S22EP09: How to Become a Master Coach - Master Coaching with Ajit Nawalkha

Welcome to One Insight. My name is Rich Litvin. I grew up in London and I now live in LA. And this is a podcast for extraordinary top performers and their coaches. You see, I've coached some of the most successful and talented people on the planet. I can see what most people cannot see, and I dare to say what most people wouldn't dare to say.

And what I know about success is that on the other side of it, it can be incredibly lonely. You can feel more of an imposter the more successful you become. And when you're the most interesting person in the room, you're actually in the wrong room. Clients who are more successful, more intelligent and wealthy. need your support more than they know and more than you can imagine. I coach around insight. Life looks one way. Something happens.

And the world looks different, and your entire world changes. It can happen in an instant. And this podcast is called One Insight, because a single insight can change everything. One of the most powerful insights I've had in recent years around creating clients is that

Your job is to audition clients. And so often as coaches, we've got it the other way around. When you walk into the room thinking, how can I prove myself to this person? I hope they like me. I hope I can impress them. You have to turn a buyer into a seller and the seller into a buyer.

Hi there, this is Ajit Navlaka and welcome to the Business of Coaching podcast. Today I have a really, really special friend, a mentor and a coach that I truly respect. in context of not only as a coach, but also as somebody who's developed a phenomenal business around his coaching practice. I'm super excited and I really, really want you to also welcome somebody that you may already be familiar with. 嗨 I'm so excited to have you today on this Fasc podcast.

Yeah, always look forward to our conversations. Yeah. So the reason why I also wanted to bring you on is because you've been one of those first few people that I studied when I started to work towards Evercoach and when we started to work towards coaching and my own coaching and consulting practice that I've now developed. And one of the first few people that I studied because of your book, The Prosperous Coach, that's the place where I started.

And I would love for us to quickly touch upon that for the people who may not be aware of that book and still are coaches somehow, uh, which is like a must-read book by the way. If you haven't read The Prosperous Coach, you absolutely must do that. We'll put the link somewhere.

in the description box for you to be able to go get a copy for yourself. It's an absolute read. But why don't you tell a little bit about uh Prosperous Coach or just your journey a little bit so people can just get warmed up to you. Sure. Somebody said to me recently, never write a book you wouldn't be happy to be talking about in three years' time.

Well, I wrote that book seven years ago and I'm still happy to be talking about it, so it feels good. Uh a friend of mine and myself, Steve Chandler, wrote a book for coaches and it was meant to be the antidote to all the stuff that coaches think they need to do when they begin a coaching practice.

'Cause it it's very noisy online. And the moment you go online, all the messages seem to be, we will help you to build your glossy website, come to networking events that we run, because that's how you get clients. uh do s learn search engine optimization, pay-per-click, Facebook, Google. Some of this stuff didn't even exist when we started writing about this. It's more new stuff comes out all the time and it's very noisy and it's very intense.

And you become a coach because you're a people person. And then you become overwhelmed because you're doing all this stuff that has nothing to do with people, trying to get business of working with people. And we basically said, you don't have to do that.

There's nothing wrong with it. If if it's your thing, it makes you feel alive, if you love it, do all the social media, all those things that that that work for you. But you don't need to. You can be an extraordinary coach with a handful of clients. Building a practice, one relationship, one conversation at a time. That's the heart of that book.

And that's that's a beautiful place that we've found for for coaches, especially when they're starting out and and even when they're growing their practice, depending on like you said, what's your wife and what's your how you wanna play out in the world, but to give that

kind of antidote and uh and an alternative perspective to saying you don't have to go wild on Instagram and Facebook and all these different things that everybody wants to go wild on. You don't need to do any of that stuff. Just do one relationship really, really beautifully.

How is it that you discovered that it was one relationship at a time? Uh well my story is I'm I'm a high school teacher by background, nothing to do with coaching overtly. Um I spent 15 years teaching in uh Africa, Southeast Asia, and um the UK inner city London. And was a vice principal eventually, fifteen years into my career, lost a job uh because the the boss I was working for got pushed out. New boss wanted her own team and a few weeks into a new job I was unceremoniously fired.

Went to sit on a beach and lick my wounds and had these coaching playing cards, began playing uh this game called coaching and people said, Can I play? So I started coaching people literally on a beach and then uh fast forward almost fifteen years from that date and it's it's my profession, it's what I do. I've always loved people. I knew when I was leaving university I wanted a job with to do with people. I didn't know what that would look like. I started off working in human resources.

I was in the healthcare system uh in the UK at a children's hospital, but it was so bureaucratic it bored me. Then I came across teaching and I loved it. If I'm honest, I didn't love teaching. I loved kids because I love people. And it was only when I became a senior teacher that I started to really love it because then no one was watching my lessons anymore. I was watching theirs. So I could do what I wanted to do in the class and I would f have fun talking to the kids.

And I was involved in hiring teachers, building teams. So I learned about how to build groups of people who are on a big mission. And all of that was a background to my practice as a coach. Uh, and and that's been my profession for 15 years now. Yeah, it's beautiful. It's beautiful. Tell us how that I I see how the journey started, but the first few years and I'm kind of trying to get you to reflect back on how that journey has been because it's always interesting to kind of

uh reflect back and go, okay, wow, that's that's how I started, that's where I went, these are the journeys or these are the ups and the downs that I experienced. The reason why I also asked this question is As much as and and and and I hope you you agree too, is as much as business is about the strategies and so forth, it's about the journeys that we take in personally, internally. Uh so

I'd say more so about the journeys than even the strategy. So I I sometimes describe myself as an accidental entrepreneur. That wasn't my destiny. I I thought I was gonna be a a young, successful head teacher. uh I think I'd have been a very uh uh young, successful board headteacher quite quickly. And so I'm grateful now what happened to me. W when I started coaching, I

I didn't know how to be an entrepreneur, so I came up with a one-line business plan. Meet fun and interesting people. Anytime I did that, my business would thrive. Anytime I started hiring, I remember at the time hiring SEO experts and people who taught me systems to do 25 minute taster sessions, my business was struggled.

