Coaching Blog

Wondering how you can become a successful life or business coach?

There are three main approaches to becoming a successful business or life coach. The first, I call the Entrepreneurial Coach. The second, is the Professional Coach. The last is the Sweet Spot. Let me explain:

1. The Entrepreneurial Coach* usually has a strong business, marketing and sales background and either a juicy niche or a smoking hot specialty. This coach knows how to attract the right clients and how to encourage them to buy. However, if s/he over relies on her business smarts, s/he can get caught on the hamster wheel of constantly having to market and sell, in order to keep his/her coaching roster full.

Why? Unless clients experience fantastic results quickly, or at least maintain their motivation long enough to experience extraordinary results, they tend to drop out of coaching within a few months. That means the entrepreneur coach has to constantly close new sales just to maintain a good income. For most coaches, this is exhausting and unsatisfying.

Worse yet, if clients quit before they're delighted, the entrepreneur won't maximize their number of all-important testimonials, case studies and viral buzz - the stuff that makes for a friction-free marketing and sales engine.

2. The Professional Coach*, on the other hand, has great coaching skills, either from decades of coaching or from a few years of coach-specific training. S/he knows how to elicit amazing results for his/her clients and as a result, clients stay month after month, or buy again and again. However, s/he may know little about effective marketing and sales strategies and as a result, too few clients ever sign up in the first place. That means too few potential clients ever find out about the professional coach, so s/he's constantly searching for that rare client who's willing to pay his/her fees.

Sadly, this coach may have spectacular results to point to, but often fails to share them with potential clients, who increasingly, are looking for 'proof' that their coach really knows what s/he's doing.

* In both cases above, the coach is forced into a situation where s/he needs his/her clients. The entrepreneur always needs new ones. The professional needs to hang onto the ones s/he has. Otherwise, both risk losing their incomes. When you need your clients, your focus is on yourself, instead of on helping them. To reach the coaching sweet spot, your needs must be met, so you can focus all your energy on helping your clients get those awesome results. Otherwise, something's got to give. It's way harder to maintain a sustainable coaching business when you have to focus on your own needs instead of clients' needs.

However, there are some entrepreneur coaches who really are good at coaching and most of their clients are quite happy and loyal. And there are professional coaches who get it when it comes to marketing and sales, so they're not desperate to get and keep clients. These exceptional coaches are moving into the Sweet Spot.

3. The Sweet Spot: This is the coach who has the skill to produce awesome results quickly and to keep producing results for months or even years. That keeps current clients wanting more and paying for it happily. At the same time, this coach has his/her marketing message down cold, has expertise that new people will buy and knows how to communicate and form client relationships (a.k.a. marketing and sales). Of course, those ever important testimonials, case studies and viral buzz come easily to this coach.

When you reach the sweet spot, you aren't desperate to make new sales and you don't cling to your old clients, trying to squeeze out a few more more dollars. You naturally meet your own needs and you can focus all your energy on meeting your clients' needs and helping them get what they want. Happy clients attract more happy clients.

I call this coach The Master. Everything we do at School of Coaching Mastery is designed to move our coaching students into the sweet spot by helping them become masters, faster.

Marketing programs help entrepreneurs communicate and sell to clients, but are useless when it comes to the critical skill of getting coaching results and keeping clients.

And most coaching schools will only get you started on becoming a professional coach - who may never get clients. At SCM, we give away that part of our program for free and focus our real attention on helping our paid members become masters and enjoy that sweet spot, sooner.

Turn your five-figure business into a six-figure coaching business and turn your six-figure business into a seven-figure coaching business: Become a Master Coach.

Article by David Papini and Julia Stewart.

Julia: Below is the winning entry in the Best Coaching Films Contest. I chose it, not because it was the best example of coaching, but because it was presented in a thorough manner that made it easy for David Papini and me to analyze it, which we were interested in doing. In that sense, it's an awesome entry and it provides a terrific opportunity to disect something that sounds like coaching, but actually isn't. At least it's not very good coaching. See if you agree.

You may or may not be surprised to know that the character of John Keating, in Dead Poet’s Society, is not an example of a good coach. Yes, he opens up new worlds for his students, something that great coaches do, but he is burdened by enormous assumptions and a huge agenda, which leads him to a crucial conversation with Neil Perry and may have helped cause Perry’s later suicide. Not a desirable outcome in coaching!

