questions you ask. We all live inside one inquiry or another. Is your inquiry there by choice? Or has it chosen you? What questions do you want to be asking yourself? Those questions will determine whether you are working in your business or on it. The inquiry you live inside is what determines your behavior. An owner asks these questions: “What can I do? How can I use this circumstance to my advantage? How can I differentiate myself in the customer’s eyes? What’s something creative and exciting I can do this week to get my people and my customers talking? What value can I add that would allow a price increase and that the customer would really appreciate? What steps can I take to really grow this thing? What outcome would I like to produce this month? What would be a creative and exciting way to get that result? How can I help my people? How can I help my customer more?”
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A victim asks these questions, “When will I ever get caught up so I can get out of here? How much will this new competitor hurt me? Why do I feel like I have to be a babysitter to my own people? Why can’t you get good employees these days? How long does it take for a business to start turning a profit? Why is it that the harder I work the deeper in debt we go? Why can’t I trust these customers? Why is it that all these expensive ads I run do nothing for me? When do I start liking this work? What was I thinking when I started this business? Why doesn’t anyone ever tell you how hard it is? Why didn’t I wait until I had more capital to start this business?” When your prospect started his business he was living a dream. If you coach him to remember to remain an owner, you will honor that dream every day. He will see his business growth as a form of lucid dreaming. Each day he will use his and your imagination to craft more progress. Owners dream all day long and turn each dream into an action plan. Victims only dream at night. “Those who dream at night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity,” said T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), “But the dreamers of the day are dangerous people, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible.” Even victims can remember way back when they had their daytime dream going on. They set up their business, they remember, to get certain things out of it. But when the first wave of fear hit, and they became victims, the dream vanished and the nightmare began. It turned into more work than they thought and less money than they hoped for. It had them accepting the E-Myth that “You’ll never turn a profit until you’ve been in it for four years.” Once the victim position is taken, all of these nine lies become easy to believe and repeat. They are what explains the victim position. They are the rationale.
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Victims put all the good things they used to imagine into the vague and unreal future, or the distant past. Owners seize the moment. Victims think of a lot of things they “should” be doing to improve their business, but they are just too busy to do them now. (They’ll do that price increase in the future. They’ll recruit that great new person when they get un-swamped. They’ll work up that fun special event to appreciate customers when they can get some room to think. They’ll fix up the location and paint some areas when they get a break from the grind of survival.) Victims are focused on survival, while owners are focused on the next quantum leaps of success. (In small business life, what you focus on grows.) The owner does all these good things NOW. Now is when it all happens. And if it can’t literally happen now, an owner sets precise deadlines. Sets the deadlines NOW. He or she sets the deadlines NOW, so that they are still in the NOW. Deadlines soon become the owner’s best friend. Victims are victims of their own cynicism. They bring a negative, fatalistic “What are you gonna do?” approach to work every day and it becomes fatal to their business.
Here are some points to keep in mind while coaching: * People can take ownership of their own spirit and morale, or they can choose to think they are victims, the choice is an internal one. * Studies show that optimistic, ownership thoughts and communication lead to higher levels of creativity and productivity.
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* Studies show that increases in ownership and optimistic thoughts and communication lead to higher levels of physical and mental energy. * Studies show that habitual victimized thoughts and language lead to low moods, decreased physical and mental energy, and lower levels of creativity and productivity. * Choosing to take ownership of how we respond to a situation or another person is the fundamental internal choice of all people with free will. * We are free to think anything we want about anything. It is our fundamental freedom. We are free to think victim thoughts or the thoughts of ownership. The choice is always ours. The joy of coaching comes when you restore your client to ownership and phase out all the victim thinking. Listen for language in those first conversations:
Owner
Victim
You can count on it
I will try
I’ll take the first small action
This is so big
What can I do?
Who can I blame?
We
They
How can I use this?
Why does this always happen?
I want to (intend to)
I should
I use life
Life uses me (life is unfair)
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Get from
Get through
Commitment=decision
Commitment=feeling (comes and goes)
I don’t need a reason to be happy
People, places & things make me happy
If there’s a problem, I’m the problem
There shouldn’t be problems
Who do I need to be right now?
Why am I the way I am?
I’m focused
I am swamped
Take the test... who are you? Owner: “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.” Victim: “We’ll see what happens.”
Owner: “How may I serve?” Victim: “What would I get back?”
Owner: “I’m committed to making a difference.” Victim: “What difference would it make?”
Here’s why coaching is such a lucrative profession. It was summed up years ago by the great sales trainer Zig Ziglar, “You can have anything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.”
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Appendix A: Chapters One, Three, and Five from: 9 Lies That Are Holding Your Business Back... and the Truth That Will Set It Free
Lie # 1
I Just Need to Know How to Do This We are about to tell you precisely you how to succeed in business. But there is something that must be handled before that. Something so important that to skip it would be a crime. Most people do skip it. Most people jump right in, trying to figure out how to succeed in their business, as if that was all they really needed to know. But it’s not true. There’s something else that they need, even more important than the how to…and that’s the want to. Don’t proceed in your business without a want to succeed. Don’t even go to work if you don’t have it. You’re better off closing the place down for a day and taking a long, long walk to ask yourself, “Why do I want this to succeed?” Then answer that question by listing lots of benefits that will accrue to you and your family by your succeeding at this business—not just getting by, but succeeding. Talk to yourself about this. Have this conversation with yourself and later write down the answers where you can look at them each day.
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This is a conversation a lovely young woman by the name of Francine never had with herself. Of course, we don’t know that for sure, but the signs were all there that she never got clear about the depth of her intention. Francine opened a franchise coffee shop five minutes away from one of the locations of Sam’s business. He was in her shop getting coffee one day after she opened and he struck up a conversation with her. “I run the business down the street,” said Sam. “How are things going here?” “Things are going well,” said Francine, and for someone who was starting a new business, she looked pretty successful already. She was well-dressed, not in the regular franchise uniform, and the $40,000 car in the parking lot was hers. Sam had seen her getting out of it before. On a later visit, Sam learned that she co-owned the business with her father, who had put up all the investment to get things going. (So the car and the clothes started making more sense.) Sam himself had just finished a record year in his small business down the street and was in the process of expanding. In the following months, he stopped in the coffee shop often but Francine wasn’t around as much, and when she was there she was always in the back doing computer work. She was no longer out front talking with customers. Sam caught her eye one day as she peeked out from the back room and he asked again how business was. “Things are slow,” said Francine. “But I think it’s the economy. The economy is slow, so what can you do?” Sam didn’t know how to answer her because he’d just finished a record year! He was in the same neighborhood, working inside the same economy. But was it slow? The area they were in had new construction happening all around! And there were local area statistics just out that revealed the large number of new residents moving into the area. Sam was in the middle of preparing his increased advertising to match the influx. What economy was Francine talking about? A few months later Sam noticed that Francine’s shop had reduced the serving staff to cut back on payroll expenses. When he went in for coffee, it took a little longer to get served. Sam saw her getting out of her expensive car one day as he was leaving the shop.
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“Things going well?” Sam asked. “No, it’s worse than ever,” said Francine. “There just isn’t a customer base to draw from. I’ve tried. In an economy like this, you don’t have a lot to work with. People don’t have a lot of extra money to go out and spend.” Not long after that, Sam parked his car down the street, came by the store and noticed that the door was padlocked. Francine’s store was no longer in business. And here’s an ironic footnote: The store location wasn’t shut down for long before there was another coffee shop franchise operating successfully out of her same location. Soon two other good coffee shops opened, each one about five minutes away! It was clear that Francine never got grounded in her intention to succeed. Searching wildly for her how to, she had never strengthened her want to. Her intention had only gone this far: “I’ll open this place and see what happens.” That’s an intention, of sorts, but it is not enough. You have to want to succeed. If you want to badly enough, you’ll always find the how to. And once you’ve got your want to tuned up and ready to operate, outside forces (such as the “economy”) won’t be an issue. Whenever a small business owner has a weak want to on the inside, all power goes to the outside. That’s why the missing want to is never identified as the problem. Having a weak want to inside will create an exaggerated fear of the forces outside of you: competition, the economy, location, employee problems, lack of cash investment, all those outside forces that appear strong only when the inside is weak. We humans often make this common mistake: We jump to the how to way too soon! We buy books on how to lose weight, without really wanting to lose weight. When we do this we are ignoring something even more important than the how to, and that’s having a strong enough want to. Most people, once they get their business up and running—whether it’s cleaning gutters, washing windows, or selling rebuilt cars, it doesn’t matter— just come to work and stay busy inside that business all day and then go home. If they notice that things aren’t getting any traction, they start to look around
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outside of themselves for answers. Maybe they bounce around from one advertising representative to the next, or from one relative to the next, asking, “How do I make this thing work?” But they don’t realize that a “system” is not what’s missing. How to make it work is not what’s missing. What’s primarily missing is a strong intention to succeed. And what that lack of intention gets filled with inside a human being is an intention to just “keep my job” and get through the day. People can turn this whole purpose deficit around if they just check their intentions as they go to work: What’s my intention today? To just keep this job? To just keep this small business I’ve created for myself and my family and get through the day without too much damage done? Or is my intention to succeed? And if my intention is to succeed, grow the business, and indeed maybe even become a millionaire, then I will think completely differently every step of the way. If your small business career is not yet what you want it to be, it may be that “Intention Deficit Disorder” (no real clarity about what result you intend to produce), is the biggest problem you have, and the first problem that needs to be solved. Let’s look at this another way. If your teenage son’s room is chronically messy it would probably never occur to you to send him to a seminar on “how to clean a room.” The reason you wouldn’t is based on your knowledge that the “how to” is not missing here. The “want to” is missing. You know that. He doesn’t want to clean his room. The only way you will get him to clean his room is to create an incentive—through pain or gain—that makes him want to clean his room. And you need to do the same for yourself. Your business requires a strong intention to succeed.
Don’t Just Figure Out How to Do It We have sometimes given small business owners a multitude of fresh ideas on how to add value to their services and raise prices accordingly. We know that by using these ideas, they will turn their cash flow around and begin to prosper. We know this. But when we check back with them later, we often find they’ve tried almost none of the ideas. We then realize that we went to the how to too soon.
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A young man named Reggie recently approached us during a seminar and said that our ideas sounded fine but that the economy in his town was so bad that his business was not going to make it. After working with him for a while, we thought we had succeeded in giving Reggie a number of ways to actually leverage the slow economy to his advantage with his customers and have his business come out smelling like a rose. But we still couldn’t get the sadness out of his voice or the victim look out of his eyes. It was almost as if Reggie had already chosen his fate and chosen his emotional response to having his own business. We all of a sudden realized that Reggie didn’t want to succeed. Not yet, anyway. So we would have to address that deficit first. We believe that one of the reasons our Website programs and teleseminars are now working at such a dramatic level is we address the how to and the want to with equal attention and commitment. Sam Beckford’s well-chronicled success as a small business millionaire, and his follow-up success at teaching all his secrets on how to do exactly what he did, are synergistically woven together with my personal motivation coaching (the want to) so that both halves of a successful small business owner can emerge. A person must have both the how to and the want to to succeed. Both traits can be taught, and both can be learned. The want to is often the most important component of your success, especially if it’s missing! To succeed at anything, you have to want it. But most people overlook this simple fact. And when they are confronted about the fact that their actions suggest that they don’t really want to succeed, they get very depressed. They believe there is something wrong with them. But there is nothing wrong with them. All they need is for their level of desire to get a tune-up. Anyone can do it. We keep proving that. Your level of want to is totally within your control. It doesn’t exist by itself. You are in charge of its intensity. You can turn the flame up or down any time you want. But most people don’t realize that one’s desire to succeed isn’t a permanent thing. Similarly, they think it’s some character flaw or personality trait in them when they aren’t driven to succeed. But it’s not. Desire and intention are living, growing, ever-changing energy sources inside you. You can learn to
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continuously grow them to any degree you want. You can learn to motivate yourself to whatever degree of energy and enthusiasm you choose. Outside events have nothing to do with it. Personal history has nothing to do with it. It lives at the level of choice. You have the power to choose it.
How to Get What You Really Want If there is a level of business success that you want but do not have, then the first place to look for it is in your deepest self. Why do you want this business to succeed? What good things would it do? Do you think you deserve it yet? If not, why in the world don’t you? (And if your answers are opening up more and more clarity for your objective, then you are getting somewhere. If they are not, then you need to step back in space and time and start out in a more primal way. How do other people motivate themselves? How can I learn to do that? See our website to get more information about these questions.) Some people leave their job in a big company because they think they have enough want to to start a small business. They leave the security of a regular paycheck for the adventure of the entrepreneurial world. But after the first few difficulties their want to begins to weaken and outside forces seem to acquire more and more power over them. Brandon was just such an individual. He was a successful sales manager in pharmaceuticals in Michigan when he decided to strike out on his own. He had an excellent business plan for a small technical supply shop, so he moved his wife and family to Florida to start afresh. Difficulties hit him early. Brandon’s business partner turned out to be unimaginative and not very motivated. The early money invested in the project began to run out faster than anticipated. Sales were slow, and Brandon began to long for his former sense of confidence. Things at home weren’t all that great now either, especially now that he was bringing his fears home. And soon it was just a matter of time before the whole thing came down around him like a house of cards. Today Brandon (after closing down his failed business) has found a secure middle-management position with a large company in Florida, and his life is getting back to normal. When we talk to him now, we can hear that he still doesn’t fully understand what happened to his small business. He still talks
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about what he thinks happened outside of him, but he is still clueless about what happened inside. “If I ever do that kind of thing again,” says Brandon, “I’ll start with more money up front. I never gave myself a chance to get rolling. We only had a year, and everyone knows it takes four years before you see a profit in a business.” Brandon is quick to identify the many outside forces that got in his way. “My partner and employees weren’t what I had hoped,” he says today. “I think that was what also doomed the enterprise. I needed someone with a lot more confidence and energy to work with. And finally, we entered the market at just the wrong time. Most of our potential clients had already signed their supply contracts for the year so we just had to bide our time.” During this period of time we had given Brandon numerous ideas about how to jump-start his business, but he was too uninspired to give them a real fair try. He had already lost his want to, so, of course, all of our how to ideas fell on deaf ears. I made a mistake as a coach. I didn’t get Brandon as clear as I could have up front about his intention. I assumed too much about his level of desire to succeed and proceeded too quickly to the specifics. That’s a mistake I will not make again. Without the desire, no system—no matter how brilliant—can work.
Learning to Want to Have a Great Team Doug and Jan had been doing well enough with their franchised furniture store in Fresno, California, but one month the bottom fell out when a number of sales people (“designers”) quit for various reasons, leaving them short-handed and cash poor. We began coaching them in our principles for small business success, but realized that for the principles to work, a quick shock to the system was needed. “Good people are hard to find,” said Doug, “and we’re losing sales every day now because we don’t have good sales people to capitalize on the people who come into the store.”
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“Good people are hard to find when you need them,” I said, in our first heart-to-heart coaching session. “And your problem is that you always wait until you need them to start looking for them. That’s why you are struggling.” “How do you find good people?” asked Jan, reflecting her husband’s frustration. “It’s not a matter of how to,” I said. “There is no problem learning how to find good people. That’s not what’s missing here.” “We don’t follow you,” said Doug. “Your business struggles…because you hire to fill needs,” I asked. “You do what’s needed. You don’t do what’s wanted, you do what’s needed. It’s a needs-based activity. It’s counter-productive. You get nowhere. All that work and all that time and you keep sliding back to ground zero. That’s what needsbased activity does.” “Well,” said Doug. “It’s true, though. We do need people. If we had a few more people like our top person Michelle, we’d be in the money right now. Because of the shortage, Jan and I have to be in here ourselves all week from early morning to night. Even on Saturdays.” I wanted to drive his point home. “Until you proactively create the company you want, you will always have a major struggle on your hands,” I said. “Also, it is not true that the owners need to give so much of their precious time to the business. That is only true if your recruitment is reaction-based instead of a creation. Most small businesses Sam Beckford and I coach create a way for the owners to come by once a week. That’s plenty!” “That would be heaven,” Jan said. She and Doug had just adopted a little boy and hated the thought that they hardly saw him during the day anymore. “For now, during this period, I agree that you must be there full-time,” I said. “Talking to customers, saving your business, and so on. It is perfectly appropriate during this current crisis. However, if the two of you commit to being great at recruiting and hiring you will have people who want to do what you’re now doing, and who can do it well.”
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Doug and Jan were not persuaded. I had to confront them about how much time they had blocked out on their calendars for recruiting and hiring in the past year, and of course the answer was zero. They scurried around interviewing people whenever the need presented itself, but never proactively. “In your business,” I said, “there is no commitment right now whatsoever for building a great team. Not that there isn’t a wish and a hope, there’s just no commitment. There is reaction to crisis, and choosing to have your hiring be in the ‘reaction’ mode, rather than the ‘creation’ mode has caused almost every problem you have. It has tied everybody up, including yourselves.” Doug and Jan started taking notes. “You must hear this,” I said. “Simply because all the other franchise people echo your ‘truth’ about staffing and labor shortages doesn’t make it true. Your efforts at recruiting have been disorganized and frantic, and if you had ‘enough’ staff you would not recruit at all. I bet there are days when you don’t do any recruiting activities at all. Maybe even weeks. But it’s the most important thing you could do. It’s the best use of your time.” Doug and Jan began to protest about how many problems they had to deal with prior to recruiting and building a good team. As so many other business owners are, they were so “into the forest and trees” of their business they couldn’t see what would give them more profit. They literally couldn’t see it! Doug and Jan had a choice. Their choice was to (1) manage an endless stream of mediocre people, trying to make this thing work, or (2) build a great team that earned them a huge profit and only required one day a week from each of them. “That sounds impossible,” said Doug. But Jan was starting to get it. “Doug, wait a minute, think this through,” she said. “If we had to do it, we would. Wouldn’t we? If Donald Trump brought his TV cameras into town and gave us three months to find these people, we would find them. Wouldn’t we? If he said the end prize was a few million dollars?” “Well, yeah,” said Doug.
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“Do you know why?” I asked. “You would be committed! It would be a completely different ball game than you have right now. Right now there’s no commitment whatsoever, none, to do this. I mean it! I don’t mean it as a criticism, because 90 percent of small businesses do it just like you do! And I bet that 98 percent of your franchises do it just like you do…all activities of the owners being need-based. Responding to what’s needed to keep the business afloat. It’s ironic, but filling the needs of your businesses is not what will ever make you successful. That’s the ultimate flaw of working in your business rather than working on it. You need to focus on wants, not needs.” The next week Doug and Jan went on a recruiting blitz. They blocked out an hour a day to call everyone they knew in town to put the word out that they were looking, like the Marines, for “a few good (wo)men.” They ran an ad in the newspaper and hung doorhangers on the doors in the nice neighborhoods of Fresno with a big picture of Michelle, their best salesperson/designer. “Michelle had no previous experience...” said the ad, “and you don’t need it either! Come take our test, and if you show you have an aptitude for design we will invite you to submit an application for a design/sales position with our company. Write to us today! Tell us about yourself. Do you watch HGTV? Do you have a love and passion for interior design and creating artful solutions for people? Why sit at home, or work in an unfulfilling job when you could work at this wonderful store! We train you thoroughly. You’ll become masterful at serving our customers!” Doug and Jan had realized that they could no longer afford to have “No one wants to work here” as the store’s culture. That’s what their culture had become! That’s what even the best and most optimistic people they had were thinking and speaking. Their new commitment to recruiting was changing their store’s entire culture. “People listen to committed people,” I had said to them. “Your employees listened to the malcontents who quit your store because those people were committed to being right about how hard it was to work at your store. Your people don’t listen to you, because you have no waiting list of people who want to work for you. In fact, you yourselves tell them that there is a staffing crisis and a labor shortage. In your own way you are telling them ‘no one wants to work here.’ I’m not trying to insult you; I am trying to wake you up to what you are doing to your people when you don’t recruit. Only you can change it around to “everyone wants to work here.” 110
Once you change it, morale, productivity, and everything else will pick up dramatically. I promise you this is true. I’ve worked on this very same recruitment subject with many, many businesses, and it’s the most difficult realization they get. It’s the hardest thing to convert to: working on your business instead of working in your business. If you make the conversion, I promise you that you will double your profits. I’ll help you in this project. I am committed to showing you the way to design and create the business you want and eliminate the word crisis from your vocabulary.” Soon Doug and Jan had three new people working in the store, and two more on their way in. Not only that, there was the beginning of a waiting list. I stopped in the store to talk to Jan about the record sales month they had just experienced. “Wow!” I said. “Look at how much you have done already! Great work. Stay on the phone, and network like crazy…until all of Fresno knows you are looking for a few good women. Never stop looking…never stop creating your team. Your team of people is your most important creation, it’s your most important work! Way to go.” “Thanks, but may I ask you something delicate?” Jan said. “Sure, of course,” I said. “It’s always been my desire to have a very close group of trusted employees— family,” said Jan. “And I still have a hard time changing that mindset. So it’s hard to picture a constant stream of new people always being recruited. I want to build something and keep it. I don’t like change. I like the family feeling.” “Don’t change that mindset,” I said. “That’s a great mindset! But even family members move on, and you can have a great family and a waiting list too. In fact, your waiting list will help you keep more of the family you want to keep. They will be less likely to leave, not more, if they know there are people dying to take their place. Have recruiting become your specialty, what you and Doug are known for. It will build the family you want.”
