If we are truly committed to our own success, then surely success includes keeping our sanity while we get there! After all, the freedom of working for ourselves is part of why we’re doing this, right? So when are we going to start acting like we’re free?

The truth is, overwhelm is most often just a bad habit wanting to be broken. Whatever the reasons, we choose to feel overwhelmed. Like the boy who cried “wolf”, we’ve trained our brains and bodies to perceive challenges as emergencies. We’re actually OK, but don’t know that we are.

So how about making a different choice? I agree with David Risley’s smack-you-upside-the-head post about overwhelm. It’s time the vogue went out of our crazy busy lifestyles.

Overwhelm is caused by:

• Non-stop stimulation
• Procrastination and chronic disorganization
• Scarcity consciousness, and
• Not knowing how to resource

This is Your Brain in Rehab

It’s no wonder we’re all over-stimulated. There’s so much coming into our psychic space all the time — we’re never without connection to global media and entertainment (much of it anxiety-ridden).

The New York Times reports there’s a neurological reason that all that digital input doesn’t seem to make us any smarter. It turns out, when people keep their brains constantly stimulated with input, they miss the mental downtime they need to effectively learn from all that incoming information.

Think of your brain like a basin. Information coming in is like the flow coming from a faucet. If you leave the flow on full, your brain is soon overflowing and you’re in overwhelm.

Do you find yourself signing up for ever more expert newsletters, attending lots of free teleclasses, purchasing more ebooks? How often are you actually implementing what you “learn” from those sources? Most coaches cannot possibly take action on the amount of how-to information they access.

I think most of us secretly imagine it’s easier to go get more information than to implement what we’ve learned already. Taking in information is passive and seems risk-free. Taking action requires taking risk. But taking action is like the drain of the basin. It’s what makes the space for more useful information to come in.

The cure for the info-junkie:

• Develop the habit of mining your own wisdom, experience and knowledge first.
• Reach only for information you need right now to inspire or take the next immediate step.
• Integrate and implement what you learn. Commit to doing this before reaching for more information.

Move Forward

Taking action is also the key to beating those twin progress killers – disorganization and procrastination.

It’s not hard to find out how to overcome disorganization. Advice on how to get organized and “get things done” is one of the fattest info faucets out there. (Ironic, isn’t it?)

The key is to focus on one step at a time. Clear the decks. Block out your time. As David Risley puts it, bring one thing at a time under your control. Then move to the next.

Procrastination at bottom is a reluctance to make decisions. There may be a place for delaying a decision in your personal life, but when you are faced with a decision in your coaching business, make it. Postponing decisions creates clutter.

Of course, there is a risk of leaping before you have really looked. But the risk of doing nothing is far greater.

Here’s a confession. I make half-baked decisions in my business all the time. Mistakes, too. It can be embarrassing, but you have to be big enough to take a bit of embarrassment. And in the end, the mistakes either don’t matter, or they teach me something I wouldn’t have learned any other way. Plus – and here’s the real payoff – my business keeps moving forward.

It’s All in Your Mind

Taoists say that wherever your attention goes, that’s where your life energy goes. Whatever you focus on expands.

Modern life trains us to focus on what is missing, what is not going right. Building a business just redoubles that training, demanding that we fill the gaps and fix the problems in order to get results.

But if you allow your mind to become fixated on what is wrong, then overwhelm has you in its grip. Maybe you don’t believe you are enough (not good enough, not up to it). Maybe you believe you don’t have enough resources. My favorite version is “It will take so much time to do this.” This is overwhelm as a form of scarcity consciousness.

If you find yourself running this racket, the most important thing is to catch yourself in these thoughts, and consciously choose the beliefs you will hold instead. No one is the master of their thoughts all the time, so be willing to repeat this process over and over. Often it helps to write it down:

• the old tape you’re running, and
• the powerful statement you are choosing in its place.

Then (again), move into action – one deliberate step at a time.

5 Minute Resourcing

The long term cure for overwhelm is to cultivate a more contemplative life. This doesn’t have to be complicated. Check out this brief guide to life on Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits blog.

