Hey, this is Mark Butler and you are listening to a podcast for coaches.
Today I wanna share with you an abbreviated call from my Office Hours
community, and it's the call in which I articulate for the first time a new
hypothesis I have around how coaching practices can actually get full
without the coach having to spend too much time or money pursuing clients.
If you like what you hear, you really should consider giving
the Office hours community a try.
You can go to office hours with mark.com
and do a 30 day trial for just $1, but whether or not you join us in the
Office Hours community, I would ask you to seriously consider the concepts and
the ideas that I share in this episode.
I think they're different.
I think they're compelling.
I think that if you can buy in to these ideas, you could transform the
way you think about your practice.
You could go from having to think about yourself mostly as a marketer to
mostly as a coach, and in my opinion.
That's what we all want, so enjoy the episode and I will talk to you next time.
Mark Butler: Hello, I'm Mark Butler and you are watching this or
listening to this because you are a member of Office Hours with Mark.
And when I launched Office Hours, I launched the website with a specific
headline and the headline said, fill your coaching practice without advertising.
That's an exciting promise to me.
The truth is I had a lot of confidence that I could guide people in the
direction of how to fill their coaching practices without advertising.
But I don't know that I could have spoken in very clear terms
about how I think that happens.
I think it's finally coalesced in my mind and do a, a single kind of
mantra or hypothesis that I believe works reliably for anyone who wants
to fill a one on one practice.
So let's start today by.
Reminding ourselves of what the objective here, the objective is to create a one
on one coaching practice that delivers five to 15 coaching sessions per week
without spending too many hours or too many dollars pursuing clients.
That's the objective as I understand it.
That's the objective as I've proposed it.
That's what we're shooting for here.
If that's not what you're excited about, you probably won't be
excited about this approach.
This is a way to have a one on one practice fit in your life.
Without having to give it a bunch of extra resources, this is a way to approach
your practice patiently so that as time passes, you notice that more and more
of your week, more and more of your available coaching time is filled by
clients without you ever having to hire a Facebook ads contractor or, you know,
whatever.
That's the objective.
This is the hypothesis.
This is the mantra.
As I spend time in spaces and with people, I enjoy becoming more interested and
interesting coaching clients will appear confidence, curiosity, and patience.
Save me from anxious, desperate chasing.
I build my practice in a way that feels good now and will feel good later.
Never believing the lie that misery is the price of success.
So let's go through it sentence by sentence and see if I can make the case
that this is maybe the right plan for you.
So first let's talk about spending time in spaces.
And with people you enjoy, you're going to go where your people are.
You're going to go where your people are online.
You're going to go where your people are offline.
It's total personal preference.
Some people really enjoy spending time in Facebook groups.
Around specific topics and around specific communities, those Facebook groups may or
may not have anything to do with coaching.
They may relate to other hobbies, other passions of yours.
I'm not a person who likes to spend time in a Facebook group or a
slack channel or group or whatever.
That doesn't appeal to me very much, but I have Watched my peers and some
of my clients have great success in building relationships and then through
those relationships seeing client relationships Spark by hanging out in
online spaces of all kinds same thing with offline spaces Hanging out at the
gym you like to go to the yoga studio You like to go to the church you like
to go to your work your office Your neighborhood community get togethers
affinity groups like hiking groups and, networking groups, which sometimes can
get a bad rap because networking groups can often be seen as highly transactional.
I get that.
But the key to this is that you're going to meet and to listen and to connect.
You are not going to sell.
Other people might be there to sell, but you are not going there to sell.
You are not going to spaces because you believe they are
the spaces where you will.
Find your clients.
You're going to those spaces and meeting with those people, hanging out
with those people because you want to.
The idea of quote, getting clients may or may not even cross your mind.
I would hope that your primary motivation would be, I like these
people and I like this space.
I like this activity.
That's why I'm going there.
And that's my intent in going there.
It's to meet, it's to listen, it's to connect.
If you don't feel enthusiastic about going, go somewhere else.
I don't think it's a long term winning strategy to go places and
do things just because you believe they will quote get you clients.
It's not that I think that's an absolutely losing strategy.
You can do that and you can have client relationships start as a result.
But in the long run, I think the winning strategy is to go where you want to
go and be there with people you enjoy.
So that the dread doesn't creep in to the habit and start to build
resistance and friction such that eventually you quit that activity.
These things change over time as well.
There was a season roughly, let's say 2016 to 2019, where I really enjoyed getting
on an airplane and flying to an event where there would be a bunch of coaches.