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Ben Didn’t Have a Sporting Chance An acquaintance of ours named Ben owns two independent sporting goods stores. He gives good customer service, and Sam has bought a few things there over the years. Sam recently asked Ben how business was going and Ben brought up the sore subject of his main competitor across town. The competitor was also a small independent sporting goods store with two locations. Ben said his competitors were starting to “private label” their own brand of sport shirts and track suits by dealing directly with a manufacturer. He said that they were probably making a better profit by their new approach. Ben thought they were pretty aggressive and admitted that some of their private label push was cutting into his business. Sam then asked Ben if it would be difficult to start a private label program of his own. “I guess it would be possible,” Ben said in a weary voice. “I’d have to call a manufacturer and make some designs and test it out. I guess a guy could do it if he really wanted to.” Sam waited for the obvious, the spark of enthusiasm at this new opportunity to level the playing field. Sam hoped Ben would say, “I’ll start tomorrow. If they can do it, so can I!” But those words never came. Ben eventually just changed the subject and started talking about the good old days of the business. The worst failure we see business owners making is the failure that comes from no longer having the internal flame, from no longer being willing to try a new strategy. You can give someone all the best new strategies in the world, but if his or her willingness is not there, it won’t matter. Notice this in yourself. Don’t “try” something new until you’ve tuned yourself up for it. Take care of your own internal flame before you halfheartedly try a new system or idea. Don’t get down there with Ben and the broken spirit his low energy voice tones conveyed when he said, “I guess I could try that idea out if I wanted to, but….” 112
The lack of want to becomes a lack of oxygen! You’ve got to have oxygen to keep a body alive. The word inspire literally means “to breathe in” and businesses need daily inspiration. That’s your primary responsibility. That’s why we give all of our clients a deep wake-up call on the want to so that the how to has a chance to be executed. Some of the most effective teaching tools our small business owners have utilized have been dialogues Sam and I created about how to use ongoing personal self-motivation for small business success. If you’ve ever lacked a fresh infusion of intention, you know what it feels like. Before your want to was firmly in place, you were probably similar to most business owners, going around thinking, “These customers are a pain, and I hope nothing bad happens today because I just have to put out fires. We’re just battling against everything!” You were going out each morning knowing you were going to get beat up throughout your business day. Then when the day was done, you would drag yourself home and just try to forget about it. But that is not a creative cycle. Each day the negativity and sense of overwhelm just starts all over again, and this negative will eventually destroy your business. Soon everyone associated with your little business is just working for the weekend! “Is it Wednesday yet? Good! Wednesday is hump day. We’re over the hump.” But wait a minute! Doesn’t that sound a little familiar to you? Wasn’t that why you left that big corporation you were working for? What’s going on here? How could you be reproducing the same thing? You started this little business for the freedom it would give you, and it’s given you the opposite!
All the Effort Is Wasted on the Start-Up In most businesses, people set up their business and then believe that all the real important work has been done in the start-up. They think, “Once we start the business and we get it running, then we’ll just come around and manage this thing.” But successful businesses don’t work that way. Businesses are living things, not fixed constructions. They need to grow, just as a planted garden does. In business, it’s grow or go. And by “grow” we don’t necessarily mean grow larger. You can succeed by just growing better! But grow.
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Your business has to be continually reinvented. You have to want to (want to!) continually reinvent your business so that it is better and better each day. Each day. The market is changing, the customers are changing, and every business can be improved each day to better match up, and even be ahead of, the changes. So when you want to succeed, the start-up starts again every day. Every day is a new beginning. You don’t ever try to nail it down. You know you can’t just do the same thing. If you see a business that is doing the exact same thing today as it was five years ago, chances are that business isn’t doing very well. There’s nothing worse than a business that’s been around for years (barely surviving) that looks like it’s been around for years. So when the customers walk into the business they say, “Wow, this place is looking pretty rough. The carpet’s in bad shape. Look at the duct tape on the carpet! That’s an interesting touch. All this stuff in here is worn out. Hey, somebody tell these owners, paint is cheap! I’m sure there would be a spare weekend to paint it.” One of the reasons businesses get that weary look to them is that the owners think of the business as something that is already done. They think, “Okay, this is all the business is and this is all it can be.” So they can’t see beyond that thought. They can’t even begin to ask the question, “How can this be the dream that I wanted it to be?” They miss the gold that’s lying around the next corner. They miss the fact that there’s so much freedom and flexibility in owning your own business that you can make it into anything you want it to be. But you have to realize that you have that power to transform the business and be willing (to generate the willingness) to make it into what you want.
This Is Your Ultimate Investment Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Nothing great was ever created without enthusiasm,” and so to create a great success with your business you invest enthusiasm. It’s your most important investment. It’s the key element in the mix. The word enthusiasm comes from the Greek “en theos,” which means “the god within,” which is the level you need to play at to win big. To succeed in business you need to bring your highest, most spiritual self to work each day. It’s that vital. Your mission is to make this business your greatest piece of work ever.
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Your masterpiece! A monument to your energy, to your laughter and tears, to your heart and soul. From that level you can fly. From that level, you can be so enthusiastic about serving your customer that you are continuously finding ways to astonish him or her. You can be enthusiastic about recruiting and hiring the best team of people alive. You look at all the wonderful ways you can acknowledge them and keep them in the game of pleasing your customers. You can honor their innovation and energy. And, finally, you are enthusiastic about yourself. You have found your fun. You have become a success in life. As journalist Sheila Graham quite wisely said, “You can have anything you want if you want it desperately enough. You must want it with an inner exuberance that erupts through the skin and joins the energy that created the world.” Enthusiasm comes from taking ownership of your life energy. You know how to do that. You did it every day as a small child. Enthusiasm comes from despising that weak, meek little voice in you that wants to be a victim of circumstance. It comes from breathing deeply into your dreams and oxygenating your brain, just as you did as an energetic, unstoppable child. Reach back and find that joy again and make this business your great masterpiece.
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Lie # 3
We Just Need to Get Our Name Out There Again and again you hear people tell you that you need to get your name out there. Advertising reps will tell you that name recognition is vital, and your ad must get your name out there over and over again. Not true! Your ad doesn’t need to get your name out. Your ad needs to get your customer in. Your business needs an ad that works to attract the exact type of customer that you want to sell to, and keep selling to. The purpose of advertising is not to “build awareness” or “increase your name ID.” The purpose of your advertising is to create a sale! So watch out: There is a lot of bad information floating around about advertising. And “bad information” is just a nice way of putting it. When your friendly local newspaper ad rep tries to tell you that your small business needs some name recognition, and that the most important thing you can do is to “get the word out,” then you have just been told a lie. This lie is not unique to newspaper reps. All media reps, billboard reps, radio ad reps—anyone at all pitching “awareness” is steering you toward failure. Because there is absolutely no value to your business whatsoever in having a lot of people simply know your business’s name. That lie has cost more small businesses more unnecessary wasteful expense than any other we can think of. To make advertising really pay off for you, you need to understand what advertising is! Advertising is “salesmanship in print.” And that hasn’t changed since the former Canadian policeman (turned advertising genius) John E. Kennedy changed the face of advertising forever with those three words in 1905. 116
So think of your ad as a salesperson. Make it be a salesperson. Would your salesperson get a sale by contacting your prospective customers and just saying the company name over and over? Calling them on the phone, whispering your business’s name, and hanging up? You expect a lot more than that from a salesperson, and so you should expect a lot more than that from your advertising as well.
Make Your Ad Attract Someone Even before you design an ad or a flyer, you may want to ask: Who are we trying to attract? What type of customer do we really want? (The same kind of talk you would have with a salesperson before sending him or her out into the world to make a sale.) Do we want a customer that will be profitable for our business? Or, do we want cheapskate price shoppers? One of the most important small business truths we could ever pass on to you is that the quality of your business is directly related to the quality of your customer. To make your business successful, you need customers who are good, solid citizens, customers who will be with you for a long time. And your advertising is a great place to start building that kind of customer base.
A Recipe for Business Misery If you pick up your local newspaper and look at ads for small businesses you will see a common pattern in how the ads are designed. Look right now in your paper to see if this isn’t the way it is: 1. Business name at the top of the ad. 2. A discount offer, such as 20 percent off a certain product or service, or an el cheapo price-related offer ($19.95 oil change). 3. The phone number and address at the bottom of the ad.
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This common type of advertising is not salesmanship. It’s closer to a bulletin board listing in a dormitory lobby. It’s crude and brutally brief. It has no chance to start the sales process toward a nice high-profit sale for you. It does little more than “get your name out” and establish you as a low-price (and probably low-value) business. If this ad even accomplishes these limited objectives, it is still not helping you in the long run. Because in the long run you want to grow a highly profitable business, and that starts with the first ad you place. So don’t use this bare-bones kind of advertising! Just don’t. Because you are wasting money and attracting the wrong type of customers (that is, if you are attracting customers at all). Here are two typical ads we just saw in our own local paper:
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Look at your own local paper and you’ll see ads very similar to these. In fact, you may even be running one yourself. And if you are running one yourself, you will be able to verify that it doesn’t work. Even though your rep is now telling you that you need to be patient. It’s all about “repetition.” But it’s not. If your ad doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter how many times you repeat it. If you have the wrong combination to a lock, your chances of opening the lock do not increase each time you try it. If you are dialing the wrong phone number, it doesn’t help you to dial it many more times in your attempt to reach someone. Your ad is there to reach someone. It must reach someone. If it doesn’t reach someone the very first time, it is a waste of money. Many newspaper reps will tell you that you have to run your ad 10 times to get “frequency.” Your rep will insist, “If people see it enough, they will respond.” Knowingly or not, your rep is lying. Time will pass. You’ll be getting no response to your ad. And now that you and your rep both realize that the ad is not working, your rep may then tell you to make the same ad bigger, so more people will notice it. “Don’t change the copy, just make the bad ad bigger!” (That’s the same as a waiter saying: “Don’t like the pie? Why don’t you try a bigger piece!”) Frequency and size sound like logical reasons people respond to advertising, but they are both false. Frequency in and of itself doesn’t make any difference. Neither does size. Not if the ad is ineffective. There is a restaurant somewhere in your city that you have driven by at least twice a day for over a year now. You keep seeing the name, and the restaurant doesn’t look at all unpleasant. You’ve probably seen their sign more than 1,000 times! But you have never eaten there. Frequency and knowing about the restaurant are not enough. A bigger sign on the restaurant won’t help either. If you don’t have a reason to go, you don’t have a reason to go.
From Broadway to the Right Way Frank Mastercola and his wife, of Park Ridge, New Jersey, were clients of ours a while back when their small business was doing okay, but not thriving.
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Frank and his wife were former Broadway performers and had acted in shows such as Cats and Starlight Express. They had worked with Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett, Cheeta Rivera, Liza Minelli, and other noteworthy professionals in the industry. After their success on Broadway, Frank’s wife, Anita, opened a small studio business. She started teaching music and dance, and four years later Frank decided to join her and get more involved in running the studio. “Our student total was in the 400s for about three years,” Frank told us. “And our original advertising philosophy was that getting the word out is the best way to sell your school. But it turns out you can’t just rely on that. And that’s why we were just spinning our wheels. So you came along with your advertising system at the perfect time for us and we thought, ‘Of course!’” By simply switching from the “getting your name out there” falsehood to the small business truth that advertising is salesmanship, Frank and Anita increased their student base to 800! Twice their original business! They are now looking forward to purchasing a new building for their school. So let’s go deeper into the two ads we cited earlier, to see exactly the kinds of changes you can make to increase your business the way Frank and Anita did. Question: What type of customer will the Lube Master ad attract? Look again: Lube Master Winter Special Oil Change $19.95 Expires December 31 536 Saddle Street Mon-Sat 9-6 555-1234 Answer: Someone looking for a cheap oil change, right? This ad is trying the old “loss leader” strategy. Get a customer to buy something cheap to get them in the door. But this ad probably won’t attract much response. Cheap oil changes are everywhere, aren’t they? There’s
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nothing compelling here. Nothing special. Therefore, no sale is being made. Remember: For an ad to work for you, it must be salesmanship in print. But even if this ad actually gets a response, you will have attracted a price shopper. Someone motivated by price. And then you will have the impossible task of getting them to come back and pay regular price for future services. Good luck. Try to upgrade a price shopper into a value buyer and both you and the customer end up frustrated, angry, and betrayed. Businesses do this all the time when they attract the wrong customers to begin with and then try to change them to a good high-value customer. You must change the belief behind your ad and the belief behind your business. What you believe about your business is what your customer will believe about your business. It has to start with you. People can get their oil changed anywhere. A cheap oil change is nothing special. So, you might ask, what is special? What does someone with a car want more than just a cheap oil change? There are two answers we know about for sure: (1) time and (2) convenience!
Remember this: Time is the new money According to the latest income surveys, 20 percent of the population controls 47 percent of the disposable income. That means one out of five people have so much money to buy things with, that, relatively speaking, they’re not concerned about the price at all. Does it make sense to focus your ad’s message on something that doesn’t concern them? Because those 20 percent are your ideal customers! Money is not the main factor in their decision to shop with you. You are. You are the main factor in their decision, and that’s how you want it to be. Your quality, your service, your commitment to them. That’s where you want it to be, because
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that’s where you profit margin is, and that’s where your data base of lifelong customers comes from. Not from one-time price shoppers. So, here’s an ad that reinvents the cheap oil change and attracts a totally different customer:
Who will this ad attract? Someone who is more concerned about time than money. Someone who loses more money per minute hanging around an oil change joint than all the attendants earn combined. Someone who sees the time spent waiting for his or her car as billable hours down the drain. Someone who wants to golf or play with his or her kids on the weekend, rather than running errands. That’s your ideal customer!
Always Use the High-Value Customer Ad Formula Here is the simple advertising formula that helped make Sam Beckford a millionaire: STEP 1: Place a headline at the top of the ad that solves a problem or gives a unique benefit that is more valuable than just the product. Your name should never be at the top of an ad, because it does nothing to attract customers. People don’t care what your business name is. They care about what your business can do for them. STEP 2: Make no reference to price in the ad. If price is your only selling feature you are in a losing battle. Remember that one in five consumers don’t need to fret about price. We have all bought things that were expensive but worth it. Price is just a detail, not the deal itself.
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STEP 3: Offer a unique service (that only you provide) as the “hook,” not a lowball price. People buy for many reasons other than price. Once you believe this you will attract customers that will continue to prove it to you and verify your belief. Higher-value customers who like your unique offer are the ones who stay with you. Remember that the two car brands with the highest repeatpurchase rates are Lexus and Cadillac! Is that because of the price? Let’s use our small business truth formula (see www.smallbusinesstruth.com) to reinvent the second ad, the one about the chainsaw. Here is the original:
First ask yourself, “Who will buy a $300 chainsaw as a Christmas gift?” Answer: The wife of a man who likes the outdoors. Try to remember that gift purchases are not made by the recipient of the gift! (That sounds obvious, as if we didn’t need to tell you that. But during the holiday season, look at how many ads are thoughtlessly misdirected. Remember: Your ad is doing a sales job for you. Make it talk to the buyer.) The majority of wives who will spend $300 on a chainsaw for a gift are not price-conscious shoppers. If they were, they would be looking at $39 wrench sets, not $300 chainsaws. Question number two: Would most wives like to go to a power equipment store and spend time looking at chainsaws? Probably not. They would be intimidated at the very thought. So, taking those observations into account, here’s our reinvented ad that attracts the ideal customer for the chainsaw gift:
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How much is the chainsaw? Could it be $50 more than the first ad? Who cares? It’s worth it. We are no longer selling a chainsaw, we are now selling an event! The log in the backyard to try it out, the hiding the box, not having to lug it through a store. Not having to worry whether he likes it. You have (1) spoken to the buyer, (2) painted a picture of a great Christmas day, and (3) even helped to keep the surprise. You are a hero to your customer. You have solved her biggest problems with your ad! Remember: One in five people walking around in your community don’t need to be concerned with price. They will buy something because they feel like it and they will gladly pay extra to have a great event and experience. Everyone wants to splurge on events such as weddings, anniversaries, and Christmas. But that all sounds like a lot of work!
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Isn’t it extra work to wrap and deliver a chainsaw? Yes, of course. Most businesses owners would not do this because of that. That could be your advantage over them. Because this little bit of extra work you do up front will save you from the endless work of keeping a struggling business alive. It will put you on the path to prosperity, a path that will lead you to lots of vacation time, and happy profitable years ahead. And once you get the hang of it you’ll find out something additionally rewarding: Working to get paid well by pleasant customers does not feel like work. It feels like you are finally executing a fine craft. It feels like mastery. Because it is. High-profit customers mean a high-profit business. You can’t separate them. If you want, really want, higher profits, then the market is wide open. One in five people are waiting to have their problems solved in exchange for money. You can be the solution and reap the reward. We’ve trained hundreds and hundreds of small business owners just like you to learn this approach. It works for them, and it will work for you. Their stories are on our Website, so enjoy them and let yourself see the truth of this. (You can see more unique high-value customer ads for six different businesses and get free reports on further strong systems of newspaper advertising at www.smallbusinesstruth.com.) There is nothing mysterious about advertising. It either works for you or it doesn’t. If your advertising is not working (or cannot be measured), stop spending money on it. Demand that it delivers a measurable return on your investment. Hold your advertising as accountable as you would any other salesperson, because that’s what it is.
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Lie # 5
Lowering Prices Boosts Business Low prices do not boost business at all. In fact, low prices can cost you your business. Sally started a dry cleaning business near Sam’s business in Vancouver. She started optimistically because the plaza was in the middle of a fast-growing, upscale suburb. Her business began with a small surge, but then her customers became scarce. Sam took his dry cleaning to Sally because it was convenient to where his own business was located, and he would chat a bit with her about business. Soon Sally began to ask Sam for ideas on what to do to get more business. He mentioned a couple of things that we teach at our Small Business Truth Website, such as following up with customers and adding on extra services, and he suggested maybe a free pick-up and drop-off service for her business if someone requested more than a certain amount of cleaning. All things that would allow her to strengthen her pricing structure. “Because she was just sitting around waiting for customers, I figured she had time to drive around and do those extra services,” Sam reasoned. Sam also suggested Sally approach stores in the local mall that sold highend women’s and men’s clothing and offer them a free first cleaning with the purchase of a suit. If people were going to buy an expensive suit or dress, they probably would want an upper-end cleaner, so why not target that market? Sam was trying to lead Sally to the truth about successful business: Success comes from good, repeat customers and strong, profit-producing prices. But this will not turn out to be a success story. This story about Sam and Sally has no happy ending, because although Sally listened to the ideas politely, she never followed up on any of them. Instead, she made a fateful bad decision that eventually would drive her out of business.
