Every coach has her own list of the top 10 reasons to become a coach.  Some we knew before we started.  Others become obvious as a result of our coaching experiences.  Here is my top 10 list:

Internal reasons in my “top 10 reasons to become a coach” list

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1. Coaching give me a sense of purpose and an opportunity to help heal the world, as well as many more than 10 reasons to become a coach!

2). Coaching teaches what accountability and integrity are really about.  Now I know that even a casual “I’ll try to phone you tomorrow” said to a friend, is a commitment I need to keep to feel in integrity with myself.  I also know what not being in integrity feels like, and that I don’t like the feeling.

3. Ongoingly in coaching, I have learned a lot about myself–from the difference between how I perceive myself and how others perceive me, to what motivates me, to how competitive I really am.

4 In learning the business side of being a coach, I have learned a whole new language of persuasion, influence and marketing.

5. A peak productive state is now part of my repertoire of ways of being and I have become fluent in a system for changing my own state.

External reasons in my “top 10 reasons to become a coach” list

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6. Coaches comprise an amazing community of people who each have their own top 10 reasons to become a coach.  The coaching community is very diverse–from sports coaches to business coaches to spiritual coaches and everything in between.  But one thing we all have in common is a desire to help other people, and that makes us kindred spirits.

7. Coaching introduces me to a constant stream of new people and I have the privilege of entering their worlds, albeit briefly.

8. I not only can, but must on occasion, interrupt people, take a superior position or shock them to change their state.  I enjoy these “bad girl” behaviors which I would not normally do!

9. Holding someone accountable is doing them a tremendous service because when a lapse in  integrity shows up in the coaching relationship, you can bet it shows up in other places in that client’s life and work.

10. I’m learning to leverage my time with the goal of making 6 figures plus, with time to travel, spend with family or do whatever I want to do.

These are my top 10 reasons to become a coach.  What are yours?

Hope you took some great value out of this post today! I’d love to hear your feedback, so make sure you leave a comment with your thoughts or questions. And also, you can click on the Twitter button below to retweet this article… Thank you!

Dorine G Kramer
JTS Strategy and Accountability Coach

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Tips on coaching may not seem a particularly likely focus for quality control, but you want to be the most effective coach you can be, right?  So you need to find a way to know if you are being your most effective.  If you have a transformative session with your client and the results are obvious, you are clearly being highly effective.  But what if that isn’t your experience every time you coach?  What are some of the factors you can actually look at objectively to see if you are working at the highest possible level?

Tips on coaching: Be sure you are client centered every time

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As a coach, you know how important it is to develop and maintain rapport with your clients and you are probably always on the lookout for great tips on coaching.  During my coaching training, one of the factors I was evaluated on was rapport and charisma.  Now, I’m pretty likable.  I get along well with people on the phone and I routinely got full marks on rapport and charisma, except for once.  What a shock!  But I learned two extremely important tips on coaching from that experience, and they are both about staying client centered and staying in rapport.

Staying in rapport isn’t a given

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It’s critical that tips on coaching include tips on maintaining rapport, since without it, you have no chance of making a difference for your client.  But if you think rapport is just about being likable, think again.  The first tip is that no matter how likable you are, rapport drains away down the phone line if you are working toward an endpoint that your client isn’t interested in right then.  Even with the best of intentions, what you think is important may have nothing to do with what your client thinks is important.  If you try to pull him in a direction he’s not ready to go, not only will you not help him, but you may lose rapport and distance him from you–possibly even lose him as a client.  Find out what result he wants, and give him that result, even if it’s not what you had in mind.

Keep your antennae out

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The second of the tips on coaching is to be sensitive to the feel of the conversation.  In other words, stay in sync with your client.   This isn’t about some woo-woo stuff.  As a good coach, you use the same faculties you use as a good friend.  If you are having a conversation with a friend, you know by tonality, by the silences, by paying really close attention to the “vibes”, if you are off track.  You know if you’ve hit a nerve and you need to back off or come from a different direction.  It’s the same in coaching.  Pay attention to the nuances and if you feel your client isn’t involved in the process, back up, figure out where you went wrong and change so you are going in the same direction as your client.

Tips on maintaining rapport are some of the most valuable tips on coaching.  Use these to do your own quality control after each coaching session and you will soon find your rapport skills to be huge allies in producing great coaching results.

Would you like an endless stream of new coaching clients? Simply fill out the form to the right with your first name and email and I’ll send you free videos with step-by-step blueprints for generating a massive income from high paying coaching clients.

