Getting Started in Personal and Executive Coaching

How to Create a Thriving Coaching Practice

Chris E. Stout, Stephen G. Fairley

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780471426240
• eBook ISBN: 9780470893500
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Find satisfaction and financial success with a new career in coaching Getting Started in Personal and Executive Coaching offers a go-to reference designed to help every mental health professional build, manage, and sustain a thriving coaching practice. Packed with hundreds of proven strategies and techniques, this nuts-and-bolts guide covers all aspects of the coaching business with step-by-step instructions and real-world illustrations that prepare you for every phase of starting your own coaching business. This single, reliable book offers straightforward advice and tools for running a successful practice, including:
* Seven tools for making a great first impression
* Fifteen strategies for landing ten paying clients
* Seven secrets of highly successful coaches
* Ten marketing mistakes to avoid
Complete with sample business and marketing plans and worksheets for setting rates and managing revenue, Getting Started in Personal and Executive Coaching identifies the fifteen biggest moneymaking markets to target and offers valuable recommendations for financing that get the most impact and mileage from every budget. Quick "Action Steps" for applying ideas and techniques make this book useful right away. Get started in coaching today!

CHAPTER 1
Decisions, Decisions … Personal Coaching or Business Coaching?

1. What Kind of Coach are You?
2. Personal Coaching
   1. Positives and Negatives of Personal Coaching
   2. Characteristics of Successful Personal Coaches
   3. Titles Personal Coaches Use
   4. Pricing Your Personal Coaching Services
3. Business Coaching
   1. Positives and Negatives of Business Coaching
   2. Characteristics of a Great Business Coach
   3. Titles Business Coaches Use
   4. Pricing Your Business Coaching Services
4. Distinguishing Coaching from Other Fields for Marketing Purposes
5. Is Personal or Business Coaching Right for You?
6. Self-Assessment Inventory
   1. Recommended Responses
7. Action Step

What Kind of Coach are You?

As professional coaching grows in popularity, it will experience an external struggle to define, refine, describe, and distinguish itself from other fields, as well as an internal struggle to create subspecialties. The field of psychology offers a typical model. In the early years, the primary struggle was to differentiate psychology from psychiatry (it struggles with this even today, as most lay people still don’t know the difference between a psychologist, a psychiatrist, and a social worker). As time went on, the field began to divide into other specialties, with the first few being experimental, clinical, and academic psychology. Today, the American Psychological Association recognizes over 50 major divisions with many other specialty areas.

Currently, there are two major branches of professional coaching—personal coaching and business coaching—but each is quickly gaining subspecialties. Each division goes by various names. For example, personal coaching is also known as life coaching, success coaching, personal life coaching, and professional coaching. Some of the more popular subspecialties include spiritual coaching, relationship coaching, coactive coaching, Christian coaching, personal development coaching, and career coaching, among others. This book uses the term personal coaching to refer to all of them, except where noted. Business coaching is also known as corporate coaching, management coaching, executive coaching, and leadership coaching, to mention a few, but some people define each of these areas as a subspecialty of business coaching. This book uses these terms interchangeably and refers to all of them by the generic term business coaching, except where noted. Yes, I do realize there are distinctions and separations between the many areas and even the specific names, but the differences are primarily not in the techniques coaches use, or in their ability, their training, or even their experiences, but in the particular populations served and the problems most commonly encountered during coaching.

In this chapter we will:

• Briefly define the two emerging branches, personal and business coaching, for the purposes of this book.
• Discuss the positives and negatives of both personal and business coaching.
• Provide an overview of the characteristics of successful personal and business coaches.
• List the job titles commonly used by people in each field.
• Inventory the current prices of services and reported average incomes.
• Present a map of how you can distinguish coaching from different fields for the purpose of positioning and marketing yourself.
• Give you a self-assessment inventory to help you determine which field would be a better fit for you given your interests, experiences, and location.

