Life Coaching Blog - By Rhonda Hess

Your Best Coaching Niche

Bill@CoachTrainingAlliance.com (CTA Admin) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 10:03:18 -0700

Want help choosing your best coaching niche?

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There's nothing you have to know. And you'll find you market less with better results. When they see your coaching as an essential tool for their life success, you'll have clients lining up to work with you. This six week workshop will be the turning point in your coaching career.

Learn more about How to Cultivate a Base of Raving Fans Who Crave Your Coaching Services. Hurry, it starts June 9!

Four Ways to Reach Coaching Success

Bill@CoachTrainingAlliance.com (CTA Admin) — Tue, 19 May 2009 08:32:05 -0700

by Rhonda Hess

If you've been trying to sell people on the virtues of life coaching but striking out most of the time, try something that gets great results. There are four ways for coaches reach six figure success and do their most soul satisfying work:

1. Become an Icon
You've got a bold original message, a lot of charisma, and you love to travel, getting up in front of BIG audiences. Oh, not your style? If the last thing you want to do is be in the spotlight, you're in good company. Most coaches are introverts, preferring quieter methods to make it big in coaching.

2. Call Everyone in Your Huge Rolodex
You've amassed a large active rolodex of colleagues. It's a gold mine! You only need ask. No big rolodex? Don't feel bad. This is a rare person -- a master networker, a mover and shaker. We're not all type A and upbeat in the morning.

3. Teach 'em How
You've got a marketable skill (something like branding or networking skills) that people are scrambling to buy. If you're not sure whether you have a skill to sell, then now is not the time to pursue this method. Maybe later after you've developed a...

4. Target Market
This is the fastest and easiest way to build your coaching business. Instead of pushing a unique message, doing a lot of warm calling or selling that skill bucket you have--target one very specific group of people. (For example: financial planners. See how narrow and specific that is?) Get to know what makes them tick and what is getting in their way.

But don't get in your own way about this. You don't need expertise or credibility, at first, because you'll tailor your offer to fit that specific market like a glove.

Rhonda Hess is is a Coaching Business Success Strategist and founder of Prosperous Coach. Sign up for her complimentary teleseminar Four Roads to Coaching Success. See below...

Which Road Are You On?

If you're not making a big splash with your current coaching niche, stop the struggle and learn what will finally bring that constant flow of clients you long for.

In Four Roads to Coaching Success, Rhonda Hess, Coaching Business Success Strategist, helps you find out—once and for all—how to target the niche market that's perfect for you. This teleseminar is no-charge for all Coaching Compass subscribers and CTA blog readers.
Learn more...

This Year's Challenges Are Next Year's Wins

Bill@CoachTrainingAlliance.com (CTA Admin) — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 09:59:37 -0800

by Rhonda Hess

"Victory is sweetest when you've known defeat."
- Malcolm S. Forbes

The close of the year is a good time to acknowledge your wins and mine the gold from your setbacks.

Start by recognizing what worked well in your coaching business. What new skills did you apply? How did your practice grow? Measure in percentages to see the impact. If you started with one client and went to four, you've had a 300% increase in the size of your practice! Whatever you accomplished is worth celebrating.

How's That Working for You?
Now, what didn't work for you? What got in the way of the results you wanted? What will you do differently next time? You know exactly what held you back. And that is a powerful piece of information you can leverage into greater success next year.

There are shortcuts to making it big in coaching on your own terms. Would you like to know them? Start by answering one question, and then think about turning any of your "defeats" into victory in 2008.

What is the single greatest thing that held me back from having a prosperous coaching business this year?

Rhonda Hess is a Mentor Coach with Coach Training Alliance and founder of Prosperous Coach. She is also co-author of the #1 best-selling Coach Training Accelerator.

Becoming Undeniably Successful
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Learn the details of these five provocative steps and discover what it takes to catapult your coaching business to the top. Learn more...

Are You Coaching Prosperity?

Bill@CoachTrainingAlliance.com (CTA Admin) — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 13:50:22 -0800

by Rhonda Hess

We aim to coach our clients to an expansive life full of joy, opportunity and wealth. But, have you tapped into the most dynamic source of that – prosperity? For any niche, coaching around prosperity has its time, place and long lasting value.

How do you enter the territory to coach clients toward greater prosperity? One of the most common entry points is to detect scarcity thinking, which slows the flow of prosperity down to a trickle.

Within each of us lives a loud gremlin – a naysayer that wants to keep us small, scared and under tight control. His secret weapon is scarcity-based thinking, steeped in feelings of neediness, lack and fear. It's all a sham. Like the great and terrible Oz behind the curtain, this part is just a small, bumbling fool.