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She decided to try to boost business by lowering prices even more than her already under-market position and offering some two-for-one specials on shirts and suits. She also invested in a window artist who painted huge, garish “LOWEST PRICES IN TOWN” lettering on her windows. About three disastrous months later she confided to Sam, in a weary voice, “You just can’t make any real money in the dry cleaning business; the overhead is too high, the labor is too expensive, and people only want the cheapest prices.” It was ironic that she felt that way, because in that same year, in the local paper’s business section an article came out talking about the unusually high profits some people were making in the dry cleaning industry! The article revealed the story behind how this “sleeper” industry had become a source of great wealth for some of its owners. Would things have been different if Sally had realized that the industry was a sleeper success? Not really. Because Sally could have seen 10 articles similar to that, and they wouldn’t have mattered to her. She was convinced that in her dry cleaning business it was impossible to make money unless she offered dramatic price incentives. She was convinced. Sally was one of many victims of the myth that lowering your prices is a good way to stimulate business. Some of these victims even believe it’s their only option when times are tough. It’s too bad people fall for that one, because it is simply not true that your customer is only responding to your price.
Your Fear Is Not the Customer’s Fear The biggest fear that most of us have when we start our business is that we might not make it. Because we all hear the statistics that say 80 percent of businesses fail in the first five years. We also hear all the other things that people tell us about small business: “It’s risky; you’re going to lose your shirt. Oh, don’t do it, you don’t want to go for some unproven thing, why don’t you stay with your secure job?” The minute we start our small business we are vulnerable to these money fears. It’s not hard to slide unconsciously into a scarcity mentality. Soon we’re afraid we may never have enough money.
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And as we do with all other beliefs we hold, we start projecting this belief out into our external world. Now we’re even projecting it on our customers. “Look at them! They have money issues! They’re scared of spending!” As Sally did, we begin to assume that the only reason the customer is not buying from us is because our prices aren’t attractive enough. All these conclusions are fear-based and false. The great American philosopher Henry David Thoreau used to say, “We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.” We were attending a business Internet forum recently and a small business manager was talking about how his business was struggling, “just like the overall economy.” He had convinced himself (erroneously) that his business was down as a result of the poor economy, and he had then reasoned from that position: “The reason I don’t have money in my business is only because people out there, my customers, don’t have money. So the solution to that is for me to keep prices low, to address their shortage.” That man was heading in the wrong direction. He had quickly bought in to small business lie number five, and it was leading him to disaster. Let’s not project our own struggle onto the customer! It compounds the error. The customer is not struggling with paying our price. We just think so. Somehow we have to learn to get this truth and get it down deep in our soul that lower prices are not the answer. When Harry and Sasha started their own successful business running a little print shop, Sasha couldn’t shake her childhood memories of scarcity. “Sasha’s father was a miner in a very poor part of Pennsylvania,” Harry told us. “And he didn’t make any money. When she was a child, her parents had no money and people around had no money, and now we live in one of the most affluent areas in the country, in a suburb of Pittsburgh you know, and there’s a lot of people with a lot of money out here. But for years, in our own business, when we would want to raise prices, a lot of the reasoning for Sasha not wanting to raise the price would be because what she experienced as a child. And she would have a real guilt factor attached to raising prices. ‘Oh, but I can’t do that to them. After all, these customers are so loyal to me, how could I do that to them? They can’t really afford it.’”
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But Harry knew better. And he kept pushing their prices higher and higher to stronger levels for his business. And in the end, their customers proved that they could afford it. In fact, the customers were glad to pay solid prices for that one small, but important, printing need in their lives.
We’ve all seen the trailer park with expensive pick-up trucks and SUVs parked there, because people will always spend money on whatever their priority is. People buy what they want and will pay whatever that costs. The trick is not to give them something they can afford, it’s to give them something they want. For you, as a business owner, it’s a matter of changing your focus. Focus on what your customer wants. Then focus on what you can add to that, to address a further and deeper want. That will keep your prices climbing right along with your value to the customer. And the good news is that once you convert from the low price focus to the strong price focus, your business will thrive! The truth that people pay for what they want will be proven to you. And the truth will set you free.
Raise Both Price and Value Together Sam Beckford has become a small business millionaire by being willing to raise prices over and over again. “We don’t do what I call the ‘scaredy-cat raise,’” Sam explained. “That’s when a price increase is so small that no one would even notice it anyway.” When Sam raises prices he raises them at least 11–15 percent. “But we don’t just raise prices, we increase value at the same time,” Sam explained. Increasing value helps you and your customer make a happy, confident adjustment to your new price. There are always ways you can raise value, and, in fact, if your business is to thrive, you must continuously add value to your
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customer. So, “How can we raise the value of what we deliver?” ought to be a daily inquiry. It can be an exciting, ongoing intellectual challenge for you and your people. Don’t try to run a business while letting your mind go to sleep on this issue. Often, if you give in to money fears, your heart overrules your mind. The louder your heart pounds the harder it is to hear yourself think. But thinking about adding value is always the answer. You can keep your creative thinking alive by challenging yourself and your people to always think of ways to increase value to your customer. Have it be a weekly contest. Keep a suggestion box. Hold meetings about it. Because in the end, increasing value makes your price increases logical and easy to execute. When you’re increasing value, one of the first helpful hints we give clients is to first spend money on what people can see, not on what they can’t. So when you increase your fees, always try to put some money into some improvement that people will notice. Your customers should walk away saying, “Wow, this place looks great. You improved this area, you did that upgrade.” And it’s just like those real estate makeover shows on TV where they take $1,000 and work two days and the house looks as if a $50,000 interior designer was there! You can do that in your business! Additionally, you can improve the look of what you sell, and you can improve the look of your communication pieces. You can also do invisible things that enhance value to your customer and that can justify a price increase. For example, if your employees are dedicated to innovative, continuous improvement, they are going to be better at the service they deliver than they were a year ago. Everybody admits it: “I deliver the product better, I have better people, I know what I’m doing more, I provide better service than I used to, simply because I’ve been improving over the past year.” So even if you don’t do a great deal overtly, you are still providing more value than you were a year ago just by the fact that you’ve learned a lot about your customers’ wants. That spells value to the customer. This, by the way, is different than the “experience lie” we talked about earlier that says experience itself is enough to run your business better. It’s
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not. You must grow in consciousness. You must make your experience be about raising value. When you stay alert to raising value, you’ll always get better at serving the customer. And then charge accordingly. (If you don’t, they won’t appreciate the value.)
Everyone Associates Price With Value The final irony of business lie number five: Raising prices itself will make you worth more to the customer. Customers know they get what they pay for. Blind tests show that people enjoy the taste of expensive wines more even if the testers have put the same wine in both bottles. This is not to encourage you to fool the customer, or raise your price for no reason, but it does show that you value something according to what you pay for it. And there’s another reason to raise your prices. Raising your prices raises the bar. By doing so you’ll put a new obligation on yourself to make sure you’re now serving the customer better than before. Raising prices wakes you up. When you stay with the same low prices, you may believe your customers like it, but you are putting your creativity to sleep in the process. Low prices put yourself and your customer to sleep. You don’t look for ways to enhance the buying experience because you’re resentful at only getting a low price for the service. Your low price causes you to dismiss and dislike your customers because you know subconsciously that they aren’t paying a true price for their service. Perhaps you were tempted to put that extra touch of service on a recent job by driving it out and delivering it yourself, but you stopped when you thought, “At this price? No way am I going to go the extra mile. They are getting much more than they paid for already.” The lower your prices, the more you resent your customer. Soon you’re doing little passive-aggressive things to under serve them. How dare they call me on the phone…at the prices they are paying me? I’m not returning that call. Customers are the source of all your wealth. Sinking into an adversarial relationship with them is fatal. It will kill the golden goose.
Time Is More Important Than Money Let’s look at two butcher shops about 10 minutes away from our business. They’re actually across the street from each other, on different corners, in
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different plazas. They were getting along well enough until a big grocery store with a meat department opened in a plaza down the street. One butcher shop was owned by a woman named Jeanne. (We say “was owned” because the butcher shop is closed now. It shut down about two years ago and there’s a Chinese restaurant where it used to be.) We used to go to Jeanne’s butcher shop before it shut down. It looked the way you’d expect a butcher shop to look. It had signs crowding the front window saying, “Pot roast on sale this week!” and “Corned beef is on special!” When the big grocery store opened down the street from Jeanne’s, her prices got even lower and soon a sign went up in her window that said, “Best prices! Best service!” in an effort to compete with the big grocery store. Pricing was all that people cared about. Or, at least, that’s what Jeanne thought. And that was the way her clerks in the store began to feel, too. In fact, her workers all talked that way when you were in there: “People want to pay less. People just price shop.” (Funny how a lie repeated often enough becomes everyone’s truth.) Now, Frank’s butcher store (across the street from Jeanne’s) was also in the business of selling meat. And the same big threatening new grocery store was down the street from Frank, too. But unlike Jeanne, Frank is still in business. Even though every weekend, in the Sunday newspaper, there were big grocery store coupons for meat at the cheapest prices, Frank would not panic and respond as Jeanne did. Frank’s store was not caught up in the lie about price. In fact, Frank’s store made no mention of having “the best” prices. Frank’s store, instead, became notoriously more expensive than the grocery store and Jeanne’s store combined! But consider Frank’s store. Stop by any day of the week, and it’s packed. The reason for this is that Frank doesn’t just sell meat; he sells precut, marinated steaks, chicken, shish kabobs, and fish fillets, ready to put on the barbecue or in the oven. If you bought your meat at Jeanne’s or at the grocery store, you’d save a few dollars, but you’d have to marinate your steak or chicken overnight. And who has time for that?
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Frank’s ready-to-go butcher shop charges premium prices and even has money left over to give away a free barbecue each year. Frank’s business is thriving because he found a way to raise prices and raise value. Jeanne is out of business because she thought lower prices were what customers would respond to. But Jeanne’s customers weren’t the cheapskates she thought they were. That’s why the lure of saving a few dollars didn’t attract them after all. She assumed they were broke, because she was broke. But they were only broke in terms of time. And the store that was able to give them their time back (Frank’s store) solved a problem for them. That’s why the customers were not patrons of the low-priced supermarket a few minutes away. Unfortunately for her, Jeanne assumed that what’s cheapest? was the most important thing on her customer’s mind. But one casual look in the typical American freezer would have revealed to Jeanne many high-priced TV dinners and frozen snacks that are bought to save time, not money. That look in the freezer would have given her the secret truth she needed: Time is the new money.
If You Can Save People Time, You Can Charge People Money This summer Sam Beckford hosted a barbecue at his home for the employees who work in his company. “I remember it was a busy time in the summer and I was at the business working late,” explained Sam. “I still had to get the meat for the barbecue, and so I stopped by Frank’s store. As I was walking out of the store, I realized I had spent a lot of money, but I was happy. Frank’s prepped meats had saved me hours of time. All I had to do when I got back to my house was put the prepared meats directly on the barbecue. I realized that if I had gone to the grocery store, I might have paid half as much, but there’s no way I would have been ready in time for the important event. And now I go back to Frank’s ‘expensive’ store over and over again, any time we have company or are too time-strapped to cook. The time is more valuable to us than the money.”
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Your own customers are in the same situation, or some version of it. In the 1950s the average American household spent two hours preparing a meal. Today, the average American household spends less than thirty minutes preparing a meal! That’s a startling trend that applies across the board to every type of business, including yours. For you, time is money. Anything you can do to make things more convenient for your customer, and to respect your customer’s time, will allow you to raise your prices. Time is really very valuable to them. Think in terms of your customers’ time instead of their money, and your profits will start to increase immediately (as long as you also raise your prices accordingly.) “When we started our business, we were actually on the lower end of the pricing spectrum,” recalled Sam. “We made the classic mistake that many business owners make. We thought, ‘Well, we’re not really that good, we don’t have that much experience, so we’re going to open our business and we’re going to see what everyone else is charging, and we’re going to charge a little bit less. Because, you know, we haven’t paid our dues, we don’t have the experience, we haven’t been around as long as the others have.’” But the problem with that low price positioning is that businesses get stuck in that cheap format. It becomes a part of their identity and it deepens their fear of ever being more expensive than someone else. They have come to believe, really believe, that the only reason someone is choosing them is because they’re a little less expensive!
Learning to Eliminate the Fear Factor When we asked our coaching client Melinda to consider raising her consulting fees (she was a healthcare business consultant, and a very good one) she said she couldn’t. “I established myself in this business, consulting with healthcare professionals, by offering a lower price for my services,” Melinda told us. “If I raise prices now, I’ll lose my advantage. Have you ever had the head of a nursing team mad at you? It’s no fun. Nurses are like wolverines when they turn on you. I have to face facts here. Prices are the main reason these people are working with me.” Melinda had painted herself into an unnecessary psychological corner. 134
I explained to her the faulty logic in her approach. “Melinda, you yourself have to shift the focus of the discussion from price to value,” I told her. “Even if they ask about price, tell them your price and shift the conversation back to the value. Create value!” “Well, I’m just worried,” Melinda said. “Sometimes I have money issues and self-worth issues of my own.” “Leave those behind,” I said. “Focus on the outcome of your work. Stand for it. Stand strong for the outcome. Your consulting gets good results, right?” “Yes it does,” she agreed. “Then stay focused on that value. You are not a commodity. They can only get your unique consulting from you. They can’t get it anywhere else. You, however, can get money and clients anywhere. You don’t need them, they need you. They will pay you what you think you are worth. And the more they pay you, the more they will value your work.” Melinda finally decided to accept our advice and the small business truth that raising your prices is a good thing to do. She just held her nose, and spoke the new fees to anyone interested in her services. She also explained to existing customers that her original fees were purely introductory. If they wanted to do future work they would have to pay the fees that were standard, and if they didn’t care to do that she was okay with that. She understood, and it didn’t bother her because there were plenty of clients waiting to use her. Melinda was shocked by the results of her fee increase. Some existing customers complained, and two even left her (one came back later). But with every new client she acquired she was surprised to see that her increased prices didn’t seem to matter to them at all. They were just as eager to receive her services as the earlier clients were. In fact, once they paid the higher fees, they were more likely to keep their appointments and to do their homework! Their commitment to the outcome of the consulting was deeper, so the consulting had taken on more power from the raising of the prices alone. Soon she was learning to sell value rather than price, and so value was what they bought. “I found that the more I charged, the more they valued my time,” Melinda said. “I don’t know why I had just assumed that lower prices would
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be good for them and appealing to them. Maybe it was because price was always the first thing they asked about, so I just assumed it was the most important thing on their mind.” I learned this lesson early in his seminar career. I used to offer an “introductory pilot seminar” to Fortune 500 companies interested in his training. I had noticed that at the free introductory seminar, people would wander in late, people would take cell calls during my talk, and the attendance was low. One day, the president of a major bank asked for one of my introductory seminars so its managers could preview my work. I said “sure,” and quoted him a very large price. The bank president stopped and stared at me. “You’re going to charge me that much just to preview your program?” he asked. “Yes I am,” I said. “How do you justify that?” he asked. “I want your people to value the time they give me and the time I give them,” I explained. “My seminars carry the power to change lives, shift thinking forever, right on the spot. But they won’t do that if there’s no commitment from you or your people. Commitment is a two-way street. When you are committed you listen differently. I need your people listening as if their lives hung in the balance. And you will also see that after the seminar my time was worth that money to you. I am not a freebie. I cannot move your people from their fixed victim positions if I’m a freebie, a human handout.” The bank president wrote me a check that very day. What happened in that room that day was much different than what used to happen in my free intro seminars. People showed up early, got good seats, and took notes. The level of consciousness was different. Money commits people.
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The Basic Math Is Very Simple The biggest damage unnecessarily low prices can do to your business is obvious. It’s simple math. Low prices mean you simply make less money on each transaction. You have less to live on, less to spend on effective marketing, and less to pay to good employees. You also have less to save for a rainy day, less strength in your business, and less pride in your work. And there’s yet another damaging impact to your business that low prices cause. (Are you starting to be convinced here?) It’s subtler, but just as toxic: Low prices attract more questionable customers. The customers you attract who are just shopping price are not the kinds of customers you want in the long run, anyway! To build a business that serves you, instead of a business that you are constantly serving, you want to keep improving the quality of your customers. You want loyal, long-term customers. You want people who can afford your services over and over again. You want people who refer others like them. Low prices don’t attract that kind of repeat customer. Small business truth: Low prices attract disloyal, unfaithful people. People you can’t build a business on. When we bring people into our seminars we often hear them say, “My customers are cheap and all they care about is price!” Well, how did you produce that situation? It takes a while to get these people to see that they themselves have actually created that situation by believing the lie that lower prices boost business.
Your Customers Get What They Pay For The two companies with the largest repeat car purchases in the United States are Cadillac and Lexus. And they also happen to be two of the most expensive cars on the market. The most expensive cars have the most repeat purchases? Wouldn’t you think that repeat purchases would occur wherever people were getting the “best deal” on a car?
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With Cadillac and Lexus owners, the larger price they pay makes them more eager to love and care for their vehicles. They then do all the things necessary to really get their money’s worth out of their buying experience. They take better care of their cars, and so the cars serve them longer and better, and retain more value. It’s a never-ending positive cycle! The more people pay, the better they appreciate what they have. When your customers pay you top price, they will help you make sure it has been a valuable purchase. Keep that in mind: They will help you justify the price. Yes, your customers will do that for you! The more you charge them, the more their behavior changes for the better. Soon, they’ll be referring others, because they want to feel good about their decision to commit a real investment into your services. Now they have a stake in making this buying experience valuable, and they will help you make your value a reality. Sam experienced a similar example of this phenomenon. “We had just bought a new building for our business,” he recalled. “We had to get about $5,000 worth of signage for it. We sent out the quotes and began looking at options and prices. In the end, we didn’t just pick the cheapest sign company to do the job, because we eventually had more respect for the gentleman whose prices were more expensive. He even explained why his signs were more expensive. And that helped close the sale! We appreciated the pride he had in his business. We didn’t want to save a couple of hundred dollars going with the cheapest company. If they don’t have much respect for themselves, we didn’t think they were going to have as much respect for the work they would do.” You think your low price is showing respect for your customer. It’s not. It’s showing a lack of respect for your customer and for yourself. If you appreciate yourself enough to raise your prices and say, “I’m worth it,” then people will know you are worth it. People will value you to the degree that you value yourself. Remember that every prospective customer of yours believes deep down that “you get what you pay for.” He or she has probably even said that phrase out loud
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numerous times in his or her life. Have you allowed the customer to apply his or her insight to your business?
Get on the Magic Carpet of Higher Price The next time you get an envelope full of coupons (the kind you always get in the mail) take a look at them. You might have even decided once to use a discount coupon to clean your carpet—three rooms for $50! But did you respect that cleaner when they came? Or did you have to hire a security firm to watch them? At the very least you probably thought, “Here are some cheap people desperate for the business.” We know a carpet cleaner who charges more than any carpet cleaner in southern California. He cleans the homes of celebrities and CEOs. He says, “If your house isn’t worth a half million dollars or more, don’t call me, because I’m too expensive for you. If you’re in a rental place, or if your house isn’t a very expensive house, you won’t want to pay what I charge. You won’t be able to afford it.” And people flock to him! He’s the person everyone wants. People love knowing that they have risen to the level of being able to use him. And for a carpet cleaner—really! People would gladly pay you more if you gave them a reason. The best reason of all is the belief you have in yourself. People will pay more for that than anything else.
