Mark Butler: Hey, this is Mark Butler and you are listening
to a podcast for coaches.
A couple of stories this week from a couple of different client sessions
and from my own day to day life.
So first story, I was meeting with a client who is a
relatively new one on one coach.
We're not coaching about her business.
We're just coaching.
But I did ask her about her business and it came up.
She's had some good things happening.
She's had some early wins that are pretty exciting to her and to me.
But then she said something interesting.
She said, because of the stuff that I have going on in my personal life
right now, and parentheses, I know we can all relate to this because of the
intense stuff in my personal life right now, I just don't have the time or the
bandwidth mentally and emotionally to really put the effort into my practice.
And I thought that's interesting because if you think that you don't have
the energy, the time, the mental and emotional bandwidth to build your coaching
practice, you and I might have different opinions about what energy, what time and
what mental and emotional bandwidth are required to build your coaching practice.
So let me jump to the other story with another client that I've known for a
long time and has become a good friend.
She does.
A lot of advertising.
She has what I would call an advertising driven business.
It's more of a training business or has been historically more of
a training business that relies on Facebook ads to generate leads to
convert to program participants.
She's very good at it.
And although she does say it's harder than it's ever been it's still
viable, so there's no doomsday here.
Some people are still advertising to great effect and with great success, but she
did say it's harder than it's ever been.
And so I started to interview her in the middle of our coaching session.
What's it like?
What's it like to be a person who advertises a lot?
What does it require of you?
And she did confirm some of my suspicions.
She said it requires a lot of creative output.
A lot of content creation, a lot of graphic design, a lot
of photography, a lot of video.
There's a lot of raw material that goes into ad campaigns and into the
funnels that people get into after they engage with the ad campaign.
So she confirmed that for me.
And she said it is a lot of work.
Now I know her, I know she's a great system creator.
I'm sure she has created great systems, but it's a lot of work and it's a
lot of work for an uncertain payoff.
Even if you're confident you can get it to work, you're not necessarily
confident when it will start working or to what extent it will work.
So a lot of the difficulty in a training business that's fueled by advertising
is not just all the output that it requires content and creative output.
It's also the thinking about the campaigns.
She told me she's thinking about the campaigns a lot.
I don't want to dramatize it.
I don't know how much of her mental energy is going into these campaigns, but
she told me she thinks about it a lot.
It's an everyday thing.
Looking at a bunch of different numbers, not knowing which numbers contribute
to which outcomes necessarily.
Turning a lot of knobs and pulling a lot of levers and hoping that you can
dial it in and make it something that actually plays out the way you want it to.
So there's a lot of mental overhead there for an uncertain return.
Now it does work sometimes.
It doesn't seem to work quite like it used to for the people whose businesses
I am inside of, but it does still work.
If I'm thinking about my other client who says I don't have the
time or the mental energy, the bandwidth to really throw myself
into my coaching practice right now.
If she's talking about the kind of business that my other client has,
that's advertising driven, a lot of creative and content requirements, a lot
of mental overhead, a lot of analysis.
Then I might agree with her.
I might say, yeah, you probably don't have that bandwidth, but that's not what
a one on one coaching practice requires.
A one on one practice has its own challenges, which are also mostly mental.
But in a one on one practice, we don't have also all the technical overhead,
all the content overhead, all the creative overhead that's required in an
advertising driven training business.
So in a one on one practice, almost all of the difficulty is just waiting.
It's just waiting for the next.
Yes.
The next yes, could be days away.
It could be weeks away.
It could be months away.
And if we're honest with ourselves, we want it to be that way.
Now you might disagree with me.
You might say, no, I want more clients to come more quickly.
And I'll agree with you in the short term, when you're really looking for
some validation, when you're really hoping that new clients will send you
the message that yes, you are good at this and it is working and it's all
going to work out according to plan.
I understand that in those cases you want the clients to come faster,
but as soon as they do, as soon as you get something like full and full
might mean five sessions a week, it might mean eight, it might mean 10.
If you're superhuman, not like me, maybe it's 15 or 20 sessions a week.
I don't have that many sessions in a week.
In me, as far as I can tell, But at some point you'll arrive at a level
of fullness in your practice where you say, okay, I want them to keep coming,
but I'd like there to be a little bit more space in between their arrivals.
This is the hard part of a one on one practice.
It's the time between yeses.
That's a phrase I'm using in a lot of my client calls lately,
and it seems to be pretty useful.
I believe that the time between yeses makes and breaks one on one coaches.
If in between yeses, I can continue to work on my knowledge, my skills, and
my character, and if I can continue nurturing the relationships I have and
where possible starting up some new relationships, the yeses are coming.
I don't know exactly when they're coming, but they are coming.
Here's what I think that looks like for me and for you.
About 10 days ago, I went to lunch with a couple of old friends.