As you read through this chapter, if you have not already decided which area you will focus on, please try to keep an open mind. If you have already decided, now is the time to start making yourself more aware of the potential positives and negatives and to develop a plan for maximizing the former while compensating for the latter. However, make no mistake: What title you give yourself and what field you see yourself in will largely determine what kind of clients you attract to your practice. There are some definite advantages and distinct disadvantages with both personal and business coaching. Let’s explore each area in turn.

Personal Coaching

Personal coaches usually work with a wide range of individuals on a host of intrapersonal and interpersonal issues, such as coping with a specific problem or crisis, focusing their energy, achieving their dreams, making career transitions, living a happier, more fulfilled life, overcoming conflict, enhancing their communication skills, specifying and achieving their life goals, and building better relationships, to name a few. Clients may or may not be connected with a business, and their careers or jobs may or may not have anything to do with the focus of the coaching, with the exception of career coaching, which almost always has a professional connection.

Positives And Negatives of Personal Coaching

Every field has its positives and negatives. Personal coaching is no different. On the positive side, the target audience for personal coaching is fairly broad. It can include adolescents, college students, working professionals, people in career transitions, couples, business executives, and adults in general. You can focus on people who are in a crisis situation, adults in a midlife transition, couples with relationship difficulties, professionals who want to advance their careers, soccer moms who want more out of life, elderly people who are facing death—the possibilities are only limited by your imagination … and a few other things. It’s the “few other things” that can make personal coaching a difficult field to be in. Here are the top five negatives of personal coaching:

1. The market is so big you can have a hard time focusing.
   One of the biggest mistakes new coaches make is targeting too large a market. In your desire to help all different kinds of people with all different kinds of problems, your lack of resources can quickly become a fatal weakness to your business, because no one has the time, energy, or financial wherewithal to effectively target a vast audience. It’s easy to tell when a personal coach has fallen into this trap. Ask them who they help and what kind of problems they commonly coach around. If they list more than three distinct target markets or more than six completely different kinds of problems, it is very likely their business is hurting because they are unfocused. On one personal coaching web site I came across recently, the author listed a few typical clients:
   • Individuals who want to live a bigger life
   • Professionals who desire more from their career
   • Adults who struggle with personal relationships
   • People trying to balance their work and life
   • Adults who have elderly parents and are trying to take care of them
   • People in a midlife transition
   • Women who are going through a divorce
   While their attempts at being comprehensive are laudable, their results are most definitely not. This gives the clear impression that they help everybody, which most prospects interpret as actually helping nobody. Personal coaches have to be very specific about who they help. You must be able to clearly and concisely tell who your target audience is. More about how to do that is found in Chapter 2.
2. Persona...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1: Decisions, Decisions … Personal Coaching or Business Coaching?
• CHAPTER 2: Target Your Market or Waste Your Time
• CHAPTER 3: The 12 Largest Markets Where Coaches Are Making Money Right Now
• CHAPTER 4: It Takes Money to Make Money: Financing Your Business
• CHAPTER 5: What to Buy on a Budget: Creating Your Financial Plan
• CHAPTER 6: Building a Successful Business Requires a Solid Plan
• CHAPTER 7: You Only Get One Chance: Seven Tools for Making a Great First Impression
• CHAPTER 8: Relationships and Referrals: Networking, Strategic Referral Partners, and Centers of Influence
• CHAPTER 9: 15 Key Strategies for Finding Your First 10 Clients
• CHAPTER 10: Why Most Marketing Fails: The Top 10 Marketing Mistakes Beginning Coaches Make
• CHAPTER 11: From Counseling to Coaching: Constructing a Connection, Bridging the Gap, and Defining the Differences
• CHAPTER 12: Harnessing the Power of Internet Marketing, E-zines, and Web Sites
• CHAPTER 13: The Seven Secrets of Highly Successful Coaches
• Index
• About the Author
• End User License Agreement