A NEW APPROACH TO BUILDING YOUR COACHING PRACTICE

If there’s any one central problem in the field of NLP, in the field of Coaching, and generally in the field of counseling, therapy, and personal development it is that many practitioners are really good with people and really poor with marketing and selling. As “people people” practitioners in these people-centric businesses, they know how to create rapport and help people through trying times or enable people to fulfill their dreams. But they are not so skilled in creating a commercially viable business. People skills— yes, they excel there. Business skills—well, no that’s not where they are at their best.

Statistics from Coach U. a few years ago were startling— 80 percent of graduates would not even be in the business one year later. In one year, 8 out of 10 of the Coach Graduates would have given up and returned to their old jobs. Why? Because while they might have known how to work in the business, they did not know how to work on the business sufficiently to create a commercially successful business.

Sadly this has been equally true in the field of NLP and other forms of self-development. When I first discovered this, I was literally shocked. I not only did not expect it, it went against all of the expectations I had about NLP. After all, NLP is about modeling excellence, so surely, if an NLP person came up against something that he or she didn’t know, a NLPer would simply search out some people who could do it and model them. Accelerated learning via modeling. Right? I thought so. But I thought wrong.

Anyway, Meta-Coaching from the beginning has taken a very different approach. From the first Meta-Coach Training in Sydney Australia— I always invite “expert” coaches to the training and interview them to discover their secrets. I figure that we could hardly do better than get a real- live highly successful “been there; done that” Coach and ask modeling questions to discover the secrets of the trade. And from the beginning also we have used the Matrix Model to detect the key frames of mind— beliefs, decisions, meanings, and intentions form the expert coaches.

By the way, this is one of the ways that the Meta-Coach Training System itself has continued to grow and evolve over the years. We have liberally stolen the highest and best ideas and practices from the experts and incorporated it into our training program! We have integrated their trade secrets into our training format, and we continue to do so.

And yet for all of this, the business part of Coaching has continued to be for many Coaches the most challenging aspect. Now true enough, for those Coaches truly committed to their own

success, there are some mentors who have stepped forward to offer one-on-one mentoring. There are also several Neuro-Semantic trainings focused on business: the Wealth Creation Training for how to use one’s passions and potentials to set up a business and create wealth, the Unleashing Leadership training, the Business Genius training (the Games Business Experts Play), and so on.

As Meta-Coach Trainers, we know that we can do better. So to facilitate the business intelligence of Meta-Coaches, beginning in September this year, we will devote an entire day to the requisite Business Skills wherein which we will work on the Matrix Business Plan, model Expert Coaches, focus on coaching to the business competencies, and facilitate the development of each Meta-Coach’s unique branding. We have some new exercises for developing the skills required for working on the business and a new meta-branding exercise.

In terms of business development, every business (even a business of one person) involves the following categories of activities:

1) Leadership: how you manage people— the human resources, capital, and creativity in your business and use human intelligence to innovate your products and services. This includes you managing you if you are a business of one (or of a few).

2) Management of Operations: how you administrate and deliver your product and services in a reliable way that creates a profitable business. How you handle the everyday details as you meta-detail from your vision and strategy.

3) Management of Protections: how you protect your business financially in terms of budgeting, cash flow, investments, negotiations, taxes, accounting, etc.

4) Presentations: how you market and how you sell your products and services as you identify your market, enter that market, qualify your clients, contact people, close, follow- up, etc. How you identify and create your unique brand, value proposition, and reputation in the minds of your marketplace.

Since business is all about adding value to people by solving problems—our focus in Meta- Coaching will enable you to identify your market niche—effectively articulate the value that you add and develop your edge that you can leverage in your market. To achieve this we will invite you to have a coaching experience of a fierce branding conversation. This will bring clarity as you both understand and express what you do and why it’s important, and in doing that you’ll learn how to articulate it effectively so that it becomes your “auditory business card.”

Understanding and expressing your business strategy is all about making your blueprint for how you couple your value proposition of what you offer so it will influence clients to choose you. All of this will enable you to create your brand as your story that you can then succinctly express in a memorable, compelling, engaging and emotionally moving way. And when you can do that, then you become your brand.