confessions of a coach

I was talking to my brother yesterday who runs a successful and expanding computer company teamsolve.co.uk

I asked for his top tips on what I should do as I seek to expand my coaching practice.

His advice was simple:

1. Forget all the fancy website stuff I've been trying to do - as initially my website is an on-line brochure rather than a key source of new clients.
   
2. Do get top level links from as many sites as possible, and provide reciprocal links
   
3. Follow up the associate work I have been planning to do with key career management consultancies - I do have an interview with one soon and should consider applying to others. These are the foundation blocks of my business plan and I have been neglecting them
   
4. Simplify my business card - he says the one I am currently using contains as much information as a leaflet and that is not its purpose. - So get a new business card and print some black and white leaflets - and distribute them.
   
5. Make better use of my professional memberships on my publicity literature - eg CIPD, International Coach Federation and Coaching Academy logos
   
6. Since I am CIPD qualified - see what HR consultancy work I can get during the initial start-up period of my business - cold call and send letters to companies within a 25 mile geographic radius offering my Human Resource services
7. Get back to basics - people buy from people so I need to get out there, networking and being seen.
8. Bottom-line guard my finances. The money that I had ear-marked for the next 6 months in business, he told me to try and make it last 12 - even if that meant getting associate work or a part-time or temporary job while I am expanding my business.
9. Cut up my credit cards they are just pure temptation
   
10. His other advice - consider sticking with business and career coaching rather than life coaching... that I am still wondering about...
    

So after all that advice, what next....

Well I did manage to shred my credit cards today - helped by my latest credit card bill of over £1K in a month - approx £500 of which was business expenditure! On my limited budget, it is questionnable whether I should have spent that much.

I have managed to find someone who will do me some professional photos at around £6 an hour - a bargain! Once I have these, I will submit my new photo and a 1 page description of what I have to offer to a number of sites which have a find a coach service. I am already listed on the International Coach Federation website, but don't have a current listing with the Coaching Academy despite qualifying with distinction from them in January 2004.

I have prepared a CV for a career management consultancy, I now need to draft a covering letter, quit stalling and actually send it off - so that I can get some associate work

The rest I still need to do....

Struggling not to be disheartened though by the scale of the challenge. His bottom line was set an intial seed money budget for the business - but then do not increase it until sales/client levels justify it. Instead find free or very cheap ways of advertising

I really enjoy writing, so it has always been in my plan to contact the local paper to see if they will let me write a regular coaching or women's column. I even have the contact details on my fridge that I gleaned from a chamber of commerce networking meeting... Now all I need to do is the same thing I tell my clients STOP procrastinating and actually do it. At least I have a stock of articles ready to send which does help.

There was a reason, I called this blog confessions of a coach... So like anyone else I struggle to practice what I preach. However, two weeks ago I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad - since then I have put in place 2 of its pieces of advice

1. Do a direct sales and marketing course to help me in expanding my coaching, speaking and writing practice
2. Find successful role models and learn from them

This week I have therefore done a number of things for the first time... If I look at this year as whole I have done so many things for the first time I have now lost count... To me, that's what makes life interesting to be constantly learning, expanding, growing - continually moving closer to my dream.

How about you? My question to my readers is this: How good are you at learning from others? When was the last time you did something for the first time? Is it time you stopped just reading about what others are doing and started working on your own life, goals, dream and aspirations? Is there an area of your life, whether you know you need a bit of outside perspective and accountability? Can I make a suggestion... get a coach or find someone to buddy up with and work on your goal - make your dreams become reality.

Thanks for reading,

Michelle

PS If you want any help from a real person, who can help you work through your own answers and solutions to achieve your goals and dreams- call me on 07779 305825 or e-mail me or visit my website.

I went on a Speaker's Bootcamp this weekend with Frank Furness - an international speaker of some repute. I found it great. I really enjoyed learning both how to be a great speaker AND how to sell my services. On the way back from the course I stopped off at my parents...

My mum looked at my website and pointed at various typos and links not working! Fine, I thought as soon as I get home I'll sort them out. Since then my computer has crashed so many times I have lost count, and it keeps refusing to recognise my keyboard and mouse! Typical since I had been "sharing" on the course I'd been on about the great website I was building and asking people to look at it!