So th that to this day is my s my one line business plan. Meet fun and interesting peop uh fun and interesting people. I've never had a a a a a formal strategy, a strategic plan, a business plan. And and I was doing that two or three years into coaching and building a great practice with some great clones.

I was on the faculty of a couple of coaching schools. I was helping Steve Chandler who by that point I've been studying with Steve and I was helping him with his coaching school and Steve said, Hey, do you want to write a book about how to get clients?

Because it looks to me like you've written half of it already. Because back in those days we had those online forums and in the faculty in the schools I was the faculty on, I would share about how I was getting clients. People ask me questions, where do you get your clients from? And I talk about relationships and

And over time I just built up a lot of articles that I'd written, stories and qu answering questions and so on. So we said, yeah, let's jump in, let's write a book. And that was the Prosperous Coach. And we we we didn't want to create a formula. At the heart of the Prosperous Coach is a framework.

It's it's simple. It's not easy, but it's simple. And if you practice what Steve calls the blue collar work of coaching, where you get out there every day and you serve people powerfully, the clients will come. If you serve them thinking if I give something to you of value, then hopefully you'll become my client. Then people feel that kind of you're giving in order to get. It it doesn't work. You have to be willing to play the long-term game and you can create clients that way, really powerful.

It's beautiful. That's beautiful. And and I I would love for us to dive a little bit on that area. The reason also why I'm so curious about these things is As much as we are trying to bring as diverse quality of people and people have built businesses from many different aspects and different perspectives, it's hard to find very successful entrepreneurs.

who are speaking about how to just serve people. Yep. To really build a a solid practice because it's easier in the noisy world than it is to find somebody who is an Instagram influencer and knows how to do that through Instagram or through uh events or through many other channels that are available, but it's almost it's like a lost art, but a powerful one. And we kinda wanna revisit it. Or not kinda, we should be revisiting it right about now.

I think that's why the book sells so well. To this day, we sell a thousand copies every single month. Um and and I ask people all the time when they say, Hey, I I know about you Rich, how do you know about me? They they say, somebody told me to read your book. That's the most common thing I hear. It's a book that's gone out into the coaching world by word of mouth. And and it speaks to the power of actually the the the practice of creating clients that way.

serve people so powerfully they never forget your conversation for the rest of their life. Well apparently if you write a powerful book, they'll never forget their the book for the rest of their life too. And it really does speak to the heart of what I believe in. really give your stuff away in in in in a powerful way, serve people, and it comes back.

And look, I I it wasn't always like this. At the start of my coaching career, my first ever coaching client paid me$10 a month. And that was for four coaching sessions. That was$2.50 an hour. So, you know, I I struggled at the beginning of my coaching career. And then I looked around. I was living in the Bay Area. I saw some amazing coaches, cutting-edge coachings going on in the Bay Area, even to this day. And most of the coaches I knew who were great

were going paycheck to paycheck or were struggling to succeed, not to make any money. So I thought and then I saw some really average coaches who are making a lot of money. And I'm very fortunate very early on, I saw there was absolutely no correlation between how good you are as a coach and how much money you. Look, you can't be a bad coach and succeed for very long. But if you've got some average or decent coaching skills

And you know how to serve people, then you can succeed as a coach. And you have to on top of that be willing to sell. You sell by serving, but at some point you have to be willing to sell by saying this is how much it costs. Are you willing to give me a check? Hm. So these are some d I I love that you went there because what I wanted to go into next was also to ask

What were some of the shifts that may have happened during the course of these 15 years that every single time it happened, it felt like it was a big exponential shift for you? Personally, of course. The earliest one. Oh well actually the very earliest one was that guy paying me ten dollars a month.

I was happy with that. I was thrilled. Nobody had ever paid me money before for a service like that. I sit down, we talk, and then you send me a check. It was amazing to me. So I was thrilled with that. That was the first. Wow, this could be my career. I can serve people and they'll pay me. That was a life changing insight. The second one was the realization that

So I s early days of my coaching, I started doing these instant confidence sessions. We'd spend 30 minutes on the phone and you would leave a sense of with a sense of renewed power and confidence. I got really good at it. Did hundreds of these sessions. And one of my coaches said, Do you want to be known as the guy who does 30 minute instant confidence sessions for the rest of your life? I went, Oh my God, no. Uh huh.

I want to be known as the guy where you spend at least a year with me and your entire life transformed. That was it. That was an insight moment. Everything changes. And so I started saying out loud, this is what I do. How do we how does it work to work with you, Rich? Well, we spend a year together and your life transforms.

And this is how much it costs. And I got the insight early on. I wanted I think it was twenty grand I wanted a year. And I started saying it out loud. And people said no. And they said no again and no again and no again. I just got so many no's. I started saying it was twenty thousand dollars a year to work with me and people say no and no again and no again and no again.

And I'd get creative. It wasn't like I didn't have any clients. I would get creative. I would say, okay, well let's have a look at what would really serve you. It's not a year. I had one guy who paid me for a month of coaching, a single month, and we split it into four fifteen minute sessions. I got someone who paid me to write his blog. I did whatever it took because I needed money. It was eleven months to the day

from me saying out loud, This is how much it costs to work with me, twenty thousand dollars, when I'd served somebody powerfully and she just looked me in the eyes at the end and said, Okay, great, I'm in. How do I pay you? And on the inside I was like, Holy shit And on the outside I said You send me a check. And we began. And that was my first$20,000 claim.

That's those are some very interesting shifts that you just talked about. There are I think there were like many things that you mentioned. Firstly was the whole idea of saying I had to go through eleven months of nose to get to the yes and I got creative in the on the way because you still had to figure out how to pay the bills. I think that's an interesting

thing to remember for anybody that watches this is like, all right, you you might take that much longer, even if you know I have a clearly defined package. I know exactly what I serve and I know how much I should charge for it. Sometimes when you're just starting, you might take a couple of months before you get your first yes and you should be willing or you you you you should be open to the idea of saying, Hey, this might take several months and before I get to anywhere.

