A Podcast for Coaches

Mark Butler: Hey, this is Mark
Butler and you are listening

to a podcast for coaches.

I opened my inbox last week and I
saw an email from a former client

asking if I had any availability.

This is a person I had done a
few sessions with last year,

uh, along with her husband.

And when those sessions came to
their conclusion, it was all good

and we lost track of each other
for actually quite a few months.

So then she emails me and we have a
quick catch up call we decided to do

another round of sessions together.

Of course.

I'm thrilled about it.

She's a great client.

We had great rapport when we worked
together last time, and , I'm

happy to support her again.

Here's why I tell the story.

I had no idea she was going to reach out.

There's no funnel.

There's no structured follow up.

There's just an email out of
the blue, or at least what looks

like an email out of the blue.

We'll come back to that in a little
bit, but this is how my practice works.

I start the majority of months
with no idea who will hire me.

Yeah, a good percentage of my
clients do come from renewals, but

those aren't certain either.

Make no mistake, my family uses
the money I generate from coaching.

If more than a month or two go by with no
coaching transactions, we will feel it.

So I want to talk about
this unpredictability.

The truth is I think I have a
pretty good handle on my mindset.

But if you were to track my anxiety in
the part of the month where there have

been no coaching transactions, you'll
notice it's much higher than in the

part of the month after a couple of
coaching transactions have happened.

I.

I almost hesitate to admit that
because of course I have clients and

prospects listening to this, but to
pretend otherwise would be dishonest.

I'm not shocking anyone with
what I'm saying probably.

And I think that my clients can read in
me that I'm not bringing some of that low

level anxiety into our interactions where
I'm pressuring anyone to do anything that

I don't think is in their best interest.

But it is there.

It's real for me.

When I'm having these thoughts and I
wanna get myself back to centered and

grounded and positive and productive,
one of the things that helps me is

to acknowledge that although there's
an unpredictability this month as to

who is going to hire me and when I.

If I look backwards at my coaching
practice over multiple years,

it becomes highly predictable.

In other words, there have probably
only been one or two months in the past

three years where no one has hired me
for coaching or renewed for coaching.

The transactions do happen, so my practice
is this predictably unpredictable thing.

Now?

Yes.

The classic line from the investment
world is past performance is no predictor

of future performance, but unlike
the investment world, as coaches, we

have great influence over the future.

If my goal is to have a steady
stream of coaching transactions.

You won't be surprised me being
me, that my view on reducing

unpredictability is this.

The more relationships I have and the
stronger those relationships are, the

more predictable my practice becomes.

I wanna share with you how I think
about different kinds of relationships

in my coaching practice and how to
nurture them to reduce uncertainty.

But before I get into that,
I'll just remind you that I view

coaching as a utility, a hygiene
activity that keeps me healthier and

happier than I would be without it.

Here's a real life example from my
own life as a client to a coach.

Not long ago, my coach Liz, offered
to switch our work to on demand,

meaning I could just reach out to
her whenever I felt like I wanted to

talk or whenever I needed a session.

I appreciate the offer because Liz and
I have built rapport over years now,

and I think we could probably do fine
just having a session now and then

I can see the benefits of this idea.

There's merit to it, and I might even
offer a version of this to my own clients,

although it would need to be a version
of on-demand coaching that addresses.

The concerns I have about it

but I turned Liz's offer down,
meaning I still have regularly

scheduled calls with her.

The reason is that I trust
conversation to yield insight.

I might go into a call with Liz having
no idea what we'll talk about, but I

trust Liz and I trust conversation.

I know some of our sessions will be of
the brush and floss hygiene variety.

There will be renewed clarity, but there
may be no big insights or epiphanies.

I also trust that in the course
of a year of coaching with Liz, I

will have one or two big insights,
one or two big epiphanies.

So I keep my coach on my calendar
because I want the hygiene

and the renewed clarity, and I
also want the big epiphanies.

If I switch to an on-demand approach
entirely, I might only connect with

Liz in moments of acute pain or acute
enthusiasm, and I think that risks both

the hygiene and the epiphanies that
come with regularly scheduled calls.

Now, why would I interject
that here as I get into a

conversation about the kinds of.

Relationships and how to nurture
them, that will reduce the

uncertainty in our coaching practices.

Well, I'm telling you this because
I wanna remind you how confident

I am in the power and the benefit
of conversation with a coach.

As I think about the people
I've worked with in the past.

As I think about reconnecting with them, I
am not reconnecting with them from a place

of I need to generate some transactions,
and, oh, I need to reduce the

unpredictability of my coaching practice.