It was fun.
I enjoyed the travel.
I enjoyed the content.
I enjoyed the people.
Somewhere around the end of 2019.
That itch felt scratched.
I was noticing I didn't really want to travel anymore.
I wasn't excited to go.
The content wasn't as interesting to me anymore.
The communities didn't feel as aligned with my values anymore.
And so early 2020 around the time COVID hit, in fact, I had
already decided I don't really want to travel for work anymore.
It doesn't appeal to me.
So I decided that I wasn't really going to many coaching events from then on.
So when I lost the enthusiasm, if I couldn't generate the enthusiasm,
I just stopped going there and I decided to be other spaces.
In my case, I had built enough relationships during the season where
I was willing to get on a plane.
And connect with other coaches that when I do things like a podcast for coaches
and when I do things like office hours with Mark, and when I very occasionally
send newsletters, there are enough relationship seeds already there that my
newsletter and my podcast end up being a space in which people hang out with me.
And build enough affinity that eventually I, you know, I get messages asking
if I have coaching availability.
So I only want to do these things, not if they just always feel so easy and
so fun, but if I feel a lot of dread around it, I'm just not going to do it.
There is a space and there are people that I'll be excited to spend time with.
And the job is to find those and spend time there, even if they
seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with your coaching practice.
This by itself, I believe it's the foundation of a winning strategy
for having, not an easy, but maybe an ease full way of growing
your, your coaching practice.
So that's where we start spaces and people we enjoy.
So next up we have interested and interesting.
It might seem to you that interested is the thing that you've already got covered,
that everybody already has covered.
They're entertained and they're fascinated.
They're curious about coaching topics and people's psychology, their
behavior, their relationships, and helping them thrive in those things.
So you might say, I'm already definitely interested.
I've got it covered.
I'm talking about a different type and level of interest.
Obsession is too strong a word, but it moves us in the right direction.
The person who is truly interested in their work goes into what my own
coach Liz has called a scholar phase.
And in a scholar phase, the person is paying a price in
time and effort and ego to.
Know something about a thing that other people don't know to
experience it in a way that other people have not experienced it.
So the way to get interested is to make more effort with more intention
and more focus in developing your knowledge and experience in an area
then other people are willing to pay.
So if I were to describe my interested phase in the world of coaching, my
scholar phase, my phase of deep interest was kind of 2015 to about 2021 ish.
And in those six years, I was deep in the trenches of a bunch of coaching practices.
And it was hard work and it was costly in time and it was costly in ego and
it was costly in freedom because I didn't always love the work I was doing.
I mean, I was up to my elbows in coaching businesses in all
different kinds of coaching.
Models, tens of thousands of coaching transactions because
I was doing accounting.
And when I came out the other side of that, I believe that I'm in the top 1
percent of the world's population of people who really know what coaching
businesses look like from the inside.
So almost anything that anyone says about a coaching business.
I have experienced it.
I've seen it.
I can ask them questions to tease out what they actually mean, how it actually works.
That was a price paid over the course of years and a few thousand hours to where
I can say, I know coaching businesses.
I know training businesses.
I know them inside and out.
That was my interested phase.
What does it look like to bridge that gap?
My interest in coaching businesses and in coaches.
Are what created this mantra, this hypothesis that I'm
sharing with you today.
It's a lot of hard thinking.
So we listen, we learn, we read, we care, and we hang out there for a long time.
In my opinion, truly becoming interested in a topic goes beyond consuming
what other people have said about it in the most consumable, Places.
YouTube, social media podcasts for me, depth looks like primary research.
It's, it still could be books, but maybe it's older books.
Maybe it's thicker books.
Maybe it's books that don't necessarily seem completely related to the thing,
but they might have some nuggets and I'm willing to dig through them.
It looks like trying to get experience.
So this is not a consumption.
Interest that I'm talking about here.
This is effortful and costly.
Is it effortful and costly beyond the 5 to 7 hours per week that
we're hoping to spend in session with our clients eventually?
Anyway, probably not.
What I am saying is, if you will become unusually interested, In the thing that
you're trying to help people with, and if you will direct your effort accordingly
and make a sacrifice that maybe other people aren't willing to make, you're
showing a higher level of interest.
The payoff is that you become more interesting.
It's really, really hard to become interesting without
having first demonstrated a high level of interest yourself.
So we're getting really interested is about listening, learning,
reading, caring, experiencing.
