Coaching Blog

Post by Julia Stewart, MCC

A really cool problem to have (in the sense that it's the kind of problem you WANT to have) is to not know how to set your life coaching fees (or business or executive coaching fees, as the case may be).

There are many approaches to setting your coaching fees, some psychological (what's the highest fee you can say out loud without gagging?) to financial (how much do you need to cover your business and living expenses, plus benefits, etc.?) to whimsical (how much do you WANT to charge?).

What most new coaches really want to know is, 'Am I worth it?', 'Am I credible?', 'Will they laugh at me?' These are great concerns to talk about with your own coach.

If you don't have clarity about your fees, you probably won't sign on paying clients. Either people will shy away, because you seem uncertain, or you'll hold back on offering your services, because you're confused. That's expensive, so get it cleared up.

One of my EMCHA clients asked me about this recently and I decided to design a class for him that covers it thoroughly, because coaching around a topic like this is important, but sometimes some plain, old-fashioned information helps, too.

This live one-time-only class is free to SCM members and it's also available for a small fee to others.

[UPDATE: This class is now over and is no longer available to non-SCM coaches. However, you can learn some of what we covered by downloading the FREE Life Coach Salary eBook, below]

Learn to set your coaching fees with confidence here:

Blog post by Coach Julia Stewart, MCC

There are two groups of coaches that School of Coaching Mastery hasn't focused on enough.

1. The first group includes:

• Coaches for whom our class schedules just don't work (Often they're located in Asia or the Pacific Rim)
• Coaches who learn best by reading and listening to audio recordings
• Coaches who want great coach training for less money

• Coaches who are already succeeding at something and don't have time for endless hours of training
• Coaches who want to succeed at coaching quickly and need a personalized program to do so
• Coaches who want personal mentor coaching and personalized coach training to maximize their time, effort and money

I've been coaching clients like these on the side for years, but just made it formally available in a program called Elite Mentor Coaching for High Achievers (EMCHA). And it's going so well that I'm opening it up to three more coaches. EMCHA includes everything that I think you need to succeed, no more no less. Of course, you add your brilliance and you're the one taking action.

I started School of Coaching Mastery in part because many of my mentees really needed more training. But then some of my coach training students have struggled because they didn't have mentor coaches. With EMCHA, you have it all.

What do these two really different coach training programs have in common?

• They both include Just In Time (JIT) Coach Training
• They both include optional live training:
• EMCHA members get free SCM Curriculum coach training personally curated by me for them
• JIT members can join any SCM Curriculum coach training module at $40% off
• They both have special introductory pricing right now
• The special prices are available to a limited number of coaches between now and October 31st

Go here to learn more about Just In Time Coach Training and register:

Go here to learn about the special offer for the next three members of Elite Mentor Coaching for High Achievers.

Go here for more about Elite Mentor Coaching for High Achievers:

Image By Tony Crider

Guest post by Joy Maiywa.

If you are thinking of becoming a business coach, it is most probably because you enjoy helping people establish and grow their businesses. You most likely have a natural ability to recognize things that need improvement and are quick to ask questions or suggest changes that can bring about great results.

Like any career, becoming an effective business coach will first require you to acquire the necessary training apart from having some of the natural traits that go with the job. Business coaching involves a great deal of communicating with others. As such, it helps if you are a good and clear public speaker to succeed in the job. You also need to be friendly, analytical, result-focused, thick-skinned and easy to talk to.

To become a business coach, you will need to familiarize yourself with all that is involved in the opening, running and establishing of a business. You will need to know about business planning, finance, employee management, accounting and even legal issues affecting businesses. The type of knowledge and training you specialize in will determine the kind of businesses you will be handling. You can either choose to coach on general business practice or specialize in a particular business industry.

You can also offer business coaching in segments. For instance, if you would like to become a finance business coach, then your work will involve hosting workshops and seminars to train entrepreneurs on different financial aspects related to their businesses. Some issues you will be handling include how to put together tax forms, correct budgeting, how to avoid losses and bankruptcy, and many more. You can also choose to specialize in business problems, where you can coach people about the different business problems they face and provide the solutions to their problems. The type of field you choose should match your passion and skills. This way, you will be able to effectively mentor others who are lacking in you area of specialization.