From a coaching perspective, this is a classic example of how lack of day-to-day maintenance can sabotage even the grandest vision. Although in an ideal world I would go out and buy a brand new computer - preferably a laptop - the bottom line is that my computer needs, in technical speak, "rebuilding". This means backing up all the data, reloading all the programs and then reinserting the data again. A job for my hard-working IT expert of a husband.

Many of us have lives exactly my computer. We expect to be able to continue to function as goal and dream achieving adults, often without any attention to what's going on in the inner workings of our lives, our true selves. Its then that we get into trouble and things start going wrong. What we need is to be able to record our current position, so we don't lose the lessons that we have learned so far - but then effectively we need to be debugged (de-cluttered) from life's baggage and to have our main settings restored. We then need to be almost re-programmed with a more helpful set of values and beliefs that allow us to achieve our true desires and goals in life.

If you want help restoring and reprogramming your life for success, contact michelle@coachingis4u.com or ring 07779 305825.

PS To give another analogy, if you were building a one-storey building, basic foundations are okay - if you want to build a multi-storey building or even a skyscraper - you will need to pay a lot more attention to your foundation. Its the same with your dreams and goals. If you only have low level dreams and expectations, you won't need a lot in the way of foundations, the bigger the dream, the greater the need for a solid foundation. Coaching is a way of laying strong foundations for a better future. Call me NOW on 07779 305825 or visit my main website: coachingis4u.com

Although I had an existing coaching website: www.trustworksplus.com I decided that I wanted to radically change it. I don't know about you, but I'm not very good at maintaining things - I find it much easier to pioneer, to create from scratch than to go back and give something an overhaul. So I decided to set up a new website and looked at what domain names were out there and came up with coachingis4u.com . Having published my website using MSPublisher initially, I am now looking at low-cost ways of making it more professional. We have Frontpage software but at the moment it looks a bit intimidating - I'll let you know when I get round to trying it.

I'm also in the process of setting up autoresponders - but I have a list of at least 8 different types of messages that I need to create and publish - so at the moment I'm taking a break and writing this instead! It all seems very technical at times....

I only found out about blogs a couple of months ago when I read in an HR magazine that someone had been sacked for slagging off their company in a blog (not of course wanting to scare any of you). I then found out a friend of mine Caroline, an avid Home Schooler, has serveral blogs - and if you do a search on grammar lap books - she will come up on the first page apparently! It sounds about as Greek to me as autoresponders and blogs did when I first started reading about them.

Apparently the trend with websites today - is to use blogs to create interest in your website and links into it - but also to set up your website so that you create passive, residual income. So that is also a new topic of learning for me. So not only am I advised to write blogs, autoresponder messages, ezine articles, reports and even e-books but I should also be exploring the audio world with audio clips and teleclasses. I'll let you know how I get on... currently battling against overwhelm....

Recently I took voluntary redundancy so I could follow my dream and set up my own practice as a Life and Career Coach. I have been coaching people informally for a number of years on a paid and a pro-bono basis and now I want to see if I can turn coaching into a business.

I did Robert Dilt's logical levels exercise about 5 or 6 years ago, to determine what my core mission was - in the end the only way I could describe it was that I wanted to be a physiotherapist for the mind, body, soul and spirit. I then looked at different ways I could achieve that - both in terms of normal career opportunities, freelance work and even through the church.

My husband, Jeremy, decided he wanted to go to Regents Theological College and retrain with a view to becoming a minister, so I had to put my dreams on hold for a while to allow him to do that. It was a 3 year course and as you can imagine, being a pro-active person, I hate waiting for anything. So funnily enough, one year into the course I had enough of just living Jeremy's dream and wanted to live my own! Luckily, Jeremy supported me all the way. I stayed in work and did a coaching course with the life coaching academy - and got pregnant with my second child!

I did most of my coaching assignments while on maternity leave then went back to work in a Human Resources department of a big blue chip company and hoped that I might be able to use coaching in my day- job. It didn't work out, and I grew more and more unhappy particularly at work - until in the end I was at the point where I just wanted to resign my job! At this point I was still supporting my husband and it would have been financial suicide in my eyes to quit, nevertheless I felt I was hanging on at work by a thread. Thankfully, the company was going through a restructure by this point, and the possibility of voluntary severance was looming relatively large on the horizon. Even more fortunately from my perspective, I was given the opportunity to leave with a full 10 months salary - enough to pay off my debts or to start my own business!

In the end I decided to pay off all the high interest incurring debts, while keeping about 6 months money to live on / set up my business with. So here I am...