We Only Fear What We Don’t Understand Understand your fear of raising prices. Don’t run away from it. You need to know going in as you start thinking about money and prices that there’s going to be fear in there. Don’t let the fear make decisions for you. Acknowledge the fear, set it aside, and then make a very creative, nonemotional decision regarding your prices. Then, when you talk to your customers, in person and in advertising, talk value. Tell stories about other happy customers and what they have experienced. Do not talk price unless you have to. Talk value. Be enthusiastic. Enthusiasm is contagious. Your customer wants you to believe in yourself. Drop all the false modesty and sing and soar and come alive
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when you have the opportunity to talk about what your business does. Be an excited, live infomercial. Because customers love that! They want to buy from someone who is proud and happy about what they do. And when it comes time to talk price, be even prouder. Be a sunbeam when you say your price. You love your price. It’s bigger and more beautiful than the competitor’s price because of how much benefit the customer receives from you. You love that price. You say it easily, the way a proud parent talks about a little child. The way a happy grandparent brags about a grandchild. You are in love with what your business does for people. When you raise your prices, you’ll soon have more money, and therefore you have something—the extra cash— that you can use to create even more customers, and even better customers. You’ll be able to market, advertise, and promote in ways you couldn’t afford to before.
What Does a Cup of Coffee Cost? Starbucks is currently a very visible refutation of the low-price lie. They are a lesson to the world. Go on a business field trip to a Starbucks. Take your employess. Show them how it works. The next time you are inside Starbucks, really take in the whole experience and atmosphere and learn from it. Because you can do a version of Starbucks yourself. Perhaps more than any company, Starbucks has shown that you can raise prices on a very basic product (coffee, cookies, and milk!) and if you do it creatively, people will not only pay more, they will provide you with a loyal, almost cultlike, following of your business. Unlike the greasy little coffee shop on the corner, Starbucks is not projecting poverty or scarcity. When you walk into Starbucks you’re experiencing a classy, tasteful, high-value environment. There’s beauty in the design and atmosphere. Beauty! (Add beauty to your business when you get back home from Starbucks. Add beauty to your price, too.) You go to Starbucks for the whole experience. (The buying experience! Think in terms of enhancing and improving the buying experience!) You notice that there are people who love to go there just to hang out in Starbucks. They keep buying expensive items just to hang out.
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Even though your rational mind says, “This is just coffee with milk in it. I could have made my own and brought it to the park bench instead of coming to Starbucks,” you still find yourself plopping down a $10 bill and getting very little change back for your drink. Not to mention waiting in line to do it! And we do this because our emotional self says, “Yes, I like doing this. It makes me feel good to come in here.” Sell to your customer’s emotional side. All purchases are emotional, anyway, although your customer may put up a good show of talking price with you. Don’t be misled by his desire to look tough-minded on price in front of his spouse. Don’t be misled into thinking people buy based on price. And please don’t have this be your slogan: “The best quality, the best service, the best prices!” That slogan will drag your business down into the pits. We work with hundreds of businesses, and we have never seen that slogan serve anyone.
Don’t Learn From Big Business It could be that small business owners get tangled up in this low-price lie because they watch the behavior of corporate giants and think they must be worth emulating. They watch companies such as Wal-Mart and The Home Depot go to war on price and think, “That must be what business and marketing is all about.” But small business is different. It’s more creative. Your opportunities to succeed are greater. The truth is, you can take very few principles away from observing the corporate giants, because your advantages in your small business are the opposite of theirs. They have massive volume, distribution, and leveraging advantages you don’t, so don’t be misled by their price war behavior. It doesn’t apply to you. Thank goodness! For example, you’ll want to resist shoring up the low-price lie by adding the related falsehood that you will “Make It Up In Volume.” A lot of people fall for this fallacy, thinking, “Here’s my pricing strategy. I’m going to make my prices low and I’m going to make it up in volume.” Like the guy who buys a whole chain of money change-making machines. And someone says, “Well, wait a minute, how will you make a profit? People put in a dollar
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and you give them four quarters. How can you possibly make any money on that?” And he says, “Well I’m going to make it up in volume.” We were looking in the paper a couple of days ago and saw a person advertising his furnace-cleaning business. He had a small ad that said absolutely nothing compelling about why anyone should give him a call. It was just, “EJS Furnace Cleaning, We Clean Furnaces and Ducts, and here’s our phone number.” What is the reader of the ad going to think? What is going to attract him or her? Is this a new thing, that someone can clean my furnace? But what if this cleaner had a properly constructed ad that was a half page in size and actually had very compelling things that called out to the reader? You may think the owner couldn’t afford a larger ad, but with higher prices he could have!
Are You Bartering in a Flea Market? When we ask small business people in a seminar, “Who here thinks they can raise their prices between 15 and 20 percent right now and have absolutely no problem making more money next year, and not lose customers, and not worry about that? Who here can do that without worry?” You see very few hands go up, if any. They are scared. Their fear comes from that whole small business self-esteem factor that says, “I’m not worth it. I’d feel guilty because my customers already trust me for this price and I’m betraying them by charging them more.” Trust and betrayal? That sounds like daytime soap opera television. This is not a soap opera about trust and betrayal, this is a business. A business is no more than fun and games with numbers! There’s no value in taking the game of pricing this seriously, talking about “trust” and “betrayal” and all the frightening concepts that money and scarcity might be bringing forward. A price is just a number. No need to make it creepy. Get yourself back into that state of mind you were in when you first started your business. That fun-and-games state of mind when you were up all night with the positive possibilities. Never lose that game element that buoys every business’s energy and creativity.
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It’s odd, because one evening, after a grim day at work, you may go home and look for a way to relax and have fun. Soon you find yourself playing a strategic board game against friends and relatives and really feeling light-hearted and great about it. Your mental energy and creativity are carefree and inventive, even though you had thought you were exhausted. You were “tired,” but now you’re not because you’ve got a game going! Let the games begin! You’re in a higher creative state because you know it doesn’t matter if you lose or win, it’s just flat-out fun playing the game. So you apply all kinds of fresh, wacky, and bold strategies in your board game, and you find that your thinking can be really effective. But then the next day you go back to your business, and the overriding feelings are all back. What a hassle! What a grind. No, it’s worse than a grind. It’s frightening: I mean, this could all go away, I could lose everything! And there’s nothing resembling the game element of the night before, there’s just serious business going on. Knock it off! Stop it with the heavy stuff! The heavy, end-of-the-world thinking has to be changed. For you to succeed, that fear problem of yours has to be solved once and for all. You must stop being so serious about everything. It’s bringing everyone down. You. Your family. Your customers. Everyone. Instead of playing into your own fear, why not play the great game of business every day? Why not treat your challenges as you would a strategic board game? Ask yourself carefree questions such as, “What could I do in my business to raise my prices by 20 percent and be confident I could keep all my customers and get many more new customers?”
Now It Is Time to Sell Your House It may help you see the truth in this if you think of your business as a house. Let’s say you bought an average kind of house and you bought it in order to sell it someday down the line. What could you do to that house to make it worth more money in the eyes of the buyer? You would probably get very creative about increasing its value, wouldn’t you? You would go to the library, or go on the Internet, where the Realtors tell you the things to do to your house to increase the perceived value of it the most for the next sale. You’d watch the popular TV home makeover shows. You would have real fun raising the price by raising the value. Soon you might go into the kitchens and bathrooms and
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lightly renovate those rooms. Then you would plant a few flower beds. In the end, you know you could get much more for the house than you paid for it if you set your mind to it. You would see it as a game, because it’s all a game. But what about your business? Why aren’t you willing to do the same thing? The same principle applies! Exactly the same. It’s free enterprise. It’s called free enterprise, because it’s best done free and easy. It’s not called “serious, frightening, heavy enterprise.” It’s called “free enterprise.” With creative pricing, you can free yourself and free your enterprise. An episode of Donald Trump’s The Apprentice aired a while back when we were collecting our thoughts about what we would put in this book for you. As you may know, The Apprentice is a reality show that pits two teams against each other each week to see which team solves a new business problem more efficiently. The task on this week’s show was to sell a brand new line of M&M candy bars on the streets of New York. The team that made the most money within a given time period would win. One team (two men and a woman) went out into the streets offering a “nice low price” for the big tasty bars, selling them for two dollars each. And after a discouraging beginning, the team soon began to panic and lower their prices even further to a dollar a bar. (They had bought in to the lie that lower prices boost business.) The other team (two women) came out of the chute with a happy confident attitude, dressing themselves up as the attractive, fun-loving Candy Bar Twins (free enterprise), and selling the same candy bars for five dollars each! They made the buying experience so much fun, and they were so confident in their product and price, that they sold a ton of candy bars at five dollars while the other team couldn’t sell them for two dollars each. The exact same market, the exact same product - just a different mindset. We see this example over and over. Raise the value of the buying experience and raise your prices and you will not lose customers, you will gain them.
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Appendix B: from The Hands-Off Manager: The hands-off manager as coach "Our chief want in life is to find someone who will make us do what we can.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hands-off managers become excellent coaches. They create an atmosphere in which their people receive coaching gratefully. So the hands-off manager becomes quietly masterful at the coaching process. It’s a perfect replacement for the old school micromanager’s habit of criticism, judgment and correction. Hands-off managers coach their people so that their people’s talents are allowed to emerge, and they can do better work in the workplace, and they’re more harmonious with their own inner intentions. Regis was a client at a high tech company who worked in a cubicle, working at a computer, working on his job. Regis had a series of really noticeable dysfunctions in many areas. He had become a human bottleneck. Regis had time management and priority management challenges. He was doing unimportant things with equal vigor as important things and we could see how that was slowing his productivity down and creating a problem for flow of work. But Regis was a perfect candidate to enter a coaching conversation. Regis had a supervisor named Mark who had learned from us how to coach his people, but hadn’t bothered to tell his people what coaching was. So Mark went up to Regis and said, “Let’s get together. I need to coach you a little bit on this. I need to give you some coaching, here.”
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But Regis didn’t really know what coaching was. He had no concept of how great it could be. He didn’t realize that the person who would be giving the coaching also receives coaching and values it as much as he values giving it. So Regis was defensive. Regis immediately thought to himself, “Oh, coaching. Let me see, translate: criticism. Translate: I’m in trouble. Translate: I’m not doing it right and I’m getting called out.”
“Defense is the first act of war.” Byron Katie
So this started Regis’ heart to race and it created butterflies in his stomach. Regis mentally began to create a defense. He was already creating what his defense was for behaving the way he does. And of course Regis became more invested in creating a really eloquent defense than he was in finding the solution to his problems. Regis had no way of seeing that the system of two knowledgeable people giving and receiving coaching will always move things towards a solution. Because if you’ve got one person (Mark) who knows what coaching is trying to coach somebody (Regis) who has no idea what it is, you’ve got that person now investing in defense. It’s the human way. For Regis to truly benefit, the stage must be set for what this conversation’s really about! And that’s the mission of the hands-off manager: to define the coaching process up front. Because unless the person receiving the coaching deeply understands that coaching will benefit him, it will backfire. What we want Regis to immediately think is, “This conversation will benefit me. I appreciate this. This is the kind of attention that I didn’t get with the company I worked with before. I love this system.” Once Mark saw that, he had a chance to talk to Regis about the coaching he himself had been receiving, and how it’s helped him. That was all Regis needed to hear. 146
You can help your team by first creating a clear concept of coaching itself. You’ll want a definition that’s easy for your people to understand and personal to them. So that when you coach somebody, both parties know what they are doing. But what is coaching, exactly? What’s the difference between coaching and leading? And what’s the difference between coaching and psychotherapy? A lot of people get confused about those differences. And so they’re hesitant to coach people because they’ve got a fear that it’s going to be like psychotherapy. When we think about “life-coaching,” for example, we sometimes think of new-age, faux guru types who sit with people and do chants and channel spirit beings. And that doesn’t sound like something that would be a good fit for a high-powered organization that really wants to move numbers forward and achieve proactive success. But coaching really is effective. In fact, the name “coaching” came from the world of sports. A world of performance and numbers. And sports provides a beautiful metaphor for what good coaching is in an organization. In sports, coaching is what happens when a coach or a manager works with an athlete to increase that athlete’s ability to contribute to the team. That’s really what coaching is. It’s different than managing and it’s different than psychotherapy. So let’s start with the difference between coaching and psychotherapy. Here’s a message that we received in an email from a long-time mentor and hero, Dr. Nathanial Branden. Dr. Branden has written a number of wonderful books on psychology. I have actually used Dr. Branden and his brilliant wife Devers for psychotherapy many years ago; and that may shock some of you who know me, to think that I would ever be in such need (laughter here?), but I assure you I was just doing research for this eventual work.
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Now, ironically, Dr. Branden has also now moved, in recent months, into the world of coaching, simply because he has seen how effective it is. He especially sees how effective it is compared to psychotherapy. So let’s look at his message, because it’s a good place for us to begin building an idea about what coaching is, so that we’re comfortable with it and we can use it like a tool. So Dr. Branden said: Recently, I announced that in addition to my practice of psychotherapy, I was now engaged in the practice of life-coaching. Almost immediately I received many requests to explain what lifecoaching is and in what ways it differs from psychotherapy. Psychotherapy, traditionally, rests on the premise that the client has been damaged by some past event or past events and needs to be fixed or healed. The concern is with the past and the present. Coaching rests on the premise that the client possesses unrecognized resources with which he or she can develop strategies that lead aspirations to their fulfillment; the focus is on the present and the future. Traditional therapy is about excavating and neutralizing negatives; coaching is about liberating positives. It’s about putting the client in touch with his or her own wisdom and creativity. To quote one life coach, “Life coaching is about designing a future, not about getting over the past.” One’s relationship to a life coach is often a long-term project, because there need be no end to the process of learning and growth. This is why many champion athletes and high performing business executives retain coaches long after the time they have become successful. If a person suffers from acute anxiety, severe depression, or low self-esteem, he or she needs psychotherapy, not coaching. However, if a person is basically healthy but is seeking greater fulfillment in or another aspect of life, coaching can be invaluable, addressing a wide range of issues, including work, finances, health, relationships, education, recreation. Coaching looks to close the gap between our dreams and the realities of our existence. See: www.nathanielbranden.com
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Studies show that people who do training get a certain amount of boost in productivity, but if they mix coaching in with the training, and people are coached on how to use the training, productivity goes way up.
“Once used to bolster troubled staffers, coaching now is part of the standard leadership development training for elite executives and talented up-and-comers at IBM, Motorola, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and Hewlett Packard. These companies are discreetly giving their best prospects what star athletes have long had: a trusted adviser to help reach their goals.” ---- CNN.com
The key element inside coaching is the coachee’s rational selfinterest. We want to sit down with that person and appeal directly to their own self-interest, so that we can coach to lift their performance up to a level that harmonizes better with the team and is more productive. To do that, they have to see that what we are coaching them in is really in their own rational self-interest to do.
How is coaching different from managing? Management is focused on projects. A manager manages agreements that lead to the successful completion of those projects. Managing agreements elevates the person that you’re managing and leading to a much more professional level. When you manage agreements you’re partnering together as co-professionals with a common goal. That’s the best kind of leadership. You manage a project and you manage input, throughput, and output, but you don’t manage people. You lead people by managing agreements. And that’s a completely separate book (covered in detail in 100 Ways to Motivate Others) but it’s very important to get clear.
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So, then, what’s coaching, compared to leading people and managing agreements? Why is coaching different?
“Part therapist, part consultant, part motivational expert, part professional organizer, part friend, part nag – the personal coach seeks to do for your life what a personal trainer does for your body.” -- Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune
In leadership, we communicate clearly, show the team the vision, and show the individual the vision. Then we manage the agreements that come out of that. Leadership is clear in its communication. It also welcomes feedback to make sure that the vision got communicated. But coaching is completely different. Coaching is a conversation between two individuals. Coaching is about two people achieving synergy in a beautifully hands-off way. In coaching, you might take an individual aside who is struggling and say, “Are you open to some coaching on this?” When the individual says, “Yeah, sure,” the coaching begins. Coaching is a mutually-endorsed activity, completely different than managing and leading. It would never occur to you to take someone aside and say, “Are you open to being managed? Are you open to some leadership on this?” That would be a facetious question. But it does fit more intimately to say, “Are you open to some coaching on this? If you’re not, let me know. If you are, let’s sit down and talk.” And when the person says, “Yes, I’d love some coaching on this,” you can sit down and explore. The person may even volunteer, “I can see it’s…. I’m struggling, I’m stuck, I’m not doing it like I know I probably should be or could be, so, yeah, coaching would be great,” so now we sit down and the coaching begins. Coaching is more about mentoring than leading. It’s a drawing out of the skills of the individual player in the organization so that that player can play up to his or her own level. That’s what a good coach does. He or she brings performance forward by allowing the coached person to see for themselves that they really can do the job. By
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reconnecting the person to the source of their own power through the coaching process. So what is this coaching process we’re talking about? What do we do exactly when we coach someone?
Stop giving unsolicited advice A lot of people think that coaching means giving advice; that you give advice in kind of a nice way so that you’re giving advice but you can call it “coaching.” That’s not really coaching. That’s advising. Coaching is a more complete package than that. Because coaching embraces a bigger picture. When you are coaching, the first thing you do is seek is to understand the other person. You do not first seek to be understood. The first and most important part of coaching is seeking to understand where your person’s heart is. What’s their current mindset? What are they thinking? How do they see things? Because if you saw life the way they saw life, you’d be doing just what they’re doing. You’d be behaving the way they were. You’d be communicating exactly the way they are. When you get inside their mindset and really see how they see things, then you are ready to coach. Therefore first stage of the coaching session is the intake: you ask your gentle questions, and you get in touch with the intentions and the inner motivations of the person you are coaching. It’s really important for you to see what they want to achieve, what they’re trying to do, and how they see the situation. So first of all, you want to listen, ask more questions, and let them talk. Keep your hands off their answers. They don’t need fixing. “Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love; for it is in giving that we receive.” St. Francis of Assisi
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And this is why coaching is so effective. This very aspect: seeking to understand first, not to be understood. Because in the old model of managing, people tried to be understood first. They had all their communications going out and nothing coming in. They were thinking, “I sure hope I’m being understood!” And then if somebody was messing up, the micromanager would sit down with them and say, “Now let me tell you how to do this,” or, “Let me tell you what you’re doing wrong,” or “Let me tell you what I expect of you, here.” And then they would try again to be understood. And all the old school managers would go around the organization trying so hard to be understood. And it wasn’t working. In today’s organization the young people being hired are much brighter and more knowledgeable than ever before. They are so smart! But what comes along with that? They’re also more independent and personally sensitive than ever before. They’re not going to fall in line like people on the assembly line in the 1940s and just listen to orders being barked out and move like robotic sheep through the organization. We all know this. It’s a different world. That’s why hands-off managing works where micro-managing doesn’t. That’s why coaching is so effective now in an organization. Because with coaching there is a real dialogue going on. You’ve got both people participating in the communication process. You, the coach, might ask the player “What’s life like for you? How are things going right now? Tell me what you’re doing in this situation? How do you see it? Describe it to me.” Because the first skill of effective coaching is knowing to ask some good, gentle, openended questions that reassure the person you’re coaching that you’re really interested in how they feel and how they see things. That’s what you’re going to work with. You’re not going to work with some preconceived notion of how things should be. That’s just a subtle form of advising and condescending. That’s the old parent-child model of hands-all-over-the-person management. It’s derived from a military model of leadership that doesn’t work today. Coaching works because it connects directly into the other person’s mood and mindset.
