Managing the Unpredictability of a Coaching Practice

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.=