Actually, this film is a wonderful example of what happens when Values Systems collide. It ain’t pretty. The parents and teacher’s are all of the modern values system: rational, materialistic, conforming. Think: Business Executives. (And read Spiral Dynamics or take our Spiral Dynamics for Coaches course, if you don’t know what I’m talking about.) Keating’s values are post-modern: creative, individualistic, passionate. Think: Hippies.

There is nothing wrong with either system, but in evolutionary terms, post-modern comes after modern, which makes it more inspiring (that’s just how it works). Keating and his student’s assume that ‘inspiring’ is better. However, the only thing that makes one Values System better than another is whether it solves your problems best.

The film, itself, is passionate and can inspire and trigger the viewers’ own adolescent memories of struggling to become authentic while being pushed and bullied to conform by parents and teachers. But for one very sensitive, vulnerable, conflicted boy, Neil Perry, who is the ‘client’ in the following ‘coaching’ session, this schism presents a problem so overwhelming, he pays the ultimate price.

David: I think that here Keating is not coaching Neil, he is more trying to help him as parent would do. One of the risks of a “parenting” coach model is that parenting brings with itself not just love and care but it is also prone to confusion between parent’s needs and child’s needs.  This kind of confusion has an evolutionary advantage, because maximizes the chances that a parent will take care of her children as if they were herself, but it is not that useful when your goal is to foster someone else’s freedom of choice.

In terms of technique, Keating here uses more the tools of a tutor or mentor. All the relationship is with Keating ‘up’ and Neil ‘down’. No doubt, Keating cares about Neil’s greatness, but he fails in checking and validating if the change that he is pushing Neil through is ecological for all Neil’s parts. Working with all the parts (for example with NLP) and allowing all of them to show what their good intention was and to foster dialogue among them, could have been useful to Neil.

Read on to see why a coach’s assumptions and agenda can cause a client his very life... 

John Keating Coaching Neil Perry:

The 10-Year anniversary of 9/11 is a day of sadness and mourning for many of us.

But it's also a day when we saw the best in people a million times over. As a resident of New York City, someone who could see the towers burning from my street, I can say that I never felt as close to my fellow New Yorkers as I did that day and in the months following.

One snide conservative politician said New Yorkers became uncharacteristically 'human' on 9/11. He's wrong. New Yorkers are some of the kindest people I've ever known.

Today, I live in a small town, where farmers stop their pickup trucks to chat, blocking roads in both directions. You can do that in a small town. In fact, small-town people value that kind of friendliness.

In a huge crowded city, where there are always millions of people behind you trying to get home or pick up their kids, kindness is often expressed via efficiency, impatience and hurrying. We're all getting out of the way of our fellow citizens, because passing the time of day can cause traffic jams and delays.

In 2001, I lived on a small, nautical NYC island, called, City Island. The local clam-diggers, or those born on the island, were often descended from generations of sailors, boat builders and sail makers. Most were poor and uneducated, but great people.

The great 9/11 Boatlift, above, is one of the untold stories about the attacks. One radio distress call from the Coast Guard that morning, brought hundreds of boats within minutes - work boats, pleasure boats, ferries - to lower Manhattan and rescued 500,000 people who were trapped behind the destruction. It was the biggest boatlift in history.

They didn't know if they'd be killed in the attacks. They came because they were needed.

My work, as a coach and coach trainer, has always been to bring out the Personal Greatness, also known as the Great Self, in my clients and students. Horrific tragedy elicits Greatness in many, but we don't have to wait for  awful moments. We can choose to be Great, daily.

As one Boatlift hero says in the film, above, "I believe somebody has a little hero in them. Got to look in. It's in there. It'll come out when it needs to be."

Choosing to be great may mean to show a little more compassion or a little less criticism. It may mean smiling at a stranger or acknowledging a cashier. It also means serving others when it's inconvenient or dangerous to ourselves. We all do it uniquely. That's why we're different.

There is courage in Greatness.

Another hero says, "I have a theory in life. I never want to say, 'I should have.' If I do it and I fail, I tried. If I do it and I succeed, better for me. I tell my children the same thing, 'Never go through life saying I should have. If you want to do something, you do it."

These men aren't philosophers, coaches or motivational speakers; just regular guys who stepped up.