Dorine G Kramer
JTS Advisors Strategy and Accountability Coach

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If you are a life coach, marketing is what will determine whether or not you are a financial success. You may be the most effective coach, the most skilled coach, the most compassionate coach, the most any adjective you like coach. But without effective life coach marketing, you may very well struggle to make a decent living, let alone a great living, by coaching. So what’s the key to marketing effectively?

What is marketing about?

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Marketing is about conveying information. Life coach marketing is about conveying the benefits of your coaching to your potential clients. What will they get as a result of your coaching? The profitability of your coaching is directly related to your ability to translate what you do and present it as concrete, external outcomes that your potential clients want.

Who are you when you design your life coach marketing?

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You have a choice when you develop your marketing materials. You can keep your “coach hat” on and be the expert. Or you can put your “marketer hat” on and draw clients to you so that you have the opportunity to change their lives. Let’s look at some of the differences in mindset about life coach marketing under the two hats.

1) The expert’s internal dialogue is all about himself. He feels he’s invested his time and money and energy learning his craft. He’s highly skilled. Now he just has to let people know that he’s an expert, and they will come flocking to hear his words of wisdom. He thinks marketing is immoral, unethical, or at the very least, beneath his pay grade.

2) The marketer’s internal dialogue says that marketing has to be the highest priority and that the most successful coaches are marketers first and experts second. She knows that people have to be educated about the value of coaching, and that they are only interested in knowing WIIFM, also known as what’s in it for me. She knows that potential clients won’t buy your services unless you are offering what they want.

Which hat are you wearing? Is it time for a change?

Dorine G Kramer
JTS Advisors Strategy and Accountability Coach

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Life Coaching Business, life coach marketing

Many coaches are in dire need of business success coaching. Are you one of them?

Do you want to keep coaching or not?

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As a coach, your first love is probably helping people– solving problems, reducing conflicts in relationships, all that great caring for everyone else.  How about a little love for yourself?  You’ve heard it before, but here it is again.  If you don’t look after your own needs first, you won’t be able to go on helping others.  One of the best ways of looking after yourself is making sure that your business is running as a successful business and not as a hobby.  So here is some business success coaching for you!

Business success coaching keys to confidence

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1) Find the intersection of your passion, your expertise, and profitability, and choose a niche to coach based on that intersection.   Choosing a niche just means you have a starting point for your marketing.  You can still coach anyone you want.

2) Know what you want your outcome to be.  What will your successful coaching business look like?  How much time do you want to spend on it?  How many clients do you want and what do you want them to pay you?  What will you do with the money?  Put in all the details and make it real for yourself.

3) Figure out what you don’t know that you need to know.  Then learn it.

4) Develop the mindset that failure is a good outcome because you learn what not to do from it.

5) Be willing to make changes.  No matter how emotionally attached to your language, your program or your materials you are, if something isn’t giving you the results you want, disengage your emotions, and change what isn’t working.  Otherwise, your business success coaching won’t impact the success of your business!

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At the same time as your business success coaching is giving you the inner game keys to a successful coaching business, you also need the outer game strategies. No matter what’s going on in your head, if you don’t take action, nothing in your business will change. You will be left with an enjoyable (hopefully!) hobby, but you won’t have a sustainable business to fill your financial needs as well as your emotional ones.

A key from Napoleon Hill

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This one’s a bonus in case you haven’t read Napoleon Hill’s classic Think and Grow Rich. Napoleon Hill said that successful people do two things. One, they make lots of decisions. And two, they make them quickly. Do you?

Outer game tactics from business success coaching

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1) The business face that your clients see must be professional. Be concise and business-like in your company name and email. Likewise in letterheads, invoices, etc. Record your answer phone message clearly and briefly in appropriate language.

2) Have a business plan. If you have a business, you need to write down the structure, the intent, and the details of how it is run. There are organizations like SCORE which offer business success coaching on business plans as well as other aspects of business at very low cost.

3) Develop a marketing plan. If you depend on word of mouth, which is what a lot of coaches do, it may be years, if ever, before you build a full practice. Figure out the fears, frustrations and desires of your niche, and use that information to inform your marketing.

4) Learn to delegate. Once you have your business plan and you know what tasks need to be done to run your business successfully, decide what you can do, what you want to do, and what will be more cost effective to get someone else to do. The business success coaching on this is really partly inner game too. It can be hard to give up the idea that you need to be able to do it all yourself. Give it up anyway and find some help!

