218. Why Clients Say YES to Coaching

You're listening to the Life Coaching Secrets Podcast, episode 218. Did you know that life coaches are needed now more than ever? I'm Frank Macri, founder of Thriving Coach Academy. I've trained over a thousand coaches and helped them launch their own successful coaching businesses. If you want to make an incredible income and impact as a coach,

and have a lot of fun doing it, I'll show you exactly how to get it done. This is Life Coaching Secrets. What's up coaches? Today's episode is a special re-release. of one of my past favorites. I recently revisited it and I realized just how powerful this episode still is. It's been one of the most inspirational episodes we've had on the show and I know that it's worth sharing.

again so I'm bringing it back for you right now enjoy in this episode I'm going to talk about why people hire life coaches so this is going to be really helpful for you If you are someone that is considering becoming a life coach, but maybe you wonder, why on earth do people even hire life coaches? This is a question I had when I got started. And this will also be a relevant episode for you. If you are perhaps even wondering whether or not you want to hire a life coach.

So I've created a program that teaches people... how to become life coaches and have their own life coaching businesses. And before I did this work... of training coaches, I worked as a life coach for several years and built up my practice to multiple six figures before I started to teach others how to do it. And when I got started as a life coach,

I had never worked with a life coach before. So sometimes when I'm connected with prospective students looking to enroll in the academy, they might say, well, I don't know if... I should become a coach until I hire a life coach myself. And I think that it's totally... fine for you to hire a life coach first if you want to really experience the power of coaching. I'd say make sure you're hiring a coach from an accredited

who's trained from an accredited program. But I also tell our prospective students that inside the academy, they get coach. That's one of the... What's one of I think the coolest features of being inside our program is that you get to experience the power of coaching. this is one of the first things that we have you do. So I tell our students that you are your first client. So a lot of people think, how am I going to get my clients? How am I going to get my first client?

I tell our students, you already have your first client. All you have to do is look in the mirror. You are your first client. So there's no way that a great coach can become... exceptional at what they do until they receive a significant amount of coaching and that's why embedded in our curriculum we have weekly calls live calls where our students are able to coach each other on real things that they're going through in their life.

Any area of life they want coaching on or they want to explore or they want to figure out or they want to uncover new possibilities and they get coaching every single week and other coaches get to listen and learn from that. And we also have our instructors. who give feedback throughout the whole process. So your transformation is so critical because...

The more you transform through receiving coaching, the more you start believing in coaching and the easier it is for you to sell coaching. Because your own transformation is one of the things that's going to sell coaching without it even feel like you're... without it even feeling like you're selling coaching. So...

When I got started as a coach, I went through a training program and I had a lot of confidence issues when I got started as a life coach. I had a lot of insecurities. I actually had a lot of fear around public speaking. And through getting a lot of coaching... I was able to release all of that insecurity and really show up and share my voice and become an international speaker, host several podcasts such as this one.

and also really feel great about sharing my voice and knowing that I have something valuable to offer. So there's a lot of power that comes from you getting coaching, and really you... You can't take a client any willing... any deeper than you are willing to take yourself. I'll say that again. You can't take a client any deeper than you're willing to take yourself. So that's why you want to get ample coaching and experience the process of it.

That aside, why on earth do people hire life coaches? Why does that happen? Okay, maybe you have wondered it and you're... thinking, yeah, I know that I want to become a coach, but I just want to know why is it that people actually hire life coaches? So I've come up with the top reasons why...

I see people hire life coaches. And what I also did is I went through my very, very, very old journals and notebooks that, gosh, these are all... worn out and kind of ripped and tattered and weathered these are from so many years ago i i would take a lot of notes handwritten notes when i got started for my clients and i have all of these notes from my very first clients that I worked with like seven or eight years ago. So I was browsing through these notebooks.

And I just took note of what were some of the things that people wanted coaching on. So that way you can hear this and you can be inspired by it. So my intention for this episode... is for you to realize that people want coaching and people like getting coached on. There's so many things that people want to get coaching on because you might have a part of you that thinks...

Do people really hire life coaches? Why would someone hire a life coach instead of a therapist or some other professional? And I want you to realize that coaching is in such high demand and it's only going up. And while the demand for coaching is going up, the supply of quality and trained coaches is very limited.

And that's why it's so key to have a really high quality coaching education if you really want to stand out and you want to have credibility in the industry. So the top reasons why people hire life coaches. Reason number one is whenever they're feeling stuck in any area of life. So the word stuck is pretty key. If someone, maybe at times in your life, you've felt kind of stuck. You weren't sure how to move forward.

Tried many things, but those things didn't move you where you wanted to go. So you just feel stuck. And you might also like know what you need to do, but you're not doing it, okay? So... The word stuck is pretty big. Whenever someone is feeling stuck, this is a great sign that they are really a great fit to get coaching. That's the first sign. The second sign...

is someone would hire, or not a sign, but a reason rather why someone would hire a coach is because they are navigating a current or an upcoming transition in their life. Any kind of transition or change that someone's going through They're looking to go through that transition seamlessly without the stress of it. Maybe the transition includes making a lot of decisions. So it is so helpful to have a coach.

with you in that process. So that way you don't have to go through the change alone. Change for a lot of people is very scary and overwhelming, okay? And a lot of people feel like they have to go through it by themselves, but it is so much more. loving and kind to yourself when you can navigate a transition with the support of a coach as you embrace a new chapter in your life. For example, I had a friend recently say that she was going to...

move across the country. And the first thing I told her was, you got to hire a coach. Do not go through that transition by yourself. So that is the second reason. The third reason people hire life coaches is because they want to accelerate results in their life. OK, so if you are a fast paced learner, if you're someone that values growth, if you maybe you believe in yourself, like you know that you're going to go from A to B, but you want to get there faster.

