Take your time to really understand these disciplines so you can own
them thoroughly and understand their value deeply. Slowly warm up to
them and feel good about them. Soon you will get them at a DNA level.

Start by centering yourself and getting present.
Be here now

Check in with source.
Trust your intuition

Share the experience (not the concept), so that a client’s only decision is whether or not to continue coaching with you.
The client’s decision needs to be whether or not to continue with you.
Coach your potential clients with all the impact and attention and time
and energy and focus you’d give to your highest‑paying client. Make
their decision easy.

Be great at what you do…not just good. Have practices and habits that guarantee that you become better and better as a coach every day. Read books, see movies, listen to audio and talk to people who make you better as a coach. Every day.
It’s really important that a coach be great at coaching. I know that sounds odd because you’re thinking to yourself, “Well, how can every coach be great? That kind of diminishes the term.”
Well, not every coach is great. You’re going to have to understand that
most coaches aren’t. Most coaches just try to do coaching as a novel way
to make a living.
I’m not saying every coach has to be great, but I am saying if you
want to grow a really prosperous practice, aim for great and have it
be something you wake up inside you every day. Have coaching be
something you consciously and deliberately get better at every single day
so you know you are moving toward greatness.
Become great through the books you read, the DVDs you watch, the
people who coach you, the seminars you go to—this is to build greatness
in you. This is not because there’s something wrong with you and there’s
a missing piece—this ongoing learning builds you to be great at what you
do. It’s really important.

Get coaches who will build your practice and improve your personal and professional life. A coach without a coach is like a doctor who won’t see a doctor.
If you don’t have a coach who is working with you, if you don’t have that ongoing growth and continued improvement in your own world, if you
do not believe in coaching enough to have a coach, how can you go to
someone and tell them that coaching is vital?
It’s really a total contradiction. Coaches tell me their biggest problem
is that they don’t have much income. And at the same time they’re trying
to sell their coaching based on the idea, “If you hire me as a coach I will help you improve whatever you want, including your income.”
So I say, “Well, why don’t you hire a coach?” and they say, “I can’t
afford one.”
Well, wait a minute. If your whole pitch is that coaching improves
someone, improves anything they focus on, including income, then why
is it that if you want more income you don’t get a coach?
They don’t always see the contradiction in that, but I’ll tell you what it is. The contradiction is that they really don’t see how powerful coaching is because they are not experiencing it themselves. And if you don’t have your own coach coaching you, in some way your income is going to fall way short of what it could be.
Also, it is very persuasive when you go to a prospect and you say,
“Coaching has changed my life and it continues to do so today. I have
a coach myself, and I believe in it because it works.” Your prospect is
more likely to listen to and hire you than if you say, “You know what?
I don’t have one. I can’t afford coaching myself…ah….I don’t quite
believe in it, but I’m trying to sell it to you.”
It would be like a doctor saying, “I don’t go to doctors myself. I don’t
trust them… I think they do more harm than good, so I myself don’t go
to a doctor. I use natural healing. But please tell me what’s wrong. I’ll write you a prescription.”
You wouldn’t like hearing that from your doctor. So prospects don’t
like hearing from a coach that they themselves don’t have one. It makes
them very nervous. It makes them want to go home and think about it.
Or there are the codes that prospects use, like “I need to talk to my wife.”
That’s code for “No thank you.”

Slow down. All the wealth you want is right there in the next conversation. Don’t have a huge to‑do list, just be with Who’s Next.
I’ve never had it not work to get people more business—to increase their
revenue—when they just slow down.
Please look at who your next conversation is with. Who are you talking
to? Who has emailed you in the last forty‑eight hours? Slow everything
down. Because everything you want is right here in front of you. You just don’t see it because you’re racing around.
You’re racing from one meeting to another, from one quick
conversation to a brief email, and you’re skipping all over the place. You are not creating relationships. You’re just “touching base.”
Remember that coaching occurs because of long, slow conversations.
It occurs because of the focus you give to someone. It occurs because they have a sense that you are there for them, that they are very important to you, that you have time for them. You cannot have that happen if you don’t slow down. And the more you slow down, the more you’ll get done in this profession.
I had a person in my Coaching Prosperity School and he was doing
fairly well—I mean, compared to a lot of coaches. He was making a
couple hundred thousand dollars a year, but he was racing all over the
place and he was always frantic to get into his own future every day.  He
was like a fly buzzing against a window, trying to fly through the window
getting into his own future. It doesn’t work.
The coach I’m talking about always felt he was not doing enough. He
needed to do more and more and more, and he thought that somehow
more frantic activity and busyness would be the way to get his income
up even higher.
Soon he found out that if he slowed down, life would get better.
Especially in the income department. If he took more time off, and if
he took long walks on the beach, his income would get bigger and his
life would get simpler and better. It was a total revelation to him, and
his income went from $200,000 to $600,000 in a period of about eight
months. All from slowing down.