How can you step up today and celebrate Personal Greatness in your world?

Yesterday, SCM student and coach, David Papini, published a wonderful article in this blog on How to Coach a Viking, in which he analyzes a one-minute coaching session from the children's cartoon, How to Train Your Dragon.

The ensuing conversation in the comments section of that post sparked a long-held fantasy of mine, to put together a list of favorite coaching movies. Lists like that are more fun to put together when people collaborate on them, so I'm inviting you to collaborate. Best (and fastest) nominations will win prizes. Read on...

Best Coaching Films Contest

Here's how to play:

1. Nominate your favorite coaching film in the comments section of this blog post.
2. What makes a 'coaching film'? In most cases, there will be at least one pivotal conversation in the film that inspires someone to take transformative action. The conversation between Astrid and Hiccup in How to Train Your Dragon is a great example.
3. Tell us why you think your nomination is a great coaching film. For example, I think Glinda the Good Witch (above), in the Wizard of Oz, is a wonderful example of a coach. She believes in Dorothy, enjoys her completely, gives her tasks that help her grow and informs her of strengths she didn't even know she had. Without Glinda, Dorothy's story would have ended in Munchkin Land.
4. To be eligible, you must be the first person to nominate your favorite coaching film and you must nominate it in the comments section of this blog post, no later than this Friday, September 2nd. (The Wizard of Oz and How to Train Your Dragon are already taken.)
5. The Top Ten nominators will each receive a $100 discount on any live coaching course that is currently on our Fall schedule.
6. The Winner will get one coaching course from us, FREE. Must be a live course that is currently scheduled. No exceptions.

Subscribers to this blog will receive this contest announcement first. Other members of our mailing lists will get the announcement a bit later. This is a not-too-subtle reminder to subscribe to the Coaching Blog in the upper right corner of this page. We try to reward our readers with opportunities like this, as a way of thanking them for their loyalty.

Nominate your favorite coaching film in the comments section, below.

Does more work = less blog? In a word: Yes.

I've written before about how hard it is to keep up with this blog, especially when I'm working hard at School of Coaching Mastery. Like lately.

Seems like lately I've been working my bum bum off (as the Brazilians might say) and the blog is suffering again.

Yes, I know about keeping a blog schedule, writing posts in advance, guest blogging and all the other cool tools for feeding the Blogging Beast. But I also know this: my readers are more interested in my content than in my schedule, readership does not go down when I fail to post (because there are already hundreds of informative articles here), and last but not least, although educating our visitors so they are ready to become successful coaches, is a high priority for us, serving our real customers always comes first.

So here's a quick update on coaching news, plus a sneak peek at what's to come:

• Best Coaching Blogs 2011 ended August 1st and was possibly the best ever. Exactly 1,450 people 'liked' it on Facebook. Evelyn Kalinosky won 1st place. Congrats to all Top Ten Winners.
• We reached our $1000 goal for UNICEF Famine Relief in the Horn of Africa. The special live Coaching Groundwork for Famine Relief course is going great with 20 participants. Thanks to everyone who gave!
• Nearly 100 people have tried Great Self Group Coaching and the response has been phenomenal. Members of the ongoing pilot group are discovering powerful aspects of themselves. Their most common remarks are, 'This is fun!', 'Love this program!' and 'Thank You.' There's an opportunity to try it for free and to join the ongoing group at an early-adopter price. Register here.

PS: What's the new World Trade Center (pictured above) got to do with blogging and coach training? It's a great example of people furiously working on a huge project with spectacular results. I walked around it with Adela Rubio one and a half years ago and they've added more than 70 floors since then.  I bet those guys don't have time to blog, either! More to the point, they couldn't do it alone. Any great project is worth a great team. We're here to team up with you so you can master your own projects with furious speed.

If the brain is like an iPhone, how can coaching help?

Imagine you are a smart phone with 10,000 brilliant apps, but you don’t know how to use them or even what each one is for.

Instead, you try to make the weather app do the job of the GPS app and then blame it for not telling you where you are. Or maybe you use a shopping app to help you lose weight, but instead you just spend money...

Sound familiar? Some of us have frustrating relationships with our phones!

Yet virtually ALL of us have frustrating relationships with OURSELVES. Why? We don’t understand all of our brilliant apps! We don’t appreciate them because we don’t know what they are or how to use them. And when we use them without awareness, we get poor results...