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When you have two people sitting down and one person’s coaching another there’s a mutual intention arising. Both people want to do a good job. Both people want to succeed at what they’re doing. So the two people intuitively work together. Because together, there will be mutual mentoring that elevates the “problem” to an intriguing level of fresh challenge. Two heads meet challenges better than one. So, the coach opens the inquiry: What would cause you to only dribble the ball with one hand? How do you see life that would have you use that one hand only? “Well, you know, I never had confidence in my left hand. I always thought if I dribbled with my right hand, I would have more control over the ball.” Now, if you’re coaching that person you might now say, “I can see that, I understand that.” Because you want reassure the person you’re coaching that you really “get” where they’re coming from, and you empathize. You then give them a sample out of your own life. Such as, “I was in an exactly parallel position. I used to dribble with one hand only, and let me tell you what I did, and let me tell you how it cost me. I had the ball stolen from me so many times that I finally couldn’t do it anymore, and I had to learn all over again, just like learning how to walk. And it worked for me, eventually. So let me ask you. Are you open to some coaching on this?” And if the person says, “Yes,” you reassure the person that “the only reason we’re coaching together is that I can see something in you that’s possible here.”
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Coaching is about what’s possible Possibility! Coaching is all about what’s possible. Coaching is moving a person from being stuck in a mindset where they think they are limited to opening a new possibility. Most of the people who report to you will be stuck in their imaginary limitations: “I can’t really work with that department because they won’t listen to me! I can’t communicate with their people!” They are stuck in mindsets that rigidly believe certain “truths” about the organization. Soon they have “truths” about their own personal limitations: “I can’t do this work. I’ve tried everything. It doesn’t work.” One of the first opportunities of the coaching session is to set those limitations free. To look the limitations in the eye until they back down. Challenge their “truth” until they are seen to be largely imaginary. (Most negativity lives in the imagination only.)
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.” Shunryu Suzuki
The hands-off manager has what the Zen masters used to call a “beginner’s mind”: nothing is impossible. If you are that manager you are always looking to move people from rigid limitation into possibility. You might now say, “Let’s look at what’s possible here. So is it possible, even possible, that you could dribble as well with your left hand as you can with the right. Is it possible? Do you see it as possible? Would you be willing to take on a training program that would have you become masterful in using that left hand? Is that a possibility here?” Because you want the person to then feed back to you, “Well, you know, I’ve never been good at training,” and so forth. The limitations! But you understand limited thinking because you’ve been there in
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your life. So you want to now reassure that person that you’ve never been good at training, either, or some similar limitation you have had. Because as an effective coach you never want to seem to be saying “I’m better than you, I’m your superior and that’s why I’m coaching you and telling you how it ought to be.” That would be the expert giving advice, not a professional partner delivering coaching. Advice is not effective. It simply doesn’t work very well. Not unless it’s asked for. Not unless you are asked in the coaching session, “Tell me, what would you do if you were me? Tell me, how do you do this?” Because unless you are asked, you want to move slowly through the session so that it occurs to the person across from you to want to do this new possible action. It looks like it is in their rational self interest. And only that self-awareness creates lasting behavioral change. Expert advice will not bring change. It is more likely to bring humiliation. And that’s only because we are dealing with human beings. Lasting behavioral change is always the ironic specialty of the hands-off manager. By not micromanaging, more changes. By keeping your hands off the process, the process improves faster. Would you pull a flower up with your hands from the ground to help it grow? Why try to do similar things to an employee? Hands-off coaching is a dialogue that leads to the person being coached being able to see something clearly and getting an “aha,” and saying, “I could do that! I see that as possible now, and I didn’t see it as possible before. Thank you. I couldn’t see that before.” A human being can be moved from limitation to possibility inside a single conversation!
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Coming from a quest for understanding Hands-off management is not a technique so much as an inner place to come from. So again, to repeat and emphasize, the first principle in coaching is to seek to understand. If the person you’re coaching has a fear of something, or an anger about a certain department in the company that’s blocking that person from communicating freely and openly and moving this project along, you’ll want to fully understand that before you go any further. (Especially understanding that anger is a mask for fear.) You can’t coach a person if their emotion is hidden. If a strong feeling is kept hidden from you and they walk away still harboring that deep anger toward another person in the company and they haven’t shared it with you, what good was the session? How complete or transformative could it have been?
What does coaching lead to? Better behavior? More productivity? Something I as a manager want? No.That brings us to element number two: the second most important element: What good coaching leads to is that the person you’re coaching will achieve his or her objectives faster. Not yours. That’s really vital in coaching: Focusing on the wants and needs of the person being coached, not your own. When you’re coaching someone, you are coaching them so that they realize their objectives faster; you’re not coaching them so that they become better for what you want, or that they serve the company better after the coaching session. Now, they will, but that’s a side effect. They will, but that’s not what you’re there for. Because if you go directly to that, you’ll get resistance. The coaching won’t work because you’ve got your hands all over it. This is hands-off. Therefore it works. If you say to someone, “I know a way you can really serve this company. I know a way you can deliver for this team. I know a way you can really please me.” That will produce an absolutely resistant
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response. You can’t connect from there because, what we said earlier is true: rational self-interest is the route of appeal for moving another person forward. Therefore one of the things I want to know about coaching, deep down in my soul, is that I’m coaching you so that you achieve your objectives more efficiently. That your intentions are being honored, not mine. That’s why I’m here! That’s why I asked for this conversation. That’s why I asked if you were open to coaching, and that’s what we’re going to work on: you realizing your immediate objectives. Not me getting you to do what I want you to do. That doesn’t work. Let’s say you are coaching someone who’s not getting along with the warehouse people. You don’t want to coach that person to get along with the warehouse because you want them to get along with the warehouse or because you have a vision that if he got along with the warehouse better, things would move faster through the company and we’d be more efficient and your numbers would look better as a manager. You don’t want that to be the focus. You want to talk to him about what his life would be like if he got along better with the warehouse. How would his life be better if he had better communication with them? So if he tells you, when you ask him questions while you’re seeking to understand where he’s coming from (rather than you being understood), he says, “You know, I’d really like to have some respect from the warehouse. I would really like to have them do this and have them do that for me so I didn’t have to go to them three or four times, and I didn’t have to show up and not have a part ordered…” And maybe he’ll go on and on. But in going on and on, this person is going to tell you what he wants. And why he wants it. And that’s the key here. You’re taking notes. Because you want to know what he wants. And why he wants it. Because when you do coach him, and ask him if he’s open to a recommendation, what you’re going to show him do is that the recommendation might lead to getting what he wants. You don’t want to have the recommendation merely lead to the company getting better numbers. That does not inspire people. And if he doesn’t tell you his wants and needs right away, you might ask him, “How would you like to see this go? If you could wave
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a magic wand over the warehouse, how would you like them, in your ideal scene, to interact with you? What would be perfect for you? Let’s start from there. I know it’ll never be perfect, but it helps me to see what your picture of perfect is.” And so the person will tell you. Because what they want is exactly what a true hands-off manager wants; it will always be the same. If you’re reassuring and empathetic and truly a mentor, you’ve “got their back” and they know it right there in the coaching session, and they’re going to spill the beans. They’re going to give you information about what they would like to have happen. That’s a beautiful moment because that’s where you can effectively coach them. _________________________________________ “When you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it. Jiddu Krishnamurti
When you are doing your hands-off coaching you’re helping people align with their own intentions and noticing how their intentions are in alignment with yours. Which, by the way, they are. And if they aren’t, you haven’t listened long enough. So your coachee says, “I would like to have better communication with the warehouse so that they would do things with me on time,” then you can coach them toward, perhaps, getting an agreement with the warehouse. Perhaps going to the warehouse and sitting down with someone and listening and taking notes and getting an agreement with that person to respond to each other within a certain amount of time. And you can coach a person that way, because you’re coaching into what they want. In the old systems of hands-on micro-management there was no coaching. There were just people bossing people around and giving advice all day—unsolicited advice. Managers would go to a person frustrated with the warehouse and say, “Well, why don’t you just go over there? Look, just go over there and work it out with them!” And 158
then when the manager would walk away, the person would say, “Boy, he doesn’t get it. Yeah, like I can just walk over there and it would all solve itself! Like that would happen! He so doesn’t get what it’s like to deal with those people. The last thing I’m going to do is go over there and try to get an agreement with them; that’s the whole point! They don’t respond, they don’t communicate.” And so the problem just got worse. Because not only is there a problem with the warehouse, but there’s a new problem with having an arrogant, clueless manager who doesn’t know anything about the reality of the situation. No wonder that national HR studies show that the number one reason employees list for quitting their job is “my manager.” Whenever you try to boss and micromanage a person, the problem gets worse. When you order someone around or pull rank and speak as their superior, they get very defensive. Do you blame them? It’s threatening. There’s no real professional respect or trust in that approach. It comes from a deeply insecure place. Sometimes your intimidated employee might go into a totally false act of agreeing with you. Or, they’ll strike back and start telling you why things can’t happen. Or they just go silent or just barely say, “Yes, boss, okay, right.” And when you walk away they tell everyone else in their department why you don’t get it, and how you don’t understand. And that’s why the old hands-on micromanagement system really doesn’t work anymore. And that’s also why coaching is imperative if you’re going to be powerful in the workplace and incorporate other people into your leadership power and share that power so that everyone moves forward together. We’re talking about power versus force. Micromanagers keep wishing people were better than they were. They have many expectations of people, which always leads to disappointment, and so they are walking around disappointed in how people are performing all the time. That’s very ineffective. That robs them of energy.
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Hands-off coaching and mentoring eliminates expectation and disappointment.
What companies think of coaching I’ve worked for over 100 companies, many of the Fortune 500, doing coaching inside their organizations, for more than ten years. I have discovered during that time that most companies do their people-managing this way: If there’s a deficit or something missing inside the organization, managers wring their hands and pace around and talk to themselves about why, why, why can’t we do this? The beautiful thing about a commitment to a fully hands-off management system is the question is elevated right away to: How did we create this system? How do we design a new system that guarantees that everyone knows what to do? Coaching itself is a system. Coaching is a commitment to create a system for the higher good of the two people, rather than the other way. What is the other way? The other way is trying in vain to manage our expectations of people. The other way is even sometimes doing a form of psychotherapy, like trying to analyze somebody and label their personality: “Well, he’s not a detail person, or she’s very sensitive about this. And those two, well, they’ll just get in a cat fight, those two women.” And people start labeling people in a very demeaning way and nothing gets advanced. The beautiful thing about coaching is that coaching is a system wherein two people dialogue so that the person being coached gets in touch with the power that’s already inside them. Let’s review: 1) I seek to understand the person I’m coaching. So I ask about how they see things. 2) I find out what the ideal scene is for that person. I might ask that person, “If you could have it your way, what would you really like to have here?” Because whenever we move the conversation from what’s bad to what would be good, we elevate consciousness, add creativity, and 160
increase and enhance the mood of the person being coached. Everything gets up on a higher level.
"I never cease to be amazed at the power of the coaching process to draw out the skills or talent that was previously hidden within an individual, and which invariably finds a way to solve a problem previously thought unsolvable." John Russell, Managing Director, Harley-Davidson Europe Ltd.
There’s no one proper way to coach. But once you get a hands-off feeling established, great things emerge from the coaching process. And you can continuously ask for permission to coach. You might even ask for permission to coach halfway through a conversation. Even in my own work a professional full time coach, I’ll often do this two or three times in a session. A client will talk about something and they will go down a blind alley of being a victim and they’ll tell me what a victim they are of this and how somebody doesn’t do that and they’re showing up late and not helping them, and say ‘I don’t know what to do with them, they always do it.’ And I say, ‘Okay.’ And if I’ve already established a good rapport, the person already trusts that I get where they’re coming from, so I might just ask, halfway through this conversation, ‘Are you open to some coaching on this?’ And then they sit for a minute, and then they say, “Yes, yes I am.” When you ask that question, the person you’re talking to will adjust their mind so that they’re ready to listen in a fresh way. They associate coaching with being open. Because if you don’t get them relaxed and ready to listen, you might just jump in with quick advice that won’t connect. And that will create a trigger inside that person and that person’s heart will start to pound and they’ll say, “No, no, no. I’ve tried… no, no, no. That’s the last thing I want to do.” And you’ve lost ground. So people can only really be coached effectively with permission. The permission can be unstated and wordless, or the permission can be explicitly requested: “May I give you some coaching right now? Are you open to some coaching on this?” If the person says, “Yes,”
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they can take a deep breath and listen. Now could even be time to suggest something. “Here’s something I recommend that’s worked for me.” Or: “Here’s something I recommend that worked for some others. Here’s something that might be worth trying.” Your recommendation may be the same one that used to show up as unsolicited advice, in the old system of random criticism, bossing around and managing people. But inside a hands-off system of coaching, it’s not unsolicited. It has been requested. Therefore it will be appreciated and utilized. Tiger Woods is an excellent example of how sports is the perfect metaphor for this process. That’s why the word “coaching” is so appropriate for this system of hands-off communication. Tiger Woods will go sit down with his swing coach and view videos of his last round. And he’ll be so open to coaching at that time, that he’ll ask, “What’s wrong? What do you see?” He craves the weakness and he craves a flaw. He wants his coach to spot something. “Stop the tape. Freeze frame right here. Look at where you dipped your shoulder, Tiger. That’s not going to work for you.” And so the coaching occurs and Tiger becomes excellent. In the world of entertainment people have acting coaches, dialogue coaches, voice coaches, and body movement coaches. In entertainment and in sports and in every field in the world where excellence and high performance are so necessary for success, coaching is accepted as the obvious answer. Because coaching works. Two heads are better than one, and coaching gives a person distance from themselves to objectively see themselves. It’s a way to step outside your own body, assume a higher level, smarter mind for a moment and look at what you’re doing. Instead of being stuck in the same rut of habitual negative thinking about your limitations. So coaching and excellence go hand in hand. Bob Nardelli, CEO of Home Depot said, “I absolutely believe that people, unless coached, never reach their maximum capabilities.” If you want to be in a body building contest, you hire a personal trainer who’s there with you, coaching you, working with you, spotting. Anybody who really wants to be good at what they do will do that.
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And here’s why. The system of coaching is a system in which two people work together for the higher good of both. What do we mean by the higher good? What we mean is the person being coached is going to be elevated to a higher level of performance, where she’s not only better at what she does, but she enjoys it more. Because the two go hand in hand. And so the hands-off manager and her employee work together for the higher good. What is guaranteed if we coach with the right kind of hands-off dialogue is that the person being coached will emerge as a better player. It can’t not happen, unless you have someone resisting coaching.
What about follow-up to coaching? So far, we’ve been talking about coaching as an individual session. One conversation. And in that conversation, we can coach for ten minutes, or we might sit down for two hours, depending on the situation. Those are single coaching events. Now let’s look at a more ongoing opportunity. Let’s look at follow-up and accountability. Many times a coaching conversation can be enhanced by follow-up. Because a lot of people don’t trust themselves to follow through on breakthroughs they receive in the coaching session. So there’s a great opportunity for this near the end of the session. If you’re coaching somebody you can see (maybe they’ve even told you) that they’ve had some breakthroughs in the session and they’ve seen some things they couldn’t see before, and they might even be excited about doing some things they hadn’t done before. You can now ask for permission to hold them accountable. You can ask for permission to follow up. And you’ll request it in a way that asks whether that will be useful to them. “Would it be useful to you and helpful if we met again in two weeks and checked in on the progress you’ve made to see if there are any bumps in the road that we hadn’t anticipated on this issue?” 163
Nine times out of ten, if it’s asked the right way, a person will say, “I would love that. That would be good for me because sometimes things just sort of drop out of my system and I forget to do them.” That person now gives you permission to hold them accountable, so they’re not off the hook and they can’t just snap back to their old ways. What most people miss in corporate life today is that individuals have systems as well. And so the person who’s got a dysfunction going on has some kind of thinking system that is producing that dysfunction. And part of the coaching conversation is going to be to shine light on that thinking habit---perhaps a habit of always making the other person wrong, or the habit of always getting your feelings hurt if someone doesn’t answer an email and then retaliating in subtle passive-aggressive ways. Those are systems, too. So we’ll use follow-up and accountability to replace the prior system. We want to see in the person we’re coaching that the new thinking system is getting the result we both want---the result we’re calling “the higher good.” People produce their own results with their thinking and coaching helps illumine that. Coaching helps shine a light on how responsible people’s thought patterns are for the problems they’ve generated in the workplace. And that’s not bad news; that’s good news. Just as with the athlete. If the coach walks up and says, “The reason they’re taking the ball away from you is that your dribbling with your left hand is very weak. You always go to your right hand when you’re crowded or double-teamed, and they know you’re going to! And boom! It’s a stolen ball. You need to develop your left hand.” And so that kind of coaching makes the athlete happy. “Wow, I’ll be unstoppable!” A salesperson we knew named Trina was down on herself for not making enough cold calls and not prospecting enough. We met with her and she said, “I just need to prospect more. I just don’t prospect enough. I know that’s my greatest flaw, I don’t enjoy it and I put it off and handle things that I think are important, and then the prospecting never gets done.” “Great. So how does that look to you when you come to work?”
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(We asked that because we really wanted to see how prospecting looked to Trina. Why it looks a little scary, unpleasant, and uncomfortable, and why the other work Trina does looks really fun and enjoyable. A coach seeks to understand how her thinking system—“this is the fun part, this is the not fun part”—is leading to low performance. In fact it’s guaranteeing it.) So when we were with Trina for a while in the coaching session we had a few breakthroughs. She began to see that if she were to create a routine for cold calling and a routine for prospecting, she wouldn’t have to try to decide whether she felt like doing it. She would simply follow her routine. And after a while she would know that the routine was something he was committed to following and she wouldn’t have to re-visit it. She wouldn’t have to feel that pit in her stomach driving in to work wondering if she was going to be able to get herself to prospect. She would now have a routine to cover that for her. And when co-designing a new routine with someone, you the coach might ask, “Would you like me to introduce a level of accountability to you until the training wheels can be thrown off?” “Yes! Oh, would you? Yes, thank you. That would be great. That would keep me from bailing on the routine, the new system.” There’s no set prescription for how to do this follow up work. Sometimes we’ve said, “Every day I want you to email me that you’ve done your hour, you’ve made x amount of calls, and it’s done. Email that to me and I’ll email back saying ‘Bingo, way to do, keep it rolling!’ And we will do this for the first two weeks, then we’ll meet again for another coaching session, when we’ll review your new system and how it’s working for you.” So one day, perhaps, you notice you don’t get an email. So you call Trina and say, “What’s up? How’s it going? I didn’t get an email and we had an agreement that you would, so I wanted to check in with you.” “Oh, just as I sat down to do my prospecting, the boss called everybody in. We’re acquiring a new company and he gave out a bunch of new assignments. It was just chaos all day.”
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You can say, “Okay, so when that occurs, you want to put your commitment right back on track, because now is the time, today is the time to keep your commitment. Not in the past, not in the future.”
More routes to hands-off accountability In some ongoing coaching sessions you might not have anything in particular that you’re holding someone accountable for. There may not be any routine that needs to be put in, or anything measurable. There are just a few breakthroughs on what kind of new spirit and mood to take to various communications. Yet even in these situations there’s an opportunity for you to hold them accountable and to provide a level of follow-up. As you sit down and coach this person, you can ask them to travel back in time “to our last coaching session. Let’s review that for a few minutes and review what it was in that session that was helpful to you and then we’ll look at how it might have been applied or not applied in the last week. And then we’ll take off from there.” This is another way to keep the coaching consistent and to let the person know that what you talk about in the coaching sessions are not things you forget about! You as the coach remember them because you’ve got a commitment to the higher good, too. You’re in support of this person succeeding. That’s really what coaching is all about. It’s two people in support of the evolution of the coached person toward greater and greater excellence and performance. Greater mastery.
