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The Business and Practice of Coaching

This book is divided into four parts: Positioning (clarification about what is the coaching profession); Differentiation (how to explore your strengths and define your uniqueness as a coach so you stand out in the marketplace); Entrepreneurship (how to increase the chances of success of your business venture); Profiles in Coaching (examples of coaches who make a good living doing what they love). It also has an Appendix with some helpful resources.

Part I (Positioning) has three chapters that go over the short but rich history of coaching. How it emerged in the 1980s, to its media hypes and lows, and its maturation as a recognized profession. Also how coaching is different from therapy and consulting, and what elements are essential to become a masterful coach.

Part II (Differentiation) with three chapters, starts by coaching you through 4 questions designed to define your coaching specialty – what is your expertise (e.g., executive, business, life coaching). Then, it goes on to help you identify your client base or target market (who you want to serve with your coaching practice), and helps you define a business plan around your vision, purpose and mission. The authors also clarify the top eight marketing strategies that can help you attract ideal clients.

Part III (Entrepreneurship) from chapter 7 to 10 takes you through a reflection about the importance of developing an entrepreneurial mind-set, how to nurture your business persona, avoiding pitfalls and developing wise practices such as budgeting, how to establish coaching fees, service packages and revenue streams. Grodki and Allen also advise on how to stay safe and legal in our litigious society.

Finally, part IV (Profiles in Coaching) illustrates different coaching specialities, giving concrete examples of successful coaches (executive and leadership coaches, business and career coaches, life and wellness coaches, creativity and relationship coaches, etc.).

The authors give a sober and realistic review about the business of coaching. They speak about the potentialities of this field and also about the hard work implied in starting an entrepreneurial venture. Grodki and Allen provide useful material for helping new coaches to establish themselves. Masterfully through the book, they maintain a coaching approach providing many exercises for readers to find their own way through the journey of initiating their business of a coaching practice.

The Business and Practice of Coaching:

Finding Your Niche, Making Money, & Attracting Ideal Clients

Lynn Grodzki, LCSW, PCC

Wendy Allen, PhD

W. W. Norton & Company

www.wwnorton.com

2005, 299 pages

ISBN: 978-0-393-70462-4

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“Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
- Viktor E. Frankl

This is one of my favorite quotes.
Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist who survived 3 years in Nazi concentration camps. There he lost his wife, his unborn child, his parents, and most of his friends, and in spite of all these terrible life circumstances, he rebuilt his life, remarried, had a child, developed a great psychotherapy model and wrote many books including the famous “Man’s Search for Meaning.”

He must have had a great genetic set point for positivity and happiness, but he also worked a great deal on his mindset.

I love this quote because, we usually see a stimulus as something that activates a response almost automatically.

There Frankl sees a space.

A brief space where we have the power to choose our response.

A brief space where we can learn to be creators of our lives and not just be reactors.

Ready for a practical exercise?

Write down on a piece of paper the word “reactivity.”

Do you see the letter “c” between the “a” and the “t”?

If you take this letter out, the “c”, and put it at the beginning of the word -
what word do you read now?

Quite amazing!

We have to remember that:

Small changes can produce big changes.

When things are going bad in your life or business and you really try hard to focus on the positive, it doesn’t really seem to make a big difference in the overall picture.

If you find yourself in this situation, the tendency is to throw in the towel and give up.

But this would be like waiting for a pot of water to boil and, just because it takes time, you give up and turn off the heat.

Negative emotions are usually strong, like taking a cold shower – you really feel it!

Positivity is slower to be felt – it takes more time to warm up.

Yes, it’s not by noticing a beautiful flower that you are going to overcome the negativity in your life.

But if we keep our eyes open to beauty, things that make us wonder, things that inspire us, that raise our curiosity and interest, then slowly we can start to feel the difference.

Like the water pot on the stove, if you keep looking at it and wondering when the water is going to boil, it will certainly feel like a long time.

Instead, focus on the small stuff. Small things can make a big difference in the long run – you just have to keep going.

And get support too, surround yourself with positive people, speak to your coach, whatever works for you, just do it!

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If you enjoyed this post, probably you would like to read How to Increase Your Positivity, too.

http://www.amazecoaching.com/2011/08/03/positivity/

Feel free to share and leave your comments!

• Look around the room and count how many red objects you see.

• Do it now before reading further.

• Now that you know how many red objects you saw, do you have any idea how many blue objects were there?

If you are like most of us, you didn’t notice the blue objects.

So look around one more time and count the blue objects around you.

Quite amazing!

It’s similar to when we buy a new car and suddenly we are more aware of a particular brand or color of another car. If our mind is focused in on one thing, we often will see more of it around us.

Think about this. Is your mind more focused on negative or positive emotions?

It’s difficult to ignore the negative, it screams at us like the colored pen which our teachers used to correct our essays. It’s more difficult to see the positive, it’s the way most of us are and also the way we train ourselves.