Well th let me speak to that'cause there's there's three things I hear in that. One, there's a there's a quote from Byron Katie who said you can uh you can achieve anything you want in life if you're willing to receive a thousand notes. Most people can't handle one no or two no's. I was at an event the other day and I was talking to the audience and this is a group of coaches who want to build their practice.

And, you know, it's a hundred thousand dollars a year to work with me one-on-one these days. And I said to them something that really shocked the audience. I said, you realize I get more no's than almost all of you possibly put together? And people don't realise this, that the more money you charge, actually the more no you have to be willing to receive. And it's hard to get a$100,000 note.

I can sometimes really be serving someone, working with them and and they're interested to work with me and at some point they decide it's not a yes to continue. It's not the right time or something else is going on. And I'm human. That that feels uh intense to be able to hold that energy. for someone to say, now's not the right time when we're talking about a hundred thousand dollars. So that's that's one of the things to realize, most people can't handle a single Mm-hmm.

You've got to build your no muscle. You've got to build your ability to receive notes. So that relates to the second thing, which is um there's a cartoonist called Humor Cloud, who has a blog Gaping Void.

And Hugh McLeod has a a distinction he calls sex and cash theory. And I love sex and cash theory. So he says, it's all well and good to have your big sexy projects, but sometimes you just need cash because you've got to pay the rent, the mortgage, the kids' school fees, or you just want a vacation. It's really important for coaches to realise, for any entrepreneur to realise that you got to be paying attention to both.

Because if you're only focused on the sexy work and the cash is running out, you're going to be in trouble and you won't ever be able to do the sexy stuff. So yeah, I was doing things like writing someone else's blog because that brought in the cash that I needed to sustain myself.

Sometimes the cash might be coming from because you have a property that you're renting out. There's all sorts of things you can do, but get creative. If you need a client more than they need you, it's not a healthy place to be in. And you won't get clients that way. That's that's so true. And I love the sex and cash theory. That's such a brilliant idea to just simply have even that distinction in your mind to go, Oh, uh yes, you wanna be this amazing coach but

Sometimes you gotta do the work that you gotta do for the cash and and that's okay. It's a part of the journey.

So that relates to the third thing is I think almost in any business agit. Three years. Right. You've got to be in it for three you've got to commit to the long term. If you don't believe all the stuff you read online, I see these ads in my Facebook feed, you know, seven days to seven figures. I saw one the other day it said, I will teach you the precise blueprint for how I built my$30 million business.

Yeah, I mean, you know, it's it's as an entrepreneur, you know this. Like that that's it doesn't work that way. Even if it was true, I don't know about this person, but even if they had got a thirty million dollar business, there was no precise blueprint'cause it doesn't work that way. 'Cause if it did, we could just save time and read Richard Branson's book and we'd all be billionaires. Yeah.

So you've got to commit to the long term. You really got to be in it for at least three years. In business, they call it the J curve of business. There's this dip that you go through when you start any new business. If you're a new coach, it doesn't matter if you've been in as an entrepreneur or you've been an executive for 20 years, you're in startup mode. You become a coach.

And when you're in startup mode, the reason so many startups get started by spotty teenage kids in their parents' basements, because they live on ramen noodles. If you're not willing to live on ramen noodles for a while, it's going to be difficult for you as a coach. It's really important I say that. And coaching is not for everyone. And I feel it's important I say that too. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Because one of the things I see is about 10 minutes after becoming a coach, people realize, well, this is tough. But there are people who could learn from me because I'm 10 minutes ahead of them and that's beginner coaches. And I see new coaches saying, I'm going to teach coaches how to build a practice when they don't have any success. They've never got any clients themselves.

And and I think that's one of the real dangers about this field that we're in is that people are saying, here's the magic answer for success. There is no magic formula. You have to be willing to do the work. It is so true. And that was one of the reasons why we started Eva Coach, is to stop the cycle of of people just getting into the business to teach other people how to get into the business. And we are like, it's not it's not doing any good to anyone.

Like people who are actually good, then are feeling because they end up with working with somebody who's just getting into the business to teach people how to get into the business. And they end up working even if they have tremendous amount of experience. Now they're jaded because they feel everybody's this is not really a really lucrative business or it doesn't work or whatever that is, the story they start telling themselves. And we said there has to be somebody who wet.

everybody and says, Hey, every single person that we will bring on board, at least we know their backstory. We know where they're coming from. Are is there any truth to what they are saying? Are they making blanket promises like I'll give you my blueprint for thirty million dollars? Well We all know and the thing is, I think we all kinda know that it's not true. But still we fall for it. Because that I why do you think that happens? Why do we fall for the shiny object?

Because we're human.'Cause we're human. We're we're craving the the quick answer. Um I'm less so there are there are three ways to look at life. There's simplicity. Most people crave simplicity. It's why they click on the link in their Facebook feed that says seven steps to seven figures.

Then there's complexity. Beyond simplicity is complexity. You make your business systems complex enough, you can sell it. It's why some of the big consulting companies have made millions of dollars a year because you're gonna buy into their intellectual property and have the complexity they sell. I'm interested in the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

The simplicity on the other side of complexity. When I'm coaching extraordinary top performers, I'm looking for the one thing that will shift everything. The tiniest possible shift that has a big impact on their life.

Beautiful. Beautiful. What are some of the other mental shifts that you could recall right now that you think would be valuable for somebody getting into this business or is already in this business and is hoping to find that simplicity beyond the complexity? Okay, I'll tell you an interesting one which I haven't really shared much in public. So the the irony of the Prosperous Coach coming out is that I became known as a coach and then the I started to put on some events.

where I would share some of the stuff in the Prosperous Coach and did really well. So I built this company. where we'd grown to 10 employees. We were doing two big events a year and it felt great. I was growing this amazing team of really top performers. I had some great people I was working with. And what happened over time is I realized. The problem with talking to someone who's successful and asking them to track back is that they remember the things that went well.