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If it’s not fun you’re not doing it right The hands-off coach knows to link mastery to enjoyment. And there’s always a component of greater enjoyment when people get good at what they do. We really want the people we coach to learn to enjoy what they’re doing. Their dysfunctional past behaviors are always accompanied by anxiety and stress. So the more we can get the stress out of the system, the higher a person performs. It’s true when you watch a golf match and you see a golfer enjoying the process. It’s true when you watch a car race and see the wicked smile on Tex Earnhardt’s face. The person without fear---the person operating on a more joyful level than fear---is performing in the most excellent way. Playing to win. The person with fear is playing not to lose. One of the greatest accomplishments of coaching is how good it has been at taking the fear out of the workplace. That’s one of the vital things that the great business efficiency guru Dr.W.Edwards Deming preached to companies: Whatever you’ve got going on, you must take the fear out of the system, because that will always sabotage the system. And coaching is a beautiful way to do that.
A system at play in every workplace In the uncoached, micromanaged organization there is a fallback default system of judgment and reprimand. Any organization, families included! We learned it in families when we were growing up. You surely learn it in the military. Most people in American corporations, when you examine their communication styles and their leadership skills, reflect a 1930’s 1940’s system of military management and that’s usually combined in some unhealthy way with parent-child management. And hands-off coaching is the way out of that. Because coaching is partnership. And it requires that the people doing the coaching to also receive coaching. If that’s not occurring, then leaders are not role models.
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I coach for a living. But I also have a coach. And every two weeks I sit with him in his office and he coaches me for two hours. He’s a powerful unremitting tremendous coach, and I’ve written about Steve Hardison in at least ten of my books. I’ve written about his coaching and how he does it and how powerful it is and how it’s changed my life. But it is very useful, when I’m coaching someone else, to often remark that “I’ve received coaching on this issue” or, “My coach has helped me see this.” Now most people will think that would weaken me, I won’t look like a leader. They think they won’t look like a strong manager if they say something like that. But the opposite is true. In a coaching session it won’t weaken you at all; it will elevate the higher good. It will elevate the whole concept of coaching. Two people, after a coaching session, have an elevation in mood. They bring good spirits to the workplace where before there was discouragement and resentment. Coaching solves a tremendous number of problems, including “attitude” problems that were previously thought to be a part of someone’s personality. They weren’t. They came from not feeling “heard” by anyone. Many times the two of you will come up with something that will be an instant breakthrough, depending on your level of trust and your level of caring and compassion for each other. If those levels are high, you can go cut right to the chase and go right to possible solutions, and have both people really enjoy the session. If there still some fear in the session, you’ll want to go slower and ask more questions. Many times a coaching session will be purely Socratic. What you will do is ask gentle, leading questions that allow a person to express a problem, and then continue to ask questions because your Socratic questioning may cause a person to come upon the answer on their own. You can coach. Just be you and be committed to the higher good. As a hands-off manager, you enjoy great creative freedom. Because a hands-off manager is not burdened with doing things “right” or making others wrong. That’s why the hands-off manager is such a success.
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Steps to Hands-Off Success in your life: THREE ACTION STEPS TO TAKE AFTER READING THIS CHAPTER 1. If you see yourself as a manager supervisor and leader only, make the commitment today to be a coach and mentor instead. 2. If your company employs outside coaching for its executives and top account people (most companies now do), ask to get some coaching from one of them. Not that you need it! But it will give you experience receiving coaching from a pro, and you can use that experience to help you learn how to coach others. 3. Ask someone in your organization to coach you on something today. Sit with them and take notes. Notice how good it feels to be completely open to coaching.
“Work is love made visible.” Kahlil Gibran
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Appendix C: A COACH’s Excerpts from The Hands-Off Manager: Coaching with incredible, life-changing power Morale in the workplace is the creation of the leader. He or she coaches it into existence. Or doesn’t. But morale is not just an accidental climate that comes in on the wind. Tony Robinson (a name we will give this manager) was a gifted project manager who oversaw construction sites for Duane Black many years ago. His skills and intellect were exceptional, but Tony was not happy in his work. Two upper managers who came to review Tony's progress in monthly update meetings were relentlessly critical and questioning of Tony's decisions, and Tony was too sensitive a person to let it go. The quality of his work began to deteriorate to levels that were unacceptable. He justified his actions by saying these two managers were interfering with his well-being and driving him crazy. He couldn't stand the criticism. Finally Duane had had enough. He knew that compassionate listening had run its course, and it was time to upgrade the coaching to the tough love level. "Tony, I want to ask you a question," Duane said. Tony said nothing. "Has there ever been a time when these two managers' comments were deliberately designed to hurt you and undermine your work?" "No," Tony said, after some hesitation. 170
Duane continued, "Has there ever been anything they have communicated to you that wasn't intended to make you more successful at getting the job done?" "I suppose not, no," said Tony. "So it's a matter of style, then," said Duane. "You are reacting emotionally, not to what they are communicating, but the way in which they say the words." "If you put it that way, I guess I am." "Then I'm going to ask you for something. I’m going to ask you to grow up. I'm going to ask you to learn a more mature way to reformat what they are saying so that you can hear it as support and not a threat to you." "I don’t know…." said Tony. "Because it is support, Tony, and they just don't know how communicate with you in a way that considers your sensitivity to criticism." Tony was quiet. "Tony," Duane said, "today is Thursday. I want you to take the rest of the week off and do whatever it is you do to help you make a big decision. Then Monday we will meet and discuss your future with this company. You are capable of far better work than you are producing. If you find you are unwilling to grow up and take their communication gracefully, I'm going to let you go. I have no desire to have someone as capable as you are be this unhappy." Tony came in Monday with a huge smile on his face. Duane asked him what decision he had made. "I'm excited," Tony said. "I never saw my own part in this. I never realized that I could reformat this. I really think you have changed my life." As the months and years rolled along, Tony came to Duane many more times to thank him for that fateful meeting and "for changing
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my life." He told Duane that he was one of the most influential people in his life. This ended up being an incredibly positive experience for Tony. Learning to deal with the two critical managers had in fact provided him with a great service. It helped him grow up.
The thing we surrender to becomes our power. Ernest Holmes
Do people really change? I get that question all the time in my leadership seminars and asking the question itself betrays a lack of understanding of humans in this civilization. People do nothing but change. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. But it’s in the nature of a human being to be everchanging. Every living thing is ever-changing. Why would humans be different? Yet we think they don't! We think people have permanent, fixed personalities that they are all stuck with. Especially in the workplace. People get labeled early and dealt with based on the label. This is a mistake.
Can you coach another person so that the person really changes? We saw the example of Duane coaching Tony. That’s one example that confirms it. Let’s look at another. Let's look at the example of me. Let's examine the notion that people never change through the sample of this one life of mine. If you saw a man who used to be drunk most of the time—a young man whose life was nothing much more than lying, cheating, stealing, drug-taking, drinking and running up a massive debt you would have 172
a hard time trusting—or even liking that man. But what if you saw that same man today and he had not had a drink or drug in 26 years, was happy and healthy with a wonderful family and fulfilling successful career dedicated to helping other people? Would you call that a change? Every person on the planet today who has transformed from the low, suicidal life of addiction to a new life of spirit and service and health— and there are millions of them!—has more than “changed.” They have become someone else. They have become their potential. A potential that was always in them, but needed help from them and others to come through. And, in most cases, they have been coached. Sometimes coaching takes on the form of parenting. Sometimes it shows up as a 12-step sponsor, sometimes it is just sharing idea with a friend, but one thing is certain—people do change—and coaching accelerates change. My first sponsor in my 12-step program coached me from the living suicide of drinking and addiction to higher levels of life than I ever dreamed possible. We worked with a book (and most coaches are very intimate with transformative books) and we charted a new path for my life based on spiritual principles rather than the lowest human emotions of animal fear and gratification. Once I'd reached a (blessed) level of clarity and sobriety my mind was open to even more coaching from books and then from mentors. (Spiritual growth has no upper limit. Just when you think you’re as happy as a person can be, it gets better.) The coaching I received took me from abject financial disaster to a successful professional career. Yet when we think about coaching and especially “life-coaching,” we sometimes think of new-age, faux guru type who sits with their clients and channels spirit beings. And that doesn’t sound like something that would be a good fit for a high-powered organization that really wants to move numbers forward and achieve proactive success. But good coaching does just that.
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In fact, the name “coaching” came from the world of sports. A world of performance and numbers. And sports provides a beautiful metaphor for what good coaching is in an organization. In sports, coaching is what happens when a manager works with an athlete to increase that athlete’s ability to contribute to the team. That’s really what coaching is. It’s different than managing and it’s different than psychotherapy. Here’s a message that we received in an email from a long-time mentor and hero, Dr. Nathanial Branden who has written a number of wonderful books on psychology. I actually used Dr. Branden and his brilliant wife Devers for psychotherapy many years ago; and that may shock some of you who know me, to think that I would ever be in such need (laughter here?). Now, ironically, Dr. Branden has also now moved, in recent months, into the world of coaching, simply because he has seen how effective it is. He especially sees how effective it is compared to psychotherapy. So let’s look at his message, because it’s a good place for us to begin building an idea about what coaching is, so that we’re comfortable with it and we can use it like a tool: Recently, I announced that in addition to my practice of psychotherapy, I was now engaged in the practice of life-coaching. Almost immediately I received many requests to explain what life-coaching is and in what ways it differs from psychotherapy. Psychotherapy, traditionally, rests on the premise that the client has been damaged by some past event or past events and needs to be fixed or healed. The concern is with the past and the present. Coaching rests on the premise that the client possesses unrecognized resources with which he or she can develop strategies that lead aspirations to their fulfillment; the focus is on the present and the future. Traditional therapy is about excavating and neutralizing negatives; coaching is about liberating positives. It’s about putting the client in touch with his or her own wisdom and creativity. To quote one life coach, “Life coaching is about designing a future, not about getting over the past.” One’s relationship to a life coach is often a long-term project, because there need be no end to the process of learning and growth. This is why many champion athletes and high performing business executives retain coaches long after the time they have become successful.
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Coaching looks to close the gap between our dreams and the realities of our existence. See: www.nathanielbranden.com
Studies show that people who do training get a certain amount of boost in productivity, but if they mix coaching in with the training, productivity goes up even further. Coaching is about two people achieving synergy in a beautifully hands-off way. Therefore, coaching is more about mentoring than bossing. It’s a drawing out of the skills of the individual player in the organization so that that player can play up to his or her highest level. It is about seeing potential and gifts in them that they may not even be aware of. That’s what a good coach does. The first thing a masterful coach does is decrease the fearful emotional charge inside the person being coached. If you’re coaching me, you first bring your positive attention to my situation. Soon my negative feelings about being all alone with this situation start to lift. I was working with a large group of managers one day when Duane Black himself volunteered to step to the front of the room to illustrate a point I asked him to make. He walked up to the two flipcharts I was using to contrast the thinking of ownership versus the thinking of victimization. “Let’s try looking at it this way,” Duane said going to the ownership flip chart. He drew a very large “+” sign on the page and said, “When you are positive, (pointing to math sign: +) you add something to any situation, conversation or meeting you are in. That's what being positive does, it contributes, it adds.” He then walked over to the victim’s flip chart and drew a large minus sign (-) and said, “When you are negative (-) you subtract something from the conversation, the meeting or the relationship you are in. If you are negative enough times, you subtract so much from the relationship that there is no more relationship.”
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Duane was giving us the simple math of the human interactive experience! It was the law of the universe up there on the flip chart of life: positive adds, negative subtracts. A positive person contributes, a negative person takes away. I immediately recalled that in grade school the minus sign was called the “take away” sign. As in math, when you introduce a negative it diminishes the total. Add a negative person to the team, and the morale and spirit (and, soon, productivity and profit) of the team is diminished. When you are a positive leader with positive thoughts about the future and the people you lead, you add something to every person you talk to. You bring something of value to every communication. Even every email and voicemail that's positive adds something to the life of the person who receives it. Because positive (+) always adds (increases, improves) something. It's a definite plus. It even runs even deeper than that. If you think positive thoughts throughout the day, you are adding (+) to your own deep inner experience of living. You are bringing a plus (+) to your own spirit and energy with each positive thought. Your negative thoughts take away (-) from the experience of being alive. They rob you of your energy. And so the first thing a coaching conversation does is change the math. It alters the charge in the mind of the person being coached from negative to positive. That alone makes coaching immediately valuable. Notice that most hands-on old school micromanagers almost always bring a negative charge to their human interaction throughout the day. Every time they indulge in sarcasm about the organization, skepticism about the mission or cynicism about the customer, the negativity builds. And believe me, they do this all day long.
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One of the internet’s most successful business gurus is Matt Furey (www.mattfurey.com), a former international champion martial artist who specializes in coaching his clients to stunning financial results. He is a friend of mine and shared with me the other day his own thoughts about negative people and the message he likes to send. “If you're interested in more success,” said Matt, “then you and I can spend time together. If you're interested in blaming others, staying stuck, whining, complaining and so on, then we will not hang out together. Simple as that. Now, why do you think I have this rule? I have it because I have witnessed what happens to me when I am around successful people. I get charged up. I get excited. And I succeed even more than before. But if I hang out with people who act and think like losers, then I start going downhill.” A client of mine I’ll call Linda had a real problem. She was trying to run a sales and marketing team and failing at every turn. She was selling a service targeted to women and her team was a team of women who loved and admired Linda—almost to the point of worship. Linda's product was wonderful but her team was losing money and when she hired me to coach her she thought she was a hands-off manager, but she wasn’t. Linda had the same misconception about hands-off management that many people hold—they think it means no accountability. They think it means to just fire people up, love them and then look the other way. If they don't perform, then express your hurt and disappointment. Dangerous misconception. Dangerous because you can lose your business, or have your team fail miserably thinking this way. Linda didn't realize it, but she was trying to run her team on emotion alone. If her people had a bad month she would get angry and subtly intimidate them. If they had a good month she would become overjoyed and take them all out to a champagne dinner filled with promises and mindless joy.
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When we sat down together for our first session I wanted to have Linda see the importance of accountability. "Business is a logical process run by emotional beings," I told her, paraphrasing my favorite small business millionaire Sam Beckford. "How does that apply to our team?" she asked. "Your team is on a roller coaster, up one day and down the other, based on your mood. You are teaching your people that their only real job is to win your approval." "Well, yes, that's right. I want them to sell more and know that I'll approve of them for that." "Not logical," I said. "How do you mean?" "You’re basing the mission on emotion. They can't perform well if they are constantly trying to anticipate your mood. That takes them back to dysfunction. Like little girls living in a household with an alcoholic mother. No one knows when it's safe to talk to Mother." “What’s the alternative?” she said. I told her that the alternative was to return her people to their work. To let them love their work, and make it better every day. To measure their progress. But not to strike fear into their hearts. Linda was stunned by my assessment of her leadership style, but as I worked with her she began to see the value of holding her people accountable to themselves and their own best possible performance. She was opening up to a new way of seeing her business. She hadn’t always been this open! “Why do I need coaching?” she once asked. “Why can't I be fiercely self-reliant?” This myth of isolation is just about the most painful thing any of us experiences….all day thinking I'm all alone—lost and afraid in a world I never made.
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Reaching out for help is not weakness, it is the ultimate in strength. It is a commitment to something other than looking strong. It is a commitment to something beautiful, a mission beyond the ego.
We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Doctors coach us on how to get well, teachers coach us on how to become knowledgeable, parents coach us on how to grow up and why is this not just the most beautiful, natural way of it? Why is this not the most powerful way to grow? It's certainly the fastest. Which is why the hands-off manager learns to become a masterful coach. Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy to those who feel. Horace Walpole
The great business management author and advisor Tom Peters says the manager in today’s workplace cannot be like yesterday’s micromanaging boss. He tells managers, “Stop giving orders. Being the boss is no longer—if it ever was—about issuing mandates from on high. ‘Ordering’ change is a (stupid, stupid, stupid) waste of time.” Your own humility will allow you to win the total support of your people. Because you value them at the same level you value yourself. 179
Humility is not low self-esteem—quite the opposite—humility is exceptionally high self esteem. It demonstrates a self-confidence that is so unshakable that you never have to put some one else down in order to make yourself feel better. Coaching that helps bring a person "into alignment” with their true talent (passion) is not some goofy new age narcissism. It increases productivity: hard numbers and profitability are impacted. The growth curve and real dollar profit margins of the company Duane works for can only astonish competitors and onlookers who are reduced to guessing that they must have made some "lucky land acquisitions in a prime market with good timing." Well, yes, timing is everything. Especially when we notice that the time is always now.
What to do when coaching doesn’t work If you have an unhappy employee who is under-producing, coaching is always your first option. Coaching can do so much! Except when it can't. Yes, there are times when even the most masterful coaching will not change an employee's poor attitude and inconsistent performance. Some people are just not open to inner change. It is at this point that we like to remember the words of Harvey Mackay, chairman of the Mackay Envelope Company, who said, "It's not the people you fire that give you problems; it's the people you don't fire." So why are we so reluctant to fire people? Aside from the paperwork annoyances involved, we are traumatized by the thought of firing someone for two very unnecessary reasons: 1) we think replacing them will be difficult, and 2) we think we will be doing them great harm. Let's look at the first mental obstacle—the difficulty in replacing a person. The truly masterful hands-off manager must be a great (not good, but…) great recruiter and attractor of talent. Talent is everything today. The company with the most talent wins. Hands-off
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management is wasted on mediocre people. You want dedicated people who love what they do, and you want to be great at bringing them on board. So releasing a person who is unhappy and underperforming and not a team fit is a pleasure—not a problem. It is a pleasure because of who you have waiting in the wings! You are always making your team better and better. You get that talent rules. The second mental obstacle is that thought that you are harming someone by firing them. You are not. If that person is unhappy and unproductive you are harming them by keeping them. Letting them go will set them free to find work they like to do. In the end, that's the greatest gift you can give. Even current HR surveys show that people who are fired are more likely to improve their financial standing in life than people who quit. The career value of a wake up call! Hands-off managers make certain that the firing of an employee is a positive, enlightening experience. They use the phrase, "right person/wrong job." They let the employee know that they are the right person stuck in the wrong job. They want the employee to be happy somewhere—and it's clear that it's not here. Football coach Vince Lombardi was famous for saying "If you are not fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm." Was that heartless? Not to the true hands-off manager. It is actually compassionate to want your people to be enthusiastic about their work. A manager is not managing if he is not managing morale. Unhappy people are bad for morale. They destroy their own spirit as well as that of their colleagues. The hands-off manager is clean, clear and crisp about who works here and who doesn't. Duane lets people go who won't give one hundred percent to the team. He lets them go! He says to them, "You're my friend. I really care about you—and you're in the wrong position on this team. Even if you feel disappointed right now that I'm letting you go. Even if you're angry. I still want you to have an opportunity to find alignment for yourself somewhere in a job that works for you. You're the right person for that. This is the wrong job for you."
