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10 Inspiring Coaching Quotes That Rock Your World

May 14, 2013 By 3 Comments

Insightful and profound coaching quotes can serve as a great source of motivation and inspiration. Most people have a few favorite quotes and Google makes it easy to find new ones for insight, encouragement, and inspiration. Great quotes can rock your world and move you to new heights of achievement and success.

It is amazing that the words of others can touch your heart, heal your soul, stimulate your brain, and rock your world. Coaching quotes can bring your practice to a new level and help you rock your client’s world.

10 World-Rocking Coaching Quotes

1. The first one is for those of us, coaches and clients alike, who avoid pressure as much as possible. The stairway to success can sometimes be stressful; it is how we react to the pressure of that stress which determines our levels of achievement.

No pressure, no diamonds – unknown

2. For the next collection of inspirational words, we look to the gods.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become. – Buddha

3. The next inspirational quote is from that ubiquitous author – unknown.

Life’s failures are stepping stones to success.

4. From the world of sports, we get one of the most motivational coaching quotes. The hockey great understood that you have to take a shot to score; in life, you won’t succeed if you don’t try.

You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. – Wayne Gretsky

5. The next one is one of the best coaching quotes, hidden inside a joke:

Five frogs are sitting on a log.
Four decide to jump off. How many are left?
Answer: Five. Why? Because there’s a difference
between deciding and doing. – Mark L. Feldman & Michael F. Spratt Five Frogs on a Log

6. Coaching is about change – if you want to reach a different destination, changes will be necessary, and a good coach can help their clients make the correct changes on their road maps to success.

If you wish your life was different, do your life differently.- Terence Houlihan

7. Coaches will do well to heed these words from one of the most fascinating and wise leaders of all time:

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. – Gandhi

8. Teaching clients to be leaders through the use of coaching quotes:

A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd. – Max Lucado

9. Using this quote will help clients see the need for both a dream and a plan to reach that dream.

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare. – Japanese proverb

10. The best and most motivational coaching quote comes from Eugene Bell, Jr., and it applies to coaching as well as all aspects of life. If you make this an every day motto in your personal life, you will be an extraordinary human being; if you make that a motto of your coaching practice, you will be an extraordinary and successful coach.

Aspire to inspire before you expire

Take these coaching quotes to heart and use them in your life and your coaching practice – you will not only rock your client’s world, but you will rock your own world as well.

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!

Fred Philips
Business Coach
Writing Team, Coaches Training Blog Community

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5 Tips for Greater Coaching Communication Competence

May 13, 2013 By 2 Comments

Communication is a two-way street; coaching communication competence not only refers to how coaches impart knowledge to their clients; it also refers to how coaches receive and process communication from their clients.

Communication is definitely not a one-way street; if you strive to be a successful coach, measured by both the number of truly satisfied clients and your financial rewards, the information you receive is just as important as the information you send. Communication involves both a speaker and a listener and flows back and forth between the two. As a coach, effective communication is vital to the long-term success of your practice. Here are some tips to ensure that your coaching communication competency is at its greatest.

5 Tips for Greater Coaching Communication Competence

  • Everyone has heard this one, but its importance to the entire coaching process requires it be mentioned again, at the top of the list – ask, don’t tell. An effective coach asks questions whenever possible, instead of making statements. An acceptable level of coaching communication competence will not be reached without basing every session on inquiry.
  • Organize ideas efficiently and effectively. You should have a plan for every session with every client. Yes, sessions will often change direction and veer off course, but having a plan allows you to express your ideas and knowledge effectively and efficiently and return to the correct course in a session when needed.
  • Express ideas concisely. Flowery language is for poetry and romance novels; coaches should speak directly and get to their points as quickly and concisely as possible. Coaching communication competence is not about your extensive knowledge of the English language or you ability to speak for extended periods of time, it is about getting to the crux of the matter and finding solutions that work.
  • Listen to your client. Don’t think about how you are going to respond, or formulate the next question in your head while a client is speaking. Listen to the words and the tone to better understand what the client wants, how strongly they feel, and how the issue affects their emotions. What they say matters more than how you answer, and if you don’t hear every word they say, in the proper context, you will never have an answer worth listening to.
  • Read your client’s body language. Active listening includes both the words that clients say, the tone in which they say these words, and the body language they use. The art of reading and comprehending body language is a valuable skill for coaches. Competence as an active listener is one of the key components in becoming a successful and sought after coach. As a coach, you listen to obtain information, learn, understand, and contextualize. Becoming a skilled active listener will truly boost your coaching communication competence to a new level, allowing you to fully realize your potential as a great coach.

