Coaching Blog

An infographic by the team at CouponAudit

School of Coaching Mastery hosts the Best Coaching Blogs Contest each year (The above Top Life Coach Blogs To Follow in 2013 is not part of our contest - obviously we can't win our own competition!). Subscribe to our blog (above right) to get an announcement to enter your blog in Best Coaching Blogs or to vote for other blogs. Click the button below to view 2012 winners:

Your coaching business is all about your clients, not you. So how do you market and sell Brand YOU? Below is an info graphic with some of the secrets of branding in today's world.

At the bottom is a link to register for the new Q&A class called, "What Adele Can Teach You About Marketing". Learn the subtleties of branding when it's about you, but it really isn't. We'll look at some of the ways the singer, Adele, has mastered this for mega-success. And if you'd like to attend this one-time-only class for free, help us promote the class on Facebook or Twitter and we'll thank you with a guest pass!

Branding a coaching business is subtle. The success of mega-star, Adele, can teach you some lessions about branding. If you'd like to join the upcoming class, click below. To get it for free, join School of Coaching Mastery on Facebook or @MasteryCoach on Twitter and share or RT our announcements about this one-time-only class. We'll give you a guest pass to say, "Thanks!"

Sales-impaired coaches sometimes hide behind the yuck-factor and claim they don't have enough clients, because they hate to sell. That's a lie.

Not selling your coaching boils down to one thing: your refusal to own your own fear and vulnerability.

Sure, integrity and sales skills matter, but there's a risk you'll be judged when you sell something intangible like coaching and it's safer to hide.

Learn from the 8-foot bride, the art of asking. Then challenge yourself to trust that much.

Since today is Valentine's Day, I thought you might enjoy some fun facts about love and positive psychology researcher, Barbara L. Fredrickson's new book,Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become , is loaded with never-before-heard-of facts about love, romance, health and success. So pull up a chair, grab a loved one and have fun!

Okay first, this is science, so we need to define our terms. But rest assured, these are fun terms!

Barbara is the researcher most associated with the Positivity Ratio (Quick: go measure yours here. Then come right back for more cool stuff.) Basically, the Positivity Ratio says if your positive thoughts and feelings (a.k.a. positivity) out number your negative thoughts and feelings (a.k.a. negativity) by a ratio of at least 3 to 1, you'll likely flourish, rather than languish. The upward limit is around 11 to 1. Poliannas don't flourish.

Why do folks with strong Positivity Ratios thrive? Because, according to Fredrickson's research, positivity broadens your perspective so you notice more opportunities (Funny,  Thomas Leonard said 15 years ago that's how Attraction works! I'd like to suggest that positivity is highly attractive). Positivity also helps you build resources such as, values, strengths and skills, that assist you even in tough times, which creates longer-term resiliency. That's her "Broaden and Build" theory.

Barbara has recently shifted her research to shared positivity, which she terms, "Positivity Resonance" or "Love 2.0". Love in the English language is an extremely broad term. To measure it, she had to define love very narrowly. Keep that in mind, while reading the fun facts about Love 2.0, below. Her definition for positivity resonance is limited to positivity that is shared by people face-to-face or in physical contact.

"Love is our supreme emotion that makes us come fully alive." - Barbara L. Fredrickson

Here are twenty-five fun facts about Love 2.0:

1. "...love, and its absence, fundamentally alters the biochemicals in which your body is steeped."
2. Love is a momentary state that can pass between strangers who share a mutually positive experience together.
3. Love is a skill that can be learned which impacts the expression of your genes.
4. "The sheer complexity of love's biology is reason enough for awe."
5. When you learn to prioritize love, you actually get more value from it and become resilient faster.
6. Love literally changes your mind and enables you to see others wholeheartedly, helping you transcend your usual ego perspective.
7. Love is the arising of three events: shared positive emotions, sychrony between you and another's biochemistry and behavior, motive to invest in each other's well-being.
8. Other positivity emotions are not mirrored back in this way.
9. Love reverberates between people and belongs to all parties involved.
10. Safety is a precondition for love.
11. People who suffer from anxiety, depression, loneliness and low self-esteem; have a limited ability to experience love 2.0.
12. Eye contact is a potent trigger for positivity resonance.
13. You can experience some of the positive effects of love 2.0 while alone, when thinking about a loved one for instance, but the effects are diminished.
14. Love impacts your body on the cellular, even molecular level.
15. Love physically impacts your brain's development, causing you to experience more positivity and less anxiety.
16. Love 2.0 triggers cascades or oxytocin, sometimes called, "the love hormone".
17. Oxytocin is the lead chemical in the "calm and connect" function; it literally reduces stress.
18. Oxytocin appears to make people more intuitive about others.
19. Love increases "vagal tone", which your doctor can measure to predict the likelihood of your having a heart attack.
20. People with higher vagal tone regulate glucose levels and inflammation, as common denominator in many diseases, including diabetes, heart disease and cancer.
21. Vagal tone can be improved with training with positivity resonance. 
22. "In the very moment that you experience positivity resonance, your brain syncs up with the other person's brain."
23. The effects of love can be carried to you by a person's voice.
24. "Brain coupling" occurs between people who are experiencing positivity resonance and in some cases, you begin to anticipate the other person's thoughts, feelings and words, rather than just react to them.
25. The causal arrow runs in both directions at once and drives self-sustaining trajectories of growth.

