David: The whole point of this is simply that everyone has the ability to help someone else.
Great
David: Now what you need, you need 50 sessions under your belt.
Right
The following is a transcription taken from Explode Your Practice.
David: It’s that simple. And it doesn’t have to be with paying clients, what I say is get out there do the sessions, you can call them practice sessions but what I prefer to call them is exploratory sessions.
David: That way there is no pressure on you to be a guru because you’re exploring
David: Now if you went and did 50 practice, one off sessions and now of those people tuned into clients then you would still learn an awful lot about yourself and about coaching.
The following is a transcription taken from Explode Your Practice.
Now fortunately it’s not possible to do fifty sessions with people and help them by setting inspiring, exciting goals for their life and not come away with clients. It cannot be done.
There is almost like there are 3 levels. The first level is do the session.
The second level is at the end of a session, it they’re happy, if their interested in setting up a coaching structure, you can invite them to do that. You can check into that. Are you interesting in having a look at the coaching structure? I can tell you how that will look.
Third level is payment. So that is another conversation. Once they say they are interested in the coaching structure, they want to be a client for month or three months, I recommend, then what you’re looking for is a conversation about whatever is financially appropriate. Some people are happy to pay your full fee, others would like to pay half, and some people would like to pay a nominal fifty dollars to show they are serious. Like a token commitment, some people don’t want to pay anything but they would be happy to be a guinea pig.
See the 3 levels. The first one and most important one is do sessions; it doesn’t matter, and have some fun.
I got an email last week from a woman in London and this was – I get about a hundred emails a day – the most amazing email I’ve ever received in my life. It started off by saying “Dear David, in April of 2000 you sat next to my husband on a plane”. She went on “You may not remember so here’s some details and here’s a photo.” So I brought up the photo, and I called my partner Bronwyn in and I said “Read this – you know, this is amazing, I think I remember this guy, I met him on a plane. It was a lot of fun.”
The email went on to say that this woman had had a really big life experience and now she wanted to contribute to the world, and she wondered if my training school could help her to make that contribution. The next line said “My husband Simon was hosting a conference at the World Trade Center in the Windows of the World Restaurant on September 11th 2001 and his body was never recovered.” She then went on to say she was seven months pregnant at the time and two months later she gave birth to their son. So firstly we were happily reading the email and then we got to this, and what amazed me – after I’d grieved for this guy whom I’d only met for five hours – was, this woman is extraordinary. What she wants to do with her experience is help people around the world move through grief using coaching.
Now we all know that grief is a therapy issue, normally, but she found that coaching helped her to take control of her life and to work out what she wanted, and that’s what moved her. So she’s got a charity set up, she’s got trustees and that’s what she wants to do for the planet. So what I got present to, although I don’t even want to give it a name, (and there are so many words we can give it, – you’ve heard of ‘the spirit of coaching’ and so on) is that the good stuff in coaching is really about people wanting to make an impact on the planet. Yes, no? – are you a bit stunned? I was.
So, when I talked before about 50 trial sessions in 50 days, I saw some strange looks – it was really funny. Right, but can you now get to see that when we reframe it so that it’s an exploration instead of an “I have to have you as a client”, you can get your one-liner, so you get connected again to really why you want to coach. It’s not all about you. And when you start finding a reason, for the people in your life, to call them and actually say “Let’s do a session” then this starts to look a lot easier. And for you it might be a hundred days instead of fifty, or you might say “I’m going to do twenty-five sessions”.
There’s something else I wanted to say – you don’t have to call your friends and coach them. And you don’t have to call your colleagues and coach them. You can set up web sites. You can go and do public speaking. You can try advertising. There’s a number of things you can do. But I have found time and time again the quickest way to get your confidence is to use your network and coach them. I’m not even talking about referrals yet. Just talking about getting your confidence in your practice. That’s why we’re talking so much about this approach.
The following is an excerpt from David’s speech regarding FirstFiftyClients.com.
Now, when I stopped saying “I help people close the gap between where they are and where they want to be” which is accurate, but boring for me, and I started saying “I help women who are not ecstatic in their relationships to get everything they’ve ever wanted in their relationship” then I wanted to get on the phone and tell people about it. And a funny thing happened: when I did, when I got on the phone and I told them that, they could think of names.
When I said “I help people close the gap between where they are and where they want to be’ they went ‘mmmm…okay”, but when I said “women who are not ecstatic in their relationship who are ready to have everything they’ve ever wanted”, they would say “Well, Julie would be great for that, and you could call Betty, and Rhonda, yeah”. So it changed, when I decided I was going to say, (because it changes for me, you know, what I say to people) “I work with people so that when they’re eighty lying on their deathbed they have zero regrets”, I had fun with that. And then people go “Huh? Really? What do you mean?” and I say “Well, if you died tomorrow, what’s one thing you’d regret?” and all of a sudden they know what I do.
