Coaching Blog

What should every life coach (and business coach) know?

Coaches are in the business of change and creativity. Namely, our clients want to create change in their businesses and lives.

So why should a business or life coach understand vulnerability and shame? Because they have everything to do with creating change. In fact, if your clients didn't fear vulnerability and potential shame, they might not need a coach.

Watch researcher Brene (rhymes with Renee) Brown's highly entertaining TED Talks on Vulnerability and Shame. And learn why one of your most powerful coaching tools is your own vulnerability. Call it, The Me-Too Factor.

Thanks to Life Coach, Traci McMinn, CCC, CGC; and Business Coach, Mattison Grey, MCC; for sharing these.

Want to know what kind of salary a life coach makes?

I wrote about international coaching salaries in the 2012 Trends in Business and Life Coaching post, based on the new ICF coach survey, which sheds light on the parts of the world where coaches earn the most. But a Sherpa Executive Coaching Survey of international coach salaries just came out, so here's some new info, broken down by type of coach.

It's important to note that executive, life and business coaching incomes vary wildly, (anywhere from free to thousands of dollars per hour) so these averages may not represent what most coaches actually make. However they do offer some clues.

Average coaching salaries according to Sherpa:

• Executive Coaches make $325 per hour
• Business Coaches make $235 per hour
• Life Coaches make $160 per hour

What's the difference between a life coach, a business coach and an executive coach? Sherpa's definition of an executive coach is someone who coaches executives on behavioral issues, which basically means an executive coach is a life coach for executives.

I take issue with Sherpa's definition that business and life coaches are consultants and advisors. Real coaches are neither consultants, nor advisers. Real coaches help their clients think and act more resourcefully, resulting in personal growth and achievement and for that reason, coaches usually make a lot more money than consultants or advisers.

In my experience, new business and life coaches can charge $100 - 200 per hour and veteran coaches with established results can often charge $250 - 600 per hour. What makes the difference is the skill of the coach and who they coach.

It's pretty extraordinary that someone who coaches by phone in their jammies from their home office could charge more than a Park Avenue lawyer, but it happens - if their clients get incredible results and can afford to pay for them.

Here's how: most successful coaches only have a few clients. According to Sherpa,  coaches average between 6 and 6.5 clients per week. When you only coach a few clients, you can be at your best virtually all of the time, which makes it possible to give incredible service and results. That's when you can charge a lot.

So average annual incomes, according to Sherpa, range from $55K to $116K. That's pretty close to past ICF survey averages for a life coach (or business or executive coach) salary.

Learn more about life coach salary rates and how to set your own coaching fees:

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.

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:

Gregory Schillinger was one of the first coaches to take a chance on School of Coaching Mastery three years ago.

So you can imagine that I was pretty darned pleased when Gregg called me up a few weeks ago and told me he's now making more money than he ever thought possible. This, while building a new coaching business in the middle of the Great Recession!

It's really no surprise, though. Gregg is an enormously talented coach and successful businessman. But then, coaches who are attracted to the word, mastery, tend to be a cut above. Hence our name, School of Coaching Mastery.

To paraphrase Gregg, it's the ones who 'get it' that you want to attract, because they get the most value.

I invite you to listen to my entire interview with Gregg, below (worth listening to the full 24 min.), because his experience can help you succeed beyond your expectations, too, but here's an outtake that is pure gold:

'If I had a plan that said I want to make this amount, I wouldn't have. And much to my wife's surprise, and now I think she's come around to think that it's good to have a plan, but best to be able to adapt for reality, because you never know who you're going to meet on the street, or in a conversation, or through a contact and that's where the plan really starts to take place. You know, it's a fluid thing.

I'm doing very well, I must say. Better than I ever have or thought I would. But in the end of the day, why not? Why shouldn't I do well and why shouldn't anybody do well? I think forcing the expectation would have done me no good.

Accept what I have now and having faith that it would all work out is how. That's my plan. That's it in a nutshell.'

Gregg's a business coach who specializes in helping new restaurant owners succeed. His website is: CoachingRestaurants.com

Unfortunately, the audio player isn't working on this page, but you can listen to this audio here.

Are you also a coach or coach-to-be who's attracted to mastery and an 'early adopter'? You may be a perfect fit for our new Ultimate Coach Training Pilot Membership Program, which can save you a bundle. You can't read about it on our site, but you can attend a free class this week to learn about it. There are just seven spots open in this program.

Sign up for an invitation to a free call with Julia Stewart on how to become a Pilot Program Member of the Ultimate Coach Training Program.

I love social media for my coaching business.

I've been attracting coaching clients and students with online social tools for the past five years. Some of my favorite clients, ever, have come from web 2.0. Many of my Coach 100 students have had extraordinary success building their businesses with online tools. School of Coaching Mastery has had a strong social presence since its launch in 2007. Heck, we even have our own social networking site!