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Thomas Leonard, the Founder of the Coaching Profession. Nostalgic coaches everywhere are marking this day in whatever ways are meaningful to them. (Here's a Facebook group that's giving away free coaching, today only.)

If you missed knowing Thomas, well you missed the man who inspired a profession that is still one of the highest paid and fastest growing in the world. No small accomplishment for a man who died suddenly of a heart attack at only 47.

Here's what you don't usually hear about Thomas: he was a genius marketer. He could even write a sales page (You know, those awful web pages with yellow highlighting that try get you to buy stuff) that you'd read to the very end, even when you knew you weren't going to buy the product, because his writing inspired and enlightened you instead making you want to commit harakiri.

So the next time you find yourself saying, I wish I could just coach without all the marketing and sales, consider upgrading, instead.

Thomas called coaching, "advanced communication skills", which is what great marketing is, anyway. Today, I don't find many coaches who remind me of Thomas, but some great marketers do. (Here are two marketers who elevate marketing to advanced communication: Seth Godin and Chris Brogan.)

I pay homage to Thomas pretty much everyday, by taking what I learned from him at his two coaching schools and always looking at what the next step needs to be in the profession and if I think I can create it, I do. Such as taking his brilliant Values- and Needs-based coaching and integrating it with Strengths-based coaching to get the full picture.

Years ago, I discovered the rough draft of Thomas' bestselling book, The Portable Coach, on the web via the Wayback Machine, which Thomas offered to the world to use freely. It's a detailed account of his 28 Principles of Attraction (not to be confused with the Law of Attraction). I took what he wrote verbatim, typos and all, and split it into 10 weekly, easy-to-digest ecourse lessons that show up in your inbox. It is, of course, free.

Want to become irresistably attractive to the best people and opportunities? Thomas will teach you for free:

If you think you understand trends in business and life coaching, you're probably dead wrong.

Why? Because the future of humanity is about to change at even more breathtaking rates. That means the future of coaching is not what you think. Not even close.

How's that? We're about to reach a technological 'tipping point' across several technologies and this runaway world we live in is about get a million times faster. 

You've heard of Moore's Law? It's the well-established prediction that computing power will double every 18 months, while prices plummit. In other words, exponential growth. Moore's Law has held true for decades. The current result is an iPhone processor that's more powerful than the 1970's Apollo rockets that travelled to the Moon. (which makes Apple's recent map app blunder seem especially silly)

If you were to graph exponential growth, you'd get what's known as a 'hockey stick' curve. At first you get a relatively long period of slow growth, with a slight incline, but at some point the numbers that are doubling become so huge that the curve goes virtually vertical. That's the tipping point or 'escape velocity' that we've just about reached with computing power.

Moore's Law is what futurists call a hard trend. It's a prediction that you can count on. Some futurists say that Moore's Law can be applied to other technologies as well, such as nanotech and artificial intelligence, and that when you combine these technologies, as they are doing at Singularity University, you get even more explosive growth and more escape velocity.

What does all this tech mean to coaches, other than the possibility that someday, Skype will stop bumping us off our free international video calls? Well if you consider Adizes' Change Constant (Change leads to problems, which lead to solutions, which lead to more change, etc.), our potential clients are about to have a lot more problems. They're mostly the kind of problems you want to have, as we say, but they still will feel like big problems to them. And that's when they hire coaches. But wait, before you cheer...