Worse, we blame ourselves and others and even sabotage the very things we value.

How does this happen? Research tells us our brains are made up of hundreds of discrete modules, comprised of billions of cells, making trillions of connections and... 95% of it is UNconscious!

Think about that: you’re unaware of 95% of YOU.

Psychologists go so far as to say we each have multiple personalities, not pathologically, but adaptively. We tend to be different in different situations, but usually we are unconscious that we have even changed. Others can see us and our blunders, but we are blind to ourselves.

How can you grow if you’re blind to yourself?

Fortunately, there is a way to become aware of your many personalities, modules and...apps. Coaching gives you a crystal-clear mirror in the form of a coach who absolutely believes in you. And that’s where Great Self Coaching comes in...

Imagine being in a safe space where you can explore unconscious aspects of yourself that you’ve never experienced before. This is deep work, but surprisingly unscary. It's also fun - and enlightening - what you’ll discover is ALL good news!

Imagine that you not only learn from yourself, and from me, but also from the other members of this very safe group. This amazing experience connects you to your best self and helps you master ALL your gifts for the very first time.

Actually, you probably can’t imagine this, but you can experience it first hand...

Right now, I’m offering Great Self Group Coaching by phone in a fabulous new format that is incredibly effective. But you can try it out for free, by signing up for one of three Great Self Group Coaching Sessions coming up in the next few weeks.

As with all of my free programs, there are no strings attached, just lots of value (although I love it when you share with them your friends). You WILL however get an opportunity to join an extremely low-priced (a few dollars per session) pilot group to continue this amazing process, if you want to.

But first find out if Great Self Coaching is right for you by taking one or more of the following free 75-minute sessions. They're filling up fast, so take action now.

Free Great Self Coaching Coaching Group 1: The Controller
Wednesday, July 20th, 4 - 5:15 PM Eastern/NY Time

Free Great Self Coaching Coaching Group 2: The Protector
Thursday, July 28th, 11AM - 12:15 PM EDT

Free Great Self Coaching Coaching Group 3: The Analyzer
Tuesday, August 9th, 2 - 3:15 PM EDT

[UPDATE 7-14-11: These sessions are filling so fast that we've added a 4th:

Free Great Self Coaching Coaching Group 4: Fear
Thursday, August 4th, 8 - 9:15 PM EDT]

What is the Great Self?

That's a great question...If you're a veteran of personal development programs or of some forms of spirituality, then you may have been introduced to the distinction of the Higher Self vs. the Ego. The terminology may have been different, but the basic idea is that the Higher Self is good (ex.: loving, spiritual, altruistic, etc.), while the Ego is bad (ex.: selfish, petty, destructive, etc.) Read A New Earth for one of the best descriptions of this dualistic view of human beings.

The Great Self concept takes this idea a step further from either/or to both/AND. The ego is an essential operating system for any healthy human being. It's there to protect you and look out for your interests. It only becomes a problem when our interests conflict with the interests of others. This tends to happen, because we are either unaware of the Higher Self or are rejecting the Ego.

Eliminating the Ego would be like removing the Windows, Mac, or Chrome operating system from your computer and expecting it to still work. In Great Self Coaching, we integrate the ego and all of its 'apps' with the Higher Self, which is enormously powerful. This is a HUGE upgrade, like going from 8 Gigs to 160. And it's a fun process!

How did Great Self Coaching come about?

Another awesome question. Great Self coaching is the culmination of decades of professional experience, helping people reach their dreams. I've synthesized and developed the work of hundreds of master teachers from fields like coaching, psychology, neuroscience, spirituality, personal development and more, such as Thomas Leonard, the Founder of the Coaching Profession, and Zen Master, Genpo Roshi, whose Big Mind process added the concepts of the Controller, Protector and Analyzer as gateways to the Great Self.

Great Self Coaching has been years in the making and you're invited to taste it for free in one of 3 group coaching sessions coming up:

Find out more about Great Self Coaching Here.

Image courtesy of Elan Sun Star.

The following post concerning how long coaching client engagements should be is inspired by a conversation at School of Coaching Mastery's members-only Water Cooler Forum. A student wondered how to set up coaching client engagements.

The Question:

Should coaching client engagements be short (3 - 6 months) or long (1 year or longer)? And should coaching client engagements have a fixed length or should they be open ended?