Being interesting ends up being practice, writing, sharing, and teaching.
So you're taking what you learned in the interest phase, or in the scholar phase,
and now you're sharing it and teaching it.
In the process of being very interested over an extended period of time, you
become harder to ignore, because you have more experience and more insight, and more
opinions, defensible opinions, than people who have invested less time, effort,
energy, ego, in the interest phase.
The more we're regurgitating and rehashing what we've been taught,
the easier we are to ignore.
This is why one of the things I talk about so much with people
when it comes to content is practicing productive disagreement.
If you will take what you've been taught or what other people say,
conventional wisdom, if you will take it and you will try to find ways to
productively disagree with it, you become more interesting in the process.
Just recently to a group here in office hours, I said, I think that
really the 11 years that I've spent in the coaching world are defined by.
Number one, me having the great opportunity and blessing of working
with incredibly high performing coaches, high performing in terms of
content and sales and numbers of people served and all of that, and being
in a support role for those people.
And eventually finding ways to productively disagree with them.
Now, I still agree with a very high percentage of what
most of my former clients say.
So this isn't about me versus them, right?
Versus wrong, good versus evil.
This is, you have a way of doing things.
You have a way of seeing things.
You have a way of saying things and given my experience and my values and my bias.
I disagree with points A, B, and C, and I think I can back up my disagreement with
stories and data and in that disagreement, people suddenly have a reason to pay
attention to the other person and me.
But I've said for a long time now, if you're saying the same thing in the same
way to the same people in the same place at the same time as many other people,
you are not necessary to the equation.
You may get some attention.
There may be some interest coming your way, but if I know that you're
teaching exactly what the other person is teaching and I'm human.
So if I know that more people are paying attention to the person who taught
you the thing that you're teaching me, unless there's some big friction
in my ability to consume it directly from them, I'm going to consume it.
Directly from them
I think in the long run if we're talking about investment Versus return the person
who will in the long run get more return per effort will be the person who finds
a way to be just a little bit harder to ignore a little bit differentiated
from the person they learned from or from the group of people that they
learned from what is going to be.
My disagreement with them and on the basis of what learning, what experience
and what stories can I disagree with them in an interesting way so that people
find me harder to ignore and have a greater desire to pay attention to me.
So, we're going to be scholars and we're going to dig in and learn and experience
and disagree and practice and fail all in pursuit of having something useful to say.
But then in saying it, we've got to not be boring.
We've got to be interesting.
So the job is to become harder to ignore.
Coaching clients will appear.
I phrased this in a specific way.
Because I feel quite strongly that in the long run, you want your coaching
practice to, get full and stay full as people reach out and ask you for coaching,
not as you become the best at reaching out and offering coaching to them.
The issue is if my objective is to deliver 5 to 15 coaching sessions per
week without spending too many hours or too many dollars in the pursuit of the
client then As an efficiency factor, I need people to reach out to me because I
don't want to close 50 percent of consults because I don't want to do any consults.
I want my coaching practice to be filled mostly by people reaching out to me and
saying, Mark, do you have availability?
Me saying yes, them saying great.
When can we start?
That's not always how it happens, but in my case and in many of their coaches
cases, that's usually how it happens.
I think it's a function of being interested, interesting, letting
people have an awareness of the fact.
Yeah, I'm available to coach you and then waiting for them to ask.
So just the other day, a client texted me and said, I just got another client.
She stays pretty full, uh, over time.
She fits our model.
You know, the five to 15 coaching sessions per week, not too many hours or
dollars spent in the pursuit of clients.
She fits the model perfectly.
She texts me and says, I just got a new client.
And she said, you were right.
The best clients are the ones who find us.
That is another truth that I think I've discovered and that I think I can defend.
You will find that the clients who are happiest with your work, easiest to serve,
most likely to renew and refer, will be those who started the relationship.
By reaching out to you,
if you can buy fully into this idea that I want to be asked for coaching,
not ask people if they will allow me to coach them, then what you
will do is in the time between those yeses, those difficult, quiet times
between when a client is saying yes to you, you'll refocus your effort.
On where you're spending time with whom you're spending time and becoming
more interested and more interesting.
So that it becomes inevitable that a person, and then people ask you if
you have availability and could we have a conversation about coaching?
The really uncomfortable reality here is that if no one is ever asking
you for coaching in the long run, if you're finding that you have to go
sort of hunt every coaching client.
You ever work with first of all, you've created a job for yourself.