And so when you're drawing out the stories of success and people say, Well, let me copy them, is they can miss stuff. So I'm trying to catch the things that I would miss. So it wasn't that I caught one day what was working and it wasn't. I had an argument with my bookkeeper, and I started crying because I was so tired and burnt out and exhausted. because I'd spent the last few years

building a team, managing a team, leading a team, and I was doing all the things that didn't excite me and thrill me any longer. I I'd spent over a decade, fifteen years doing that in the education system. I didn't want to be that kind of leader anymore. And here I was, I've been caught back in it because I was being successful, which was driving me to the next stage. Everyone says that it's important to scale up. And I've been doing that.

And the first thing that happened is I stopped doing something uh it was a very lucrative part of my business, the coaching salons I'd run for years. Um, and I cut them out. 'Cause I was just tired. And I didn't have the energy to do them anymore. It it was several hundred thousand dollars a year, uh mostly profit, which I just said, I it doesn't matter. I I get paid in other ways than money and and time and energy. I've got two little kids and I'm burnt out, I can't do that anymore.

I sometimes look back and think, maybe that was a bit of a mistake, because it was tough to be in business for a year after that, because I cut out the most lucrative part of my business. When I cut that out. And I cut my team down from ten people down to three. Instead of scaling up, I was scaling back. And I felt great.

I just felt really good. I could concentrate on what I loved to do. I said to my team, I've forgotten the heart of the prosperous coach. I've forgotten my one-line business plan. Spend time with fun and interesting people. I said, let's fill my calendar conversations with fun and interesting people. And I began to do that. And life began to get really fun and good again. So I I'm yeah, maybe pause there and see what comes up for you and I can tell more of that story.

It the thing that's coming up for me there and and I think I can resonate to some level with you is that sometimes we we chase a particular thing because a it's a reflection of other people almost or it's the other people's dialogue or the dialogue that's just the popular dialogue. we chase that and we we don't consider what the cost of that chase is gonna be. Right? Now nowhere it's the same, but but I experienced my own story of burnout while I was running Mine Valley for a year and a half.

And it was nothing to do with the company. I loved the company. I loved the work, but I had forgotten the cost of the chase. The cost of chase, because I didn't think through, didn't plan through, didn't really ask myself the question, do I really want it? Or is this for other people? Yep. So for me it was because I needed to prove that the kid from Jaipur who grew up in a poor household

without a degree or a proper degree could do well in life, even if all the cousins with degrees only became successful because of degrees. So that was like my mom dialogue for me. And I've been very open about it. My mom knows about it. It's not a not a problem to share. But I had to come to that resolve and it took me uh it took a toll on everything in my life at the time for me to come to that moment to say, I'm not doing this for me. I am doing this for

proving myself to everybody else, not even to myself. And and I think that was the point where I realized and that's what what what is the essence of my my second book, Live Big, was, because it took me a few years to really come to come to terms with myself and accept myself as Who do I really want to be? And am I doing things which are joyous to me? In in in one line, if I have to summarize it, which Interestingly, it it it took me I I wanna say almost three years or four years to really

come full circle and really rediscover myself. And and I I'm very grateful for for my now wife and then coach and now partner and everything. Nita to play a big role in that and my business partner Vision to play a big role in that and other friends like you to show up at different stages and and play a big role in that because every little conversation would leave me with an insight and leave me with a question that helped me make that journey further, further, further, further.

Eventually to come to a point where literally two nights ago, I was with a friend that I that had not met in a year and a half or something. Um and he comes to me at the party. We were at the at the party, we were at the same party together. He comes to me at the party and he says, Ajit, I saw you on stage. I have never seen you this comfortable, this relaxed.

And I was like, thank you. Thank you for recognizing that because that's how I feel now. Yeah. I feel I am being me, instead of doing this crazy chase that the world always tells us to do. So I I relate to it in some capacity. Y yeah, my my clients do because my clients are really top performers. And most of us are top performers for a reason. We're driven for a reason that we can't see. And most of us don't catch it until it's too late. It's what Naval Ravakant calls the fundamental delusion.

the idea that finally we'll find a thing that makes us happy forever. and and as driven people, we don't understand what's driving us until we get to that point. And it's often in our late 30s, 40s, early 50s that I see people get

kind of collapse under the weight of that thing that they thought would make them happy. And finally doesn't I I coached an entrepreneur who said to me, I sold my first business for eight figures. I was about to start my second when I remembered I only started my first one because I wasn't happy. And I'm still not happy.

Now he caught it, but most people don't. And and those are the kind of people I I coach uh because success can bring surprising loneliness and sadness, depression even uh and unhappiness. People don't realize that.

There's several moments of insight that of course help us and and everybody has their own journey and and realization. You talked about how you're scaling back, uh which was a realization I'm I'm uh like you mentioned from saying, hey, I'm doing all these crazy things, but it's not giving me that joy.

So let's talk a little bit about there's so many insightful moments that happen and thank you for for sharing those insightful moments with us. Let's talk a little bit about you writing the process. And going back into the the framework that you presented and the prosperous review, because that's a really powerful framework. If you would give us a quick insight on how how does that come about and how is it that somebody could take that framework and make it real in their own practice?

Great. Well let me close the loop from that conversation we were just having, because this realization that I wasn't enjoying the business that I built and I and scaling back, what I wanted to do was fill my calendar with conversations with interesting people. And that's the heart of the Prosperous Coach approach. So I still practice that to this day. And here's how it works. There's a simple four-step framework. Invite, create, propose. Connect.

Only connect. Not who can I speak to because I might be able to get them as a client. It's simply who would I love to speak to today? It might be a buddy, it might be an old friend. But who would I really genuinely love to speak to? We live in a relationship world and we forget that'cause we're online and it's so noisy and we're on Facebook and we're on our phone. But it's in relationship and in conversation that stuff happens. Who would I love to speak to?