I met both of these guys 16, 17 years ago.
We were all pretty newly married.
Our kids were all young.
We were neighbors for a while.
Both of them ended up moving away, but we've kept in touch over the years.
I've kept in touch better with one than the other.
The one I haven't kept in touch with as well is a real estate
guy, a very successful one.
And I had a real estate question.
So I sent him a text and I said, I need a real estate consultation.
Would you like to do that over the phone or would you like to do it over lunch?
And he said obviously I'd like to do it over lunch.
I said, good answer.
And then I texted our other friend and I said, Hey, I'm
going to lunch with this guy.
You probably want to get in on it.
And he replied and said, of course I do.
A week or so later, the three of us got together for lunch at one of the guy's
offices, we sat there for a couple of hours, we chatted about everything.
We chatted about family and church and we chatted about
business and all kinds of stuff.
It was so fun.
These are such good guys.
As we were winding down, I said to them, Hey, I'm Nobody's leaving this table
till we have the next one in the books.
So we scheduled the next one.
It's just a few weeks away.
I can't wait.
It's gonna be a great time an Hour maybe two hours later after we all
left One of my friends texted us in a group and said hey That was so nice.
It was so great to get together with you guys Really value you and appreciate
you and let's do that again soon or no.
We already had it scheduled He said can't wait to do it again soon
it's just so great to care about people and to have people care about you.
I'm so grateful for the friends that I have.
A couple of days ago I texted a friend and said, Hey, let's get lunch.
And he said, okay, yeah, great.
Of course.
And then I said, I'm bringing Kate.
I know how much he values good people and good conversation.
And Kate's a great person who makes great conversation.
So I said, I'm bringing Kate.
He said, fantastic.
And the three of us went to lunch.
We had a great talk, really enjoyed it.
He's such a great friend.
He appreciates us.
It's all fantastic.
And you might be asking.
Why are you talking about all your lunches with your buddies?
What does it have to do with anything?
It feels good.
It's real happiness.
Science has now proven, Google it, go look it up.
Science has now proven that our happiness is mostly a function of
the quality of our relationships.
It happens to be an enormous side benefit of the quality of our relationships.
That they also sometimes produce pain coaching clients.
Now my two friends from the first lunch will never hire me for coaching.
I don't think so.
Anyway, I don't need them to, I need them to be great friends and I
want to be a great friend to them.
And I know that as we stay in touch with each other, and as we talk about
what we're doing and I share with them what I'm up to, I know they
will say things like, Oh man, I know somebody you should talk to right now.
There's somebody I should probably introduce you to.
That's just what happens.
And it's really easy.
So in a one on one practice, the easy part is that our best marketing is going
to lunch with old friends, going to lunch with current friends, maybe going to lunch
with somebody we've never met before.
going for a walk, going to a new social function, and just
being ourselves in that context.
That's the easy part of growing a one on one practice.
If we're developing our skill and our knowledge and our character, the
clients that will come from all of this positive social interaction, the
clients that will come are inevitable.
I don't know when they're coming.
I don't know if it's next week or next month or next year, but they're coming.
They will arrive as our skill and our character catch up to the affinity
that the people in our lives already feel for us so that they don't
just view us as a trusted person.
That they love to be around, but they start to view us as a trusted
guide that they could introduce to people that they know who are in pain.
All of this is natural.
All of this is inevitable.
And to be blunt, it's pretty easy.
Now, I know some of you are saying, I'm already doing that and I don't
have all the clients that I want.
Okay, fair enough.
We'll talk about it.
But the basic nature of our effort will not change.
And what I would say is if clients are not coming to you in the way
that I just described, it's not that likely that they'll come to you
reliably and easily through some other massive effort that you might make.
And if they do, you're going to be bummed anyway, because now
you've got a job that you don't really want a client hunting job.
In an advertising driven training business, the hard part.
Is all of the machinery and the content and the mental overhead
of managing ad campaigns.
And then the easy part, I guess, is there an easy part?
I mean, the easy part is that when someone signs up for your thing, the direct
inputs that are required from you to that person are relatively low because
they're buying something like a course or a program where the, where your effort
is spread across a lot of participants.
That's probably the easy part.
In a one on one practice, the hard part is the waiting and the character development.
And the easy part is the actual relationship building, which
brings so much happiness anyway.
So what I want to say to my client that I was talking to earlier in the week
and to any of you who feel like she does about limited time, limited energy.
If you think there's no room for your coaching practice, please reframe it.
Just move through your life, work on yourself.
The stuff that's soaking up your mental energy and emotional bandwidth right now,
it's all part of the character development process that is preparing you to be a
more effective, more supportive coach.
The hard part is the waiting, but the easy part is just do your life and be patient.
And the clients are coming.
They are coming.
I'll talk to you next time.