5) Get a coach. This one’s last but not least, as the saying goes. To be successful in a coaching business, you need business success coaching. A coach will provide you with all that you want to provide for others–help with strategy, illumination of your blind spots, and accountability to make sure you actually take the actions to make your business a success.

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Coaching tips are not always easy to swallow. And while there may be some people who care about your book, that’s not why you wrote it. You wanted to make a difference for people. At some level you know that everyone sees that book will care less than you do about it than you do. Sometimes you might not even want to read your own stuff when you’re done with the day. You know it so well that it’s already boring. This is really scary when you consider trying to get someone to read your book. You’re going to have to figure out a way seduce your readers.

How To Seduce People Into Reading Your Book

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Before people get to the point where they will actually seek out a solution for their problem, they need to feel enough pain to overcome apathy about doing anything. In a way you almost have to stir up the pain to get people into action.

Best way to do that is creating a good name of the book. Not a name you love, or your friends love; but a name that will provoke people to buy your book. The outcome of these coaching tips is to boil down all the benefits into one phrase, one title.

Step-By-Step Coaching Tips To Create A Compelling Nam

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1. Put everything else aside, and think about who this book is for. Some specific community, some specific problem, with your book as a specific solution (not general coaching tips).
2. Find out what their greatest fears, frustrations, and desires are.
3. Find out what is the most intense fear, frustration or desire. The one very specific problem.
4. From this specific problem, you can create an effective title.
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These coaching tips are intended to help you create a title scientifically instead of emotionally. You may not be able to use the title you love, but if you’re convinced that more people will read your book will it matter? The best strategy for modern day book sales is not to go on the road and give a cure-all. You have to start somewhere, but let go of the voice that this is the first and last time this book will ever be heard. If you try to market to the masses, no one will identify with it. They are looking for answers to their specific problem. The only real way to market is to fit your book into your target market’s problem like a key in a lock.

Give this strategy a try and see for yourself that it works. If you liked this coaching tip, leave a comment or use the handy bookmark buttons below to share it with others on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc. Thanks!

Colette Seymann
JTS Advisors Bi-Designated Strategy and Accountability Coach

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If you’re like most coaches, the reason you started your life coaching business was to help people. Most of us coaches are selfless when working with our clients; and selfish when we stop. Specific to marketing, we have our own perception of a marketer. We think we are different from those people. Our business is helping people. When our clients are in front of us, of course and we get into that coaching state. It doesn’t matter how good of a coach you are, however, until you get in front of them. How do you get to talk to all the people you want to help so badly?

What Your Life Coaching Business Clients Really Want

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What your potential life coaching business clients really want is to be understood. If you understand the greatest fears, hopes and desires of your target client and you can communicate that with them in a clearer, more concise manner; they will automatically see you as the solution. The will want you to be their life coach.

The Secret To Successful Marketing

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It’s not how you write your marketing material that matters most. It’s what you say and the point you are trying to make. Marketing material written at the 4th grade level can be more effective at getting clients than a work created by a professional copywriter. The ideal sales letter is almost like a love letter to your mom or a best friend. You want to give them what they are looking for in terms of greatest fears, frustrations and desires. When you market in this manner, it is more of an attraction method to getting life coaching business rather than a push. And if you’re like most coaches who don’t identify themselves as sales superstars, this can be a much more appealing way to grow your business.

Hope you took some great value out of this post today! I’d love to hear your feedback, so make sure you leave a comment with your thoughts or questions. And also, you can click on the Twitter button below to retweet this article… Thank you!

Colette Seymann
JTS Advisors Bi-Designated Strategy and Accountability Coach

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Life Coaching Business

The first thing many coaches want to do when they start their life coaching business is to choose a name.  The process can take months, and it costs time that would be better spent on getting coaching clients.  Unfortunately most life coaches don’t have the information they need to choose a great name when they are just starting their business.

The Formula For Success In Choosing a Life Coaching Business Name

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Before you can choose a life coaching business name, you need information.  You must clearly understand your ideal client, so you can choose a name that calls out to that person in a way they know you have what they want.  How do you do that?  The best way is to ask your potential clients.  I know that sounds like suicide, but there is a way to find out in a way that conveys that you truly care.  The best way is by surveying your list in order to find out what their greatest fears, frustrations and desires are regarding the problem you are planning to help them solve.  If you are a business coach for example, you want to find out what their greatest fears, frustrations and desires are in their business.

The next step is to use their fears, frustrations and desires in a way to show that you are the resource for getting them what they want.  Try to make it catchy, memorable, and in a brief form.