That's not my energy.

That's a byproduct of treating the
relationships with the care and respect

that they deserve, and by tapping into
the confidence that I have, that if

a person has a conversation with me,
they will be better off afterward.

They may not know the ways in which
they will be better off afterward.

I may not know.

In fact, I have no idea the ways in
which they'll be better off afterward,

but I have very, very high confidence
that at the end of those interactions,

they will say something to the
effect of, I'm so glad we talked.

I feel so much better.

I didn't realize how much
this was bothering me.

Et cetera, et cetera.

That's what coaching does.

Now, what are these relationships?

Number one, we have relationships
with former clients, or maybe

a better way to describe it.

Scratch that.

Number one, we have the people who
already trust me in a coaching context.

People who trust me in a coaching
context include people who have

worked with me in unpaid sessions,
one-on-one, maybe their connection

calls, networking calls, discovery
sessions, whatever you wanna call them.

People who have engaged with me
in paid coaching in the past.

Or who are engaged with me in paid
coaching now, and people who trust me

in a coaching context because they've
heard me speak at an event, or they've

listened to this podcast, or they've
listened to me talk on other podcasts,

which are not specifically about coaching,
but through those interactions, they've

built trust with me in a coaching context.

These, of course, are the people who
are most likely to engage with coaching.

Today, these are the people that if I
reach back out and connect with them,

they are the most likely to say we
should do some more sessions together.

Now, I'm not telling
you that my plan is to.

Reach back out to these people
and to say, Hey, do you wanna

do some coaching together?

Although depending on the rapport
you have with the person, that

may be the perfect thing to do.

All I'm pointing out is the more people
I have, the more relationships I have

of that type, the less volatility
there will be in my practice.

I know a coach who has a
very, very busy practice.

I'm hoping and planning to bring
her on the show in the near future.

She does so many coaching sessions.

She's a very busy coach.

And she told me once that at any given
moment she has some number of active

clients, people who are regularly
meeting with her, and then she has a

whole other big group of clients who
just sort of come and go as needed.

They're kind of doing that on demand
thing I was talking about earlier,

which I think can be a good thing.

She has this big pool of clients,
some of whom are actively working

with her today, some of whom are not
working with her today, and some of

whom are kind of in the in between.

They pop in for a session now and
then the bigger this group of people

is, the less volatile my coaching
practice is that client of mine,

that friend of mine, she's actually
so busy that I don't know if I could

handle her level of coaching practice.

I really admire what she's doing.

So that's one type of relationship.

People who already trust
me in a coaching context.

The next type of relationship I want
to talk about is the relationship

where people like me and trust
me, but not in a coaching context.

Here's a story.

Kate and I were at dinner with friends
the other night, great friends of ours.

Somehow in the course of natural
conversation, I promise I didn't shoehorn

this in, but somehow in the course of
natural conversation I said something

about, oh yeah, the, the rest of the time
I'm just meeting with my clients now I.

The husband in this relationship
isn't as familiar with my work.

The wife is a little bit
more familiar with my work.

I could tell the wife had
given the husband a little bit

of background, but not a lot.

So this is a person, the husband in
particular, who I know likes me and

trusts me outside of a coaching context,
but doesn't have any familiarity

with the work I do as a coach.

He's a great guy and a very interested
person, and so he asked me questions.

How did you end up doing what you do?

He asked me, because he knows
I'm not a therapist, but he knows

that the closest thing to what I
do would be therapy, and he said.

I know you aren't a therapist.

I know you don't have any
credential or any certification.

How did you end up doing what you do?

So I told him the story of how I started
out doing budget coaching and budget

implementation using YA and how there
was a natural evolution that when you're

talking about money, you end up talking
about the things that touch the money

and the things that touch the money
are the people and their thoughts and

their emotions and their relationships.

And there was a gradual evolution over
the course of about seven or eight years.

Where I started talking less and less
about money and more and more about

thoughts, feelings, and relationships.

And around 2021, there was almost
a clean break where I almost don't

talk about money anymore and I talk
almost exclusively about thoughts,

feelings, and relationships.

That was very interesting to him.

We got into conversation about our kids.

We talked about our kids and
our relationships with them.

We talked about our kids' relationships
with significant others and with

their friendships, and we had a
really interesting conversation in

which I was able to sincerely and
totally nont transactionally share

some things that I've learned from
a couple thousand hours of coaching.

That I've done with my clients.