So I call up an old friend and then I get genuinely curious. Hey man, how's life? What are you up to? What are you doing? How's things going? And I speak to them and find out what's going on. Maybe there's a place that they're struggling. I can help. They have a vision that I can give some some guidance on. Maybe we just chat.

And at some point if I've been genuinely curious about them, they tend to get genuinely curious about me. What about you? What's up? And I can say, oh, well funny you should ask. I have a coaching business. I'm looking for a client right now. And then you're in a conversation about what you're up to.

It doesn't mean go out and try and make your friends your clients. I mean just talk about what you're up to. Talk about what inspires you from that place of joy and excitement. Hey, well, I'm excited. I'm launching a new program. I'm looking for one client. invite step number two of the framework part number two of the framework is connect invite at some point you've got to invite someone to have a conversation with you

So you're talking to a friend and they say, actually, you know what? I'm I'm I'm my business has been growing for three years, but now we're a bit stuck. Uh I'm thinking of launching a new business. Uh I'm my relationship's going through some struggles right now. Would you like some help with that? It's a great little question. Would you like some help with that?

Some people are going to say yes. The only way to make that invitation, would you like some help with that? Is the way I like to put it, that I can invite people to my kids' birthday party. Because we put on great birthday parties for our kids. They have fun. We've had Mr. Bubbles. We've had a petting zoo. We've had uh uh we always have great punch for the adults. So if you come to my kids' parties, you're gonna have a good time and so are your kids.

And if you can't make it, we're gonna have a good time and so are our kids. So I can make a genuinely fun invitation. That's the energy you have to bring for an invitation. Coaches don't do that. They don't do that because they need a client, they need the money, they think that you're a mark, they can get something out of you. be a genuine invitation. Would you like some help with that? Hey, there's some relationships, something I love. Wanna talk about that? Connect invite. If they say yes,

Then you wanna serve them powerfully. You wanna sit down and serve them so powerfully that they never forget that conversation for the rest of their life. That's what I call create. You do your magic as a coach. Make an invitation. Would would you like so what what's interesting about writing a book is at the moment it comes out, it's fixed in stone. And the last six, seven years since I began writing that book, I'd put something else into the mix.

I'd invite someone not to a two-hour coaching session, like I put in the book. I'd invite them to a chat. I'm not the kind of person who does chats. I don't like to talk about football, soccer, the weather. But would you like some help with that? Sure, yeah, I'd love that. Oh why don't we have a chat? Why don't we talk for twenty minutes? In twenty minutes, I can ask you a couple of questions. Tell me more about this dream you've got. Tell me more about the struggle that you're facing.

Why has she even wanted to be in a conversation with me? I asked two or three interesting questions. And then I asked this one or a version of this. What have you done about that? Because in the question, what have you done about that? I can discover is this is someone who's ready for a coaching conversation and possibly more, or someone who's just, oh, you know, I it's just a dream I have. Like I first time I thought about it, heard you're a coach. I just thought we'd have a nice conversation.

They're not ready for me to offer anything else down the road. And so I love having 20 minute chats with people that. And some of those people I say, you wanna do more of this? How about we block out two hours? And some of them I say, no, it's great. And they say, oh, thanks. And we're complete. What have you done about that is my filter for who I'm going to spend more time. Ah that's beautiful.

So connect, invite, create, and propose. At some point, if I'm sitting down with you and I have served you powerfully enough, one of two things might happen. Actually one of more than two things. One you might go, thanks Rich, that was great. And we're done. You might go, Thanks which that was great. How do I get more of this? And the third thing is you might say, Thanks, that was great and I might go

Well, if you think this was great, can you imagine what it would be like if we did this week after week after week for six months? Is that of interest you to you? Would you like to have a conversation on what it might look like for us to create something where I can really serve you powerfully into the future? And then we get ourselves into a proposal conversation. A proposal looks like this. At some point I say, well, we'd work together for this amount of time and this amount of money.

And then you would say, I'm in, or I'll think about it. Well no thank. That's a powerful proposal when you tell them this is what it looks like. Most coaches are terrified. They're terrified to say a number. They're terrified to ask for someone to work with them. They'll uh uh they'll serve people. They w they'll hold something back. 'Cause they think if I serve you too powerfully, then you I've given it all away. And I said the opposite, and I serve them so powerful

that that if if they get everything they need from that conversation, they're done forever. That's gonna be someone who's gonna sing my praises forever. Uh they might never be a client. But I don't want to ever hold anything back. It says Why do you think coaches hold back? Because that's one thing that you said in the passing. But before we get to that question, actually that's really powerful that you mentioned about the twenty minute conversation that you have pre

pre uh pre the two hour coaching conversation. That's something that I discovered in in that time as well. I did the study of the prosperous coach. I've studied many other ways of really being able to build a coaching business and consulting business. And and in the process I figured the same thing that you're mentioning. It's you don't

want to even get into a deep conversation with someone when they're not even thinking about that. They're just on a surface suggesting they have a problem, but they don't really mean it. They don't want to work on it. They don't have any interest. in actually pursuing e even that direction. So it's great to have that or a pre conversation, if I may, or a chat like you say, to say, Hey, let's see if you're even actually really looking for something.

And and if you are, then maybe we'll have a conversation if it feels right in that twenty minutes, thirty minutes, whatever the time frame is. So thank you for sharing that. I think that's that's an important piece. That sometimes we miss uh as as coaches. Now coming to the question that I have, what do you think is the reason? And and I'm also looking for if there is a is if there was a mindset that you also experienced or you are seeing it as a pattern where coaches are hesitant to

position there or make a proposal where they would state their price or would tell them what exactly it is. Because if you think about it from just human nature, we know we would never purchase the product that we don't understand.

Or we don't know the price of. Like it's just really hard to make that purchase decision. Intellectually, we understand that as human beings, but as coaches, for whatever reason, we are not able to process that and be able to propose that. Why do you think that happens?

