Outcome Based Mentorship

Don't teach what you know, give people what they need.

This is BusinessIsGood. I'm Chris Cooper. And today we're going to talk about outcome-based coaching. I'm going to cover this in three big topics.

First, we're going to talk about what outcome-based coaching is, then we're going to talk about elegance. And then we're going to talk about speed.

Building a successful coaching business means starting from your clients' ideal outcomes and then working backward. So here's how we do it.

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 So first, today, we're going to talk about outcome-based mentorship. What is this? Well, it's basically starting with what your clients want to achieve, and then working backwards from there. Instead of starting with "here's what I know; how can I sell this to other people?" we want to think about what our ideal client's goals are. And so if you've got a specific niche (my niche is the fitness industry) you want to look at the people in that industry and ask "what do they really want?"

One great exercise I'm going to share with you right now is called the Perfect Day exercise. This will help you get a broad sense of what your clients' goals are, and then you can build your mentorship program or your coaching practice for your fitness business or whatever it is backward from those goals to make sure that your clients are achieving those outcomes.

Here's the Perfect Day exercise.

What we want you to do--and you can do this yourself right now-- is imagine you're living your perfect day. You don't have to worry about money or anything else like that.

What time, in a perfect world, would you wake up in the morning? What's the first thing that you would do? What would you do after that? What would you eat? Who would you do those things with?

Would you go to work or not? Would you go to the beach? paint a clear picture of all that? Would you have a nap in the afternoon? What would you do for lunch? Where would you go for dinner? Would you be alone? Would you be with friends? Would you be reading a good book?

Describe that perfect day, including what time you go to bed at night, in great detail. Now just the act of visualizing this perfect day and thinking through it will help your clients understand what it is that they eventually want from life. And then it'll help you understand in a more objective way how you can help them get there.

Then after they've done the exercise, you can work backward and you can define the outcome a little bit more clearly. So you can say, "Okay, what kind of income would it require for you to live in this perfect day all the time? Who is in this perfect day with you? Where are you living? From there, you can say okay, so these are more specific outcome. If somebody says, well, to live this kind of lifestyle, I need to make about $150,000 a year, that's perfect: you've got an ideal outcome that you can coach them to. If they say "to live in this perfect world outcome, I would need to be about 20 pounds lighter, so I'm not embarrassed to go to the beach," wonderful. 20 pounds is a great outcome, we can work backwards from that goal, to create a plan to get you to be 20 pounds lighter. Okay? This is one way that you can help define your client's ideal outcomes.

And after you've done this with enough clients, you can see the commonalities and say, "Ah, all the people in my niche seem to have this similar goal!"

For me, working in the niche of gym owners, that goal was making $100,000 a year. Now that's not their ultimate...