So we had a really interesting
conversation about relationships, about

our relationships with each other, with
our spouses, with our kids, our kids',

relationships with friends, our kids',
relationships with significant others.

It was a great conversation.

I got a lot out of it too.

It wasn't just me sitting there, I
hope, monologuing, but I was able to

bring my work into the conversation.

I was able to share things that I've
learned over a couple of thousand hours.

Working with clients.

And in the conversation, this
guy did say to me, you know what?

One of our kids would really
benefit from talking with you.

Now, will anything come of that?

I don't know.

Would I even work with their
child or would I make a referral?

I don't know.

Uh, at the very least, all I said
to him jokingly was, well, you know.

If you wanna send your kid my
way, I'd be happy to give him , the

family discount of 100% off.

And they joked and said, no,
of course we're gonna pay you.

And , we left it at that.

That is me establishing coaching trust in
a relationship where there was friendship,

trust, and I don't need that relationship
to produce coaching transactions.

What I need to do as a person who wants
to serve people through coaching is to

contribute to relationships, and when
the opportunity comes to introduce my

work as a coach, naturally, as it did
very naturally in that interaction.

I introduce it and I trust that
as those interactions stack up

in the weird magic of a coaching
practice, there will be new clients.

It will be the rarer case that
the new clients come directly

from those interactions.

It will be the more common case that
people pop up as if from nowhere and

say, oh, maybe I'd like to work with
you, or Could we talk about coaching?

And then I mapped that relationship
backward, and I find out that the

conversation had over dinner was the
first in a series of dominoes that led

to a person that I didn't even know yet.

And coaching.

So these relationships where
I am liked and trusted outside

of a coaching context are.

Almost even in a strategic business
view are almost as important as the

relationships where people like me and
trust me in a coaching context, because

once a person likes you and trusts
you outside of a coaching context, if

they actually trust you, then it's a
short journey from trusting you outside

of a coaching context to trusting
you inside of a coaching context.

So the better I am in non coaching
relationships, the more likely I am to

find myself in coaching relationships.

And that leads to the
third type of relationship.

The third type of relationship is.

One where a person doesn't know
me or trust me at all yet, they're

a stranger to me at this point.

If I want to thrive in my coaching
practice in the long run, and apparently

there's scientific research that says
if I want to thrive as a human being

in the long run, then some steady
trickle of new people needs to meet

me and I meet them and we form a
connection, we form a relationship.

As that happens, there becomes
the opportunity for them to.

Know me, then like me, then trust me, then
introduce the trust in more of a coaching

context or a coaching conversation.

And then some small percentage of those
actually become coaching clients of

mine or refer coaching clients of mine.

This is how it works.

Another client told me a story.

She was talking with
her, significant other.

They were talking about having
opportunities to just talk and to

be truly heard and paid attention to
and how as adults, that can be a very

challenging thing to find, and my
client's significant other said to her.

That's a really tough thing, isn't it?

How do you solve this?

And she said, well, it's funny you ask.

One of the ways I solve it is
I pay a guy to listen to me.

And he said, what?

That's seems odd.

And she said, it is kind of odd, isn't it?

But it's really great because she tends
to be a person that people talk to.

She's very trustworthy and
she's a great listener.

So she ends up doing more of
the listening in her life.

She has me as her coach , and my
job is to show up on a Zoom call

and she talks and I ask questions
and I ask follow up questions and

she shares, and that's her time.

She loves it and I love it, but
as she shares that story with

her significant other, she is
in a way introducing me to him.

Now, will he ever say, by the way,
who's that guy you pay to talk to?

Probably not.

All of these things are probably not,
but as they happen often enough, we end

up with people who like us and trust
us outside of a coaching context, who

then like us and trust us inside of a
coaching context, who then engage with

us as their coach for some period of time

as I give care and attention
in each of these areas.

By nurturing relationships,

I reduce the unpredictability in
a very unpredictable business,

which is a coaching practice.

So I'll end where I began.

It is early in the month as I record tHis.

there have been no coaching
transactions as yet.

I anticipate that there will be,
but the coaching transactions that

happen this month will not be random.

They will not be out of the blue, even
if I occasionally use that language.

They will be the natural fruit of
relationships that were planted and

nurtured days, weeks, months, years ago.

Come back into my life this month and
become a formal coaching relationship.

That's how it works.

So, although we can call this business
unpredictable, we have to also

acknowledge its predictable parts and
we have to exert our influence and

our energy in the areas where it
is predictable so that we make the

unpredictable parts less volatile.

And with that, I will
talk to you next time.=