I think there's a number of reasons. I think one of the reasons is we think that someone is paying us for ourselves. And it's really ski i it's easy to sell my couch when I don't need it any longer on my old computer. I just put a number on it and someone wants it, they'll take it. And if they don't, they won't. But I think at the beginning of coaching that I'm selling me and it's terrifying. I I I help.

I'm extraordinarily good at helping leaders and executives who've had a very successful career behind them become coaches. Because what I have to do is mess with their thinking for a while to remind them. It's a bit like the story of Picasso who's sitting at a cafe and uh he he sketches one of his little sketches and a woman says, Could I have one of those? And he says, sure, that will be ten thousand dollars.

And she says, but it took you about ten seconds. He looks her in the eyes and says, Madam, that took me my entire life. So we make up this story about our our we're selling us and and we get terrified out of it or we're a new coach but we forget about our track record of success behind us. So

I have to mess with people's thinking to put all of that to one side. You're not selling yourself. You're not even selling this thing called coaching. What you're selling is an opportunity for that person to work on their dream. And their dreams are priceless. And they get to decide if they want to invest in their dreams or not.

I mean, I know you're like me. You have invested thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars and probably thousands of hours over the years on your professional growth and personal development. So it's easy to know that that other people might want to do that with you. I meet too many coaches who've never had their own coach, never invested in their own personal growth or professional development, and they wonder why they can't get someone to invest it with them.

That's the first one that they're missing this sense of knowing the importance of investing in themselves. You know what? Twenty-five years ago I think it was, I was paying for professional development courses myself as a teacher because

I wanted to learn and grow. No one paid for it for me. I couldn't get my my my schools to to pay for it. I invested in myself. I did Stephen Covey's course around the seven habits, Harvard Negotiation Project. I paid my own money, flew around the world to do this stuff. Always have.

Are you willing to invest in yourself? Most most coaches aren't, so they struggle to ask for the number. The second thing is actually quite simple on one level, is you need a menu. Because what it's like, here's the metaphor. Imagine walking to a restaurant and saying, I'd like something to eat today. What have you got? And the waiter comes up to you and says, You know what, sir? I'm not really sure. Like kind of depends on you what you like and what Ha ha.

It feels really weird, right? And then you're okay, he says, okay, well here's here's the menu. Uh there's uh burger, uh there's steak, there's water, there's beer, there's wine, champagne. You go, you know what? I'm gonna have a steak and some champagne today And then a waiter looks you in the eyes and goes, You know what, my self esteem's a bit low today. Are you sure you want to have the champagne? Why not start with a glass of beer to start with?

And and that's what coaches are like. And what they need is a menu. They need a menu. So you when someone says, what is it like to work with you? You literally go, Oh, well, there are three ways to work with me. You can work with me at this level for a year and this is the price. You can work with me for seven months and and it doesn't include these things. Or you can come and do a one-day intensive with me.

And now the person goes, oh, okay, great. Thank you. I can choose. And as the coach, there's no emotion involved. It's like, here's the menu. You don't have to physically do this. But it it metaphorically, you have to if you're a beginner coach. So you're not in this moment. I see too many coaches. What does it look like to work with you? Well, it depends what you want. And it's this real fuzziness. They're afraid to say a number. And a menu just helps.

Yeah. No, that's that's powerful. So if nothing else, take away that is to have your menu ready. Yeah. Um and don't associate it to your own self worth, self-esteem, or it's not about you, it's about the person's dream that you're talking to.

So here's what I'll throw in as a an even more powerful distinction on top of that. I call it the thousand dollar hamburger. So there's a restaurant I go to in Hawaii sometimes that has a thousand dollar hamburger on the menu. And I asked the owner once, does anyone ever buy this? And he said, you know, about three or four times in the last ten years. Every once in a while somebody wants to impress somebody or they want to take a risk and have something interesting to eat.

I think as coaches we need a thousand dollar hamburger on our menus. You know, I I I wear an Apple Watch. I went to buy this just for the fitness tracking. And I come home thinking, Oh, it was a lot cheaper than I thought it would be until I realised that they'd positioned their thousand dollar watch. So when I got the cheapest watch on their list, the$350 watch, I thought, oh, I got myself a cheap watch, I got a bargain.

But that's more than I usually spend on a watch. So a thousand dollar menu, uh item on your menu, a thousand dollar hamburger, positions everything else. I think coaches struggle because they only have one number. New coaches, what does it cost to work with you? It doesn't matter what number you say:$1,000 a month for six months, for a year,$5,000. You're afraid to say that one number. A thousand dollar hamburger allows you to say, well, look.

You could spend all this time with me and include it in that year of work is two private intensives. And I would work with your senior team, and this is the stuff we would do. And then you position everything else against that. And once in a while, somebody says, you know what? I want that item. Yeah, that's that's so that's like a master class in psychology right there as well, right? Because it kind of creates that

parody for the person who's listening. Like it's basically now you're creating the level where they go like, Oh wow, that's the level that he the person plays at or he or she plays at and I still get to do this or whatever that is. Right. So it creates a great psychological parity and and just from marketing principles perspective as well.

Um, Rich, if you were to recommend uh again, there's a lot of psychological and personal growth stuff that we've talked about that would help coaches shift their realities and ask a better question of themselves. Is there something that you would say Here are a few things that coaches tend to miss to learn about. Like they tend to, like for example, one thing that you talked about in passing is just to know about how to package.

they tend to miss to learn about that. What are some of the other things that you've seen that they tend to miss to learn about?

Well, let me go meta for a moment before I answer the question explicitly. I wrote an article, I taught you about it before, a few years ago called How to Be an Overnight Success as a Coach in Forty Six Years. It was a fun article to write. I reflected on all the trainings I'd done, all the workshops I'd attended, all the coaches that had coached me, and I wrote about

And then I got this great positive feedback from people and I was suddenly saying like wow Richard didn't know you'd done all these trainings and all these learnings. And I realized two things. One, there were a few things that I'd forgotten to put in there the first time I wrote the article. And two, I'd missed out completely all the trainings, workshops and coaches that I'd worked with or tried to work with that just weren't for me. I haven't stopped investing in myself for 25 years.