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.

Fred Philips
Business Coach
Writing Team, Coaches Training Blog Community

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Coaching Questions Bring Coaching Power

May 9, 2013 By 2 Comments

Using a well structured system of coaching questions can greatly increase your effectiveness as a coach. We have all heard the phrase: “He who asks the questions is in control of the conversation.” Besides giving control, questions also help you uncover issues that your client might not even be aware of. In addition, by answering your questions your client can give your message added credibility. Here’s how.

Questions Give Control without Provoking Resistance

When your client is answering your questions, they are responding to you and following a path that you are defining. One of the sources of the power of questions is that we are all trained to answer them. Just as we feel obliged to speak up to fill a “pregnant pause” we have all been trained to fill in the gap that comes at the end of a question by giving an answer. If you can guide your client to come to your conclusion by asking questions, you need not provoke the usual “push back” that can result when you just come out and challenge them.

Using Questions to Uncover Hidden Issues

Since our subconscious mind has been trained to answer questions too, asking questions can tap into this part of our being and reveal information that even your client is consciously unaware of. I am always surprised when a client gives an insightful answer after being asked the question “I realize that you don’t know the answer to that question, but if you did what would it be?”

Using Questions to Add Credibility

An additional bonus to guiding your client to a conclusion through questions is that when they finally state the conclusion, they do it in their own voice. This may seem to be a small point, but by using coaching questions, when the client finally hears the conclusion in their own voice, it enters their subconscious virtually unchallenged. This is a far cry from what happens when the coach makes a bold statement that sets off all the client’s defensive reflexes.

Developing Your Coaching Questions

With the power that the intelligent use of questions can bring to your coaching, it is clearly worth putting some serious effort into developing a system of coaching questions. There are many resources available in sales, rhetoric and psychology. Because it is tailored for coaches, I recommend the book entitled “Coaching Questions” by Tony Stoltzfus. Referring to this and other sources, develop your own system that you can comfortably employ to bring the power of questioning to your coaching practice.

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!

Dave Iuppa
JTS Advisors Strategy and Accountability Coach

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5 Client Retention Strategies That Work

May 4, 2013 By 2 Comments

Client retention is essential to your success and it is crucial to use various client retention strategies in your practice. It takes more time and costs much more money to get new clients than it does to keep the ones you have. So many coaches focus all their energy on marketing and finding new clients, but drop the ball when it comes to client retention strategies. Though you will most likely never escape the marketing and promotion treadmill for as long as you coach, investing time into keeping the clients you have will make that treadmill less onerous and time-consuming.

5 Client Retention Strategies That Work

  1. The first client retention strategy is to over-deliver. Make sure each and every client is highly satisfied with your services. Even if 100% of your clients are satisfied, some will still decide to leave for various reasons. Leaving isn’t always a negative – many leave because you helped them reach their goals. However, if you over-deliver – give them even more then they expect with your time, skills, knowledge, attention, and empathy – you will retain the majority of your clients.
  2. Give them a sense that you care about them. Make sure they recognize that their success is important to you. Remember details of the dreams and fears, the names of their family members, and the minutia of their lives. You must be able to express sincere sympathy and empathy.
  3. Unexpected gifts or bonuses. This is one of the most underused coaching retention strategies, but more coaches should begin employing this beneficial technique. When clients know they will receive a gift or bonus for achieving a goal, it’s a great way to remind them of the value of your services, but if the gift or bonus is unexpected, it’s even better! If clients reach specific goals – receiving a promotion, losing a certain amount of weight, finishing a marathon – providing them with an unexpected gift or bonus is a great way to keep them interested in your services and keep them coming back for more.
  4. Build relationships with others coaches in and outside of your niche. Coaching is competitive, but the more peers you meet and the more coaching contacts you make, the more respected your name and practice will become. Coaches will send referrals to you and they will stay with based on the suggestion of another coach and your reputation.
  5. Do you have any clients whom you aren’t helping? Have any you just don’t like? Let them go – send them packing. No need to keep them if the relationship isn’t mutually beneficial. Working too hard on a few troublesome clients may take valuable time away from your other clients Letting go of clients who will most likely leave you soon anyway, will give you more time to spend with your other clients. Not all coach/client relationships work – but making the ones that do work, work for a long time is critical.