But don’t wait till you’ve achieved enlightenment. Begin by tracking your state of mind every day. When overwhelm starts brewing, take a five minute break from whatever you’re doing, and move away from as many sources of stimulation as you can. Do nothing else but move and breathe. You’ll quickly come back to center, refreshed and resourced.

Have you broken the overwhelm habit? How do you do it?

SHARE YOUR COMMENTS ONLINE AT: Overwhelm: A Bad Habit You Want to Break

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Here are three places to find reliable and quick inspiration that will catalyze ideas for your blog posts, coaching programs and products… maybe even your coaching business model.

Music & Art

To help my right brain engage when I’m generating anything – writing, planning or developing ideas into something usable – I stream Pandora online radio from my computer. With this online app, you can customize your musical taste. Consider buying it for $16/year – it’s well worth it to get rid of the ads.

Choose calming, wordless music – whatever works best to slow you down and keep your creativity flowing. (I like Karunesh, George Winston or David Darling.)

Anything you do to feed and exercise the artistic side of your brain will also help you bring more creative juice to your task list.

Nature

Nothing helps you get out of “monkey mind” like the natural world. I planted gardens and put up bird feeders right outside my office windows, and do my best to look away from my computer to rest my eyes several times each hour. If you have a window, watch the clouds roll by and the weather change. If not, take yourself outside more frequently.

During complex left-brain activity, human beings tend to breathe shallowly. If you’re feeling “stuck”, you might simply be out of oxygen, which is critical for creative process. So take a walk, and breathe in the outside world with all your senses. Moving your body helps you sequence out stress. And you’ll be resourced for what’s next in your coaching business.

Other People

Being a successful entrepreneur begins with realizing that you can’t get far in a vacuum. Observing and listening to other people is my favorite source of inspiration. Most anything you want to create for your coaching business can be informed by tracking:

• Your clients
• Competitors
• Mentors
• People you admire

If you’re targeting a viable coaching market, your clients will teach you most of what you need to know about to attract them, serve them well, and keep them coming back for more. And not only when you’re getting started, but as you continue to work with them, you build layers of understanding and appreciation for who they are. That’s how you experience a truly co-creative relationship.

“Competitors” are simply potentially collaborative peers. Your aim is not to compare yourself to them or copy them. Instead, pay attention to what they do, at certain times help promote them, and most importantly, allow them to show you how you can stand out in the crowd differently from them. There’s room out there for your authentic way of doing things.

Follow mentors and other people you want to emulate in social networks. Read their blogs and ezines, and pass them forward, not only for their content, but also as a model. Observe their product and program models, their delivery style, the different ways they promote and earn more.

• Save ideas for articles, programs and products in a “swipe” file (not to plagiarize but simply to spark your own original approach to the same topic, if it’s appropriate for your market). Immediately write a paragraph or two to get you off the blank page.
• Bookmark squeeze pages and share them with your webmaster to catalog ideas.
• If you read an email blast or auto-responder that really grabs you, notice what words and phrases kept you reading.

You will always do everything your own way, but why not get a seed of inspiration from your environment? You don’t have to implement everything now. Let these ideas wash over you and watch as a spark ignites inside you.

Observing thought leaders and experts in your field without attachment helps you switch on your originality. And if you put a bit of weekly attention toward cultivating this skill, you will very quickly discern what concepts, models and approaches best fit your own sensibilities and values. And then you can codify a way of doing things in your coaching business that’s perfect for you.

Staying inspired in the day to day building of your coaching business will bring you more joy and prosperity, and a greater positive impact on your clients as well. Please share here the ways you like to get inspired.

SHARE YOUR COMMENTS ONLINE AT: Sources of Inspiration for Your Coaching Business

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It’s not really a question if you already know the answer.

That’s true about the most powerful coaching questions.

Learning to draw out your client’s wisdom rather than impose your own agenda is one of the foundations of coach training. Is it time to refresh that lesson? It’s so easy to get caught up in the task list and learning curves, and forget to lead with curiosity in a coaching session.

No matter how insightful you are (and you are insightful!) the most impactful moments in coaching are drawn out of your clients themselves. There’s no formula for those moments.