You do not have to own a business to start a career in business coaching. You simply need to have the passion for the job and the knowledge and skills that go with business coaching. Say you are an expert in accounting. You can choose general business coach training but coach on this field only. If you are good at marketing, you can also choose to impart your skills on people needing marketing skills.

To become a professional business coach, you need to acquire some level of training for the job. This way, you will be able to effectively help others by improving their lives and the businesses they are in. You will have the skills to successfully motivate others to adopt certain business strategies and techniques that will result in their success and the companies they work in. As you grow in your career, you will also be able to hold workshops and seminars to help others become successful businesspersons. If you are looking for a career change from the corporate life, consider becoming a business coach in your area of specialization.

Joy Maiywa is a professional freelance writer and blogger. She has worked with clients from different fields including technology, education, health, and business and entrepreneurship. She writes for Degree Jungle online rankings, a resource for college students.

Mattison Grey sent me the 'Shit Life Coaches Say' video the same day that I got an invitation to create a TEDed Lesson. So voila! I made a coach training lesson out of it.

That was also about the time I set up a Pinterest account and started linking it to some old 'How Not to Coach' videos from SCM. Some of them are quite funny and 'Shit Life Coaches Say' fits right in.

The embed below is from Pinterest. View the TEDed lesson here.

Like all How Not to Coach videos, this one has some truth to it. Newer coaches quickly adopt the language of the profession and love to talk the talk with each other, because they all 'get it'. Nothing wrong with that. Except...

If you can't put something into plain language, you probably don't really understand it, yet. And that makes it hard to communicate it to non-coaches ~ including those you'd like to have for clients. Move away from using jargon as soon as you can.

Oh, and if being laughed at makes you uncomfortable, get used to it. Life coaching is a recognized profession and like all others, it's a target for jokes. Remember the one about the doctor, lawyer and priest?

If you're thinking about becoming a coach, then you're probably wondering whether you should get online coach training or in-person business and life coach training.

It's an incredibly important issue for you, because it impacts your career, your passion and your ability to make a great living. So be sure to get this right.

I may be biased, but I've experienced coach training in virtually every possible format, so I have a useful perspective to share with you and I've concluded that online coach training is best for the following reasons...

REASON #1: MONEY. Most professional coaches-to-be are concerned about the money they spend on coach training and rightly so. However, ultimately you also need to be concerned with your Return On Investment (ROI), which refers to how much more money you'll make as a coach and how soon. Because depending on your training, your life coach salary could range from zero to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. That's huge.

In person coach training almost always involves travel and lodging costs in addition to the training itself. And because hotels and classrooms are expensive for coaching schools, in-person coach training almost always carries higher tuition costs, as well, sometimes as much as $20,000 or more.

Plus, in-person business and life coach training tends to be offered in short workshops and seminars, that last as little as a weekend or even one day. The event itself may be great, but if you've ever gone to a seminar, workshop or conference, learned fabulous new stuff and were certain that it would change your life - only to go home and find yourself living your same old life one week later, then you understand the 'extinction principle' which says that even great training wears off massively if not followed by systems and environments that support change. Which means your $20,000 coach training may leave you inspired, but with no viable coaching business. That's bad ROI.

By contrast, online coach training usually costs less, involves no travel, time off from work, lodging costs, traffic jams or other delays. Just show up for class from where ever you are. And since online coach training is usually ongoing, you'll have supportive systems and structures to help you succeed, built right into the process. You're likely to spend less on training, start making money as a coach sooner and make more money overall. That's great ROI.

REASON #2: TIME. I just touched on time, above, but here are some more time-related issues to think about: While it's important to optimize your training time, your brain will absorb what you learn better and you'll learn to apply what you learn more quickly if you spend a couple of hours per week in class and then apply your lessons to your own coaching business during the week.

It would be great if you could just go to a weekend seminar and walk out ready to be a successful coach, but as a smart savvy person, you know transforming your life means changing a myriad of old habits to new ones. That takes time.

A few dedicated learning hours per week, stretched out over a couple of months - or even a couple of years - will allow you to take what you've learned and begin applying it in your life and business, especially when your coaching school includes reinforcing structures, such as study groups, mentor coaching, online forums, and most of all, live online classes with homework. (By the way, that's exactly how effective business and life coaching works: you have a live conversation with a client, who experiences life-changing insights with you. Then they go out and apply those insights to their life or business and report the results to you. Rinse and repeat.)