Keeping clients is essential and developing strategies to keep them is part of running a coaching business. Utilizing effective client retention strategies will help you stay in business and take your business to a while new level.

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.

Fred Philips
Business Coach
Writing Team, Coaches Training Blog Community

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A Different Set of Coaching Core Competencies

April 16, 2013 By 2 Comments

Coaching core competencies are the guidelines by which all coaches should run their practices and treat their clients. Coaching core competencies are the commandments of the profession. The International Coach Federation created a list of core competencies that can be used by coaches around the world to run their practices; these competencies are well-known to all coaches, but there are other similar lists that can be analyzed and followed.

Presented here is a different list of competencies, as created by the International Institute of Coaching (IIC). The IIC is a British based organization that is a leading accreditation body for the coaching industry and provides different levels of membership for coaches and trainers. They provide six coach core competencies.

The Six Coaching Core Competencies of the IIC

  1. Presenting a Professional Image in Each Session. There is a list of 15 points that go with these core value. These include, adhering to a specific set of standards and ethics, using a range of tools and techniques to assist and support the client, demonstrating respect for the client, and reflecting on the client’s needs during each session.
  2. Creating a Safe Environment for the Coaching Relationship. This competency helps the coach create an environment in which both the coach and the client build trust for each other and for the coaching relationship. It also provides for an environment that treats the client as an equal partner and one in which the coach responds to the client’s emotions with empathy.
  3. Questioning Skills. This is what coaching is all about; coaches don’t tell, they ask. Coaches who can use powerful and incisive open-ended questions can work wonders with their clients. Without the proper skill of inquiry, all the coaching core competencies in the world won’t make you a good coach!
  4. Listening Skills. If you are going to ask questions, you need to be able to listen to the answers. But, listening skills are not just listening to the words a client says; for a coach, listening skills means active listening. Active listening focuses completely on what the client is saying, what body language tells you, and what the client does not say. Active listening also includes being able to evaluate the information and formulate new inquiries as a session continues.
  5. Facilitating Growth. This is where a coach helps the client discover their beliefs, talents, abilities, and personal strengths. This is where a coach encourages clients to formulate their own solutions and options.
  6. Planning and Accountability. This one basically sums up the other five core competencies by providing for the client to create an implement a plan, based on what has been accomplished up to this point, with results that are measurable, specific, attainable, and time-specific. The coach’s job is to keep the client focused and to review progress.

These coaching core competencies are very similar to those that were created by the ICF. The IIC competencies are another set of valuable guidelines that can be used by coaches to help run their practice and give their client’s the best possible coaching.

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!

Fred Philips
Business Coach
Writing Team, Coaches Training Blog Community

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5 Reasons the ICF Coaching Competencies Will Not Ensure Success

April 13, 2013 By 3 Comments

The International Coach Federation has created a list of eleven ICF coaching competencies that all coaches should embrace and follow. However, are they enough? Do the ICF coaching competencies ensure success for everyone that enters the coaching profession?

The ICF coach competencies include essential traits and rules that every coach should use in their practices. These include establishing trust and intimacy with clients, ethical behavior, managing and assessing progress, designing actions, and the ability to make powerful inquiries. However, these ICF competencies, as great as they are, may not be enough to succeed in the competitive coaching world.

The 5 Reasons ICF Coaching Competencies Are Not Enough

Marketing and Promotion. The most dreaded one comes first on the list. How will your coaching business succeed if no one knows about you? It won’t! How will potential clients find out about your practice? By marketing and promoting, and then marketing and promoting some more. Almost everyone hates to market, but it is definitely a necessary evil. You either need to do it, or hire someone to do it, or all the other competencies will be rendered meaningless, because you will not be coaching for long!