So I'm not the coach you'd expect to say that social media could kill your business. And no, I don't mean that your Facebook addiction might keep you from working on your business as you should (although it could). And I don't mean that you should be out shaking hands at live networking events instead of using online social networking (although some coaches really should be networking live instead of online).

I mean that the actual tools of social networking, if used poorly, can cost you coaching clients. And given how time consuming a good marketing plan can be to implement, tools that actually work against you can indeed kill your business.

What kinds of social networking tools could hurt a coaching business? Anything (and I mean anything) that annoys people. And let's face it, that covers a lot of territory.

Most new (and some veteran) business and life coaches have poor marketing and sales skills to begin with, so opportunities to do it poorly are abundant. But if you screw up your elevator speech at a live networking event, you only risk annoying a few people (and if you can laugh at yourself, you'll probably make a few friends, instead). But tools that allow you to contact everybody in your network in ways or at times that they don't want, can help you annoy thousands of people with one innocent little click. Ouch!

Repeat that innocent action again and again and your coaching business will be dead in the water before you know it.

Why is annoying people such a big deal when it comes to marketing your coaching business? Well, remember that cliche: 'Long after people have forgotten what you said, they'll remember how you made them feel'? You don't want to be remembered as the annoying coach.

Question: If you were looking to hire a business or life coach and you had narrowed it down to two coaches who both seemed to meet your criteria perfectly, would you hire the one who annoyed you are the one who didn't?

Sales decisions come down to subtleties. Sometimes a client doesn't even know why they chose to hire one coach over another. You don't have to annoy someone very much to tip the scales away from you.

What do you need to avoid in order to not kill your business with social networking tools? 

Well here are a few items that will help you to not annoy me. But get feedback from your own networks to find out what really bugs them.

1. Social SPAM. Any social app that's designed to spread itself automatically at the expense of annoying your network is social SPAM. The inspiration for this post is an innocuous little tool called, Boxbe, that's spreading around School of Coaching Mastery. Everytime someone I know joins it, I automatically get an invitation to join, too. I don't want to join. And I don't want to get email invitations to it several times per day. It's social SPAM and it's annoying. Plaxo is also annoying. Some poorly designed Twitter apps do this sort of thing. (And don't get me started on SpamArrest. I consider SpamArrest SPAM.)

2. Social Temptation. How often do you get invitations from Facebook or any social networking site to invite or notify everyone in your Outlook,Yahoo, Google, or other address book? How often do you do it? In my book, you get to do it once. One time. Resist the temptation to tell everybody you know about something unless they followed you or joined your group or fan page. Otherwise social temptation becomes social SPAM.

3. Social Scams.  @UnMarketing just posted a link on Twitter to this blog post about scam apps on Facebook. It's easy to get tricked by these because they look like so many other apps on Facebook. Maybe you should avoid temptation and not allow every app out there to connect to your account. (While I was researching this, I came accross Scott Stratten's - A.K.A. UnMarketing - blog post on how to lose friends and tick people off on Facebook.)

4. Social Abbrev. There's nothing wrong with LOL, WTF, Ouch! and KEWL unless you use them constantly. Remember you annoying uncle, cousin, spouse who said the same things over and over until you wanted to stuff mashed potatoes in your ears? Don't be that coach.

5. Social Games. As well as gifts, etc., ad nauseum. You can have fun at work but please stay focused so the rest of us can. Sorority Life, Mafia Games, Farmville, etc., I tolerate these from my relatives (barely), but not from you (unless you find a way to combine all three, which might be interesting). Don't you feel silly posting your latest livestock aquisition on Facebook? I don't think this would persuade even Old MacDonald to hire you to be his coach.

6. Social Pics and Tags. Not all of them. Most are great. You probably don't need me to tell you not to post the pics of you throwing up at that college binge party (the real sorority life). If not, stop reading this post and get thee to a 12-step program, fast. But consider your headshot. If you coach kids, then a shot of you with your kids is appropriate, but if you coach Fortune 100 execs, maybe not. And if somebody else posts or tags you in an unflattering shot, quietly request that they take it down. If you haven't annoyed them, they probably will. If not, be prepared for radical transparency. You have no more secrets.

7. Social Compulsion. Please don't fill people's Twitter streams with constant inane tweets. They will unfollow you. Direct messages are even worse. And you're not kidding anybody by tweeting nothing but Twitter names in the hope of getting noticed. Don't tweet or post unless you have something to say and definitely don't tweet constantly.

Well that's it for now. I could annoy you with a bunch of links to friend/join/follow us, like the 'Find us on Facebook' link above, but probably more valuable to you will be for you to get some training on how to attract clients effectively, which we do in our Coach 100 classes. They start again in February and they teach what actually works.

WARNING: You'll have less time for social networking when your coaching practice is full.