Reframing to the Positive
Rather than heed the naysayer, put him in a bright corner where he can be easily seen for what he is and learn his tricks. Support your clients to recognize the naysayer in their language and shift self-talk from scarcity to prosperity thinking.

Reframe this... To this
I don't want . . . I want . . . (or) I intend . . .
I can't afford . . . I choose . . .
I'm struggling with . . . My opportunity now is . . .
What if I can't . . . I envision . . .

The Universal Law of Attraction states that like attracts like. Prosperity thinking attracts more of what we want. Self-deprecating language and scarcity thoughts set up negatively charged energy that attracts what we don't want.

Detecting scarcity thinking is just one of the many ways to enter the territory of coaching your clients (or yourself) to greater prosperity.

Rhonda Hess is a Mentor Coach and author of Working Websites for Coaches. Learn more about Coaching Prosperity and attract more of what you want!

Eight Secrets of a Thriving Coaching Business

coach@bubblingwell.com (Rhonda Hess) — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 13:56:07 -0800

In our role as Coaching Business Owner, we take many significant actions that greatly impact our success. Big decisions and tasks usually get our concentrated focus. Day-to-day tasks often go overlooked, but they can make or break a coaching business.

The Right Stuff

Even if you're just getting started as a coach and have no clients on board yet, put on your business owner's hat every work day with 100% commitment to the life of your coaching business. True commitment means dedicating resources of time, energy, money and attention to detail.

Take Care of Your Baby

Take your business seriously. If you are only giving it ten hours a week, it will take years to "make it" professionally. You might give up before your business really takes off.

Think about it. Building a business is much like raising a child. It is a full time process. Healthy gestation is critical. Birth is laborious and joyful. The early stages of development take tremendous energy and focus. Certainly, less attention is needed in the later stages, but there are times right up through maturity that require dedication.

Treat your business like a living entity. Give it your 100% commitment. With that and these secrets, which are just simple, smart systems, success will come more easily.

1. Plan the work and work the plan. Whether in a simple Day Timer or a Palm Pilot, schedule your time and honor that schedule. In addition to coaching time slots, plan in your breaks, lunches, exercise, admin, writing and marketing time. If you have an empty calendar, you're more likely to get distracted on things that steal energy from your business. If you've recently found yourself doing things for friends and family during the business week that you didn't intend, it's probably because you have no serious plans for your coaching business.

2. Use the one touch method. Touch everything -- emails, bills, other mail, everything -- just once. Download your email, read through it, toss it, respond to it, file it -- get it out of the inbox now. When you get your mail, open it, recycle the junk, pay the bill, file the document, make the call -- whatever is required, do it now. If you use this system faithfully for a few months, you will teach yourself how to be efficient and organized all the time.

3. Tame the email monster. If you have more than ten emails in your inbox and any that are more than two days old, tame the beast or you'll slowly and painfully lose grip on your business. Email is a valuable tool if you keep your inbox cleaned out every day using the one touch method.

4. Create easy filing systems, then keep them updated. Create a backup of electronic files every day. If you like database programs to keep organized, use one for your clientele and prospective network. I prefer simple email and paper files. For clients, I have a paper file with a one page document listing out the session number, date, time, length of session, agenda topics, achievements and next steps for accountability. Keep minimal notes. Or, if you tend to write copiously, clean out notes from time to time. You'll find you rarely, if ever, return to your previous notes if you have the streamlined one page document.

5. Keep your financial books up to date or hire someone to do it. Use the one touch method here too. Balance your statements when they come in. Make entries when you write the checks or pay electronically. Quicken or Quick Books are relatively easy applications for keeping books. If you use a CPA, find out what they prefer so that you can share files electronically for tax preparation. And set up your accounting as simply as possible. If you take fees using credit cards through a system like Practice Pay Solutions that deposits directly into your account and emails a receipt to your client, then you need never write a bill or collect overdue fees.

6. Intend to get everything out of your court and onto someone else's as soon as possible. Teach yourself to be responsive with fast and thorough turnaround. Then, keep tabs on the other party. If you turned over all your content to your web designer three weeks ago and haven't heard back, that relationship needs more attention from you. Create ticklers in your scheduling program to remind you to follow up.

7. Reply to all phone calls immediately. And never later than 24 hours on business days. This will not only keep you organized, but it will win you new clients and other opportunities that slower responders don't get.

8. Follow through on networking leads within 24 hours. If you forget to follow up with the stack of leads in your pocket from the last networking meeting, you've let the lead go cold. They will remember you if you remember them in a timely way.

Apply these smart systems to your business today and watch the positive impact it has on your coaching business!