Assessing Each Situation Independently. Though this is implied in the ICF coaching competencies, this should be one o the most important competencies all by itself. Assessing a situation, what the client is seeking to achieve, at the beginning allows a coach to create a game plan or a map for the client. Just like an outline for a book, this map keeps the coach from meandering. Though, changes occur as you work with a client and unexpected routes may be taken, using a map or a game plan as a guideline will keep both the coach and the client on task.

Alternate Streams of Income. To make it big in this business, coaches need to take their brand, or their intellectual property, and turn it into other streams of income. The most successful coaches do more than coach, they leverage their brand and turn that leverage into additional streams of income such as DVDs, books, coaching training, and more.

The Business of the Coaching Business. If you own your own coaching practice, it is a business. It is not much different than the ice cream store down the street, or the large home warehouse in the shopping plaza. Every business needs to be run efficiently and effectively to make a consistent profit. Business management skills are absolutely essential for the health of a coaching practice.

Providing Value. Putting all the ICF coaching competencies together create value in your practice, but this is such an important component of the coaching business, that it should be recognized for what it is – an essential yet somewhat intangible part of coaching. What is value? It is basically helping the client achieve their goals, but it can be so much more than that. So, what is value? It is basically combining the art, science, and craft of coaching and giving the client a positive return ( 2 times, 5 times, 10 times…) on their investment in you.

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.

Fred Philips
Business Coach
Writing Team, Coaches Training Blog Community

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Coaching Competencies or Coaching Incompetencies?

January 14, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Most coaches have heard of coaching competencies, but have they heard of coaching incompetencies? Coaching competencies are basically the sufficient and necessary skills needed to be a good and effective coach, and to run a profitable coaching practice.

What are the Most Important Coaching Competencies?

The 11 core coaching competencies developed by the International Coach Federation (ICF) are:

  1. Meeting professional standards and ethical guidelines
  2. Establishing the coaching agreement
  3. Establishing trust and intimacy with the client
  4. Coaching presence
  5. Active listening
  6. Powerful inquiry
  7. Direct communication
  8. Creating awareness
  9. Designing actions
  10.  Goal setting and planning
  11. Managing accountability and progress

If you follow these guidelines and incorporate the core competencies into your coaching practice, there is a good possibility you are a good coach and exhibit coaching competency.. However, there can also be coaching incompetencies that may make you an ineffective, and ultimately, an unsuccessful coach.

5 Coaching Incompetencies

  1. Failing to understand the importance of marketing. A coaching practice is only successful if it attracts and keeps clients. Marketing is a necessary evil and many coaches hate it. If you are good at marketing or willing to learn to be good at it, then you can do your own marketing and promotion. However, if you detest it and are not willing to put the time into the marketing part of your business, then hire someone else to do it. Marketing is the lifeblood of your business.
  2. Failure to actively listen. This is the opposite of the fifth ICF coaching competency. Active listening includes focusing on the client’s words, body language, tone, and inflection. You cannot be a coach without being a listener. Unfortunately, many people have poor listening skills, but it is absolutely essential to your coaching practice that you learn to be an active listener.
  3. Telling instead of asking. A good coaching session is often one long series of questions with an occasional tidbit of advice thrown in. A session should never be one long series of instructions. You have heard the expression, “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The coaching profession’s motto should be, “ask, don’t tell.”
  4. Failure to expand your business. The core coaching competencies do not include, “expand your business and find alternate streams of income.” But, it should. In an increasingly competitive industry, coaches should be seeking additional ways to generate income. One of the five coaching incompetencies is the failure to pursue other ways to make money in addition to your one-one-one coaching business. There are many other ways to make money – books, DVDs, websites, seminars, group coaching. Failure to explore these opportunities may leave you behind as the coaching industry moves forward.
  5. Professional and educational stagnation. The coaching industry is a dynamic field and, to retain a viable presence in the field, you always need to move forward. Education should be continuous and the pursuit of new skills should never cease. Staying ahead of the game is important in the coaching field.

These five coaching incompetencies are additional guidelines to follow for coaches. If you can manage to follow the 11 coaching competencies and avoid these five coaching incompetencies, your practice should be on solid ground and your future in the field will be bright.