That’s why open-ended questions generally work better than yes-or-no questions in coaching. They leave the field open to the unexpected. The conversation can go in any direction from an open-ended question, and that leaves space for the magic to arrive.

Coaching magic can be courted, but it can’t be forced. No list of “canned” coaching questions holds the key to that transformational shift your client is on the threshold of.

How do you call magical coaching moments into being? By being fully present with your client, ready to go wherever the moment leads.

A lot goes into that kind of mindfulness, but its essence is simple. Call it witnessing with acceptance. Call it showing up for what shows up. Or call it trust – trust in the client’s wisdom, and your own.

This kind of trust can only be learned through “live” experience coaching real clients – and the more the better. But even the most experienced coaches can’t force the magic. All any of us can do is hold space for it to appear. And sometimes experience can betray you, if it leads you to lean too heavily on what has worked before.

I have my own storehouse of powerful coaching questions, which evolves over time. The Coaching Commons has published a list of brilliant coaching questions from their readers. Maybe there are certain questions you rely on too, because they work over and over again.

Like the other tools in your coaching toolbox, these favorite questions are valuable in themselves, but they are more valuable for the experiences you went through to learn them. Whether those experiences felt positive or negative at the time, they taught you something about what you can trust, in yourself and in your clients.

So go ahead and develop your list of questions, but make no mistake – the truly great coaching questions arise in the magic of the moment.

When you have been through enough sessions where something magical happens, you’ll believe in the serendipity of it, and see how it can’t be controlled. You can open to it, but you can’t will it into being.

If you enter a coaching session like entering a performance, you will limit what can occur. Instead, read your client’s session prep before the session, let your curiosity arise, jot a question or two – but then release any attachment to your preparation, and to your ideas about what the outcome will be, so you enter the session relaxed, grounded and fully present.

Then you have done all you can do. If the moment is right, your natural curiosity will lead you to that truly great coaching question. And your client’s answer will surprise and delight both of you.

It’s your turn. Share your favorite coaching questions by commenting below.

SHARE YOUR COMMENTS ONLINE AT: The Essence of a Great Coaching Question

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Just thinking about it makes me tired.

I didn’t know any better. All my peers were picking a topic they felt passionate about as their coaching niche. I blindly followed them onto that rocky road and never stopped to question whether that was the way to make a good living as a coach. Turns out, it wasn’t.

After two years, very few clients and paltry income later, I did shift to targeting a niche market — women entrepreneurs — which was way too big of a market with massive competition. And still I was scraping by, feeling like a fraud, and running frighteningly low on resources.

Still, whenever I did get a client, they valued my coaching. And I loved it. But I knew what I was doing wasn’t sustainable. I was working too hard for poor results.

I remember the day I finally let go of my resistance and narrowed my niche. I observed that the coaches who had plenty of clients, profitable products, and big ticket programs also had distinguished themselves, not by being an expert, but by focusing their attention on a small group of accessible people. They had become THE go-to person for a very small, accessible group of people who seek out professional support to grow personally and professionally.

And here’s the thing: they weren’t trying to convince people to buy their coaching. But they were in high demand as a coach. It was only one simple mindset shift away all along.

This life lesson falls into the already very full “if I only knew then what I know now…” bucket.

When I narrowed my coaching niche to targeting one viable market was when I became truly committed to my success, not just to the idea of coaching. That real commitment, as well as the pinpointed focus that came with it, was a huge breakthrough. An immense RELIEF.

It felt like the blindfold and hobbles came off. And I realized I could market much less and have a bigger impact. In fact, clients started calling me ready to hire me!

Fast forward to today. The last time I had to convince someone to buy my coaching is a dim memory. In fact, I haven’t given a sample session in eons. Free coaching? Only as a conscious gift, never as an act of desperation to get a client. I can afford to be very choosy about who I give my time to, since I targeted a niche market that will go the distance.

As the demand for my coaching grew and my bank account filled, I breathed a sigh of relief — the relief I thought would come to me when I quit my JOB to become a coach was finally mine! And the freedom… it’s as good as they say it is.

I’ve gone on to make other classic mistakes as a life and business coach. Most have been character building and beautifully tested my resolve. But YOU can skip most of those mistakes. There’s just no need to waste your time and heartache on client attraction methods that don’t work.

