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The True Meaning Of The Question “How Do I Become a Life Coach?”

August 4, 2011 By 1 Comment

Chances are if you are asking the question “how do I become a life coach?” you already are a coach at some level, or are well on your way to becoming one. Most people who become life coaches have been coaching their friends and family for as long as they can remember. So what does the question “how do I become a life coach?” really mean?

Does “how do I become a life coach” mean “Do I need formal training?”

When someone asks “how do I become a life coach?” it’s often a question about formal training or certification. In studying and mentoring at JTS Advisors, I have met many experienced coaches who chose to go through one of the rigorous eight week immersion courses that are offered. Some did it to learn specific techniques. Some wanted to become part of a community of coaches with a common experience. Some wanted a structured training to fill in perceived gaps in their skills. Some wanted the formal certification to boost their credibility, even though it is not a legal requirement for coaches.

For an inexperienced coach or someone new to coaching, all the same reasons for formal training are valid. But the real answer to “how do I become a life coach” is go and start coaching people. Actually coaching people, seeing what works and what doesn’t, and being on the receiving end of coaching are elements critical to becoming a life coach whose clients get results.

“How do I become a life coach?” can also mean “How do I start a coaching business?”

The other meaning of “how do I become a life coach?” has more to do with the question of how to start or run a successful coaching business, or how to make a living being a coach. Most people who do life coaching enjoy what they do, but if they are asking the question “how do I become a life coach?” chances are they don’t want to do it just as a hobby. So in addition to the coaching skills and mindset they already have, they need to develop a set of business and marketing skills to make coaching viable and sustainable.

Coaching is about clarity around goals, and taking action to achieve them. If you’re asking “how do I become a life coach”, you are already taking the first step. Get coaching and get clear on where you are in your journey and what it is you want to find out. And then you will be able to find the answers you are seeking and take the actions you need to reach your goal of becoming a life coach.

To learn more about how to generate an endless wave of high paying coaching clients, get your FREE Instant Access to our “Life Coaching Business Blueprint” video toolkit when you go HERE.

Dorine G. Kramer
JTS Advisors Strategy and Accountability Coach

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3 Steps To Succesful To Life Coach Marketing

March 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Good Ideas For Successful Life Coach Marketing | Image by marketing-techWhen you want to build your coaching business, life coach marketing is a necessity. Marketing is the way you educate your potential clients about what you can help them with, what coaching services you offer, any products you offer and who you yourself are. There is a lot of thinking and coordinating necessary to set up a marketing campaign, and here are 3 key steps you will need to go through have a successful outcome.

What activities do you feel most comfortable using, or do you think will most appeal to your potential clients? Do you want to use social media, blogs, emails, networking? You can use more than one and that may be a good idea so that you reach more people.

The Call To Action

Whatever life coach marketing campaign you develop, each piece must have a specific call to action. You need to let your potential life coaching clients know exactly what you want them to do, otherwise they won’t do it. Make it clear, specific, obvious and easy, otherwise you won’t get the outcome you are looking for.

Measure The Success Of Your Life Coach Marketing Campaign

Make sure you include in your plans, ways to monitor what is working and what isn’t working. You can use split testing, which would be, for instance, sending half your emails with one version of the copy and the other half with a different version. Then you can see which one gives you more of the result you want. Keep track of where your opt-ins are coming from and how successful each piece of your life coaching marketing campaign is.

Whether you are marketing online or offline, you need to be marketing to build your business. These 3 steps will get you well on your way.

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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What Is Career Coaching All About?

March 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

What Is Coaching Career For You? | Image by cemvistahermosaIf you haven’t decided on a niche for your coaching yet, you may be asking “What is career coaching and what particular skills does it require?” Well, there are two different types of coaching that both deal with careers and career changes. Each is quite different from the other, and both provide a valuable service to clients who are looking for a new career or a change in direction in their current career.