The New School Of Business

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Gone are the old days where businesses flourished without really being about the client.  If you want your life coaching business to be successful in the new economy, you’re going to need to take a stand for being about your clients.  When your company name conveys their greatest fears, frustrations, and desires; they will automatically assume that you have the power to help them.

Would you like an endless stream of new coaching clients? Simply fill out the form to the right with your first name and email and I’ll send you free videos with step-by-step blueprints for generating a massive income from high paying coaching clients.

Colette Seymann
JTS Advisors Bi-Designated Strategy and Accountability Coach

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NLP life coaching gets the results your client wants with a highly effective combination of NLP, the science of the language of the mind, and the art and technology of coaching.   A skilled NLP practitioner can use NLP to reframe events, remove phobias and cause transformations in a variety of situations.  Recently, Matt Brauning, Founder of Evolution Seminars and Certified Trainer of NLP, taught me a simple concept and technique which may help your NLP life coaching clients understand their behavior around promptness, scheduling and time management and how that behavior might be affecting their relationships, their business and their movement toward their goals.

The concept of a personal time line

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In NLP terms, each person has a personal time line which you can elicit by asking direct questions of her unconscious mind.  In your NLP life coaching session, if you ask your client’s unconscious to  “point to your past” she may point right, left, behind her, diagonally, etc.  If you say “point to your present” that may be directly in front of her, she may point to herself, etc.  And similarly, if you say “point to your future”  you will get another location on your client’s time line.   In that way you both can see what direction her time line is running and where it is.

Interpreting the time line

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If your client’s time line runs left to right or right to left, she is a “through time” person.  You can expect her to be on time to her NLP life coaching appointments.  She likes things scheduled, is punctual and expects other people to be punctual also.  If you suggest “let’s get together for lunch”  she wants to pin down a day and a time right then.  Loosy goosy is not her style.  If your client’s time line runs front to back, she is an “in time” person.  For her, the only time that really matters much is right now.  Planning isn’t important,  promptness isn’t important, and keeping to a schedule is probably a challenge.  She gets caught up in what she’s doing and loses track of time.  If you suggest “let’s get together for lunch” to her, she’ll probably say “great, we’ll talk about it next week” because it’s uncomfortable to be pinned down to a particular day and time.

Using the time line in NLP life coaching

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The two types of time line reflect both different client behaviors and different expectations of behavior in others.  The differences can be a major source of conflict in relationships, and of  struggles in meeting goals, particularly if they aren’t recognized.  As an exercise in her NLP life coaching session, have your client physically reach out, grab the imaginary past and future of her time line, swivel it to the other position and click it in place.  Ask if she notices any difference.  It won’t stay there, but she will get a better understanding of the other time model.  Coach her to see how her success and effectiveness are being hampered.  Then help her strategize her way to success.

By the way… you’re invited to claim your FREE step-by-step “30-Days to Become a Coach” video toolkit. Just go HERE now to get your 30-day coaching blueprint videos.

Dorine G Kramer
JTS Advisors Strategy and Accountability Coach

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Sometimes valuable relationship coaching lessons pop up at the oddest moments. A few years ago a 2 year-old boy was staying at our house for an extended period. He happily played with my daughter toys; including the miniature kitchen, dolls, and strollers. One day my husband said that if this little guy was going to stay with us, he needed to have some “boy” toys. I was shocked, and a little resistant. Why was this a big deal?

The Biggest Relationship Mistake Women Make

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We, as women, are so often focused on having the men in our lives be sweet, caring, and romantic that we neglect to appreciate the other side. The masculine side. The side that attracted us in the first place. Many times as women we even try to squash that side and try to get the men in our lives to be our best friends. We encourage them to be more like a best girlfriend than a man. We walk all over them and wonder where the romance went.

Can Relationship Coaching Make a Difference?

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Fortunately, if one person commits to coaching it is possible to turn a roommate back into a lover. In order to restore the attraction, you need to encourage your clients to embrace their differences. Don’t make men eat quiche when they would rather barbeque. Personally I don’t really understand the fascination with fire; it must be some primal instinct. If you can get your relationship coaching clients to find ways to support their spouse in their gender role, however, you will often quickly see a shift in the relationship. It doesn’t mean women need to drink beer and sit on the sofa all day watching the games and acting more masculine; it just means allowing boys to be boys in their own unique way.

Colette Seymann
JTS Advisors Bi-Designated Strategy and Accountability Coach.

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