That isn't very appealing to me.
Secondly, You may be promoting something in the world that doesn't have enough
intrinsic appeal that people pursue it.
Confidence, curiosity, and patience.
A confident person says, I know who I am.
I value and validate myself.
Now, many of us, maybe most of us would say, of course I feel that way.
I know who I am and I value and validate myself.
But if I watched the silent movie of their lives, I would see a lot of anxious
chasing behaviors and, Looking for other people to value and validate you
so that you can feel good about yourself.
All of us do some of this.
I do some of this, but in my coaching practice, I am now
confident enough that I know who I am and I value and validate myself.
Enough.
People resonate with me and my work that I will have a full
thriving coaching practice.
That's what I mean by confident.
Curious is just this ongoing.
I wonder.
I wonder what else I could learn about this.
I wonder who else I could connect with.
I wonder where I could go spend time that I would enjoy spending time.
It's curiosity as opposed to anxiety.
And then patience is the constant reminder that there's no hurry.
I'm living a full life.
Coaching clients will come into that full life in their own time.
We want to pursue more fullness in our life.
Let's do that.
And the coaching clients are on their way.
They're on their way.
Saves me from anxious, desperate chasing.
That's where we are in the mantra.
Saves me from anxious, desperate chasing.
I believe that most courses, most trainings, most masterminds are
purchased by coaches who cannot cope with the silence between yeses.
When people buy a course, when they attend a training, when
they buy into a mastermind, that's mostly an anxiety driven.
Not only does it not necessarily accelerate the arrival of the next.
Yes.
It muddies the water around what actually impacts the next.
Yes.
It puts coaches in situations where they buy a course, the yeses don't arrive.
They join a mastermind, the yeses don't arrive.
And they start to think that it was the courses.
Or the masterminds that were wrong, but what might have actually happened is
the courses in the masterminds actually increased their anxiety because they
looked around and got the idea that everyone else is winning and I'm losing.
Everyone else is smart and I'm dumb, etc.
So their anxiety increased.
So it actually had the opposite effect.
So courses, masterminds and trainings are usually not the antidote
to anxious chasing behaviors.
Usually that's getting internally regulated, finding our own inner peace.
And that ends up being the thing that's attractive to the people we hope to serve.
Our job is to avoid through our internal peace, through our genuine interest
and curiosity and confidence and self acceptance is to avoid anxious,
desperate chasing when we know.
Because we check in with ourselves.
I'm desperate.
I'm anxious, and I'm chasing.
We know that whatever we're doing can be stopped without any negative
consequence to our practice.
In fact, if we stop anxiously chasing, there will be positive
consequences to our practice.
Because Never forget the chased animal always runs, the curious
animal always approaches.
The chased coaching prospect will run away.
The curious coaching prospect, the person who's observing you and
wondering how you've made the changes you've made and who's remembering the
interesting thing you said the last time you were together, that person,
the curious person will approach.
The chased person will run away.
I build my practice in a way that feels good now and will feel good later.
Now, when I say feels good now, I don't mean this whole
process is devoid of discomfort.
It's going to have discomfort, but it's going to have discomfort now and later
there'll be discomfort and awkwardness now and later there'll be fun and connection
now and later there will be learning.
Now and later growth, now and later boredom, now and later
there will be disappointment and exhilaration and hope all of it.
You'll have it now and you'll have it later.
You should never buy into the lie, which we'll talk about more in a second.
That I'm in the uncomfortable part of growing a coaching practice and
then the uncomfortable part will end and then I will be in the comfortable
part of having a coaching practice and that there will be a dividing line
between the two and I'll cross over a threshold and I'll throw a party and
oh boy, it used to be uncomfortable.
Now it's comfortable.
But I would say about myself now having done some form of
coaching since 2000 and eight.
Yes, we move the needle.
I'm a lot more comfortable more of the time than I was in keeping
a full coaching practice, but I'm still uncomfortable a lot.
I have very uncomfortable interactions with clients.
Sometimes I say and do the wrong thing.
I have to apologize sometimes a person who I thought would renew doesn't renew.
Sometimes a person quits in the middle of their sessions.
There's discomfort available to me at every stage of having a coaching practice.
It never goes away, but it never has to be something that feels.
At a basic level, wrong or inauthentic to me or dishonest
or incongruent with my values.
That this isn't honest versus dishonest.
That's not what I'm saying.
This is true to myself and to who I want to be or not as true to
who I am and who I want to be.