And and so that's the first thing is that willingness to learn. I I'm constantly reading. I never stop learning. I got three book lists out there right now. Each one, I think one's got a hundred books on it. The other two have got fifty books on. They're just the ones I put into the book list. And they've come out in recent years, so if you search for my name and um and book list, they'll come up.

It's that willingness to not stop learning, that willingness to not stop investing in yourself, I think is really key. The second thing I'd say, and it's the reason Steve and I wrote The Prosperous Coach, is we saw so many coaches investing in more and more coach training and never investing in understanding how to grow their business. And so that's the thing that I think is really key. The way we describe it in the Prosperous Coach, we say there are it's like these two boxes. This box is

Coaching skills and this box is business skills. And coaches are afraid of business skills. So they they don't look at them. They they they dismiss it. And they spend more and more time investing in themselves around getting better and better coaching skills. Then they become highly qualified, great coaches with no money.

You've got to at some point look at this thing, the business of coaching. And what we said in the Prosperous Coach, the way to do it is make those boxes overlap as much as possible. So Build a business by serving people really powerfully is is a way to grow your business and serve people, coach people and build a business. Those two overlap.

But at some time you do have to reflect on people's behavior when it comes to selling and buying. One of the most powerful insights I've had in recent years around creating clients is that Your job is to audition the clients. And so often as coaches, we've got it the other way around. We walk into the room thinking, how can I prove myself to this person? I hope they like me. I hope I can impress them.

You have to turn a buyer into a seller and the seller into a buyer. We applied for our kids to get into private school. My my older son, a couple of years ago, we were put on the waiting list for this school. We really liked school.

And I realized, no, they didn't it wasn't he was only five or six at the time, so they didn't assess him, it was just based on that had so many boys born in this month and, you know, they just had to break it down and get some evenness across that spread across the uh number of kids in the class.

But I wrote them a letter. I said, look, I know we're on the waiting list, but I realized I didn't tell you who my wife is in the world and what she does and what she believes in. And let me tell you who I am and what I do and what I believe in and who we are as a family and and who we are as parents. And what we bring when we come to a school. I went from being a buyer where I was going to give them my money to help my kids go to a private school that I like.

to becoming a seller. I had to sell myself to them. We were the only family that year that moved from the waiting list to get a place at that school. In that moment, I went from being a buyer to a seller. And as a coach, I've learned to do that too. I've learned to tell, to change the people who are trying to buy my coaching and audition me into selling. You've got to show me why would I want to work with you?

What are you how what are you up to? Here are my criteria for the kind of clients I work with. So I have a number of scorecards that I use to assess the kind of people I want to work with. I have many questions I use to assess the kind of people I want to work with. I turn down people on a regular basis, both as one-on-one clients. And as people who want to be in 4 PC, my community of high performers. Well, it's not for everyone. And that's edgy, it upsets some people.

And and I'm okay with that. Th the problem with Facebook this day and age is that it has a like button and likes are insidious. Because when you're liked by everybody, you're you're loved by nobody. And and your job is to polarize people. You want people to either love you or hate you. Uh they love you, they become your clients, sometimes for years, forever. Um they hate you, they'll walk away and go and spend time with other people.

And w too many coaches want to be liked. So they're on Facebook trying to make nice posts. I watch these coaches with these beautiful memes they put up of quotes of famous people every day, seeing how many likes they can get. It's meaningless. Uh your job is to polarize people. Uh uh the way I describe this, I wrote an article on this, so you can Google this one as well. Go weird, not wide. Go weird, not wide.

Steve and I did this when we wrote The Prosperous Coach. We had publicists who said, call it the Prosperous Entrepreneur. We'll get you into fortune, we'll get you into Inc. We'll we'll we'll help you really fly. We said, you know what? We know coaches. This is a book for coaching. And that's why to this day that book sells a thousand copies a month.

Uh we we did our own weird way of doing things. Both of us are introverts. We're not meant to be up on a stage doing big song and dance. We want to spend time in a room, one conversation at a time. We wrote the book that we needed to to read and

I love that I can still talk about it seven years later because it's who I am. I'm that weird guy still to this day. And too many people are trying to go wide with thousands of followers and it's meaningless. It doesn't doesn't bring you any money, it doesn't actually create anything powerful for you.

That's that that's very true and and I love that how as you're explaining the different things that you've done that are true to you. You've found and I'm talking now as a as a person looking at business model. uh you have many business models woven into one. And of course you're also fifteen years into the practice and twenty five years into the learning and

the the act of teaching and and coaching has been i it's been a lifetime in a way. Uh but but you not only do the prosperous coach approach, but you have um a prosperous coach approach from the from the place of book being your connection Right, which is a it's an alternate way doing the same thing, but doing it in an alternate way. But it's true to you, it's honest to you. And I think that's a big lesson to take here is what's honest.

to you as a coach, what is honest? What is the what what is the truth about you that you would want to hold and then see this four-step framework and adapt it to whatever that is

Then there's a great book by Austin Cleon called Show Your Work. I have a body of work right now. People I always ask people how do you know about me when they come up to me and speak to me and they say, someone told me about you, I read your book, and then they say almost identical words every time, and then I stalked you online. Ten years ago I didn't have anything online.

When Vision approached me and said, Could we partner together to create something with the Prosperous Coach? And then you and I started working together with Evercoach. I I lied to you guys. I pretended that I didn't want to speak to camera because. I was a coach. So I wanted to only ever coach people like this rather than looking into the camera camera, rather than looking into my camera and speaking to the camera. I was terrified. I'd never been on camera in my life.