Use or create inner circle connections. No cold calling..
Use your inner circle connections. Cold calling is not necessary, ever,
in the world of coaching or in getting clients. Calling people up cold
when you don’t know much about them and they don’t know anything
about you, and then trying to sell them something does not work with
coaching. It’s really a waste of time, and it’s not necessary at all.
We’re all connected. We can look each other up. We all know people
who know you. We all have very few degrees of separation between us, and
we can close these quickly.
Therefore, there are ways to prepare for my communication with
a coaching prospect—even to over‑prepare. I can rehearse really
completely and make myself very knowledgeable about the person I’m
about to talk to, which gets me eager to talk to them. No cold calling,
please. You already know enough people who know people who know
people. You really do, and if you slow your life down you’ll see that.

Act quickly. Know the half‑life of enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm has a half‑life. So if someone is excited about working with
you, they have a certain measurable level of enthusiasm for your work
and your coaching. Please know and see and experience the fact that
this enthusiasm will fade over time—it has a half‑life. And so, a week
from now, it won’t be as great and as strong and as vibrant as it is right
now. No way to stop that deterioration of enthusiasm.
Yet most coaches are completely unaware of it! They worry and
wonder why people aren’t getting back to them. Even people who said
they would!
My coach, the fabulous Steve Hardison, has taught me over the years
(the last fifteen years) a distinction that he uses called event‑action. I want to take my action as soon after the event as I possibly can.
Let’s say someone has heard me speak to a group and they email me
the day after and say, “Hey, I loved your talk, it was really great. I’m really interested in asking you about possible coaching.” Now the enthusiasm is high! I don’t want a lot of days to go by. I don’t want a lot of time to pass because that enthusiasm will go down. It has to.
It does for anything in human life. Notice when you go to a concert
and you love the concert and the next day you are telling everybody,
“Boy, we saw Springsteen—it was amazing!” And then a week later you
might talk about it a little bit, and a year later you’re thinking, “Did I go to that concert?”
So enthusiasm goes through a half‑life of continuous diminishment.
However, if I can see that clearly, I can take advantage of that and make that play to my favor. I can always act now.

Use phone or in‑person options when available. (Don’t use email for persuasion or confrontation in the act of client acquisition).
Now this is kind of an overstatement, because of course email has some
effective uses. There are some things email can do for you, but most of
the coaches I coach overuse it. They make the mistake of trying to use
email for persuasion.
They try to use email to convince people of something or to get them
to see the value of something. And it is ineffective that way. Because
when people receive an email, quite often these days it’s on their phone!
As they step out of a meeting or as they get out of their car, they ask themselves, “What can I delete quickly here? What do I have to respond to?
What can I get rid of? I’ve got so much clutter coming in.”
Your email enters that crowd of messages. You don’t want that.
Coaching isn’t appropriate for that kind of cluttered, frenzied world.
Coaching is a very intimate experience, so you don’t want to send a long
email explaining the value of your coaching. It will not arrive in the
same spirit in which it was sent. Please be awake to that.
So many of my clients in coaching have sent an email to a prospect
who was considering the coaching, and it transpires that if they had only had a conversation something great would have happened. Instead they sent a long email, and now the recipient is considering the email. They read it, read half of it or… save it for deleting later. It’s a good way to kill a relationship, especially in the world of coaching. So always look for the possibility of a conversation.

Honor conversations. Schedule them. Fill the day with conversations until your client list is full.
Use conversations, schedule conversations, have your day be about the
next conversation you are going to have, because if you do that, you will
get clients. All coaching agreements occur inside of a conversation. And
no sale has ever occurred outside of a conversation.
If you can see this, you will have your primary purpose today to be
inside of a conversation instead of pacing around, checking your email
fifty times a day, handling family calls, writing a blog, wondering if
you should write a book, going on social media, networking, trying
some marketing—all those things we do that don’t get us clients. All
those things that eat up our whole day when we could have been in a
conversation.

Certainty versus belief. Speak from what you are certain of. Keep a success list.
Use certainty. That’s your discipline. In other words, when speaking
about what you do and the track record you have for coaching, use
certainty. It improves your voice tone. Do not try to “believe in” yourself.
Do not have selling be an emotional crisis about whether you are worthy
of your fee. That will send you south. That will send you down the ladder.
That will have you not connect with people.
The antidote to that is knowing what you are certain of. And then
speaking with absolute certainty. “I just got off the phone with a client
in London” is a statement of absolute fact. Keep at your fingertips things
that are factually true about your work (and with a lot of beginning
coaches I have them keep this list literally written out).
I don’t need to “have confidence” or learn to believe in myself to say
those facts to the person I am talking to. “One of my clients just had a
20% revenue increase last quarter.”
When I fill my conversation with the things I am certain about—
clients I have, work I have done, accomplishments they have achieved,
I won’t get nervous and I won’t get scared. I want to really be connected
with certainty. Because if I go the other direction—if I go in the direction
of whether I am deeply, personally, really “worthy,” then fear enters in.

Share stories and case histories versus features and benefits.
Have case histories to tell. Have these things be stories you’ve told over and over and over. If somebody says, “Tell me how your coaching works,” I might say, “Let me tell you about a woman named Mary Ann. She was struggling. She had various problems when she hired me. When we first sat down Mary Ann and I looked at her calendar…” So I’m telling this story and stories are beautiful because they connect with people and they end up saying, “Well, I have a situation similar to Mary Ann’s,” or, “I want you to do with me what you did with Mary Ann.”
I once wrote a book with the brilliant Sam Beckford called The Small
Business Millionaire. Both of us had been coaching all kinds of small
business people for a number of years so we decided to write a story—a
fictional story—of a coach who drives into town and saves a dysfunctional business from going under. The hero of the book is named Jonathan.
We made up this story based on various coaching case histories. One day
I got an email from a person who had read the book: “I want a Jonathan
in my life. Will you call me?” So there’s the power of stories right there.
I ended up coaching that person for a year.

Find the goal behind the client’s goal. Ask about your client’s clients.
As I’m speaking to my prospect and my prospect says, “I want to earn
a million dollars this year,” or, “I want my business to show a monthly
profit,” I don’t want to just say, “Oh, okay, great. I’ll help you do
that! Let’s put a coaching contract together. I’ve helped many people
become profitable.”
You don’t want to go there yet. You want to find the goal behind the
goal. “So tell me why you want your million. Let’s say we’ve worked
together for six months, and you are profitable now. How would that be
a benefit to you? What options would you have that you don’t have now?
How would life be better?”
It doesn’t have to be a business objective. If someone says, “I want to
be able to communicate better with my ex‑wife and my son, who lives
with her,” then you can look for the goal beneath that goal. “How would
that make your life better? Let’s count the ways.”
The reason I’m asking these questions is that if I can find the goal
behind the goal, my prospect is more connected to me than ever. Not
only that, but sometimes we can create a shortcut. So, for example, my
client might say, “Well, that would give me the time to really enjoy my life and be with my family more.” And I might say, “What if we just created a life in which you were with your family more, and we also created the profit, but you didn’t have to wait until you had a 200% profit increase to be with your family?”
There are so many wonderful things that can come up in an enrollment
conversation when you find the goal behind the goal.
I don’t want to be afraid to go negative either. Like Ron Wilder
teaches in our live coaching school workshops, you want your client to
describe the gap between the goal and today’s reality. You want a long
description of the client’s default future: What if you don’t do anything
(like this coaching) and nothing changes? What does that life look
like? What is the downside of this default future of yours? What are the
consequences? How painful is it?

Stay with their wants versus your needs. Needy is creepy.
You will have a hard time really hearing your client if your own mind
is occupied by your own needs, as in, “I need this client, I need this
money so badly, I really can’t afford to lose this client, I’ll discount, I’ll
do anything, I’ll become desperate—I really need it.”
If you’ve got this sense of extreme need in your mind, your behavior
and your communication is going to push the person away. That’s
because neediness is creepy.
We don’t want to be needy. We want to have it be the opposite. We
want to talk and think deeply about the client’s world, not ours. The sale
always occurs inside the client’s world.
If my client says, “Well, I’m going to think about this, I’ll get back
to you,” I don’t want to keep calling and emailing this person like I’m
needing this work. Anything needy is creepy to the other person. Human
need in the world of business is really off‑putting. It causes people to
not want to work with you. So it must be stopped.
Many times I have my clients who are coaches put on their computer
the phrase “needy is creepy” just to remind them. Because look what
people do. They check in, they touch base, they annoy people: “I’m just
checking in. I’m just touching base. I’m just trying to find out if you are going to work with me. I’m just trying to find out if you are going to be my client,” and that’s really uncomfortable to another person.
We want to practice different ways to stay connected. We want to
explore ways to deliver value in each communication. We practice these
different approaches when we communicate because we’ll get clients so
much faster that way.
If you haven’t heard back, send a gift and a note. Don’t even refer
to working together. Contribute and serve. You don’t need them; they
need you. Behave accordingly.

Be the first and only totally committed listener in their lives. (Lamp Post Metaphor from Michael Neill)
This is something Michael Neill taught me. Any time I catch myself
wondering if my coaching is really good enough to be charging what I
charge—any slippage in my confidence, or my realization of how good
coaching really is for people—I think about a lamp post.
The point Michael makes is that even talking to a lamp post would be
good for a person. Let’s say a person leaves his place of business every
evening and walks over to a lamp post and speaks to it. Maybe he vents,
maybe he talks about the problems of the day and about opportunities
for tomorrow and areas where he can make improvements.
It’s just a lamp post sitting there. But if he returned to that lamp post
every evening and shared his successes and challenges of the day and
his goals and dreams for the next day, even that would make his life
better, would help create a better person. Even talking to a lamp post
every evening would be beneficial to a person.
So your clients would get value if you just showed up. But as a coach
you bring an entire world beyond a simple lamp post. You can really
listen, you can see things. And you as a coach can be better than a lamp
post. You can talk back.

Maintain innocence in getting your yes/no. Yes lives in the land of no. If they have to “go think about it” the conversation was not complete.
Please know that yes lives in the land of no. Don’t be afraid of no.
So, for example, when you are talking to a prospect, when people
are talking to you about coaching and you really feel they’ve had a good
experience of it and the conversation is about to come to an end, do not
be afraid to live in the world of yes and no. Do not be afraid to ask an
innocent question like, “Is this something you would like to do?”
Now notice how innocent that question is. It’s not pushy, it’s not
salesy. Please see yourself in the same light as if you were a waiter in
a restaurant. See yourself serving someone by asking that question. If
you were a waiter in a restaurant you would come up to their table at the end of a meal and say, “Would you like coffee? Would you like dessert?”
That’s service. And if there’s a yes, then you bring coffee, and if there’s a no then you don’t, and you don’t care which. You’re serving with your question.
A lot of times coaches don’t see that. They think a question is pushy
and salesy and puts pressure on a person. It doesn’t—it serves. “Is this
something you would like to do? ”And if a person says no, that person usually explains what’s behind the no. “No, because…” Whatever is behind the no is showing me where a yes could come from if we keep talking. So no is fine, yes is even better.
But the implied “maybe someday” does not serve either one of you.

Show leadership in your enrollment conversation.
In sales training they call the agreement phase of the conversation “the
close.” Most coaches refuse to direct the action during the close. They
go soft and vague and the next thing you know the client has left the
conversation and nothing is on the calendar and no money is in the
mail. This happens because of lack of direction.
Let’s say someone says, “Yeah, I really want to do this coaching,” and
you say, “Okay, hey great, so I’ll be getting back to you with a proposal and availability, and after that you’ll get back to me, and after that we’ll set it up…”
Now it has disappeared! And the client’s life is happening and there
are all kinds of new opportunities to spend this coaching fee elsewhere.
A new granite countertop, for example, might be discussed over dinner.
And so coaching with you just sort of fades into the ether. Because
they have second thoughts, or someone else is asking for money in their
world and they are thinking, “Well, I could postpone the coaching.”
I don’t want the conversation to disappear into the ether. I’m the
coach in this relationship so I want to show some leadership. I want to
direct the action so that once someone says they want to work with me it
gets completed!
“Okay, great, so if you want to do this work, and you’re ready to begin,
here’s what you need to do. Open your calendar so we can put our first
session on it. What’s a good date and time for you? Wonderful. Now
you can either pay at the website, mail your fee in or bring it to the first session, whichever way is most convenient for you. Any questions about that? Excellent. I look forward to this.”
Now I’m directing the action as if you’re coming to a great auditorium
and I’m standing outside and I ask, “Do you have your tickets?” “Yes.”
“Okay, then please go into that line. Now, when you get into that line,
you’ll go here, then inside, and then talk to the usher; he’ll seat you.”
It is a great service to people to direct them. When someone wants
your work—wants your coaching—please direct them. Don’t get all shy
and deferential because money is involved. It is not pushy to direct. It
does not put pressure on a person. It really helps. People are asking to
be coached. They are asking to be led at this point. They are asking to
be directed.

Leave the conversation in a context of possibility, not a context of affordability.
Most coaches allow a prospective client to hang up the phone in a context of affordability. In other words, the prospect leaves his talk with you wondering if he can afford you (no matter what you charge). He goes to his wife or business partner and says, “Hey, can we afford to lose this amount of money on coaching?” Of course they are likely to say no in this context of affordability, because you left him wondering whether he can afford you or how he will get the money.
That context of affordability is not a service to the prospect (or to me; nor is it likely to bring me a client).
So I don’t want to let that happen.
Before our conversation ends I want to return the client and myself
to the context of possibility. Even if we have slipped into the context
of affordability, I want to re‑direct the conversation to the context of
possibility before it ends:
What’s possible if we worked together?

Why would it be worth it to you if we worked together?

How would it be worth it to you?

What in your world that you would like to be different might be different if
we worked together?

What’s possible for us?

What would you like to change?

What do you want?

Why don’t you have it now?

Tell me what you want and then tell me why it is not in your life right now.

If you can tell me why it’s not in your life right now, you and I might be
able to create a plan to work together to make that possible for you. What
would that be worth to you? Would those results be worth that investment?
You tell me. I’m not going to tell you.

Now we are back in the context of possibility.

Limitation creates value. Make sure you are the one doing the auditioning of the client (not the other way around).
When something is limited, its value goes up.
I read a story about a stamp collector. There were only two of a certain
kind of stamp remaining in the whole world, so naturally they were
very valuable. He owned one of them and when he finally got hold of
the second one he burned it. The price of the first one went way, way,
way up when he burned that second one. Way higher than the two of
them combined. Because now it was the only one in the whole world.
Limitation creates value.
So when someone knows that you are limited (which you always are
as a coach, because you only have so many hours every week to offer to
the world), they know you don’t have that much availability. The fact
that you do have an opening and are willing to consider them for it raises
the value of your offer—always. Limitation creates value.
In our prosperity workshops we really go in‑depth on how to express
and make use of this discipline. I want limitation to be very present in
my communication about what I have to offer someone, even while I am
offering it.

Be constantly aware of role reversal. Do not surrender your power, leadership and role as the coach in the conversation.

Don’t allow the roles to become reversed in a conversation with a
prospect. In other words, don’t let them become the coach and you
the client.
Don’t become needy and put yourself in the position of saying, “Well,
you know, anything you want, call me anytime, tell me when you are
available…” as you fall all over yourself to talk to them. It’s called role reversal when you do this.
Please keep in mind that you are the coach. You are the one considering
adding someone to your list of clients. You choose clients based on their coachability—it’s not the other way around. I have coaches come into my school who have it totally the other way around until they learn this powerful discipline. Their whole approach is unlimited availability— “I’ll coach anyone with money. If you have money, I’ll coach you. I don’t care if you’re coachable, I don’t care who you are, I don’t care if we succeed together. It doesn’t matter to me—all I want from you is a check, and then we’ll book time and get through it.”
You can see that this approach is not strong. It does not get you clients.
It has to be the other way around. Even if you only have one client and you have room for nine more on your calendar, you must hold your role. You might want a ten‑client practice but only have one client. You still don’t want role reversal to occur when you are talking to a prospect. You still don’t want to be needy and falling all over yourself and totally available to this person. You want to be the coach in the conversation. Because if you will hold for that, if you will commit to that, you’ll get clients.
If you can communicate from that LIMITED place in you, you’ll get
clients a hundred times faster (I was about to say “ten times faster,” but I really do mean a hundred times faster).

•••
One final note. As you practice these disciplines, never forget that
coaching really is good for people. Coaching is so good, so powerful.
Coaching has to be good.
The thing that’s so different between coaching and therapy is that
you can be in therapy for five years and still not know exactly what’s
happened or gotten better; but coaching has to be good. People don’t
renew their coaching contracts if it’s not working for them, if life is
not getting better, if they’re not transforming and hitting their goals.
They don’t just stay on with the coaching like they might with therapy.
So there’s a burden placed on coaching to really work, so coaches
keep getting better and better at what they do. Coaches have to prove
themselves with their work constantly or no one will refer people to
them, clients won’t renew with them, and they’ll have to start their lives
all over again. You have to be great at what you do for coaching to be
your profession, and that’s the good thing about it; that’s why so many
people have coaches now. Because it does work. Therapy is about the
past—healing wounds. Coaching is about the future. It’s about creating a
future that’s different from the future that would have arrived by default
if you had no coach and no sense of creativity and no commitment.
That’s why in practicing these disciplines you will change the future—
for yourself and your clients.