Career Coaching To Find A New Direction

When potential clients ask you “What is career coaching exactly?” that’s your opportunity to begin to open their eyes to new possibilities. Many, if not most people start out on a career path sometime in their late teens or early twenties. They may get a particular degree or qualification or they may do an apprenticeship of some kind or even just start at the bottom of the ladder in some industry and plan to work their way up. But what often happens is that someone starts out on a particular path and then can’t find their way off that path, even when it turns out they hate that industry or their job bores them. As a career coach, you can begin to expand their horizons. Help them remember what they love to do, what they find exciting, what aspects of what they are doing currently they want to keep and what they want to leave behind.

What Is Career Coaching For When Your Client Knows What He Wants To Do?

The second kind of career related coaching is more of the consultant type of coaching. Is your client clear he wants a job in the real estate business? Then your coaching can help him learn better interview skills, how to dress for the job and how to best present himself to a possible employer. Does your client want to start his own business? You can increase his chances of being successful by helping him put his best foot forward with potential financial or other business partners.

Depending on your pre-coaching background, career coaching might be the field the interests you. Then,when someone asks “What is career coaching?” you can explain that it’s what you do to help your clients find careers that are as enticing and rewarding for them as coaching is for you.

Special Bonus – Learn 3 simple ways to become a life coach with the “30-Days to Become a Coach” video toolkit when you fill in the form at the top right and click the “Watch The Videos Now” button. You’ll learn how to change your client’s life in 45 minutes.

Dorine G. Kramer
JTS Advisors Strategy and Accountability Coach

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Coaching Sales Training On The Conversation You Hate

March 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Coaching Sales Training You Should have | Image by pearcejobsHave you had any coaching sales training? While some coach training programs include segments on marketing and sales skills, many don’t. And they should. Most coaches don’t like to think about having to sell their services, but client enrollment is a sales process and requires a sales skill set. Without being able to sell your coaching, you only have a hobby, not a business. So, if that’s what you want, great. But if you are hoping or planning to leave your salaried job, you’d better get some life coach sales training under your belt.

Asking For The Money Is A Challenge

Anytime you have the money conversation with a potential client, you probably feel vulnerable. Chances are, somewhere in your past someone—a parent, a teacher, a sibling—devalued your efforts or your results when you thought you were doing a great job. Probably with the best of intentions, what they did was to make you feel that your best effort really wasn’t worth much. As an adult, you may have generalized that to a subconscious belief that your coaching isn’t really worth much. Consequently, unless your coaching sales training, or some other coaching you get addresses the limiting beliefs that were set up, you won’t be comfortable asking for money in exchange for your coaching.

What Coaching Sales Training Should Include

At a minimum, coaching sales training should give you a script to follow so that you know what you are going to say. In the coaching context, selling is about giving value in the sales conversation, and leading your prospect to a comfortable place of choice. For you, that means asking good questions to find out if your prospect needs the kind of coaching you offer, helping him see when he does need it, and not being attached to his response. You also need tools to find a fee that is comfortable for you. If your fees are too high or too low, you will feel out of integrity, and potential clients won’t be comfortable with you.

These are some basics to consider about your sales training. If your coach training didn’t include any sales skills, make sure you get them somewhere else so you can ask for and get paid what you deserve.

By the way… you’re invited to claim your FREE step-by-step “Life Coaching Business Blueprint” video toolkit. Just go HERE now to get your life coaching business blueprint videos.

Dorine G. Kramer
JTS Advisors Strategy and Accountability Coach

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3 Great Coaching Questions For When Clients Get Stuck

March 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Coaching Questions In your Coaching ProfessionCoaching questions are your stock and trade in the coaching profession. Unless you are more the consultant type of coach, you probably spend much of your session time asking questions. There are questions about goals, about challenges, about wins, about commitments kept or broken. You name it, a coach has questions. But what do you do when your client runs into a thought roadblock and just doesn’t have an answer? Here are some mind-benders that just might open up the roadblock.

