Once upon a time, in a land far far away, where everything always looked as it should, if you hired a life coach, s/he was most likely older than you. Prevailing wisdom said more experience meant greater wisdom and that's what you want in your life coach, right? Maybe.

In the world I live in, life coaches come in all ages and aren't necessarily all sages. Does that even matter?

At left, is Life Coach, Traci McMinn-Joubert, CCC. She's one of the many under-forty coaches who studies at School of Coaching Mastery and who hold their own with most of us older coaches. Apparently, that's surprising to a lot of people, including some coaches.

For instance, yesterday, the New York Times ran an article called, Should a Life Coach Have a Life First? about the growing trend toward younger coaches in this profession. I found the online comments on this article more interesting than the article, itself. They're loaded with misconceptions and skepticism from folks who aren't sure what life coaching is but suspect they don't like it, plus the occasional plug by an actual life coach that tends to seem self-serving. So I thought I would try to help clear up the confusion. Here goes...

1. One reason younger coaches do well is that life experience is only a fraction of what life coaches offer. As I tell my students, advice is the least of the deliverables you have to offer your clients. Coaching is far more than that. Author, David Rock, says life coaches help people think better. That might not sound like much, but if you need to make life-changing decisions, having someone help you think better is priceless. And that pretty much explains  why coaches command such high fees when everyone knows that advice is free.

2. Another reason is that experience is relative. Clients hire life coaches who are on a similar path, but further along. If you just graduated from college, for instance, and want a coach who can help you make that enormous transition from student to full-fledged adult in today's world (that's a big need), it makes sense to hire a coach who's a few years older than you, rather than someone your grandma's age.

3. A third reason younger coaches do well is that experience has a short shelf life in today's world. Maybe you have awesome experience on how to climb the corporate ladder from the 1960's through the 1990's, but you struggle with social media, smart phones, apps and tablets. If so, then you may not understand the culture, much less have the skills needed by today's workers, who are intra-preneurial and know that there's no gold watch, nor life-long pension waiting for them.

Let's face it, young coaching clients are an ever-renewing potential source of business for life coaches and some of them want young coaches who they can relate to.

Then again, Baby Boomers are still asking themselves questions like, "What do I want to be when my children grow up?" And in some cases, older coaches are the ones who can help middles-aged clients make better choices that lead to happier lives (another big need).

The real issue isn't how old your life coach is, but how much 1) personal development, and 2) coaching skill, they have under their belts. Too little personal development and their egos and issues will get in the client's way. Too little coaching skill and their clients' thinking and behavior won't be impacted enough to make a difference in their lives.

Rather than choose your coach based on age, I'd suggest you ask the following two questions:

1. Did someone you know and trust highly recommend a life coach who helped them achieve something that you want? Don't hire a coach just because his/her age is appropriate or marketing is convincing. Look for outside evidence of results.

2. Does your life coach have substantial coach-specific training (not just a related degree) and/or a certification from the IAPPC, IAC or ICF? Unless your coach has been at it for 20+ years, they need to be well trained and certified.

A good coach doesn't have to have both of the above, but they probably have at least one.

Here's my last thought on age and coaching, for whatever it's worth. In my twenties, I personally, would have made a lousy coach. I was too immature and had too many issues to work out. Not everyone improves with age, but I suspect that, like me, many coaches do.

What do you think? Should your life coach be older or younger?

If you want to become a certified coach and you're ready to get started, consider the Certified Positive Psychology Coach Program which leads to IAPPC certification. Our students range in age from their twenties to their seventies.

Find out all about it here:

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.

A month ago, I posted to this blog with questions about conversations that coaches dread and I mentioned that best-selling author, Deborah Brown-Volkman, and I are working on a related project...

Well, I'm ready to tell you about the 1st step in the related project: It's a series of 4 interactive webinars, hosted by Deborah and me on 4 types of conversations that coaches tend to dread and how to handle them.

You see, Deborah and I are both constantly asked by stressed-out coaches who are unprepared for tricky communication issues that come up all the time and we knew somebody needed to address this stuff, like...