Here are my views. I find the length of coaching engagement varies according to the business model, niche, and specialty of the coach, as well as the goals of the client.

The Short or Fixed-length Coaching Client Engagement:

    •    Shorter engagements of specific length are common to business, executive, career and corporate coaching, where the bottom line is always of high importance.
    •    Lengths usually are 3, 6 or 12 months. Almost never shorter than 3 months.
    •    The per-hour or per-month charge is generally much higher, $300+/hour; $500+ per month, or the charge may be for the entire period.
    •    If you use this business model, know that you must be prospecting for your next clients at all times.
    •    Benefit to the coach, other than the higher fee, is that you can sometimes contract to coach an entire team, department or company. In other words, it can be a very significant gig and you may need fewer gigs to support your business.
    •    Benefit to the company that hires you, is that the fees are fixed and predictable and ROI is easy to measure.

Long or Open-ended Coaching Client Engagements:

    •   Open-ended coaching agreements are common in life coaching and other forms of personal coaching, such as health, restorative, personal development, and spiritual coaching.
    •    Minimum lengths of client engagements are 3 months. Any less than that and the client is unlikely to experience a specific outcome and may not see the value of continuing. Also, the coach is likely to get stuck on a merri-go-round, constantly trying to attract enough clients, if they allow clients to sign up for one month or less.
    •    Keeping one's ego out of the coaching engagement is extremely important in open-ended client engagements and depends on on the coach's personal development and integrity. Also, having plenty of money in the bank can be  important for the coach. Otherwise, the coach may be tempted to stretch out the client engagement for the coach's financial benefit, rather than the client's personal development. Some coaches, especially those who are less well developed, assume that all coaches create dependancy in long-term coaching engagements, but that's not necessarily so.
    •    In a long-term coaching relationship, the coach needs to keep an eye out for what else the client may need to work on. Periodically invite the client to a new higher level of play when you sense they are ready for it. Some clients absolutely love this, because they want to grow as much as possible. Think: Empowerment vs. Dependence.
    •    Generally, coaches charge less for this type of coaching, $250 - 450/pr month or $100-200/hour.
    •    The benefit for the coach is greater client stability and less marketing, although annual income may be lower than for business coaches. Benefit for the client is greater personal growth and fulfillment.

My colleagues and I have all experimented with these business models. Commonly, what we find is that when we raise our fees to over $500/month, we have no trouble attracting clients, but coaching client engagements tend to be shorter.

In my coaching business, I offer three different types of coaching. My life coaching clients focus on personal development, shadows, values, attraction, etc. My fees are lower and engagements sometimes are for several years.

I also offer mentor coaching for coaches, which includes working toward certification, business development and personal development. Fees are a bit higher and engagements last 6 to 12 months.

Finally, I offer business coaching that focuses on inbound marketing for micro businesses. Fees are higher and engagements last from 3 to 6 months.

How do you model your coaching client engagements?

The Water Cooler Forum is one of the 'hidden benefits' of membership in School of Coaching Mastery's paid coach training programs. Get your questions answered by mentors and insiders:

Yesterday my IAC Chapter hosted a call on how to keep IAC Life Coach Certification.

Some coaches are dismayed to find that their life coach certification isn't a 'set it and forget it' deal. But if you read last week's How to Get Life Coach Certification, you know that the two respected certifying organizations are the ICF and the IAC. Both have requirements that you must fulfill in order to keep your credential.

This is typical in any profession and like it or not, life coaching is on the path to professionalism. Major research initiatives are under way to establish a body of knowledge behind the considerable anecdotal evidence that coaching really works.

Professionalism happens in every service offering that succeeds, from medicine, to psychotherapy, to personal training and it's inevitable in coaching.

You can resist, or you can be more curious. The latter is more fun.

Here are the basic requirements by the ICF and IAC in order to keep keep your life coach credentials.

1. Both organizations require you to maintain your memberships. For the ICF, annual membership is $195USD. For the IAC it is $129USD. A professional life coach can easily earn their annual membership fee with one hour of coaching.

2. The ICF requires 40 Continuing Coach Education Units (CCEUs) every three years. A CCEU is defined as 1 hour of direct coach-specific training. Go here to see how you can earn CCEUs.