So.
There are some people that I really think that once they get into
coaching, they're going to discover, they just don't like it very much.
I mean, it's just, that's just the deal.
If I get into it and I, find that the work of developing a coaching practice
and then of maintaining that coaching practice, if I find that they just
don't feel good to me and right to me, it's okay to go do something else.
We can express our genius elsewhere.
Everybody has some genius.
It's a question of looking for the place where that genius is best expressed.
So if a person feels miserable, there's a lie that I think we hear
in the personal development world that misery is the price of success.
Now, we also hear a lot that discomfort is the price of success.
And of course, I agree with that.
But sometimes the way people frame this idea is like we're in the trenches and
it's so hard and it's, uh, this is awful, but eventually we'll make it through.
And when you make it through, then the vacations and the houses
and all of it's going to come.
What's truer is that it's not miserable.
And the discomfort is actually not terrible.
Most of the discomfort is the discomfort that we generate with fear and impatience.
That's where most of the discomfort is.
There's some discomfort and feeling like we completely blew it on a coaching
session, which I still experience.
There's some discomfort and having a person that we
thought would say, yes, say no.
There's some discomfort there, but overall, I don't think growing a coaching
practice offers a lot more discomfort or more extreme discomfort than getting
into a car at seven in the morning and commuting to an office and being in a
cubicle all day and then commuting home.
That's not necessarily a bad thing either, but
if the thing that you feel like you're supposed to do right now
feels very miserable or very dangerous, I would suggest that.
That's something, true and correct inside of you.
It's telling you it's just the wrong thing to do, maybe not
for someone else, but for you.
And that there's some other way for you to spend time in spaces and with
people you enjoy working to become more interested and interesting, staying in
confidence and curiosity and patience.
That will have discomfort in it, but then the clients will arrive
and you'll realize, Oh, number one, it's not as exciting as I thought it
would be when the clients arrived.
I'm thrilled about it, but it's not the fireworks necessarily
that I thought it would be.
And number two, you'll realize, wait, that's it.
Isn't there a lot more to it than that?
No, there's not a lot more to it than that.
But what we find is that because people can't cope with the silence, the
space in between yeses, And they get involved in a lot of frantic activity
and then they talk about the frantic activity that they're involved in.
You fall prey to the idea that it's all much harder than it actually is.
You'll notice as I conclude, this whole conversation didn't
include anything about niche.
It didn't mention anything about content or content strategy.
Not that those things have no place, but those things do not matter.
The way our industry culture talks about them, because if you're a
person who spends time with other people in places you enjoy, you have
real enduring curiosity and interest in the problems you hope to solve
and the people you hope to support.
If you're willing to share that interest as you accumulate it in the
form of sharing, teaching, writing.
Speaking, et cetera, clients will appear,
they will,
my focus from now forward will be to try to back up my words today.
I don't want to be guilty of presenting a simple case like this one and
then teaching complex topics or implementations of those topics.
I don't want to be guilty of saying.
Here's how to do this very complicated thing in order to get a client.
I will teach things like, you know, I'm working right now and how do I
write 52 newsletters at once, but I'm only trying to write 52 newsletters at
once because I want to be interesting and trustworthy in a specific context.
And I think that might be the best way for me to get that done, but I
will never say that somebody else needs to do that, that they need to
implement things the way that I am.
For me, I'm just expressing this principle of being interested
and interesting in that way.
But you're not going to hear me do challenges.
I'm not going to say, okay, for the next 30 days, we're all going to
try to go have 16 conversations.
I might say, oh, consider this.
Consider this way of engaging with the activity, but I'm just going to
keep teaching these principles and inviting you to consider how you
want to express these principles.
My goal, if you and I share the same objective of delivering five
to 15 coaching sessions per week, Without spending too many hours
or dollars pursuing clients.
My goal is that in the months and years to come, I'll be hearing messages
from you that say, yeah, I do have five clients a week right now.
And it hasn't felt very hard.
I'm almost wondering if it was too easy or if it was a fluke, because I
didn't suffer very much along the way.
And I'll say, no, by my standards, you did it right.
You did it right.
And now I want there to be thousands more of you and thousands more of me
whose primary focus is supporting those five to 15 clients a week so that as a
group, we move the needle in people's happiness, health, and relationships.
That's where we're going.
And with that, I will leave you to consider these ideas and to
ask me questions about them in an upcoming open coaching call.
Thank you for being here.
I will talk to you soon.