Speaking at the Chamber, endless live networking hoping someone will do more than smile and nod their head when you tell them about coaching. That’s what I call selling your wares. I won’t do it anymore and you don’t have to either.

No more beating the pavement for you. You can coach more, have more long term clients, get more referrals and leverage every bit of your time because the way you’ll enroll clients is so efficient.

Ease and grace. True service. More soul-satisfying coaching.

Let me show you in 8 weeks what it took me three years to learn.

Enroll in the IDEAL COACHING MARKET Workshop!

SHARE YOUR COMMENTS ONLINE AT: My Biggest Mistake as a Life Coach

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But then there are people like Google CEO Eric Schmidt – the lead architect of the most successful business growth story in recent history. When asked to share the best business advice he ever received, he said “Everyone needs a coach.”

So, is coaching worth paying for? The answer seems to be: It depends on WHO you ask.

I think I know where you come out on this question, or you wouldn’t be staking your career on the power of coaching. But here’s my point:  Draw your clients from groups of people that believe coaching is worth the investment.

So how do you find and connect with those people? The answer may not be obvious, but it is straightforward.

Choose a Niche Market Full of Seekers

Certain groups of people, because of who they are, will readily invest in their own personal and professional development. Here are three examples of niche markets that are full of seekers:

• Mompreneurs know that adding a business to their list of responsibilities is a stretch, and they want help rising to the challenge.
• C-suite executives know they need allies to help them grow into the leader they want to be.
• Coaches too, are hungry to learn, grow and develop themselves in multiple ways.

The best way to find people who truly “get” the value of coaching is to focus on attracting a specific group of people that you know will invest in their own development.

Meet Them Where They Live

I know that you didn’t launch a coaching business so you could market. You got into coaching to make a difference. But if you want to do that and financially prosper at it, then connect with people who will invest in your services, and keep connecting with them.

That’s what smart marketing does — it helps you build relationships and trust with those people. Smart marketing starts with listening, just like good coaching does.

When you’re coaching a client you are primarily listening and asking questions, right? You draw out their insights about where they want to go and what’s getting in their way. You listen into what they say. You tune into where they are coming from, so that your questions and responses will land with them.

It’s time for coaches to stop trying to convince people that coaching will help them. Instead, meet your prospects where they live. This approach to marketing plays to your strengths as a coach, because it centers around what the client is seeking, rather than what you do.

Simple Marketing for Coaches

1. Choose a specific, easy-to-find, group of seekers to serve. You don’t need to limit your client base to these people. But do focus your marketing efforts on them and use their language.
2. Find out what they most want and what is stopping them from getting it. What will motivate them to invest in their personal or professional development? What are they seeking as a return on that investment?
3. Then use your powerful coaching skills to help them get what they want.

With this approach, you will never again have to sell anyone on the idea of coaching, or on your particular flavor of coaching. But you do need to believe in the value of your services. This is your chance to show that coaching is worth paying for.

I teach this approach in my workshop, How to Choose and Champion Your Ideal Coaching Market. Enroll now and learn how to connect reliably with prospects who want and will value what you offer.

SHARE YOUR COMMENTS ONLINE AT: Is Coaching Worth Paying For?

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So many coaches miss this, because they already know what they’re selling – their coaching services. It’s a natural way to think, but it’s also a classic marketing mistake. They try to sell coaching as the solution before they’ve even asked what the prospect sees as the problem.

You have a profound appreciation of the power of coaching, and that’s essential. But if it leads you to try to sell coaching, you may be setting yourself up for poor results. The basic law of the marketplace is supply and demand. You can supply all you want of something you think has value, but if there is no demand for it, it won’t sell.

That’s why established businesses do research before they launch a new product. I realize “market research” sounds pretty off-putting – technical, boring, expensive. But at its core, it’s just listening to people to find out what they want. What could be more coach-like than that?

I call this “listening to your market” – and you have everything you need to start doing it. To prove it, try these steps:

1. Find 10 people in your coaching market, and ask them for a brief informational interview. Be clear that you’re not selling anything, but you want their help to understand what matters to people in your niche market.
2. Ask questions that draw out specific, practical information about what people in your market want most – their highest priority goals, the problems they are most motivated to solve.
3. Pay close attention to the language they use to describe these goals and problems.