A Coaching Question That Turns The Problem On Its Head

You may have a client who comes to a session in the throes of a miserable day or a distressing experience. Even with all your skills in getting someone to change her state, you have failed to do so. What can make the moaning and groaning stop and turn the problem around? Ask your client “What’s great about having this problem?” It’s a mind-bending question for someone who isn’t used to thinking that way. If she is willing to focus on answering the question, her state will change and she will begin to see options and interpretations that your previous coaching questions didn’t elicit.

Coaching Questions That Come At A Problem Backwards

There are two coaching questions that essentially ask the same thing, but in slightly different ways. These are “What are you willing to give up in order to resolve this problem?” and “What are you willing to stop doing in order to have what you want?” Both of these questions come at a seemingly unsolvable problem from a perspective your client is unlikely to have considered. And you both might be surprised at the answers, which could be anything from giving up TV watching to giving up the security of a steady job.

The Best Question Of All

My absolute favorite coaching question is this one: “If you did know, what would the answer be?” It doesn’t matter what the subject is—a feeling, a goal, a memory, whatever. The human brain is designed to answer questions that are posed to it, and it will find its best possible answer. Then you have something to work with.

Compile your own list of favorite coaching questions. I hope some of these are useful additions.

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!

Dorine G. Kramer
JTS Advisors Strategy and Accountability Coach

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Top 10 Mentor Skills Your Mentor Should Have

March 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Perfect Personal Characteristics and Mentor Skills For A Mentor | Image by tipsonlifeandloveHave you ever considered what personal characteristics and mentor skills you would want in a mentor? Everyone who is successful has had at least one mentor, probably more over time. Sometimes you might be lucky enough to just kind of slip into a mentor-mentee relationship without even realizing it’s happening. But often, you want to choose a mentor to help you with something specific. So do you know what to look for in that mentor? Here are my top 10 tips to help you successfully choose your best mentor ever.

Your Personal Relationship Matters

1. Your mentor must be someone you respect. You want to model your mentor—to step into his shoes and speak and act as he would speak and act in any given situation. You won’t want to take on his characteristics if you don’t respect him.

2. The know, like and trust factor has to be there. Just like your clients need to feel safe with you, you need to trust your mentor in order to be willing to follow her lead.

3. Be mentored by someone who is an innovator. Innovation is one of the clues to mastery in a subject, and also allows space for growth and creativity.

4. Your mentor must be willing and able to spot your weak points and figure out how to help you strengthen them or work around them.

Mentor Skills To Look for

5. Make sure your mentor is experienced in what you want to do. Just knowing how isn’t enough. He should have been through it all himself.

6. Your mentor’s skills and business should still be growing. If they aren’t, he may be out of date, bored or unenthusiastic and it will be hard to maintain your own excitement.

7. His mentor skills, knowledge and abilities draw other people who want to learn from him.

8. He is probably a leader in his field.

9. She will have a systematic plan for succeeding and to help you make progress and succeed.

10. She is a magnet for interesting, amazing and productive people and will include you in that circle.

Consider carefully who you want as a mentor. Mentor skills are important, but equally important is the bond you will form and the opportunity to learn from, spend time with and have a lifelong relationship with someone cheering you on in your business.

By the way… you’re invited to claim your FREE step-by-step “Master Coach Blueprint” video toolkit. Just go HERE now to get your master coach blueprint videos.

Dorine G. Kramer
JTS Advisors Strategy and Accountability Coach

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3 Reasons Your Life Coach Marketing Needs Social Media

March 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Your Life Coach Marketing Needs Social Media | Image by thelittlehousecompanyLife coach marketing is the way you educate your ideal clients and attract them to you. You need a planned campaign, strategic, well designed and carefully executed, to get the best results from your marketing. For most of us, online marketing has become, or will become, a mainstay, no matter what else is included in the campaign. And increasingly, social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are moving from the realm of an individual’s personal life and becoming significant in the realm of a successful marketing mix.