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Duane says that over the many years of working in his company he and his colleagues are unanimous on one point—"We've never let a person go too soon." It's hard to lead people well. We get distracted by the daily "problems" of the workplace. Soon we think we're too pressed and swamped to recruit and interview properly so we hire people to "fill immediate needs" and the quality of the team goes downhill. We have become distracted from our original vision. Therefore, vision-renewal is a daily activity of the hands-off manager. There can’t be exceptions to the vision of excellence. "You have to release people who are not right for the team," said Duane. "Because you care for them in a more elevated way than just trying to please them or be their buddy. You can't let the rest of your team suffer because of that one unhappy person." The hands-off manager is willing to disappoint people by letting them go—is willing to sacrifice his own popularity for the higher interest of the team itself—the other players. Duane has let a lot of people go over the years. But now it’s a rare occurrence. "You end up working through a fair amount of people before you get the team you want," Duane says, "but once you do, they'll serve you for a long time. It's not like a sports team where athletes have short careers. Bodies wear down. But the mind does not." Under the supervision of a hands-off manager, the mind only grows stronger, more imaginative and more excited about doing great work. "We have people who have been offered more money to work elsewhere," Duane says, "but they don’t leave because they can't duplicate this environment somewhere else." Mariano was a powerful CFO of a company with a good-sized accounting staff. He had been on my website reading about breakthroughs that hands-off management was achieving. "I don’t agree with your theories at all," he said, as we sat down to chat at an outdoor restaurant. "Really?" 182
"Really," he said. "In fact, I told my partner that I was angry with you after reading your theories about hands-off guidance or whatever it is." "That is okay with me," I said, "but remember that they're not theories. They are experience. You don't need theories about success in the workplace, there's enough actual experience to look at." "Well whatever, I got angry because I know it wouldn't work. I could never trust my people that much." Mariano had always had problems with his people. He hired people in a hurry to meet needs and then spent most of his time furious with the mediocre work coming from his people. "I have mediocre people," he said, "who need to be watched and monitored every minute." "They are not mediocre people," I said. "In the right job, with a trusting mentor, they could be magnificent. Every last one of them." "So you say." Mariano was not a respecter of human talent although he himself had a great deal of it. To him, people basically weren't trustworthy, so therefore his recruiting efforts were never very visionary or creative. He always hired to fill a need. Never to fill a want or to fulfill a vision. Mariano's anger came from not knowing how to mentor people and allow them to be successful. He thought mentoring was weak. Especially compared to his own system of criticizing, correcting, humiliating and embarrassing his people. "Your system is too easy," he said. "You were a parent raising your son for many years if I am correct," I said. Mariano nodded and said, "Oh, yes." "Was that easy?" "Hardest thing I've ever done."
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"But you loved him." "More than anything." "And you guided him and mentored him." "Constantly, until I didn't need to." "Rewarding?" "Oh, yes." "And because of your love, was parenting a weak or soft activity?" "I see where you're going with this but there's no comparison." "Why not?" "You don’t want me to all of a sudden love my employees like I love Derek?" "Maybe not all of a sudden." "After when? I get a heart transplant? After I get new employees?" "After you coach them. After you really, truly coach them, you won't have to try to love them. It will just happen." "Why is that?" "Because you'll get closer with every session. You'll be partnering for the higher good. You'll be sharing life's most difficult experiences. And you'll be sharing life's best moments . . . moments of growth." Mariano wasn't convinced. But he was willing to listen. And, ironically, he'd always been an admirer of Duane’s team. ("How does he pull down those numbers year after year?" he would ask, shaking his head at his strange "magic.") I wanted Mariano to get something: When firing a non-producer is not your current choice then coaching is what you must do. Seems obvious?
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Not to Mariano! And not to most managers. Most managers know nothing of coaching. When a person underperforms they don't coach them, they do other things, all of them toxic and dysfunctional. They become sarcastic. Or they ignore their employee, playing the timeworn game of "Guess Why I'm Mad?" They reduce the logical process of business into an emotional battleground. Tension fills the workplace. Morale suffers. "I don't know what else to do!" an angry CEO named Mark said when I talked to him about a team leader who wasn't getting the job done. "I'm caught between a rock and a hard place! I am furious with Gordon but the nightmare of finding a replacement is too much to think about." "How do you think he feels?" I asked. "Frankly, that doesn't concern me right now, he has totally betrayed me." This was getting to be like a scene out of General Hospital for me, so I looked for a way to introduce coaching as an alternative to the daily drama. "Have you ever coached him?" I asked. "Have you ever mentored Gordon?" Mark stared at me like I'd asked him whether he'd ever given him a pedicure. His face was twisted with confusion. "What do you mean by coaching?" That was a valid question! What is this coaching process we’re talking about? What do we do exactly when we coach someone?
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Stop giving unsolicited advice A lot of people think that coaching means giving advice; that you give advice in kind of a nice way so that you’re giving advice but you can call it “coaching.” That’s not really coaching. That’s advising. Coaching is a more complete package than that. Because coaching embraces a bigger picture. Coaching is not directing. Coaching is another word for true open communication. When you are coaching, the first thing you do is seek is to understand the other person. You do not first seek to be understood. The first and most important part of coaching is seeking to understand where your person’s heart is. What’s their current mindset? What are they thinking? How do they see things? Because if you saw life the way they saw life, you’d be doing just what they’re doing. You’d be behaving the way they were. You’d be communicating exactly the way they are. Therefore first stage of the coaching session is the intake: you ask your gentle questions, and you get in touch with the intentions and the inner motivations of the person you are coaching. It’s really important for you to see what they want to achieve, what they’re trying to do, and how they see their situation. So first of all, you want to listen, ask more questions, and let them talk. Keep your hands off their answers. They don’t need fixing.
Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love; for it is in giving that we receive. St. Francis of Assisi
And this is why coaching is so effective. This very aspect: seeking to understand first, not to be understood. Because in the old model of managing, people tried to be understood first. They had all their communications going out and nothing coming in. They were thinking, “I sure hope I’m being understood!” And then if somebody 186
was messing up, the micromanager would sit down with them and say, “Now let me tell you how to do this,” or, “Let me tell you what you’re doing wrong,” or “Let me tell you what I expect of you, here.” And then they would try again to be understood. All the old school managers would go around the organization trying so hard to be understood all day. And it wasn’t working. In today’s organization the young people being hired are much brighter and more knowledgeable than ever before. But what comes along with that? They’re also more independent and personally complex than ever before. They’re not going to fall in line like people on the assembly line in the 1940s and just listen to orders being barked out and move like robotic sheep through the organization. We all know this. It’s a new world. Therefore enlightened management is no longer about tenure, or position, or control. It is about guaranteeing an opportunity for people to become their highest vision of who they can be. About a decade ago I worked for a company called TimeMax and we delivered productivity training and sold time management products. Our company was struggling financially when it brought in a business coach by the name of Steve Hardison. Hardison was dynamic. His coaching went through the company like a hurricane and it wasn't long before empty classrooms were converted to “standing room only!” and major Fortune 500 companies were writing six figure checks for our training. Hardison was a force. His coaching sessions opened people up to levels of performance and creativity they never knew existed. I'd never seen anything like it. And the best part of the company transformation was that it included me. Not since I'd transformed from a hopelessly addicted person to a happy clean and sober person had I changed so much. Do people change? 187
Because of Hardison, I started teaching classes, giving seminars (I'd previously had a public speaking phobia) and writing books. I was 49 and had never written a book before. I've now written 16—some of them bestsellers—so, do people change? Does coaching work? More than anyone can imagine! "But you've got to have someone willing to receive," says Hardison. "Coaching can't be imposed from one person to another. It's a two way street. It's an exchange of life. Both people learn. Both people grow." Hardison has now coached some of the top celebrities in the entertainment industry and personal growth field and says that everyone's "problems" are the same. "There's no new problem," Hardison said. "People are afraid to really express who they are. That's all that's going on. My job is to listen and connect." Hardison likes to quote one of his own clients, Byron Katie, who says, "If you have a problem, you have a solution. There's no problem without a solution." When Hardison started coaching me a decade ago, fear dominated my life. Especially my professional life. But he was able to connect to me on such a deep level that I knew he had the same fears I had. And his growth to transform fear became my own. His commitment to me was total, and I could feel it in every coaching session. I was no longer alone. I was connected now to the whole universe and all its energy. I have seen Hardison give so much of himself away in a coaching session that he emerges physically drained to the point of almost not existing. "It's an exchange of life," he says of coaching that works. "It's almost like giving a blood transfusion. But when the people you coach can see what they're afraid of and then meet it, it's exhilarating!" Exhilarating financial transformations occur, too. I watched Hardison coach TimeMax from deep debt to exhilarating, staggering
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profits. I experienced my own professional life go through the same change. So coaching is not just some new age amateur psychotherapy—it combines the very best of sports coaching and business consulting to produce astonishing quantum leaps in productivity. Hardison taught me to create from the present moment. He showed me the startling leverage we have in the present moment actions we take. He taught me to let the past dissolve away. He showed me that my future was just an anxious anticipation. Did I want to spend my whole life swinging between memory and anticipation like a bipolar monkey in a jungle of fear? Or would I like to swing on a star?
To me every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle. Walter Chrysler
Hardison hooked me up with Duane Black a few years ago and told me that Duane was one of the few leaders in the corporate world who was fearless about bringing love, nobility and integrity into the workplace, treating work itself as a sacred act. I was very interested in that! And after meeting with Duane and coproducing seminars and workshops for his leadership teams I knew Hardison was right. The extraordinary financial success of Duane's company was no accident. Duane was genuinely excited about his team of people. And I recalled that Hardison had always told me, "Most of what is called coaching today is not really effective. There is no commitment to relatedness, and if a 'coach' has no excitement about listening to the other person, no change will take place." After Walter Chrysler had built a dramatically successful automotive company against great odds in the 1940's he said, "I feel sorry for the person who can't get genuinely excited about his work. Not only will he never be satisfied, but he will never achieve anything worthwhile.” 189
This kind of excitement is not passive or limp. That's a big mistake people make when they first hear about hands-off management. They think it's soft. It's the opposite.
Coaching is about what’s possible Coaching is all about what’s possible. Coaching is moving a person out of being stuck in a mindset where they think they are limited. Therefore the hands-off manager has what the Zen masters call a “beginner’s mind”: nothing is impossible.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. ANAIS NIN
Because as an effective coach you never want to seem to be saying “I’m better than you, I’m your superior and that’s why I’m coaching you and telling you how it ought to be.” That would be the expert giving advice, not a professional partner delivering coaching. Expert advice will not bring change. It is more likely to bring humiliation. And that’s only because we are dealing with human beings. Lasting behavioral change is always the ironic specialty of the hands-off manager. By not micromanaging, more changes. By keeping your hands off the process, the process improves faster. Would you pull a flower up with your hands from the ground to help it grow? Why try to do similar things to an employee?
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When you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it. Jiddu Krishnamurti
Tiger Woods is an excellent example of how sports is the perfect metaphor for this process. That’s why the word “coaching” is so appropriate for this system of hands-off leadership. Tiger Woods will go sit down with his swing coach and view videos of his last round of golf. And he’ll be so open to coaching at that time, that he’ll ask, “What’s wrong? What do you see?” He craves finding a weakness and he craves a flaw. He wants his coach to spot something. “Stop the tape. Freeze frame right here. Look at where you dipped your shoulder, Tiger. That’s not going to work for you.” And so the coaching begins and Tiger becomes other-worldly in his play. Bob Nardelli, former CEO of Home Depot said, “I absolutely believe that people, unless coached, never reach their maximum capabilities.” A salesperson we knew named Trina was down on herself for not making enough cold calls and not prospecting enough. We met with her and she said, “I just need to prospect more. I just don’t prospect enough. I know that’s my greatest flaw, I don’t enjoy it and I put it off and handle things that I think are important, and then the prospecting never gets done.” “Great. So how does that look to you when you come to work?” (We asked that because we really wanted to see how prospecting looked to Trina. Why it looks a little scary, unpleasant, and uncomfortable, and why the other work Trina does looks really fun and enjoyable. A coach seeks to understand how one’s thinking system—“this is the fun part, this is the not fun part”—is leading to low performance. In fact it’s guaranteeing it.) So when we were with Trina for a while in the coaching session we had a few breakthroughs. She began to see that if she were to create
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an interesting routine for cold calling, she wouldn’t have to try to decide whether she “felt like” doing it. She would simply follow her routine. She wouldn’t have to feel that pit in her stomach driving in to work wondering if she was going to be able to get herself to prospect. She would now have a rather fun routine to cover that for her.
A system at play in every workplace In the uncoached, micromanaged organization there is an unconscious default system of judgment and reprimand. This is true for any unconscious organization, families included! We learned it in families when we were growing up. You surely learn it in the military. Most people in American corporations, when you examine their communication styles and their leadership skills, reflect a 1930’s or 1940’s system of military management and that’s usually combined in some unhealthy way with parent-child management. And hands-off coaching is the way out of that. Because coaching is a mature partnership. Two grown-ups with a common goal. Not Mad Dad versus Bad Child (how most teams are run). Duane says, "Coaching takes a level of commitment, passion and desire that most people are not willing to give." A great leader is more committed to the success of the team than he is to the success of any individual. So his mission when coaching his people is to show them that success comes from what they can contribute to the whole—not from how they can stand out as individuals. And this allows him to apply some very tough love to the individual in the name of the team win. "The hands-off manager has to be absolute," says Duane. "He or she can't be wishy-washy when it comes to excellence. There must be unwavering commitment to everyone becoming the best they can be at what they do."
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And these results are not numbers or money (although they will be nice side effects, in the long run). These results are the ever-improving quality of work. They are the process of great work, not just the financial outcome. "We want a team that is so excited that they can't help but produce a great product," Duane said. "Our love has to show through." A typical life coach will work with one individual, solely to bring the individual's talents forward. The hands-off manager, however, has to add a dimension to that—he or she has to be tougher in the coaching process and not settle for an “okay” contribution to the whole. The point is not to be a babysitter in the name of compassion. The path is to consistently insist that the player is giving his all to the team. (And becoming personally fulfilled in the process.)
Know when to fold ’em A coach with true commitment to the vision can light you up even when he's fictional! My wife Kathy was working for a large organization whose leader was taking hands-off to a negative extreme. It was no-hands-at-all, no head, no heart, no leadership, no direction and no vision. Kathy hadn’t figured out exactly what felt so wrong at work each day, but she knew she didn't like it. Then one afternoon she and I went to a movie called Any Given Sunday with Al Pacino playing the head football coach of a team in disarray. In one brilliantly dramatic scene Pacino calls his team together in the locker room and allows himself to burst like a fountain of passion and fire. He pours his heart out on the subject of team and the beauty of all-for-one and one-for-all. Pacino’s team—like Kathy’s team at work—had become demoralized. There were jealousies, politics, and drama going on all day instead of a single unified mission. “We’re in hell!” Pacino yelled to his team in the locker room before the final game of the season. “Either we heal as a team or we crumble. But we can heal. We can fight our way back into the light…we can 193
climb out of hell one inch at a time. What will it be? Look into the eyes of the person next to you. Either we heal now…as a team…or we will die as individuals.” Kathy was in tears. She knew right then and there what was missing in the company she was working for. And she knew the missing leader wasn’t just going to appear. There was no Al Pacino to pull them all back into a team. When she went to work the following Monday she put in her twoweek notice and hit the pavement looking for other work. The next company she worked for had true leadership at the top and was a joy to work for. And had it not been for Pacino in Any Given Sunday she may never have seen the higher vision.
The main ingredient in stardom is the rest of the team. John Wooden
If it’s not fun you’re not doing it right The hands-off coach knows to link mastery to enjoyment. There’s always a component of greater enjoyment when people get good at what they do. Notice when you watch a golf match and you see a golfer enjoying the process. A spring in his step, a twinkle in his eye. It’s true when you watch a car race and see the wicked smile on Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s face. The person without fear—the person operating on a more joyful level than fear—is usually performing in the most excellent way. Playing to win. While the person with fear is always playing not to lose. Great coaching takes the fear out of the workplace. That’s one of the vital things that the legendary business efficiency guru Dr. W. Edwards Deming preached to the companies he transformed: Whatever you’ve got going on, you must take the fear out of the system, because that will always sabotage the system.
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Should you fire someone for being afraid? Or for being unhappy? Wow. That sounds like the ultimate cruelty. They are already unhappy and now you're going to fire them?!? It reminds me of British philosopher Colin Wilson's observation that the fastest, most efficient way to change the mental state of a depressed person would be to throw him down a flight of stairs. Depression wouldn't be there any more. It would certainly be replaced by something else. Although Wilson was being deliberately absurd and insensitive to depression, his point was worth taking. Unhappy people don't make as much money as happy people (when everything else is equal). They don't produce or perform as well in the workplace, either. So, yes, it is your role as coach to address the issue and solve it. Many corporate cultures almost guarantee widespread unhappiness by being conditioned to be fearful of criticism "from above." Soon everyone is living in paranoia, hoping nothing "goes wrong" today. The hands-off manager cultivates a culture of "NO FEAR." Team mates can be bold, and be happy. They can make mistakes and "fail forward." Recently a woman who owned a home design business named Stella sat down with me for some coaching. She wanted to know what to do about Rosie, one of her veteran employees, who "came to work angry" every day. “Every day?” I asked. “She comes in angry every day?” “Every day.” "Why does she still work for you?" I asked. Stella looked stunned. She was taken aback by my question. Which was the reaction I was hoping for. I pressed her further. "Does her anger affect your other employees?" I asked.
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"Yes, of course. It makes them very uncomfortable." "Every day?" "Just about, yes." "And what about you? Does her anger—the anger she brings into work—does it infect or affect your own mental well-being?" "All the time. That's why I called you." "So let's look at it logically," I said. "Business—when it succeeds—is logical. When it fails, it's emotional." “Okay," she said. "What if this person—this Rosie—came into work and sprayed an aerosol can of skunk mist throughout your showroom and offices every day. What would you do?" "I'd tell her to stop. And if she did it again, I'd dismiss her." "But why?" "Because she would be damaging our ability to do business." "And she's not now?" Stella grew very quiet. Finally she started nodding her head. "So I just fire her for being angry?" "No, you coach her. First you see if you can help her find herself so she can be happy and very proud of her work." "And if she refuses?" "You decide what’s next. But don't leave it like this. Remember, nowhere is it written that you have to put up with unhappy or angry people. It's not in the Bill of Rights." Stella was even tougher than I expected her to be. The next day that Rosie showed up angry and cursing, Stella sent her home and told her
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to take a paid week off and when she came back next week they would talk about her future with the organization. Rosie was stunned, shocked and a little frightened. She had just been thrown down a flight of stairs. The hands-off manager is not a coward.
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Appendix D: How to double your income as a coach “Being a millionaire is the best possible thing you can do for society. If you have more, you have more to give. If you are financially independent, then you will not be a financial burden on others. Contrary to what you have been led to believe, your dream of being a millionaire is extremely virtuous. Having the status of a millionaire will give you the influence to make a major difference in the world; it will give you a voice.” John R. Colt There’s an exciting concept that anyone can use and we are just going to call it “doubling.” We stumbled upon this as a mental phenomenon years ago when we were coaching a young salesperson, and he was selling a certain amount of cars a month, and he was only improving by a little bit each month. So he said, “Will you coach me?” and we did. We sat down with him and said, “What would you have to do differently if you were going to double the amount of cars you sold?” He said, “Well, you just don’t understand. This is a hard business and people don’t just double what they do—they improve.” We explained to him the difference between creating from the past and creating from the future. When you create your life from the past (as most people do) the best future you can ever have is really not the future at all but a newer, better past. Almost all companies do this. To chart their future they put up a projection of their past year and then just improve it by 10 or 12 per cent. That’s not a future, that’s a warmed-over past. Groundhog Day!
