The following is an excerpt from Top Coaching Techniques.
David: OK, so we’ve got some lovely things that can help them develop life purpose. Again, they could be thinking life purpose or they could be thinking career. For some people it’s mixed, but for some people life purpose is just too hard. They just want something that will fulfill them. It’s not much different, but that way you can say it in words they can understand. You can say, let’s find a career direction, something you can do with your life that will make an impact and have you feel fulfillment, which is what they’re after.
Let me give you a model that I have been using with my clients. I’ve had mixed success with it, but for some people it works really well. The model is Vision, Mission, Games. How it works is, I have them write down their vision if the world was perfect, what would they want for their vision? It has to include more than them. Then once they’ve got that, they write a mission: how they will personally bring about that vision. Maybe world peace is the vision or harmony between all people. The mission might be something like, to expand people’s awareness of who they are and inspire them to grow. Mission doesn’t have to be that specific. I like to have the vision and the mission be quite broad. The games, or projects is another word for this, are anything you can do that would contribute to that.
The following is an excerpt from David’s Independent Report on Coaching Training and Certification.
You don’t actually require a certification from your school to get your ICF certification. For example I (David) didn’t. I did 50% of a course, and then resigned so I could build my own training school. I then added up the training hours I had done, and combined those with the hours I had done with Landmark Education (not their normal courses, but actually training to be a coach with them), and submitted it to the ICF accompanied with a barrage of documents. In other words, it’s possible to piece together your training from different schools, as long as it’s coach specific, and you clock up enough hours.
The following is taken from David’s interview with Leza Danly in 10 Super Coaches.
What top three methods, in order, did you use to get your clients in the first 2 years?
My top three methods were:
- Magic
- Referrals
- Public Speaking
I am not joking when I saw magic was my primary enrollment method. In fact, it was really important to me that I create my practice magically, meaning that I visualized it, I programmed for it, I spent time regularly in meditation imagining my full practice and seeing myself happily coaching a full practice. I made a schedule of where my client appointments were going to be and I absolutely allowed myself to desire it, imagine and expect it to happen.
Then I would delight as the phone rang and people called and I would set up sample sessions. I got so excited about the opportunities for growth for the people who called. I think I held an authentic space of possibility in such a way that they could more clearly see who they were becoming. Then I imagined people saying yes to coaching, and they did.
Again, I want to be clear I am not talking about a child’s magic that is about wishful thinking and looking the other way. I’m talking about the true, adult magic of consciously creating reality.
Once I started getting clients, then they referred other people. Also, even though I don’t recommend coaching friends and family, I did give them sample sessions so they would know more first-hand what I was doing and they were more likely to refer people.
Later, I began training coaches and speaking at conferences, which is another way for people to see you and get the power of your presence. But I didn’t do any public speaking in the first wave of practice-building.
The following is an excerpt from Top Coaching Techniques.
David: Okay. So, I know a really nice model of coaching – I heard this from Laura Berman Fortgang at the ICF conference, and I really like it. Her model that she is using is very simple, and that is to begin each question with the word ‘what’.
So don’t ask them ‘why’. Never ask clients, ‘Why do you want to do that?’ or ‘Why do you feel like that?’ Just ask them ‘what’. You can ask them ‘how’, but again, try to start with what. It was really funny when we did the exercise, we had someone tell us about a problem, and we had to say ‘what’. Like, ‘Okay, what’s the solution?’ and they’d say, ‘Oh, I don’t know. I probably need to lose some weight.’ Then I’d say something like, ‘What’s the first step?’ and they’d say, ‘Oh, I probably should go to go to the gym.’ and I’d say, ‘What are you going to do at the gym?’ It was really amazing how it just focused them in, even if they didn’t know the answer. In five ‘what’ questions, they had it.