There's a video somewhere Monique made once. She wanted Monique, Monique, my wife and myself, she wanted me to be on the amazing race with her. Mm-hmm. And she recorded a like a an audition. And she's speaking really uh uh uh animatedly to the camera about how we'd be so great on the on the o the amazing race and it she turns to me, Rich, what about you? I look at the camera and I'm frozen and I say like two words and I was terrified.

So I pretended to you guys that I wanted to coach like this and that's why it'd be powerful, which is true, but what wasn't true is that I didn't tell you that I was terrified to talk to camera. If you look at some of the early videos online, the w early ones we didn't ever coach.

I I'm I speak for two minutes, three minutes maximum, and I'm nervous and I'm I'm not sure what to say. And over time, I would speak for four minutes and then five minutes and then twenty minutes and now I can teach for hours to camera. There's a body of work I have online. It doesn't matter that I'm embarrassed by the old stuff. People can find my stuff online. So find something that speaks to you. Find something that you want to speak about and speak about it.

Don't hold it back until it's perfect. Put it out there in all its imperfection because the people who need to hear it are the ones are at the stage they're at that you're at right now when it's not perfect and you'll grow and so will they. It's it's uh it's one of the things that we talk about in in the book of coaching and and our and our events as well is just the stages of your of your career. You have to know it the stage that you're at and

as you realize and accept that this is the stage that you're at, you start to start to produce the body of work because you're like, all right, this is where I am. I don't have to feel shy, guilty, ashamed, any of those feelings. This is the stage I am and one day I'll get to the next stage or whatever that stage means for you, it's not necessarily financial, uh, but whatever that stage is, however it feels like to you, to be able to continually do the work. I think the the challenge.

with coaches often like you also mentioned previously in this interview is is they don't understand the three or first J curve of entrepreneurship and all of us are entrepreneurs as coaches. It is a business as well. It's not just, you know

That's a really important distinction. Really important. The coaches I see who thrive are the ones who get their an entrepreneur first. They're a business owner. You cannot succeed unless you understand that, unless you're willing to look at the business of coaching. And many coaches aren't. uh in the pub, their girlfriends tell them, Yeah, hey, you're great at helping us with our relationship issues. Why don't you become a coach?

They see these things online. I can get certified in a couple of days. They spend thousands on that. And then they meet the website person who gets them to spend thousands on that. Then they meet the SEO person who spends thousands on that. And and they don't make any money ever as a coach.

you have to get that you're a business person first. You know, an amate there's nothing wrong with being an amateur the word amateur comes from the Latin, amore, which means to love. And and that might be the Italian, but the to to love something You're an amateur when you love, do what you love. There's nothing wrong with that. You're a professional when you get paid to do something. You're an extraordinary professional when you get paid to do what you love.

Sometimes you have to go through the middle piece first. Do the things that you don't necessarily love to get to the other side. People want to skip it. Annie Lamotte, who who wrote a book called Bird by Bird, uh to help helps people to write. She's I've taught people to write for decades. And I see everyone wants to be published, nobody wants to write.

And it speaks to this Instagram age we live in right now. Let me get a photo of myself in front of the Eiffel Tower, or in front of the the uh uh the Taj Mahal, then I can prove I've been a traveler. Uh no, that just shows you took a nice photo. And and and the same in coaching. All the memes you post online mean nothing. Get out there and serve people and and give your all to it.

Yeah, absolutely. Very true. And I I love how you also created that distinction because I I think one of the powerful things that happened with the amateur, which I've never said it that way by the way, in an Amer Indian accent I would say amateur. Uh but I think they're saying the same word, right? Uh so so I think that being that person also has its benefits in many ways because you tend to find unique different ways of things.

Because you're just loving what you do. Which but I didn't know the meaning of that word until you Yeah, now that's a really good distinction because there is something really powerful about being an amateur because you don't know the rules. Uh I was speaking to someone the other day who's got a thirty million dollar business and I said, you know, I've got this business plan I came up with, one line, meet fun and interesting people. And that's been the business plan I've had for years.

And he said, well, thank goodness you didn't learn how to the real way to grow a business because I found out what worked for me. And so I'm not I don't teach that as a business plan for anybody else. I say you've got to find your own way. And sometimes your willingness to be an amateur

is that you're willing to make mistakes, you're willing to screw up. You don't know what the rules are, so you break them all the time, or you hear the rules and you're willing to break them because hey, why should I do it that way? There are benefits to being an amateur.

Mm. It's beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing all that wonderful insight. I if there was something to capture the moment for you or the dialogue for you or something that you would love. for for the listeners and the watchers to kind of take and kind of remember, um, as like the golden nugget, the essence to things. Would there be something that you would like to check? And that's a tough question. No, it's not a tough question. I smile for a reason.

I don't think that question will serve you. And I'm talking to everyone who's listening and watching right now. Mm-hmm. I think it taps into the mistake we make, that there is a golden nugget or a golden bullet or the magic answer. The magic answer is how long are you willing to be in this? Are you willing to be in this for a long time? Uh, you know, when I started coaching, I was being paid$10 a month.

I now get a hundred thousand dollars a year. I didn't know that was the path. I didn't pick that number. I was willing to be in it for the long haul. It's been hard. It was hard a couple of years ago when I'd grown my business and scaled my business and I was making a lot of money.

And spending a lot of money at the very same time. Profits went right up and so did expenses. And I didn't realize the mistake I was making as an entrepreneur, which I've found out since is a very common one, that that when you make a lot of money, you spend a lot of money, all it takes is a couple of hard months. and suddenly you're right in the dip and you're in the red and you're struggling. I went through that recently, relatively recently. And and and

There's no magic answer. I had to find my way out of it and find my way back again. So I'm glad you asked that question because it's the question people want to ask. And and the bad news is there isn't a magic answer. There isn't a golden nugget that I can give you. It's that willingness to be in the game for the long haul.

which is a perfect golden nugget to end the and the dialogue with, is to think about a long day you love this what you do why there's no reason for you not to think about long term. So much, Rich, for taking the time and coming by and speaking to us on the business of coaching. Love you guys. Keep watching. Love and so all.