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To create from the future is to either forget the past completely, which is hard for the uninitiated mind to do. Or, to take the next best mental step, look at the past and double it. Just for a mind-stretching exercise. So our car salesman said, “I’m selling about six cars a month and I would like to get to eight, maybe even ten.” We said, “That’s great. That would be fine, but you’re going to think differently if you answer my question.” We asked him to really seriously look at what his week would be like, and what his average day would be like, if he had to double his output—if it was absolutely necessary. That they were going to take him away and put him in a dark damp jail forever if he didn’t do it. He said, “Well, if I had to….” And he started coming up with a lot of unusual and unorthodox ideas about how he could maximize his time, and multiply the number of conversations he had each day with prospective customers. He came up with a lot of really wonderful ideas—things he wouldn’t have thought of while thinking about incremental improvement. Most people think incrementally. They think about a little bit of an improvement here or there, or maybe they could raise their coaching fee just a little bit, or maybe they could start coaching a different kind of thing, or maybe they could coach groups now, and charge a little more, and little tiny improvements come in. But we find that when coaches actually open their minds to something incredible, something extraordinary, like if they HAD TO start very quickly making twice what they are now making, ideas start to flow. It’s amazing what you can do if you have to do it. A lot of people say, “Well, if I absolutely had to double my income, I would work twice as many hours. I would simply work 16 hours a day instead of 8.” Actually, that would work … and what would really happen is that after the first two or three 16-hour days you would start to find
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efficiencies and leverages to take it down to 14 then 12 and still have your doubling happen. Then you’d get it to ten and even eight. Because out of that heightened consciousness you’d find intuitive, innovative ways to do things that were really powerful and effective. You would find tasks that you could delegate that you weren’t delegating before, so that your time was spent only on activities that produced income; which would be the 80/20 rule kicking in. We all know that 80% of our income comes from 20% of our activities. Almost everybody who looks at their calendar and schedule will discover that that’s true. We actually know coaches who spend hours poring over taxi cab receipts, expense submissions, bookkeeping, copy-paper bills, and all kinds of housekeeping when they could have been transforming the lives of clients and writing amazing large coaching proposals. They could fill their day with productive activity. That’s what we do at the six-month prosperity school for coaching. (See www.stevechandler.com if you want to enroll in the next one.) We re-invent and completely renovate how a day is constructed and how a week is constructed for a coach. That is step one (How do I spend my day?). It can come from the experimental question, “If I had to double the income and the revenue, what would I do and what could I do?” A lot of people ask, “Well, why don’t people just on their own, double things, or think in terms of doubling?” Most people don’t think to do that. The mind likes to stay in homeostasis…the comfort zone of repeating the past. In most coaches’ lives you could start their end-of-day journal this way, “It was a day like any other day.” In other words, daily habit protects the status quo all by itself. Unless it’s challenged. And when it’s challenged, when somebody in a room full of people says to you, “What would you do if you had to double your monthly income as a consultant, coach, public speaker (whatever you are)?” you start thinking of things that you’ve never thought of, and you are thinking in ways you haven’t thought in, and it’s a really tremendous experience. The time that I’ve spent with individuals who have looked at their lives this way has been
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rewarding—it’s really opened things up for them. Because in the past (and in their own minds) they haven’t even had permission from themselves to think in these ways. The ego will try to control the status quo and keep the human construct safe from anything dangerous, anything radical, and anything new. It thinks it’s doing you a favor! But when you have a coach, or when you have an inspiring leader or somebody who gets the best out of you, they won’t think that way, they won’t say, “I bet you could be 10% better.” They really do believe, and in fact know, you could be twice as prosperous from what you are doing and you know it too, you just haven’t admitted it to yourself.
Time management for coaches “There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.” Rebecca West Time management for coaches is a really key factor in whether their income just explodes or stays stuck. Because coaches bill their time! So coaches mentally work by the hour, or by the 45 minutes or by the half hour (even though Sam Beckford does 15-minute coaching sessions and they are just amazingly productive). Therefore the time management issue for coaches is really vital because there are only so many hours in the day that you can use to coach with. So, it’s not as if you can fit 20 times more coaching hours in one day; but in certain ways you actually can. The key thing is this: the number one way to have time management start to be really effective for you is to have your fees raised. When your fees are raised, it really sorts out prospective clients faster; so you don’t have a lot of clinging, high-maintenance clients that you are working with and that call with tons of questions and whose coaching sessions descend into therapy. 201
Now I talk to a lot of coaches who are really tired of the coaching profession at the end of the week; because of these low-paying or medium-paying clients whose sessions wander all over the place, (and then when you coach them again, they haven’t made any real progress.) One of the great things that happens when you increase your fees, is that the commitment-level of clients increases. You have more committed people. Therefore you get better results. And because you’re getting faster, more dramatic results, you are now getting faster, more enthusiastic referrals. A client who has paid you a large fee is really ready to work! If I’ve paid my coach a great deal of money—and I (Steve) do—“I am truly committed inside those coaching sessions to alter my life. I have a coach that I pay $150,000 a year to and I’ve signed a four-year contract with him! Every year he coaches me, my income goes way through the roof. So it’s worth the money to me, but I’ll tell you something. When you write a check to someone for $150,000 and he recommends something in that coaching session, you’re going to go do it, and you’re going to change your life, and you’re going to listen hard, and you’re never going to be late to a session, and you’re going to take notes, and you’re going to allow your life to be completely changed based on that fee. Basically, because that’s the value you now place on the service of coaching.” So, if your fees are irrationally low, or modest, or in your mind you are thinking, “Well, I haven’t coached for long, so I better start out small,” please realize that it will lead to a less committed clientele. You may get a lot of clients trying you out (and wearing you out) if you’re known as a discount coach, but you will have a very hard time making a dramatic difference. Stronger fees, or more rational fees, will actually help do time management for you. It will sort your life out. It will make it simpler, cleaner and bolder. Time management for coaches is not an issue of organization. It’s not a matter of how you are going to organize your office, and your files, and how you are going to do your day planner, your Blackberry calendar and all of that, as most people believe. Time management is an issue of boldness. Time management is all about the courage to say “no.” And the courage to speak a fee so large it turns business away.
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Time management also means not doing a lot of Rolodexing and contact building. It means not doing things as a means to an end…like a free talk that will get you business later sometime. Time management means you make your money NOW, in this conversation right here, wherein you ask if the person wishes to receive the coaching and then instruct where to send the retainer. It means saying “no” to nonpaying callers who want your time…to email from nonpaying people. It means a really good strong, high-quality “no” where people are deeply impressed with your “no.” “No, thank you. No, that’s not something I will do,” and they are completely impressed with that and they go away thinking, “I’m going to use him or her as a coach.” When your priorities are strong, that helps organize your day in and of itself. Then ask yourself at the start of each day, not How Many things you can do today, but How Bold are the things you are going to do. Give tasks a boldness rating. Because that bold, daring, audacious coaching proposal to the company you’ve been talking to is a better use of your time than all the little things you thought you had to get done. You know that. But unless you start charting a degree of difficulty with your task plans you will not manage time well. You’ll be overrun with small items and bothersome time-wasting people and you’ll look at the end of the day at the one opportunity you have postponed. Remember, procrastination is not the problem. Boldness is the problem. So be fearless in creating your day. That’s where you have the opportunity EVERY DAY to take a hero’s journey, in what you choose to do. Will it be a very brave journey? Or will today be a day like any other day? Then, when boldness starts to come in at every point, you’ll be a role model for your clients on how ruthlessly simple a professional life can be. You’ll show them how to courageously keep your life simple and clean and clear, and you’ll show your clients that that’s what you do, and they can do it too. For a coach, that’s really so important. A coach can’t afford to have a life of chaos, hangers-on, busyness, all kinds of scrambling, all kinds of wild “marketing,” on the internet all the time trying to search for new clients. That doesn’t work. It doesn’t work as a real bold system that leads to clients, and it doesn’t work for role-modeling.
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One thing we find when we are hired by a coach to coach that coach, that what has been missing in his life (or her life) is accountability. And so the very fact that they now have a coach that they are going to talk to regularly and report back to on steps they have taken to grow their practice—that very fact grows their practice! No matter how the coach coaches, just that very reporting. That level of accountability alone changes how a client looks at the week ahead. If they know that they are going to report progress to someone, they will make progress. Human nature. Usually what happens is this: Someone is coaching, and their consciousness becomes very high during a coaching session; so they bring the best of themselves to their clients. And they keep changing their client’s lives, and they keep transforming what occurs with a client, and it’s really great work; and after the sessions (you know it, you’ve experienced it-—I have) total exhaustion—total down time. I don’t want to think about anything. I just want to kind of veg out for a while and get ready for my next session. Because in each coaching session, we bring such a high level of attention, and listening, and consciousness—and we really listen for breakthrough potentials with our clients—that when it’s over we shut down a little bit and take care of ourselves and re-group, rejuvenate, and relax. Here’s the problem with that. It’s not a bad system; however, who is coaching the coach? In other words, who is making sure that I myself, am having breakthroughs and seeing innovative ways to leverage what I do and maximize and optimize my own talent? Who is looking after that, and the answer is no one. The answer is, there really isn’t any accountability for that. There’s no one I answer to; because most coaches don’t have a board of directors that they report to and say, “Well, in the past 30 days here’s what I’ve done to grow my practice.” There isn’t that kind of feedback or accountability so the coach is on his own or her own to see that that happens; and at the end of the day, that usually has not happened. Now the beautiful thing about having a coach yourself (and we urge every coach to get one) is that we’re going to think long and hard about progress. What have I done? What bold proposal have I put out? What have I done in the way of delegation? How have my fees strengthened? What innovative way of serving an existing client has
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now been introduced and they are now paying me for? And I will report that at the end of the week about my project, And just having this changes consciousness of everything during the week. Someone calls you from a company that you’ve coached a couple of people at before, and you’re listening from a different place. You’re listening from “I could grow my practice dramatically if I played my cards right, right now,” instead of, “Oh, well, here’s another company person calling and this is good, it might result in a client, might not.” And most coaches I’ve talked to, if they’re not really being held accountable for growing their practice, simply don’t grow it. They will get a call from a company saying, “We’ve got a couple more people we’re interested in having you coach,” and they’ll just say, “Well, OK, thank you. Give me their names, I’ll see if I can chat them up and talk to them and then I’ll get back to you and send a little invoice over and we’ll get rolling,” and everything is just so mediocre and low key and down trodden that it really doesn’t grow the practice. What needs to happen for a practice to become vibrant and vital is for that call to come in and for me to now say, “I’ve got a whole new way of doing things that I’d like to talk to you about that I believe would benefit you and your company a great deal more than the way we’ve been doing business together. When do you have time on Friday that I can come by?” So now I’m going over with a whole new proposal that’s bolder, stronger, more long-term and has a very nice retainer fee in it for me, and I report that on Friday and, bingo, it looks great and it feels great. I feel like a winner, and that is what’s missing in most coaching practices—accountability of any kind. There is one kind of accountability that we hear about and that is the coach goes home at night, talks to the spouse or partner about what’s going on and kind-of says, “Well, you know it’s looking good, I’m doing better and time will tell, and experience helps, and you can’t help but get a little better.” And then at the end of the year it’s like, “Yeah… well, we did it… but 10%... I don’t know why you’re complaining, of course we can’t afford everything you want, but we did 10”% better,” and there’s really a sense of defensiveness in it and a sense of burden, and misery, and my gosh, why do I have to explain
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myself? It’s so much better to have it be pure, success, accountability and it really works for coaches. It’s really the missing piece.
Grow your practice by doing less work One of the great ways of growing a practice is to do less work. Of course, this is counter-intuitive, but the paradox actually works. If you have at least one designated day a week where you do no business, no coaching, nothing to grow your practice, and you’re just away from work and you are on vacation and you’re spending a great time with people you care about or you’re reading, or you are working out, or you’re walking by the beach, or you are playing golf, you will be amazed at how that improves the other four days and makes them more prosperous and makes your whole practice more effective. There’s a reason for that! There is a certain level of esteem that a coach feels that gets transferred to a coaching prospect during an exploratory conversation. Because, in the end, people don’t pay you what they think you are worth. They pay you what you think you are worth. And this is reflected in the way you live, and the way you speak and the way you communicate with them. So if your whole life is not strong and impressive, in and of itself, that will cause you great problems in the long run. Because there are huge self-esteem issues that come into play here. Your lifestyle is vital to the success of your coaching. It is powerful, and it’s a key to the success of your practice.
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How to grow a coaching practice is not as important as WANTING TO The “how to” is not as important as the want to. And the “want to” is triggered by the decision to. People who make a decision to double their income as a coach, or consultant, or public speaker, have already done it. That’s it right there. That decision changes everything. Now here’s the big myth out in the world. All the people we coach—including over 20 Fortune 500 companies over the years—get sidetracked by a single myth about life. Even coaches that we coach are thrown by it. And that is this: they believe that they have to know how to do something before they can do it. And that’s just not true. It stops so many people! Because they think they have to learn how to do something! So they don’t do things because they “don’t know how!” Well knowing how is not necessary. People back off from doing so many great things because they say they don’t know how to do them. I talk to business owners who would love to build a sales team of great people and they tell me, “I’ve always wanted to do that, but I don’t know how.” So they don’t do it. People say, “I’ve always wanted to turn a lot of this business over to someone else, but I don’t know how to do it.” So they don’t. But not knowing how is really not what’s stopping them. Remember this forever: You don’t need to know how to do something in order to do it. And that’s something that most people don’t realize. For you to do something you don’t need to know how to do it! Now I know that sounds somewhat bizarre, but it’s absolutely true. When you decide, and really decide, that you are going to do something, the “how to” is easily found, many times on the fly. The first step is the decision that “I’m going to!” Once you’ve decided you will and you are going to, then all the tips, techniques, proven methods, ideas—they’re there. They are out there. There are so many coaches who have improved their income by much greater factors than doubling; and we’ve worked with them, and we’ve both 207
been one of them. We have MORE than doubled by following the ideas in this book. But the key was not the things we learned how to do (although all those are in the school) the key was deciding to do it. People are stopped by giving an exaggerated respect to the “how to.” You ask them when you’re coaching them, “How about this idea? Have you ever thought about doing this?” “Well, I’ve always wanted to do that but I didn’t know how to!” And that’s why they didn’t do it. We had a client the other day who said, “I’ve got this great product and I don’t know how to put the sales team together to run it—I just don’t know how to do it and it’s stopped me for about the last year.” Well, the truth was, she didn’t want to do it yet. If we can see that, we have opportunity. Most coaches can’t see that. They buy into their clients’ stories about not knowing how to do something yet. But they wouldn’t have had to know how to do it. That’s not necessary. We have people contact us constantly who read our books and they say, “I want to be a public speaker. I think I’ve got a lot to say, and I think I’m really good, and I think I could make a lot of money, and the only thing missing is I don’t know how to do it. How do you get started?” Well, you don’t need to know how to do it if you want to do it. Steve remembers, “When I did it, I didn’t know how to do it. I just made a decision, I’m doing this, and I began stumbling around, figuring this out and finding that out, and I did it. Anybody who really wants to do something doesn’t need to know how to do it.” Now let’s give a final example of that. Let’s say that somebody told you they would pay you ten million dollars if you ran a marathon a year from now, and you’re not even a runner, but all you have to do is finish a marathon. Would you say, “Well, I don’t know how to train for a marathon so I’ll have to decline your offer!” Well, no. We don’t think you would say that.
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You know in the back of your mind that there are so many thousands of people who know how to do it, you can find that out. You’ve decided right now, yes, I’ll run a marathon, I’ll take the ten million dollars even though I don’t know how. Now let’s go a step further. What if we say the restriction is that you can’t use anybody’s knowledge on how to train. You can’t even find knowledge on the Internet or anywhere else—you have to do that on your own, even though you don’t know how. Well, you still run the marathon in a year because you would figure out on your own how to train for it, through trial and error; so you don’t even have to access the Internet, which we all have, or books, which we all have. Even if you can’t access those, you can decide what you decide to do. You can decide to do anything. Even become a millionaire coach. That’s the important message here. The how to is never what’s missing. The want to is what’s missing. And we don’t mean that in an accusatory way. We don’t mean to say the clients we have worked with didn’t have the desire. Here’s really what it was. They had not yet made the decision. That’s all it was. It’s not like there’s something missing in them. Like they don’t have the character, or the willpower or the desire; or like some people say “the fire in the belly.” They’re not missing any of that—they simply haven’t decided yet! But once you decide you are going to do anything powerful—like doubling your income from now on—once you decide, that’s more than 50% of the battle. We’d say that’s 90%. That decision alone.
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And here’s a final word from 100 Ways to Motivate Others: "A teacher affects eternity. He can never tell where his influence stops." Henry B. Adams Great coaches always cite the coaches they themselves learned from. In today's environment, most (surveys show over 70%) of today's top business leaders have coaches….personal success coaches or life coaches who take them to higher levels of success than they ever could have attained on their own. The object of the coaching process is to allow the leader to discover his or her hidden strengths and bring them to the forefront in the daily life of the business. Every great actor, dancer and athlete credits most of their career progress to a coach who gave them support and teaching along the way. In the past, our society has celebrated the concept of coaching in sports and show business, because those were fields where excellence was always expected. Business was just business. But because of coaching, today's business leader has the same opportunity to explore the upper limits of his or her excellence as does a sports star or an actor. Coaching makes that opportunity a conscious part of the leader's career. Remember this quote? "I absolutely believe that people, unless coached, never reach their maximum capabilities," said Bob Nardelli, former CEO of Home Depot. If you're a leader, be open to being coached. There's no value in going it alone just to prove you can.
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A message from Steve Chandler about learning to live the fearless and successful life… “Do not follow the path Go where there is no path to begin the trail.” ―Ashanti proverb
Dear Fellow Traveler, Fear closes the human mind. It shuts it down. Soon the mind is contracted and shivering in the corner. But when you open your mind to the soft upward spiral of repeated shifts, it soars. And soon what you wanted to "succeed at" becomes a joke . . . it's so easy to do. That's been my experience, anyway. And so on a series of ten CDs called MindShift I share it with you. All my life I waited for this moment: the chance to say that I no longer need to coach you or train you or write a book for you, because it's all contained here: in this new program that teaches you to MIND SHIFT. It took me 10 CDs to say to you what I wanted to say about success and how to achieve what you want to achieve. How to shift upward from fear to grace and courage and pure action. It's a shift that anyone can do, because it's a shift that happens in the mind. What if fear were the only real problem you had? Well, it is. And what if a series of shifts in your mind could take you above all that so you could achieve what you always wanted to achieve?
So listen to these CDs and allow them to become a part of who you are. Play them over and over and don't get too literal or linear about what you are "learning," but just let your mind roam freely while you listen. I've recorded them slowly in a very low-key way so that you can listen again and again and let your mind drift in and out of the content. Soon it will be yours. What would the ultimate success course have in it? That's what I wondered as I went through the years sampling success courses by all the motivational greats and the New Age gurus. Then one day I thought, why don't I just turn on the microphone and say what it is? Of all the books I've written, of all the audios I've made, this is what I would leave behind. If I could just leave behind one thing for my children and their children, and you and your children, it would be this. It would be MindShift, because it's the only thing that says what I really wanted to say. A mind that is open will shift. Go here to order it: www.SteveChandler.com.
Sincerely Yours, Steve Chandler
BONUS MATERIALS To help you create the courage to change the things you can!
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One of Steve’s most powerful programs! If you are truly ready to create success and a life that you love, you’ll learn exactly how with the Owner/Victim Choice MP3. Steve identifies the core values, thought processes, and the language of the Owner vs. the Victim.
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Powerful Graceful Success:
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Essential excerpts from MindShift: The Steve Chandler Ultimate Success Course. Learn to shift the mind to a higher level of consciousness, of creativity, energy and joy. (69 page 160 PDF eBook)
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BONUS #4 Free trial subscription to … Fearless text messages from Steve via
Get ready to expand your thinking, move your career forward, and move your life forward. Steve’s daily text messages will help you identify and change the limiting beliefs that are holding you back! The world of action is full of ever-expanding opportunities. It is only thinking that keeps these opportunities out of reach - or brings them within reach. Steve’s messages are your personal "thinking tools," designed to inspire you to think fearlessly, and courageously, so that you can make a focused, fresh start.
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