A Social Media Presence Lends Credibility

What is the first thing you say when someone tells you about a service provider you don’t know? If you are like most people nowadays, you probably say “I’ll check him out online.” And how do you feel if you sit down at your computer, google the name and ….no social media connection comes up? Frustrated probably, but even more importantly, wondering how credible he can possibly be if he doesn’t even have a Facebook page. Your life coach marketing needs the credibility and transparency of a social media presence, so clients and potential clients can see that you are a real person and have something to offer them.

Your Life Coach Marketing Needs Social Media Because “Everyone’s Doing It”

The most recent statistics I saw on social media are mind boggling: 600 million use Facebook, 190 million use Twitter, 70 million use LinkedIn, and more than a billion YouTube videos are watched every day. Social media is the great equalizer. Everyone has access, and it’s a way for you to connect with all sorts of people to whom you would not normally have access. You can contact anyone from your doctor to a major coach guru to the dry cleaners down the street, and if you “friend” them you can begin to build a relationship.

Social Media Keeps You Up To Date About Your Industry

With so much changing on a daily and even a minute to minute basis, social media helps your life coach marketing to be responsive to up to date information from sources within your industry. When a guru you follow releases a new product or program, you’ll know about it. When someone makes a comment about you, you’ll know about it. That gives you the power not only to acknowledge the positive comments that people make, but the opportunity to immediately reframe anything that might damage your life coaching marketing or branding.

Social media is quickly becoming a mainstay in life coach marketing. Love it or hate it, you had better get moving and start using it, or you’ll be left behind.

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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Life Coaching Training From Reality TV

March 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Get Life Coach Training By Watching Reality TV Shows | Image by linkleak`Watch The Amazing Race on CBS sometime and you can get some terrific life coaching training on meeting goals. It’s a reality show where teams of two race around the world completing various tasks along the way. The first team to finish wins a million dollars, and at the end of each leg there is the risk that your team will be eliminated if you arrive last. It’s grueling. Teams are exhausted, filthy and challenged physically, mentally and emotionally. So what does this have to do with life coach training, you might ask. Well, there are three major coaching points to take away.

Attitude Is Everything

No matter how well you play the game, unexpected set backs happen. In life, just like in The Amazing Race, you can get detoured from the path you want to follow. You can get lost. You can be challenged by something frightening or unknown. And sometimes you just have to take a chance, not knowing what will be on the other side of the door. But just as you learn in life coaching training, a positive attitude and mindset goes a long way toward keeping you in the game until the end. Enjoy the journey and appreciate the lessons along the way, no matter what the results are.

Life Coaching Training Teaches The Importance of Goals

As a coach, you know how important goals are. Without knowing where you are heading, how can you ever know you’ve got there? And how do you know you are on the right path? For the most part, the individuals and teams on Race never lose sight of their goals. Every so often, though, some challenge creates so much fear that the focus shifts from the end goal to the fear, and that can take the team right out of the the game. And there’s the coaching–your goal has to be more important than your fear if you want to succeed.

Let Go Of The Need To Be Right

The teams on Race that do the best are the ones who support and respect each other. From watching how team members interact and how that impacts their success, you get a life coaching training take-away message. If you have to be “right” all the time, it creates friction in your relationships, and friction is not just unpleasant, but a distraction from your goal. You are more likely to reach your goals and do so efficiently when you work cooperatively with others, and everyone feels appreciated and valued. This training applies in life, in business and in love.

If you watch television, check out some reality shows and let me know what life coaching training you find.

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!

Dorine G. Kramer
JTS Advisors Strategy and Accountability Coach

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The Top 10 Client Commitments for Successful Coaching

March 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Client Commitments For A Successful Coaching | Image by abcnewsSuccessful coaching involves a complex interplay between coach and client. As a skilled coach you know the steps to a successful and transformative coaching relationship. You understand that you need to build and sometimes break rapport, to ask uncomfortable questions, and to push your clients beyond their comfort zones. But you are only half of the equation. What are your client’s responsibilities in ensuring success?

The Client Commitments

1. Commit to a higher standard. If your clients aren’t willing to make this commitment, successful coaching just isn’t possible. They will back out of coaching at the first challenge.