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!

Fred Philips
Business Coach
Writing Team, Coaches Training Blog Community

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The Five Fundamental Best Practices For Coaching

January 3, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Every coach should be concerned with best practices for coaching. But, you ask, what is a best practice? Best practices are techniques and methods that have shown to be practical and effective when applied to specific coaching scenarios and contexts.

The Five Fundamental Best Practices for Coaching

  1. Building Your Coaching Business
  2. Selecting a Winning Mix of Coaching Strategies
  3. Selecting the Right Coaching Media
  4. Client-centric Practice
  5. Measuring Success (and Failure)

Building Your Coaching Business

There are two main ways to be a coach – work for someone else ( either a large coaching firm or as a coach in a large corporation), or work for yourself. This fundamental best practice for coaching is for those who dare to become entrepreneurs and start their own coaching practice. It is essential to learn the skills that can create and maintain a successful business. It is important to establish a business infrastructure that is constructed for long-term success. This infrastructure includes business documentation such as a business plan; legal requirements such as insurance, permits, and taxes; and marketing and promotional strategies that work to build your business and reputation.

Selecting a Winning Mix of Coaching Strategies

There are many different types of coaching techniques that can be employed in a coaching practice. One of the best practices for coaching is to find the correct mix that fits your personality and style, and to adapt these techniques to the types of clients you will work with. Your techniques can be learned through your own experience, your continuing education, informational materials such as books and DVDs, and from coaching peers.

Selecting the Right Coaching Media

As a coach, you will start off coaching one-on-one. As your business grows, it is vital to the financial health of your business to seek out new media to expand your coaching empire. It is beneficial to explore group coaching, online coaching, webinars, seminars, books, and DVDs. The more income streams you can generate, the more money you will make, and the more you will brand yourself as a successful and relevant coach.

Client-centric Practice

What is a client-centric practice, you ask? It is a coach-coachee relationship that is based on the client’s needs. The relationship is built around a client-centric focus; the client sets the direction and agenda and the coach uses the correct techniques to fulfill the clients needs. Fully grasping the concept of a client-centric approach should be any list of best practices for coaching.

Measuring Success (and Failure)

One of the most important best practices of coaching is to measure the effectiveness of your coaching techniques. Clients need to receive a return on their investment (ROI) – they are paying you big bucks to help them and they need to feel helped and to see results. Coaches need to be able to effectively measure what approaches and techniques work and which ones fall short of success. The measurement will involve client feedback, client results, coach observations, and interaction with peers.

These five fundamental best practices of coaching are crucial to the success of any coaching practice. Understanding the roles that these best practices play and how they effect a coaching business is one of the most important pieces of the success puzzle. Without a thorough comprehension of these practices, a coaching business is probably on the fast track to failure.

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!

Fred Philips
Business Coach
Writing Team, Coaches Training Blog Community

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Coaching Best Practices – Youth Sports or Professional Coaching

December 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

One of the most important topics for professional coaches is the concept of coaching best practices. Best practices can best be defined as techniques and methods used by a coach that are deemed to be practical and effective when applied to specific coaching situations and engagements. So, to describe what best practices you should use in you professional coaching business, we will look at the best practices of unpaid, untrained, and unprofessional coaches – the youth sports coach.

Coaching Best Practices for Youth Sports

If you have never coached a youth sports team, you might think this connection is a bit tenuous at best. However, if you have stepped out on the baseball field or the basketball court or the soccer field with a clipboard, a whistle, and plenty of trepidation, you certainly understand how this connection can be made. Coaching youth sports is not easy and it takes plenty of coaching best practices. Here are the top five for dedicated youth sports coaches.