As Sonja Lyubomirsky, in her book, The How of Happiness, shares that our happiness and well-being are determined by the following:

- 50% Genetic set point. We are born with a set baseline or potential to which we tend to return, even after a major setback or triumph (death of a spouse, winning the lottery).

- 10% Life circumstances: being poor or rich, healthy or unhealthy, beautiful or plain, married, or divorced, etc.

- 40% Thought patterns, behavior, and intentions.

Scientific research shows that 40% of what determines our happiness has to do with our mindset, that is, what we think and do on a daily basis.

So this means that we can train ourselves to see more positivity around us.

Focus on what bring us:

- joy,

- gratitude,

- serenity,

- interest,

- hope,

- pride,

- amusement,

- inspiration,

- awe, and of course,

- love.

This reminds of the old story (adapted by B. Fredrickson):

One evening, an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside all people.

He said:

- My son, the battle is between two “wolves” inside us all.

One is Negativity. It’s anger, sadness, stress, contempt, disgust, fear, embarrassment, guilt, shame and hate.

The other is Positivity. It’s joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspirations, awe, and above all, love.

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather:

- Which wolf wins?

The old Cherokee simply replied:

- The one you feed.

In sum, everyday, every moment we have to decide what wolf to feed – negativity or positivity.

If you enjoyed this post, probably you would like to read The Three Good Things Exercise, too.

http://www.amazecoaching.com/2010/01/03/the-three-good-things-exercise/

When I work with people trying to change their lives, I usually speak about a model of change developed by a team of psychologists in the 90s*. The first point to make clear is that change is complex enough to have many models trying to explain it. The one I’m going to described below is one of my favorites. It emerged from the studies of successful self-changers, that is, people who successfully change important behaviour in their lives without professional help (for instance, to stop smoking).

According to this model, if someone wants to change a habit or behavior, they will go through a 6 stage process.

During the first stage, they are in pre-contemplation. Here people don’t see any need for changing, in spite of friends and family thinking otherwise. Imagine somebody with worn-out clothes to the point of having holes in it, but yet rationalizing that they are OK and they don’t need to buy new ones.

The second stage is named contemplation, since people realize that there is something that they are better off changing, yet they don’t know how or they don’t feel quite ready to do it, (and they use the typical excuses referred to above). It is like if the person with worn-out clothes looks at herself in the mirror and realizes that she really needs new clothes, but she keeps contemplating this need and the best that she can do is window shop. She can feel that she doesn’t have enough money (read resources), or she is looking for the perfect clothes or the best deal, etc. We can spend lots of time in this stage spinning our wheels without going anywhere.

Eventually we can move to the preparation stage, where we really start to devise a plan with concrete action steps with dates of implementation. “OK, today is Saturday and I’m going to this shopping mall, to that specific store. I know that I need these items on this list and I have enough credit in my account to get them.”

Then, if we don’t take a step backwards and start to doubt our own plans (“Maybe I should research more”), we move on to the action stage where we visibly modify our behaviors and surroundings. This stage has all the glory, but could not happen without the others before it. It’s like the victory of running a marathon. That couldn’t happen without the needed preparation and intention of doing it.

Moreover, if you run the marathon and stop exercising afterwards or if you buy new clothes but don’t take care of them or expect them to last forever, soon enough you will be at least 2 steps backwards, back in the contemplation or worse – denying the need to change and arguing that “I already did that, but it didn’t work.”

To sustain a new habit or change in our life, we have to go through a maintenance stage where we begin to consolidate the new habits, behaviors and patterns. Only if we persist and keep going two steps forward and not giving up when we take a step backwards, will we be able to reach a plateau where these new habits and behaviors become automatic and second nature to us. This is the last stage of the change process and a new starting point to continue learning, evolving and changing.

Very important – this is not a linear process where you go from stage 1, to 2, then 3, then 4, 5, and 6. The best image to describe the changing process in an ascending spiral like the plant in the photo. There are ups and downs, steps backwards and forwards, with the important thing to keep going, learning for the relapses and keep trying.

TIP: Get a good support team and this process becomes easier and even a fun one.

My last adventure on this domain has to do with staying healthy and fit.

I managed to loss my pregnancy weight in about 12 months, which felt great, but I’m not finding the time to exercise regularly. I do some weight resistance training once a week and I keep this going because my personal trainer comes to the house every week at the same time and she really gives me a workout.

Yet to stay healthy, I know I need to have some regular cardio sessions too. I love to walk. When we are on vacation in Portugal or California, I really walk a lot. I do easily more than 10,000 steps per day (measured by my handy-dandy pedometer). But here in Phoenix, I have to confess that my daily step count is only around 4,000 steps! This means that I’m living a sedentary life with all its health risks (even if we are not overweight).

To add salt to the wound, I work from home and spend most of my day in front of the computer or on the phone coaching my clients. The reality was that I was spending more than 7 hours seated between the time on the computer, a little bit of TV at night, reading and phone time. Not a very healthy life style!

For months I was trying to go regularly to the gym to listen to my podcast or other audio material while walking on the treadmill, but the best I managed was to go once a week and not every week. I have many irons in the fire and after getting my daughter from preschool it’s family time.