What kinds or problems are caused by explosive growth in the tech fields? Well first there are new jobs created, like IT professionals, website designers and virtual assistants; jobs most people couldn't conceive of 50 years ago. And then there is the elimination of jobs that are replaced by technology, like librarians, sign painters and secretaries. Painful! Except, every time technology replaces some jobs, it creates new ones, such as international tech support, robot repair, and home-based manufacturing. That's a cycle you can count on. New high-paid jobs are always on the horizon, only most people can't even conceive of them, much less get ready. That's scary.

Let's face it, our ancestors evolved back when exponential change equaled the invention of the wheel, the bow and arrow and roasted mastadon instead of raw. Those changes occured at the slow-sloping left side of the hockey stick curve and that's what your nervous system today is wired for, not change at the rate of a new job every year. Jeez.

People are going to need assistance in making constant life-changing transitions, the kinds our grandparents only made once or twice in a lifetime. Maybe we'll need more psychotherapists to talk us down off the ledge, but in this month's Wired magazine, Founding Editor, Kevin Kelly says robots will soon replace therapists. I don't know about that, but he also says nurses, teachers, personal trainers, waiters and surgeons will soon be robotic. The jobs will go to the people who manage the bots.

The best-paying jobs will go to those who can leverage the added value that technology is constantly creating. Beyond that, we can spend our time doing what we want.

So what's the one job Kevin Kelly says robots can't replace? The job of deciding what people really want to do. 

Coaches help people decide what they really want to do.

Coaching is not a tech job, but technology creates the need for coaches. And it's creating more of that need all the time for coaches who are ready.

Can coaches be replaced by artificial intelligence? We're a long way from that, because coaching relies at least as much on 'right brain' intuitive skills, which have been a challenge to the computing field so far, as it does on linear processing skills. But they'll probably crack intuition, eventually.

However, no amount of AI will ever make robots human. You could program 3CPO to say, 'I believe in you', but those words ring hollow unless you hear them from someone whose opinion matters to you.

Coaching will likely be with us for several more decades, or at least until Siri gets programed to ask more than she tells.

What else is about to change? Everything from the demise of our current too-slow, too-expensive, too-ineffective system of higher education (watch this video of new Google University for what might be next); to the rise of the 'bottom billion' as a result of cheap smart phones that now connect impoverished people to unlimited information, to vertical farming that can scale up to feed 10 billion of us. To get a more complete picture, I highly recommend you read Abundance by venture capitalist and X Prize founder Peter Diamandis.

How can you get ready to coach in the coming decades? 

Surprisingly, you don't need to chase every trend. And you don't need to coach huge numbers of people for less. Because the rise of technologies means there is also a trend at the other side of the spectrum. It's the one that leverages Kevin Kelly's 1000 True Fans concept and focuses on hyper-customization and hyper-personalization.

Chris Brogan calls this the 'bespoke business'. This is the type of business most successful coaches have. It includes just a few clients who each pay a hefty fee. It usually also includes some lower-priced options and free content in order to build relationships and true fans. This type of business is on the rise and looks like it's here to stay.

More people will need and want coaching in the coming future. Less expensive goods and services provided by automation will free up money. And with the coming need to prepare for new professions every year, the savvy will use that money to hire tutors, mentors and coaches to help them get where they need to go faster.

What's a good strategy for a coach moving forward into the super-high-tech world of the future? Become the best - perhaps the only - in your specialty. Get just the training you need, be nimble and ready to pivot when things change dramatically, have your own coach and take super great care of yourself - you'll need it.

And have fun. Technology is designed to free us from drudgery. Coaching is the perfect profession for enjoying that freedom.

Need some coach training?

Do you know which types of happiness will create lasting value for your coaching clients? Everyone has a slightly different happiness style. What works for one person may not do it for another. Depending on your happiness style, you may want to master the following to create engagement and flow.

Positive Psychology founder, Martin Seligman has identified 3 happy lifestyles, each more enduring than the last:

1. The Pleasant Life
2. The Engaged Life
3. The Meaningful Life

The engaged life is one in which you're challenged to use your greatest strengths and slip into a brain state called, 'flow'. Great performers, athletes, inventors and more have described this state of flow in which everything else disappears. Turns out, flow is an important element of happiness and flourishing.