As Aristotle said, “We are what we habitually do. Excellence then is a habit, not an act.”

REASON #3: LEARNING. I mentioned the learning issue above, but here's a deeper look at that. Most folks assume the they will learn more in in-person training, but that's usually because they haven't experienced high-quality distance learning. I'm not talking about turning in written papers online and I'm not talking about audio CDs and MP3s. While those can be helpful adjunct tools for training, nothing beats live, conversational classes for learning coaching. Let's face it: coaching is live in-the-moment conversations, followed by strategic action. That's what effective coach training is, as well.

I'm also not talking about teleclasses, which are still a popular training format in some of the older coaching schools. And I'm not talking about standard webinars, which usually involved little or no conversation in a class. Today's technology allows us to do everything in what I call a 'tele-webinar' that we can do in person, except shake hands (or get stuck in traffic).

Tele-webinar training is perfect for learning business and life coaching, because it allows you to join from anywhere, using your iPad, computer, and/or telephone; and have a highly interactive conversational class that allows you to learn in whatever learning style works best for you: audio learning, visual (in the form of slides, live demos, co-browsing, videos, etc.), questions and answers, live practice and feedback, downloading materials before, during or after class, move your body, take notes, take an instant test, go out and apply it along with class colleagues, whatever learning strategy works best for you. Little by little, you learn new habits of excellence and get inspired by your own, and your classmates' successes. Together, you succeed.

If you'd like to get started learning to be a successful coach and get life coach certification quickly, using the tele-webinar format, try Coaching Groundwork Advanced.

I finally have an answer for you to the age-old question: Which is more effective, coaching by telephone or coaching in person?

The coaches who prefer coaching in person, invariably assume their way is better. Those of us who prefer to coach by telephone sheepishly counter that coaching by phone seems to work just as well.

But is telephone coaching really just as good as coaching face-to-face?

After all, we've all read the scientific estimates that up to 90% of the information we receive in a face-to-face conversation is visual, not verbal. So how can telephone coaching possibly work as well as face-to-face coaching?

And from another perspective, face-to-face coaches often brag that they make more money per hour, but do they really? Yes, telephone coaches charge their clients on average slightly less per contact hour, but they also spend less time in non-contact hours.

I'll explain: While I don't recommend scheduling your clients back-to-back (a 15 minute break helps you refocus), I've done it and I know lots of other phone coaches who do it and I can tell you that a few hours, earning $300/hour, from my home office on a snowy Monday sure beats traffic jams, commuter trains, crowded elevators and cafeteria lunches, ad nauseum, by a mile. And when you add up the extra time spent in transit, plus tolls, tickets, parking, gas, wardrobe, wear and tear on your car, eating out, not to mention all of the above which also has to be spent on in-person client attraction, versus attracting clients via the internet, I'm willing to bet telephone coaches make more per hour, keep more of it for themselves,  and enjoy more of their working hours with less stress. A coach who's relaxed and having fun is always better than one who is not.

But here's why telephone coaching is actually more effective than face-to-face coaching:

Remember how up to 90% of information taken in during a face-to-face conversation is visual? That should make face-to-face coaching 10 times more effective than telephone coaching, but it doesn't. Why? Because nearly all of that visual information is unconscious, meaning the coach isn't even aware of it.

It gets worse. Many assume that our brains absorb continuous information, like video cameras  making a movie, but they don't. Not even close. Your brain takes a couple of snapshots of visual information and fills in (nearly all) the rest with your expectations, assumptions, beliefs, shadows, biases and prejudices. In short, while you're talking to that person, you're taking in some new information from them, but you're unconsciously adding 80-90 times as much information from your past.

And you don't even know it.

With telephone coaching, if you're well-trained, you learn to consciously hear more. And if you practice those hearing skills in hundreds of coaching sessions, you develop the kind of hearing - at least for conversations - that usually only the blind possess because thousands of hours of coaching changes your brain. That means you can hear far more than most of us ever thought possible. And you do it without adding tons of info from your past.

Are telephone coaches completely free of their past assumptions? No, of course not; no one is. But a strong case can be made that, because telephone coaching is a skill that's consciously learned from the ground up, the coach is aware of a larger percentage of incoming information, which helps them interface more fully with the present and the uniqueness of their client and the client's situation.