2. Results, not excuses. Clients have to be willing to take responsibility for what happens, even when that is a stretch for them. If they are at effect rather than at cause, they lose the power to make the changes they want.

3. Play at 100%. Clients must commit to regular coaching. They must be committed to continuing the coaching process even when it’s uncomfortable or frustrating for them.

4. Be honest and open. If something isn’t working in the coaching relationship or process, successful coaching clients will speak up. That gives the coach the opportunity to make whatever changes are necessary.

5. Come to sessions prepared, with a focus or result in mind. It’s up to your clients to determine what results they want. Sometimes as a successful coach you might see that something the client didn’t bring up needs handling before he can get the results he is looking for. But ultimately, the focus of the session is up to your client.

6. Follow through on agreements. Without integrity around keeping their word, clients have very little hope of successful lives and businesses. Your accountability coaching should teach this.

7. Be willing to be uncomfortable at times. If clients sit in their comfort zone, nothing will change for them and coaching will be a waste of time.

8. Show up to appointments on time and in focus.

9. Be open to change. If your clients aren’t willing to leave behind their beliefs about how things must be, or won’t give up feeling entitled to negative emotions because of their stories, successful coaching is all but impossible.

10. Be coachable. Your clients must be willing to explore and try on what you say to see if it works for them, even when they disagree, think it’s crazy or ridiculous, or just don’t like it.

Successful Coaching Leads To This

In the JTS Advisors trainings, the 10 commitments are expected and demanded of everyone involved. And what happens is that everyone, trainees and mentors alike, grows and achieves. Expect and demand the same commitments of your clients and their successful coaching stories and outcomes will be the reward.

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 Advisors Strategy and Accountability Coach

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Dude, Where’s My Life Coaching Client?

February 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Dealing With A Life Coaching Client No-Show | Image by officearrowSooner or later in your life coaching career you will face the problem of a no-show client. It’s one of those events that is super frustrating. First, you feel you are wasting precious time that might have been scheduled for someone else. Second, you feel you are not being respected. And third, if you are anything like I used to be, you might feel how I used to feel–uncomfortable about taking someone’s money without providing them with the agreed service.

5 Techniques For Managing Life Coaching No-Shows

1. If your client doesn’t call in on time, give him about five minutes and then call him. He may have been involved in something and lost track of the time. I have also had a normally reliable life coaching client who was so overwhelmed with her life that she simply forgot to check her calender that day—she missed a doctor’s appointment the same day. Usually, your client will be grateful that you took the trouble to call.

2. Follow up. Follow up. Follow up. If your client doesn’t show up and the five minute call doesn’t reach him, keep calling, emailing, etc. until he does respond. Don’t assume anything. Instead find out what’s going on. He probably needs techniques 3, 4 or 5, but there might be something really wrong that you can help with or at least should know about.

3. Hold him accountable. Make sure he understands that he has broken a commitment, where and how else he shows the same behavior, and what the cost of that behavior is in his life and business. Then have him recommit to showing up on time for his appointments.

4. Motivate him to show up by creating a deep belief that life coaching will help him make the changes he wants to make.

5. Provide really awesome transformative sessions.

Managing Your Discomfort

If you are feeling uncomfortable about a client paying for a session they don’t show up for, reframe your thinking. Be responsible for having written policy on cancellations and no-shows which your client agrees to when he signs up to work with you. That way you both know that he agreed to show up for sessions as scheduled. Use the techniques above if you need to. Then if he doesn’t show up, that’s something to call him on and coach him on. But it isn’t your responsibility as his life coach to see that he calls you, or that he’s available when you call him.

No-shows are frustrating, so make your expectations clear before you start life coaching someone. If you can get him be responsible about his coaching appointments, you will be making a huge impact on his life.

By the way… you’re invited to claim your FREE step-by-step “Life Coach Salary Secrets” video toolkit. Just go HERE now to get your Life Coach Salary Secrets.

Dorine G. Kramer
JTS Advisors Strategy and Accountability Coach

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