If you do this, it will change how you think about enrolling new clients. You’ll understand what I mean when I say that marketing your coaching business is not about you. It’s about your prospects – what they want to achieve, and what is getting in their way. Marketers refer to what stands between a prospect and their goal as the “Gap”.

Understand what the Gap is for people in your niche market, weave that into everything you communicate about your coaching business, and you’ll get more effective at enrolling new clients.

Whenever I encounter a coach who’s having trouble enrolling a steady stream of ideal clients, these are the first questions I ask them:

Do you have a viable coaching market?
Do you know what they most want?

The answers to those two questions are the keys to attracting ideal clients and being in high demand as a coach. Nothing else will give you more leverage.

Want support to get those answers for your coaching business? I have a process that could save you years of heartache and tons of money putting out marketing messages that you don’t know whether your prospects will buy. I’ve streamlined it into an 8-week hands-on workshop where you come away with:

• your ideal niche market,
• an understanding of what they most want,
• a marketing message they will resonate with, and
• titles for a suite of coaching programs they will be motivated to buy.

Find out more about the Ideal Coaching Market workshop here.

SHARE YOUR COMMENTS ONLINE AT: Do Your Next Coaching Clients Want What You’re Offering Them?

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Recently, a company called ThoughtLead offered “the shortest marketing conference ever”. The Influencer Project featured 60 thought leaders who offered sixty seconds worth of their best advice on how to increase your influence online. I’m impressed with the creative way that ThoughtLead offered value, started a meaningful conversation and built more influence with their market.

Six Tips to Build Influence With Your Coaching Niche

Here are six influence tips that you might not have thought of before. The first two are social media tips. The last four tips have a common theme weaving through them. Did you catch it?

Get Your Message Out There with Online Video
“Online video is probably the fastest way to get your message out there to increase visibility and to get clients and customers online. Very simple — find a good camera, there’s lots of different types online. The Cannon Vixia is a personal favorite… make sure your lighting is good and you have an external microphone. Come up with some great content — it can be two to three minutes, it does not have to be a lot. Create content around your area of expertise and then distribute with gusto!”
Shama Kabani, author of The Zen of Social Media Marketing

Repeat Your Tweets
“You should repeat your tweets. I repeat them four times every eight hours. And I see about the same amount of click-throughs for each one. So no matter what people tell you—repeat your tweets.”
Guy Kawasaki, co-founder of AllTop.com

Stop Talking About Your Products and Services
“Everything that you create on the web should be valuable information for those people that you’re trying to reach. And it shouldn’t focus on what your company happens to do or what your products and services happen to do. People don’t care about products and services; what they care about are themselves. And they care very, very deeply about solving their problems.”
David Meerman Scott, bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR

Talk To and About Other People
“… if you’re looking to influence a certain thought leader, or even just a group of people, talking about them, talking to them, instead of about yourself is something that I find exceptionally powerful.”
Yaro Starak, Entrpreneurs-Journey.com

Start Thought Provoking Conversations
“…engage readers in a conversation. And that means introducing topics that are thought provoking and interesting, and on which people have a lot to say. People look to you to start a conversation, to lead a conversation and to engage them in topics that really catch their interest.”
Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, Happiness-Project.com

Earn Trust Through Consistency
“Consistency demonstrates commitment. So, for the people that you’re trying to serve, if you are consistent, they’re going to keep coming back. You’re going to earn their trust because you’re consistent. They believe that you’re committed to them for the long haul.”
Michael Port, author of Book Yourself Solid

The theme that carries through the Influencer Project presentations is what I call becoming a “champion” for your market. Make all of your messages about them – what they care about, what they want most. Your essence, style and story will flow into your messages to attract the people who resonate most with you.

Are you championing your ideal coaching market?

Do they see you as influential?

What can you do in the next 90 days to amp up that influence and connect more with what is most important to your target market?

Share your comments on this blog.

SHARE YOUR COMMENTS ONLINE AT: How to Be Influential in Your Coaching Niche

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