  1. Communication. There can be no coaching without communicating. If you think communicating with an adult who has walked into your office is difficult, try coaching a ten-year old boy who’s parents made him sign up for soccer. In the youth sports world, you need to be able to effectively communicate with parents and children – two different communication skills sets are needed. There is a reason communication is at the top of the list of coaching best practices – you cannot be a coach of any type without it!
  2. Patience. It can be difficult to work with a client for several months and not see results, but that frustration pales in comparison to what you feel when you coach youth sports. It may take Little Johnny an entire season to learn a position or a play – without patience you will never experience the joy of success, in both youth sports and professional coaching.
  3. Knowledge. No matter what you coach – little league baseball players or multinational executives – a little knowledge goes a long way. It is undoubtedly advantageous to have played a sport before you try to coach it, or to have been in an executive position before you start coaching executives, but it is not an absolute necessity. Both experience and education are knowledge – if you don’t have the experience, get the knowledge. First-time youth sports coaches will improve their skills by reading about their sport, gathering information on coaching a particular age level, and talking to others who been coaches. Professional coaching require continuous education – gaining knowledge and updating your knowledge is vital to your success and an important coaching best practice.
  4. It is their success, not yours! Youth sports coaching requires much more telling than professional coaching. Life, career, executive, and wellness coaches have to be skilled at helping find their own path to success, and though youth coaches have to be more specific and instructive, it still pays big dividends to let Little Janie find her own way some times. The use of informative and insightful inquiry works not only with professionals who have hired you to be their life coach, it also works with twelve-year old female softball players.
  5. Establish an infrastructure for success. No coaching best practices list would be complete without this one. Infrastructure has a different meaning for youth sports coaches and professional coaches. For youth sports coaches it means you come prepared, create a plan for practice or games, have responsibilities for both parents and kids, and make sure to have all your tools – whistle, clipboard, practice gear, and more. For professional coaches, infrastructure includes both the way you run the business part of your practice and the manner in which you conduct your coaching sessions. Basically it means – have a plan, know your plan, have the right tools for your plan, and implement your plan!

There are five crucial coaching best practices that work for youth sports coaches, and guess what, they also work for professional coaches as well. Defining your coaching best practices before you begin a youth sports season or before you start your coaching practice is a great way to start the season…or your career!

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.

Fred Philips
Business Coach
Writing Team, Coaches Training Blog Community

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How to Brand Your Coaching Practice

December 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Every coach wants their coaching practice to stand out from the competition, and one way to do this is to brand your coaching practice. Without a recognizable brand, your coaching practice runs the risk of becoming just another coach on the block – just another life coach, health coach, executive coach, or any old coach! One of the many. A small fish in a big pond!

Brand Your Coaching Practice – 3 Easy Steps

  1. You are Unique! Finding something that says something unique about you and your coaching practice is important. To do this, write down all the words that describe your coaching practice. For example, if you are a health coach, you would write down words such as, health, wellness, fitness, nutrition, diet, longevity, vitality, and other similar words. You would then write down words that describe yourself as a person – positive, optimistic, introspective, healthy, extreme sport fanatic – whatever tells someone who you are. The last set of words would be some colorful sounding adjectives that fit you or your coaching practice – be creative! With these three lists, you start mixing and matching and see what you come up with. This is a great way to begin branding your coaching practice.
  2. Research Your Peers. You do not want to copy other coaches, but is is very helpful to look at what other coaches have done to brand themselves. Don’t steal or copy, but researching what others have done may be the starting point for creative inspiration. The three best ways to do this is to do online research on coaches, watch television ads and infomercials on coaches and other marketed services and items, and by checking coaching books and DVDs on Amazon.com to see what brands, logos, catch-phrases, and descriptions your peers are using to help brand themselves and market their products. They have banded themselves, now it is your turn to brand your coaching practice.
  3. Create a masterpiece! This is where you put all your information together and create a brand for your coaching practice. It should be creative, irresistible, memorable, and unique. Examples: America’s Got Coaching – a play on America’s Got Talent; American’s Finest Coaching, a play on San Diego’s city motto – America’s Finest City ( only works if you are in San Diego), Big Apple Coaching – with an apple logo (works if you are in New York City). These are very minor examples of what you can do to be creative and unique.

One additional step you may want to try when seeking to brand your coaching practice is to also create a tagline. You’ve certainly heard -”Just do it”(Nike), “Have it your way”(Burger King), “Don’t leave home without it” (American Express). Creating a tagline makes your brand even more unique!

Now that you know how to brand your coaching practice, it is time to get started. The earlier you get started, the faster your coaching practice will become a household name in the coaching 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!

Fred Philips
Business Coach
Writing Team, Coaches Training Blog Community

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