I was in a dilemma without knowing how to solve my challange. Then my personal trainner (Jacky Burke at Body Definitions) told me about this all movement around working standing up. It sounded great, but I love my office and I did not fancy to the idea of having to change my big beautiful desk or even replacing my loved reading chair by a treadmill. But I started to look on the web and researched about this idea (I don’t need a big motivation to start googling anyway ). Surprise, surprise, I found out that there are retrofit solutions to raise our computer screens and keyboards without having to buy a new desk (one excuse gone!), and that there is even a company that does a treadmill with a detached control panel that can be kept under our desk (another excuse gone)!!

So, I decided literally to walk my talk about being more physically active during my workday. I now have the stand, so I spend most of my time typing while standing, and the great thing about it is that I can also lower it down to work seated on my exercise ball to have a break or write some paper notes. I’m still waiting for the treadmill, but I already feel more alert and energized with my new working environment.

Please feel free to speak your mind. I would love to read and respond to your comments.

Let’s keep walking our talk,

Ana

P.S.:

If you want more information about joining this uprising, I’m posting several links below with useful resources.

Workspace Planner Tool: http://www.computingcomfort.org/create2.asp

Adjustable Screen and Keyboard Stand: http://www.ergotron.com/WorkFit/tabid/640/language/en-US/default.aspx

Treadmill that fits under the regular desk: http://www.treaddesk.com/

General information: http://www.juststand.org/

And of course for those who live in the Phoenix area, the website of my personal trainer: http://bodydefinitions.com/

The exercise is about 6 steps to see ourselves more clearly, and it’s a great way to explore traits we dislike in others and to discover their hidden messages. When we obsess about a situation or a particular person, when we keep thinking about it all day long, ruminating possible or past scenarios in our head – it’s a way for our subconscious mind to try to communicate something to us. Many times the situations or the person with which we are obsessing about are just mirrors that are reflecting something in ourselves that needs our attention. Now that I did this exercise, I can attest to its power! What a great exercise for an insightful journaling hour!

Try it for yourself the next time you catch yourself obsessing about a conversation or something else. Click here and follow Martha Beck’s 6 steps. Afterwards, come back here and feel free to share your thoughts about this exercise.

Learn, grow and evolve!

Ana

P.S.: If you like this type of inspirational and self-help material, then Like AMAZE Coaching on Facebook! Everyday I post some material for your personal development, it’s all free and always available 24/7!

Even the person who is walking on the top of tight rope cannot be totally still to keep her balance!

It’s important to clarify what a balanced life looks like for us (everybody’s vision is different) and then walk our talk by being aware if we are walking away from our vision or being our vision.

It helps to ask oneself:

1- What is on my plate?

To have a system to capture our to-dos, ideas, etc, in such a way that we can free our minds to focus on what we’re doing at the moment.

2- What are my priorities?

Having our priorities clear is an essential element to be in balance.

Then, it becomes easier to:

3- Define a plan of action to do what we want to do in order to respect or get closer to our vision (even if the plan of action is just taking a break for resting).

Try it and tell me how it works for you.

“They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms–to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” p. 66

“It is this spiritual freedom–which cannot be taken away–that makes life meaningful and purposeful.” p. 67

“It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future…And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force is mind to the task.” p. 73

“As we said before, any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength in the camp has first to succeed in showing him some future goal. Nietzsche’s words, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,”…Whenever there was an opportunity for it, one had to give them a why–an aim–for their lives, in order to strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence. ” p. 76

“Whatever we had gone through could still be an asset to us in the future. And I quote from Nietzsche: “That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.” p. 81-82

Part Two and the Postscript–shorter than 60 pages–are where Frankl summarizes is therapeutic model, Logotherapy. He defines it as a meaning-centered psychotherapy. In his words:

“Let me explain why I have employed the term “Logotherapy” as the name for my theory. Logos is a Greek word which denotes “meaning.” Logotherapy… focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man’s search for such a meaning. according to logotherapy, this striving to find meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man.” p. 98-99

Following with his words:

“Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what ones should become.” p. 104-105

“No instinct tells him what he has to do, an no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do.” p. 106

“Thus far we have shown that the meaning of life always changes, but that it never ceases to be. According to logotherapy, we can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed [the way of achievement or accomplishment]; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone [the way of nature and culture, and the way of love]; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.” p. 111

“When we are no longer able to change a situation–just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer–we are challenged to change ourselves.” p. 112

“But let me make it perfectly clear that in no way is suffering necessary to find meaning. I only insist that meaning is possible even in spite of suffering–provided, certainly, that the suffering is unavoidable. If is were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing to do would be to remove its cause, be it psychological, biological or political. To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.” p. 113

I hope these excerpts have stirred your curiosity about reading this book, and more importantly that they give you some light for your own personal journey and search for meaning!

NOTE: If you like this type of inspirational and self-help material, then Like AMAZE Coaching on Facebook! Everyday I post some material for your personal development, it’s all free and always available 24/7!