3. The IAC requires a Learning Agreement (LA) every five years. The LA is flexible. You simply plan your own learning path around the 9 IAC Coaching Masteries(tm). Examples of acceptable LAs:

• Working with a Study Group

• Working in a Triad

• Work with a mentor coach

• Taking a coaching course, such as SCM's Mastery Express Module or Coach Certification Bootcamp.

• Join a coach training program like Certified Coach Training

• You could even create a program for your clients using the 9 Masteries

In short, you can expect to pay fees and do some extra work in order to be perceived as a professional, but you can also attract more clients and higher fees as a credentialed coach.

With some creativity, you can leverage either IAC or ICF requirements to boost your effectiveness and profitability as a coach, while maintaining your life coach certification.

Get free tools that will help you get life coach certification from the IAC:

Guest post by David Papini.

Last week, while I was coaching a buddy coach around the issue of “being afraid of making mistakes -> becoming anxious -> eating snacks” (loop endlessly), the association between errors and snacks (added with the fact that due to different time zones it was 8.30 pm and I was hungry) popped in my mind in the form of a clear image of my fridge, with magnets on it.

The vision narrowed to one magnet, reading as follows: “Always make new mistakes. - Ester Dyson"

I shared the image with my client and that allowed us to make a shift about the topic. We started discussing the fact that he could become very competitive in making more errors than everybody else, joking about that. And anxiety was gone.

So the magnet vision proved to be a good tool to re-frame  the problem and at the same time offer a structure to help the client in dealing with performance and anxiety issues.

After the session, thankful to the magnet, I gave a closer look to my fridge door.

That magnet has been there for five years and I meet it every morning, but it was the first time it became handy in a coaching session. I started looking at it as one of my professional coaching tools and a source of daily personal awareness. This put the whole bunch of magnets in a new light; I stared at the magnets with more respect.

Below is my magnet list:

• “Some People walk in the rain, others just get wet - Roger Miller”
• “Always make new mistakes - Ester Dyson”
• “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail? - anonymous”
• “Passion is the only way a man learn to create” (written with poetry magnets by myself)
• A picture of my children, Alice and Francesco
• Four magnets about New York
• A small wooden heart with written “Mi manchi” (I miss you, in Italian)
• One magnet with two white kittens

I let my magnets coach me and this is what each of them told me:

• You can choose how you feel about everything. There are no problems in nature, just events
• To create you need errors, to be happy and growing you need new ones every day. Dare!
• Free your vision, don’t limit your options (at least in thinking and feeling)
• To learn, you need emotions: connect with what you feel, the rest will follow
• Your future is here and it has your children’s eyes
• You are the places you love
• Relationship is a dance between similarity and difference, presence and absence
• Sometimes a magnet it’s just a magnet: use it to keep notes attached where you can see them

Back to the session, because the magnet citation was useful and helped us in making a shift, I told myself “that works, I could reuse this sentence [i.e. “always make new errors”] or even I can reuse the whole trick (magnet plus fridge image)”.

On a second thought I realized that “reusing it” is good for consulting or teaching, not for coaching, because what made the image powerful and effective was the fact that it popped during the coaching relationship. Effectiveness was related to that moment with that client. Moreover, as this blog post demonstrates, the image was powerful to the client and to the coach as well, so the right use for an effective image that helped in a session is honoring it, deepening the reflection on oneself as a coach; more than reusing it in another session or with another client.

In this sense and in my opinion, every coaching session is always a unique piece; it cannot be serialized. Do not bring your fridge programmatically to a coaching session: as it happens with hunger, thirst and the like, if you stay present in the session, it will show up when needed and that will be effective and artful coaching.

David was born in Florence in 1966 just a few months before the deluge, and that's a kind of destiny. As an executive is in charge for general management in a IT Firm, as a certified NLP counselor helps clients to explore their life experience, as a Coach helps clients getting what they really want , as a conflict mediator witnesses how tough and creative a relationship can be, as a trainer helps trainees in stretching their brain, growing and learning, as a public speaker enjoys co-creating experience on the fly, as a dad loves his two children. As a man he is grateful and worried that he’s got this wonderful life. And he’s fond of categorizing his professional roles :-). More about him at http://papini.typepad.com/lifehike/

David's blog is entered in Best Coaching Blogs 2011. Check it out and vote for your favorite blogs while you're there.