• Clients who lie or don't follow through on fieldwork
• Potential clients who say they 'can't afford' you
• Clients who don't pay on time
• How to fix it when you've said the wrong thing

These issues aren't just embarrassing and stressful; the fear and confusion that come from not knowing what to say or how to handle tough situations like these can bring your success to a screeching halt!

So here's what we're doing to help: In these 4 one-hour Q&A webinars, Deborah and I will offer advice on how to handle the most-oft asked questions, but we won't stop there: You can ask your biggest questions and we'll answer on the spot.

Think of it as an injection of clarity that brings you the ease and confidence you want for yourself and your business - and we're doing it at a price that any savvy coach can handle:

Take one class or all four and get the answers you need on 4 Mondays, January 23rd to February 13th, 2-3 PM EST (GMT-5). They're just $30 per class...but if you act quickly you can save up to $40!

• How to Have Have Tough Conversations With Potential Coaching Clients

• How to Deal With Renegade Coaching Clients

• How to Create Ideal Coaching Clients With Advanced Communication Skills

• How to Have Conversations That Create Your Ideal Coaching Business
  

Here's a secret to all of these questions: The are all best handled proactively. But how can you set up yourself for success if you don't know what to expect? Easy. Ask your questions and listen to the questions and answers that other coaches share on these value-packed calls. Deborah and I know a lot and we're ready to share!

Seating is limited and classes are filling up. But if you act fast (a.k.a. proactively), you can save $10 on each class that you sign up for. How?

Register by January 20th and get each class for $20: Add the discount code below when you register online. Click 'Apply' and the cost of each class will be lowered to just $20. But you must use the discount code no later than 5 PM EST this Friday, January 20th.

Discount Code: Early20

Click below to register now:

If you've read blog posts on how to become a successful coach, you know that building your marketing list is a must.

As the saying goes, 'The money is in the list!' But things have changed. Now that inbound marketing is replacing traditional marketing for small business, the marketing list is a must for local face-to-face marketing, as well as for internet marketers.

Not only that, but social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, have permanently altered the definition of 'list', as well as how to manage a list and nurture more sales.

So if you think the size of your list is what matters or that email is your principal marketing tool, you're missing out on some huge opportunities to connect with your potential coaching clients and get hired by more people. In short, you're losing money.

What if you're a new coach who has no list at all, yet? You need a strategy for building one, right now. The good news is, you don't need a website to start building your list.

Learn the myths of list building for coaches and find out what really matters when it comes to marketing your coaching business with Coach 100.

Get started with the popular and FREE Coach 100 eBook.

Learn what Coach 100 is and where it comes from. Find out why it works and how you can put it to work for you.

The Coach 100 Business Success Program is highly effective even if you currently know nothing about marketing and sales. It is included for FREE when you join the Certified Positive Psychology Coach Program. Get certified by the IAPPC!

Get your FREE eBook now:

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:

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.

As most parents are, I am exposed to a lot of cartoon movies (most of them full of cleverly engineered cross-generational stimuli and layers) and also repeatedly to the same one, with a frequency inversely proportional to the child age.

When an adult starts watching the same cartoon for the nth time, he or she can react in two ways: blankly staring at the video letting his or her mind wander in a more interesting place or trying to consciously watch the movie paying attention to details escaped to the first nth minus 1 session.

Or it can be that the reactions mix, and that’s what happened to me watching a dialog between two young Vikings, Astrid and Hiccup, in the movie How to Train your Dragon. The dialog is 1 minute 5 seconds long and yesterday evening I suddenly realized that I was watching a masterful and efficient coaching session. Astrid is the coach and Hiccup the client. The relationship between the two is already well established, but it is the first time in the movie that Astrid purposefully tries to help Hiccup.

Here is the dialog with my comments:

To me, from now on, coaching like a Viking, is going to have the meaning of: make a shift happen in 1’5” or less, and Astrid is on my top ten list of masterful coaches.

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/

Visit David's Coach 100 Page Here.

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.