Hey, it's Mark Butler. And you are listening to a podcast for coaches. I just threw away a 23 minute rough draft of this episode because it took me those 23 minutes to realize there is one story that I want to tell you. And I think I make the best use of your time by just telling you this story. And I trust you. You're smart. I trust you to take this one story and make it meaningful and useful in your life because it has changed my life actually forever. Here's the story.
Maybe 18 months ago, a coach friend of mine sent me a text. She texted a couple of her coach friends actually. And she said, I've got a teenager who's struggling. And of course, When you get a message from someone that you care about and hear that someone they care about so deeply is having a hard time. You want to do what you can. I have teenagers. Many of you have teenagers or have had teenagers or have littles who will someday be teenagers.
Or you love teenagers that are nieces, nephews, friends, students. And when you see one of these perfect, messy people who are between childhood and adulthood, and you see how hard it is to be them, frankly, in 2024, and you just want to help. And of course we know coaching can be a powerful resource for people at all stages of life. But the idea that we could give that kind of support. Two kids who are in that stage. That's amazing.
So my friend sends a couple of us this text and says, I've got a teen who's struggling. Do you know anybody who could help? Do you know any coaches or therapists that you think are especially well suited to give my kids some support? Now here's an important point in this story. It did not occur to me in that moment. To offer, to help directly, to be the coach. I consider myself a very confident coach and a very competent coach, but it did not cross my mind to say, Oh, I could do it.
Let me talk to him. Well, why not? Yes. I think I could have been of some service, but I don't spend time in coaching conversations with people in that specific circumstance. Teenagers. I don't have the language of those interactions on the tip of my tongue. So even though we as coaches might have the idea, Oh, these tools can help anybody. I can help anybody. And there's some truth to it in that moment when you know that someone you care about is worried about someone they care about.
You just want them to receive the highest and best service that they can. And in that moment. I don't need the validation or the money that could come from saying, Oh no, no, I can help. I can help anybody with these tools or with my way of being and that's important to this entire conversation. So my friend says, do you know anybody? And the truth is in that moment, when it comes to specifically a person who works with teens, and I will.
I didn't throw out an apology to any of my friends whose names should have popped into my head at the time, but didn't. But I believe there was inspiration in the fact that a name popped into my head, and it was a friend of mine who I knew to be well connected in the world of struggling teens. So I sent her a text. I've got a friend who's got a teenager who's having a hard time. Do you know anyone?
Now, my friend has coached teens, but she, with her self awareness and with her desire to give people the highest and best service possible, she knows that it is not her strong preference or her best competence or genius to coach teens. So she didn't volunteer herself either. She gave me five names. And after giving me five names, she said, by the way, the last one. is my favorite. He is amazing. I said, thank you so much.
I went to my friend and said, I got these five names from someone that I trust and her favorite is the last one. My friend thanked me. After a year or so we reconnect and I said, by the way, how's your kid? And I was so relieved and thrilled and grateful to hear. The kids thriving relative to the last time we had talked so much better. She tells me, and I said, Oh, well, did you end up ever finding a good practitioner, somebody to, to give some support?
And she said, yeah, it was the one that you recommended. It was the, it was the favorite one. Okay. Well, you know, at that point then I just have this surge of amazing emotion. And I tell her how thrilled I am to hear that. And then I go and text the referrer, the original referrer, and say, Hey, I just want you to know that your referrals panned out to the benefit of this kid that was struggling. This kid that neither she nor I will probably ever know personally.
But now we've both been able to be part of a chain of support that helped get this kid some relief. And of course she thanked me for letting her know for closing the loop for her. She wasn't surprised because she knew she'd given good referrals. She was confident to say, here are some great people, but this one's my favorite. And it felt amazing to her, of course, to have that loop closed as well.
This whole story, this experience captures the essence of how a coaching practice can grow and can thrive. I may never meet the practitioner whose name was passed through all of our hands to this young person, but I have no doubt that that person's practice is full or close to it. And it wouldn't surprise me if there were a waiting list because in this one experience, this practitioner's name was introduced and infused with trust across multiple people.
And then the people at the end of that chain who actually received the direct relief, they will be referring people. And then if I'm ever in that situation again, I will be able to say, I don't know this practitioner directly, but a person I trust recommended him and another person that I trust had an amazing experience with him. Therefore, I'm confident to say, you should probably reach out to him. By the way, don't bother using my name because he has no idea who I am.
I'm just some nameless faceless person out there who's in his relationship web that he doesn't even know trusts him. This is how the world works. Is it the only way the world works? No. We can take a more transactional approach to growing our practices. We can do advertising. We can even do referrals in a more transactional way. We can do reciprocal referral arrangements. We can do paid referral arrangements. None of those may be my choice or my preference, but I'm also not saying they're wrong.
What I'm saying is there's beauty and magic and reliability in the fact if we imagine our relationships as a web of people, the trust that exists between individual nodes on that web ends up benefiting everyone in the web because person a trusts person B and person C trust person B. And now we're all benefiting from the trust in the system. And that is so. Cool. And it's reliable. I talked about reciprocity in the episode on launch based selling. I want to talk about reciprocity again today.
We can treat reciprocity as a reliable, trustworthy principle. We don't have to treat it as a transactional tactic. So we don't have to give in order to get. We can give trusting that giving always results in receiving. It's a universal law. It's the law of the harvest. Where we sow, we will reap. We may not be able to predict exactly when we reap, but seeds planted and nurtured have to bear their fruit. They can't not. It's the law of the harvest.
So what you have in a relationship web, like the one I'm describing is a bunch of people or two people who are planting relationship seeds, planting little trust seeds with each other, nurturing those, and then having them bear fruit. And they have to bear fruit. And it just happens that in the case where those people are coaches or where they're interacting with coaches, some of the fruit that they bear is formal coaching relationships.
And thank goodness, because that's where people get relief and help and growth. So, today's message, today's thesis is if I acknowledge my connection to people, to individuals, and then I acknowledge their connection to other individuals and how all of those connections end up interlinked, then it helps me see that I'm happily investing. in any of those relationships is a way of investing in all of those relationships.
And as I develop my character, like we talked about in the last episode, if I can develop my character and my skill, and if I can confidently occupy my space within this network, that my only job within that network is to give. And then to trust that the goodness will come back because it has to. So when you think about referrals, I'm not mad at all.
If you think about referrals on a transactional way, I'm not mad about blog posts, books, and podcasts that have titles that sound like how to get a steady stream of referrals or, you know, Whatever, how to ask for referrals. I'm not mad about it. I think there's, there's benefit there. I also want to shine a consistent light on the fact that a less transactional approach also works beautifully.
And in my opinion is the better approach, the approach where you don't know when the connections will bear their fruit, but you know that they will bear their fruit. There's just an inevitability to it. So I hope that we will develop ourselves to become more valuable parts of our network. And also that we will invest in our network in whatever way we're best suited to do.
And that we'll trust that as we do that consistently over a period of months and years and maybe decades, that the fruit harvested will be sweet and it will be reliable. It'll be consistent. And we'll end up with something of course, that's much more important than the money. It'll be the relationships built and maintained over those years. And it'll be the knowledge that people in pain got relief because of the way we all invested in our relationships. And I'll talk to you next time.