Flow is an equally important element of positive psychology coaching, as well. When we create this peak state with our clients, coaching feels easy and client results are amazing. If you learn to coach this way, you will immediately upgrade your coaching results. Fabulous coaching practically sells itself because clients like to share their amazing success with others. Learning what flow is will get you started, but join a class to discover how to do it, yourself.

Flow is very much connected to what you are doing and how you do it. When you master a skill, you have more opportunities to reach flow than when you have just beginner skills. That is why we train our positive psychology coaches to coach masterfully. They have more fun, create incredible outcomes for their clients, and enjoy much more success.

Watch this TEDTalk with the 'Father of Flow': Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to understand how flow is the secret to happiness:

Learn more about positive psychology coaching and flow:

Like millions of others, I've grown to love NBC's The Voice. For me, it stands head and shoulders above other TV talent shows for a whole slew of reasons.

I even like it better than So You Think You Can Dance and I'm a former dancer! After laboring for years in dirty loft studios and off-off-off-Broadway theaters in Lower Manhattan, I can only imagine how incredibly cool it is for those young dancers to be featured on television. But it's equally cool for singers to get their chance on The Voice and the format of The Voice makes it really special.

What's so great about The Voice?

1. Like Ceelo Green says, The Voice is full of positive energy. Unlike some other shows that will remain nameless, all The Voice contestents are good performers. None of them are up there to be ridiculed and laughed at. It takes guts to go for your dream and the show respects that.

2. The Voice is a supportive environment. It's a cosmic kitchen serving up great singing chops. The first cool feature is that the judges are competing along with the singers, so they are on the line, too. That makes each of them, great singers in their own right, both judges and coaches. The Blind Auditions that made the show famous, mean the judges have to choose their team members on voice, alone. When more than one judege turns their chair around, the singer gets to choose their own coach, giving the power to the contestents. Those constant shifts in power make the show exciting. Plus, every coach has a vested interest in each of their singers. The better the singers do, the better chance the coach has to win. It's a win-win-win set up, much like a strategic habitat designed by a great life coach.

3. High-quality performances every week. With great coaching, huge talent, intense competition and tons of singing challenges and opportunities to perform, the singers grow before your eyes. Each week, at least one performance gives me chills. Last night, both Amanda Brown with 'Natural Woman' and Trevin Hunte with 'And I'm Telling You', gave me chills, tears in the eyes and a lump in my throat. As every coach will tell you, there's nothing better than witnessing someone who is stepping into their full potential. Very cool.

4. Acknowledgments from all the coaches. The show spends A LOT of time on this. It almost seems like too much, but it's a cornerstone of why the show works. Even though the coach/judges are competing, they are generous with both their praise and suggestions for improvement to all the singers. They don't just hand out pats on the head. And it's fun when they admit how jealous their are of the other judges' teams.

The possible exception is Christina Aguilara, who has doled out faint praise for several singers from competing teams. Positive psychology coaches will notice Christina's use of Passive Destructive Response (PDR) when critiquing Melanie Martinez on three separate occasions, by changing the subject and praising the stage set instead of the singing. It's a well-researched method for subtly stealing someone's thunder. As a result, I grew to dislike Christina and her team by extension and wonder if that's partly why the public voted them out early. I hear Christina won't be back next year.

5. The show is just plain fun. This year, during the knockout rounds, when singers had to win by singing a great duet with their opponent (another example of winning via cooperation instead of straight competition), competing coaches got to 'steal' the losers. Amanda Brown was snatched up by Team Adam Levine and Ceelo is still lamenting her loss.

Of course the banter between the judges is priceless, including Blake Shelton's dumb country jokes, like his comment last night that he thought that big violin-thing was called a Ceelo.

The Voice has everything that I love as a life coach: positive energy, supportive environments, great performances, acknowledgment and fun. As Oprah proved years ago, TV can reach for the highest common denominator and still succeed - hugely.

Curious about becoming a life coach?

Recently I interviewed Mattison Grey, MCC, about her 15 years as a super-successful coach and the three secrets to success that she wished she knew when she first became a business coach.

If you want to become a business coach yourself, love your work and be well paid, you owe it to yourself to listen to the 45-minute audio, below. Even if you're a veteran business coach, this audio will be eye-opening. In it, Mattison discusses in detail the following:

1. Your fee has to reflect the value your client wants to create, not what you think they want to pay.
2. Her mentor was right when he told her she would have to learn to sell if she wanted to succeed.
3. Traditional selling is pushy and manipulative, so she had to learn a new way to sell with authenticity.