 Check out Coach 100 classes here.

On September 29th, CNNMoney wrote, "Should You Hire a Career Coach?"

In it, Christopher Metzler, associate dean for human resources studies at Georgetown University, says, "Any time there's an economic downturn, career coaching spikes,"

With job searches now averaging 25 weeks, it's no surprise that the out-of-work are looking for every competitive advantage they can find. And while career coaching is not cheap,  one session averages $161, it more than pays for itself, if you land a great job a few months earlier than you would have otherwise.

There are pitfalls, however. As the article points out, not everyone who calls him/herself a career coach is skilled or qualified to help you reach your goals. And the quality of coach certifications varies widely. Some coach certification training programs take only a weekend to complete, with every participant guaranteed a certificate just for showing up. (I recently spoke to a coach who completed one such program. She confirmed that it was "pretty much a joke.")

Two places you can find career coaches who have pledged their professionalism, are the coaching trade organizations, IAC and ICF. Each has a Find-a-Coach feature. You can also find career coaches at Mastery Coach Exchange, where you can easily connect with and find out about your coach, before trying them out.

Other coaching specialties that do especially well in economic downturns are business and corporate coaching, executive coaching, and money coaching, but even fields like life coaching do surprisingly well, especially now that there are lower-cost options.

Here's the full CNNMoney article on career coaching. Check out their sidebar for more interesting information about it.

Read the Coaching Commons article on the same subject here.

Saying "no" is the first step in setting effective boundaries, which is a requirement for living a great life.

When you have the tools you need to say "no", you can open the door do being, doing and having what you really want. However, depending on how hard it is for you to say "no", you may also need coaching in order to incorporate this skill into your life. I became a coach, in part, to master this skill and now it's one of my coaching specialties.

I'm here to tell you that if you have a hard time saying "no", you're missing out on some of the best things in life, because you're not getting the chance to say "yes" to what you really want. That's one reason why hiring a masterful life or business coach is such a powerful game changer.

Whether or not you've already hired your own coach, here are some tips on how to say "no" effectively to almost anyone, including family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers who nag, plead, bully, etc. You will need to practice them in order to master them.

How much freer will your life be when you only say "yes" when you really mean it?

1. The simple no. Do your best to say "no" with a neutral tone of voice. No edge, no charge. Simply say, "No", followed by no explanation. This is the most powerful way to say "no". A variation is: "I'm sorry, No." The key is to not offer an explanation. Explanations just invite arguments.
2. The kinder no. Say, "I wish I could." (If necessary, follow with: "I understand. I wish I could.") This establishes that you're still a kind person, but you just can't. Again, no explanations.
3. The preference no. Say, "I'd rather not." (If necessary, follow with: "I understand. I'd rather not.") This time, you're being clear that you have a preference and that preference is, "no". No need to explain it.
4. The conditional no. Say, "I can't do it now, but I can do it ______." (If necessary: "As I said, I can't do it now, but I can do it ______.") This is a conditional "no". In some cases, you may be willing to say, "yes", but only under your conditions. Avoid trying to convince the other person that your condition is right. It doesn't matter who's right. (By the way, you have a "right" to set boundaries, even if you're "wrong".)
5. The broken record no. If the other person argues, say, "Be that as it may, I can't." Repeat exactly this phrase and nothing else, until the other person runs out of arguments. Again, avoid engaging in any argument or explanation. This is known as the "broken record" response. The person that you repeat it to will run out of steam, eventually.
6. The oh no. Just say, "Oh." This is useful if the other person tries to push your buttons, which is a common tactic of people who can't accept the word, "no." They most likely are upping the ante in order to engage you in an argument that they are used to winning. "Oh" is disarming, because it gives them nothing to argue with. Again, use a neutral tone of voice. Do your best to stay calm.
7. The I'm not having a good time no. If the person you're saying "no" to persists, say, "I'm not having a good time and I'd like to end this conversation." If they still persist, say, "I'm not having a good time and I'm leaving."
8. The stop no. If they still persist, "I'm asking you to stop." Stay calm. Next, "I'm requiring that you stop." Continue to stay calm.
9. The traffic cop no. Finally, put your hand up, palm forward (think traffic cop) and repeat any of the steps above. This is extremely powerful.

If good fences make good neighbors, then good boundaries make great relationships, great careers and great lives.

Once you've mastered these nine ways to say "no", the energy vampires in your life will slink off to find other victims and the energy that you free up for your own life will be incredible. You'll also start attracting higher quality people. And paradoxically, you'll probably become a more giving person. Trust me on this.

These nine ways to say, "No" will help you build effective boundaries within which you can create your best life. If you need a coach to help you, I still take a few clients. If you want to help others create fantastic lives and careers, join School of Coaching Mastery. Either way, it's okay to call me at 877-224-2780 to find out.