Here's an example: I've lost track over the years of the number of clients I've coached who were of a different race, socio-economic background, or sexual orientation, and I didn't know it. I'd like to think that wouldn't make any difference (unless it was pertinent to the topic of the coaching), but I've seen the studies on that and know how unlikely it is that anyone is completely free of biases.

Telephone coaching doesn't eliminate all assumptions and biases, but it narrows them down and makes it less likely that a bias or shadow can lurk undiscovered.

Here's another reason coaching by phone is more powerful: When using the telephone (or Skype), you can coach with anyone in the world. That means that out of over 7 billion people worldwide, you can match up with your ideal clients and be their perfect coach. Coaching in person is almost always constrained by distance and travel, forcing people to coach with whomever they can find in their home city.

You'd think with the ease and low cost of talking via online video, that video coaching would catch on quickly, but it hasn't so far. I'm guessing it's because video tends to highlight the visual in a way that makes it even harder to listen and really hear - and raises the likelihood that unconscious visual information is triggering a conditioned response. And if people can see their own image, they are more self conscious and less likely to show up authentically. Some find video coaching more distracting than anything. Indeed, some find talking by telephone t o have an intimacy that's lost with video.

Last but not least, from the client's perspective, lower prices for telephone coaching, plus higher quality coaching, means a greater ROI (return on investment) for clients. Who doesn't like that?

In short: phone coaching is not only just as good as in-person coaching, it's actually better. Do you agree?

We've been training our coaches via distance learning and preparing them for international coaching careers for over a decade. Find out more below:

The Sherpa Executive Coaching Summary, a large-scale annual survey on the state of executive, life and business coaching, was just released yesterday, with a startling statistic that 10% of all coaching schools worldwide go out of business every year - every year.

I've heard this statistic tossed about in reference to specific years, but now it's becoming an annual trend? This flies in the face of an old coaching myth, that the real money is in coach training, not coaching. That couldn't be further from the truth.

Why are coaching schools going out of business when the profession of coaching is still growing?

1. One theory is that there are too many coaching schools. As Donna Steinhorn mentioned in her recent The Truth About Coach Training post, 10-12 years ago, there were only a few coach training schools, but now there are well over 100 coaching schools, worldwide. Sherpa says there are actually over 300 coach training schools in the world. In fact, peer.ca, which tries to compile all the coach training schools worldwide, lists 508, as of today.

That means around 50 coaching schools will go out of business this year. Will one of them be yours?

2. Another theory is that many professional coaches, believing the myth that 'the real money is in coach training', started coaching schools when their businesses were challenged recently during Depression 2.0. If that's the case, I'm guessing most of them have/will go out of business, because it is actually much more expensive and time-consuming to run a quality coach training business than it is to run a coaching business.

Personally, I made more money per hour as 'just a coach' than I do running School of Coaching Mastery. Education, done well, is labor-intensive and labor is expensive.

Why do I do it? SCM is a labor of love for me. I have a vision of one million master coaches worldwide and I'm just getting started.

3. Another theory of why 10% of coach training schools go out of business, is that coach training has become a commodity. There is so much competition that schools are competing on price, rather that value. This was further supported by the incredibly high unemployment rates of the past few years, when people were desperately trying to start coaching businesses with little or no money.

When money is extremely tight, unlikely promises, such as the promise of one coaching school mentioned by Sherpa, that you can 'Become a Certified Professional Life Coach in Just 16 Hours' for $397 or $497, or whatever the price du jour is, become alluringly tempting. If such a school also brags about their 3000 successful graduates, you have to wonder about their criteria for 'success'. I've talked to quite a few 'graduates' of these 2-week wonders (because eventually they realize they need more training and contact me) and not one of them has told me they ever got a single paying client.

So in the race to the bottom, some schools, even the huge schools that were founded in the mid-nineties, have become less profitable. And if you're not in it for love, you'll get out if there's not much profit.

School of Coaching Mastery is about to turn five years old in March. We've weathered Depression 2.0 and our international Ultimate Coach Training coach-students are spreading their masterful coaching skills to thousands of grateful (paying) clients. 

I wouldn't close this coaching school for anything. I've got too much work to do to get those one million master coaches out there changing the world for the better.

What do you think? Do 10% of all coach training schools really go out of business each year? Why or why not? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments section, below.

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?

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.

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: