TOOLS & ARTICLES
Balance & Self-Care for Coaches
Self-Care for practitioners in the helping fields could not be a more critical
part of a successful business practice.
You shoulder the burdens of many clients and even though you aren’t supposed to take that weight home with you often it happens… even though you aren’t supposed to take on your clients’ problems you may find yourself drained by the weight of their issues.
Being around pain, struggle, challenges and a vast array of negative emotions is taxing on your system!
The weight of your job effects your physical system, draining your energy and taxing your immune system. It can burden your emotional system with the heaviness that your clients are facing. It can take up space in your mental system, or thought life. All of this can cause stress and also deplete the quality of your own life.
So how can you create time, space and self-care rituals to support yourself while at the same time supporting SO many others?
The founder of Integrative Wellness Academy (IWA), Rachel Eva was in private practice as an Integrative Wellness & Life Coach for over 20 years prior to founding IWA in 2010. During her years in private practice, mastering self-care in order to maintain wellness and balance in the mind, body, emotions and spirit was one of the keys to her success both personally and professionally. Here are Rachel’s top 3 recommendations for other coaches…
- Create space, time & energy for self-care
Schedule this into your weekly calendar and make it as high of a priority as you would a paying client session.
- Determine which type of self-care will give you the highest (and fastest) return
Journal on this and follow your excitement! Try new things from time to time, experiment with new self-care activities and continually expand your self-care options! After a self-care activity or practice, journal, asking yourself, ‘On a level of 1-10 (10 being the highest) how much did this activity or practice replenish me?’
- Practice stress reduction & stress management techniques
As a coach you have many tools in your tool box for stress management and stress reduction but when the going gets tough are you reaching into your Integrative Life Coaching took kit and using your tools for yourself? Set an intention to increase your capacity to deal with life’s stressors while decreasing the stress in your daily life bu picking up and applying your tools.
Building Relationships to Expand Your Business
A note from Rachel Eva…
Relationships, Relationships, Relationships!
We can all get easily sucked into social media and online marketing to grow our businesses as coaches. However, the most successful marketing I ever did to expand my business was through DEVELOPING & NOURTURING RELATIONSHIPS. This produces new clients and referrals while also helping you to stay in your lane as a coach and reduce the amount of time you spend on marketing and sales. We all (or most of us) got into coaching with a desire to help people, not a desire to be a sales or marketing person. Invest time to build new relationships and nurture existing relationships and you will see the fruits unfold in your business.
Building and cultivating relationships does require an investment of time, energy and attention so please consider approaching this with a LOT of INTENTIONALITY!
Coffee & Talk
So how do we build relationships in this digital era? Connect! True connection, face to face over tea or coffee (even a virtual coffee date over Skype) cultivates a relationship more deeply than any effective marketing campaign, blog or social media post ever can. When I was still in private practice as a coach I made sure that I scheduled a few coffee dates each week with new contacts to build relationships and also with old or current contacts to cultivate and deepen the relationship.
Here is the most important part… show up with a heart of service NOT your own agenda. Show up and ask how they are, what they are doing and how YOU can be of service to them. Being of service helps others and also opens doors for you to be referred!
Incentivizing Referrals
Another powerful way to grow your coaching business is to incentivize your current clients in order to gain more referrals. Creating a referral program for people who already know and trust you and your work is a highly effective expansion tool for coaching businesses.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you offer a 12-month coaching program. You could let your clients know that for every referral they send to you, who also enrolls in the 12-month coaching program, that you will give them one free month added onto their current 12-month coaching program. You can also do something like this scaled back to 1,3 or 6 month coaching packages as well.
Creative Offerings, Start with The End in Mind
One of the pitfalls that I see coaches get stuck in is communicating what you do, your services and generally the coach-client relationship to potential clients. I see this communication breakdown show up on coach’s websites, their social media posts and also within their conversations with potential clients. Telling a client that you are an Integrative Life Coach does not tell them what benefit that is to them. When you share what you do for a living, the person you are talking to immediately tries to take this new piece of information and fit it into place to make sense to them. When you don’t clearly explain the puzzle piece they, more often than not, won’t even try to fit it into their puzzle of ‘how this could benefit me’, instead it goes directly into their mental trash bin along with all other ‘non-applicable and not helpful information’.
When we are communicating to potential clients we need to start with the end in mind…the clients internal question ‘how is this helpful to me and my life?’. When communicating, whether via a one-on-one conversation, speaking event, virtual event (such as a Facebook live), through your social media posts or website, ALWAYS ADDRESS THE NEEDS OF THE CLIENT AND HOW YOU CAN HELP.
Here’s are some example…
Ineffective – I am an integrative life coach, want more information on becoming my client?
Effective (niche coaching practice) – I am an integrative life coach who helps new parents achieve balanced lives and increase their capacity to parent successfully.
Effective (niche coaching practice) – I am an integrative life coach who helps single people break unhealthy relationship patterns in order to create more meaningful and fulfilling relationships
Effective (generalist coaching practice) – I’m an integrative life coach who supports clients going through challenging life transitions in order to transform successfully and build the life they want to experience.
Effective (generalist coaching practice) – I help clients overcome the negative patterns and habits that keep them from achieving their goals so that they can effectively create sustainable positive changes in their lives.
Know WHAT problems your potential clients may face and be SPECIFIC about the benefits those clients can experience by working with you. These are known as PAIN POINTS (the negative things that are motivating them to change) and the BENEFITS (the positive outcomes or solutions they would like to experience instead and that you can help them achieve or experience through coaching). |