Like maybe you want to make more money or you want to get in better shape and you know that you'll be able to do it over time but you just want to collapse the timeline. You want to do it 10 times faster, 10 times easier, make it 10 times simpler.

This is a great reason why people hire life coaches because they want to accelerate their results. When people work with life coaches, they're able to understand how their mind works. They're able to... see the blind spots that they're missing because their coach is able to listen at that deep level and ask them the questions that are going to move them forward and open up.

possibilities and insights that they weren't currently accessing. So that is the third reason. The fourth reason people hire life coaches is because they are faced with a big decision that they're unsure about. When someone has some kind of significant decision.

And they're weighing different options. They are worried about making the wrong decision. They're navigating through it. This is a great reason to hire a life coach whenever you have some kind of big decision in your life. Another reason people hire life coaches is because they're procrastinating or hesitating to get something done, okay? So you are maybe avoiding or you are delaying your progress.

You're pushing something off. It's staying on your to-do list, but it is not getting completed. This is a great thing to hire a coach for, whatever it is. If you have, for example, a goal to write a book. And it's been a goal for years. Sometimes I call this having a someday list. We all have things in our life that we say we're going to get to someday.

And someday never comes. So think about that right now for you. What are the things in your life that you've said, yeah, I'll get to that someday. Like someday I'm going to go do this or I'm going to create this or I'm going to achieve this. And it's been on that someday list for a long time. So eventually that catches up to people and they realize, you know what? I don't want to wait for someday anymore. I want to make it happen. And I want to figure out why I'm so...

why I am delaying my progress and I want to break through that. So that's another reason people hire life coaches. All right, next reason is because someone has a goal that is... Okay, so maybe they've made some progress, but the goal is not fully finished. They have some momentum they're getting, but maybe it's slipping a little bit. So they would like to have more accountability.

in order to complete the goal. One of the biggest reasons people hire life coaches is because they're going to have someone that's going to hold them accountable to actually following through. and completing. So think about how many things in your life you maybe started out strong, but then your momentum and energy faded, okay? Having a coach...

One of the most amazing things about it is you have someone that's holding you accountable to doing what you say you're going to do. It's easy to say that you want to lose 10 pounds or you want to run a marathon or... You want to start your own business. It's easy to say that, but to actually do it and follow through, right, that's where coaches come in to really make that so much simpler because...

They're going to make sure they're going to be following up with you to make sure you're doing what you say you're going to do. And that's one of the skills we teach our coaches in the academy is. We teach our coaches how to challenge their clients so that way they are not... getting in their own way, but also the skill of accountability so you know how to compassionately hold your clients accountable to make sure that they are constantly making progress and consistently moving forward.

Okay, another reason people hire life coaches is because they want to take their life to the next level. So there are times in our life when what used to work is no longer working. And we're looking for a complete makeover on our life. We're looking to up-level it, okay? We're looking to really raise the energy and the enthusiasm and the excitement in our life because maybe we're just kind of feeling, eh, life's just fine. It's so-so. It is what it is.

So there are people in this world who value growth and who believe that life is not meant to be tolerated. It's meant to be celebrated. It's meant to be fully embraced. and really live to the fullest, but a lot of people struggle at knowing how to do that, how to go from good to great, okay? So this is why people that generally hire life coaches are goal-oriented, ambitious, driven.

responsible, self-aware people. They're people that have their life mostly together. Maybe they're doing well, they're successful, but they're not totally fulfilled and they're looking to really... take their life from good to great, from okay to optimal. So that's another big reason people hire life coaches. And then the last reason people hire life coaches, at least for the most common reasons, is because they want to understand their mind.

and use it to get a result in their life. Okay, so coaching, life coaching is not just chit-chatting and getting a high five and getting an affirmation. And this is not what life coaching is, okay? It's not just someone giving you advice. It is a trained professional who knows how the mind works.

That's what we teach our coaches in the academy. It doesn't matter what your life experience is not relevant to your success as a coach, right? You just need to know how people's minds work. And that is teachable. That's what we teach you.

So people hire life coaches because there's a result in their life they're not getting. Coaching is very results-oriented. I have a whole episode, I think it's episode two, called Coaching vs. Therapy, where I give you the differences between coaching and therapy. One of those differences is that therapy is very process-oriented. So mostly a therapist is going to have clients process their emotions and process their past, process their childhood.

A lot of it's very much on processing and healing. Coaching is results-oriented. So it's about, okay, where are you now? Where do you want to be? And how do we bridge the gap? It's more forward moving. There's not much time spent processing emotions or exploring the past, okay? You are hiring a coach because there's a certain result.

like tangible result in your life that you don't have and you'd like to acquire it. So coaches are trained at knowing how to help people use their mind in order to get them the results they want to get. Because every mind, every problem is a thought problem. And coaches in the academy especially are trained to understand this. Because if there's a result that you don't have in your life...

It means that you're not taking proper action to get that result. And if you're not taking proper action, that means you have some emotions that are causing you to stay stuck. And if you have some emotions that are not inspiring you to take action, that means you have some thoughts. that are causing you to feel a certain way. So you've got to understand how people think and why they think.

and support them in deciding what thoughts are going to support them in moving forward. Okay, and this is what coaches do. This is really the fun, the juiciness of a coaching session. I know that some other coaching programs are very surface level and they just focus on, you know, having coaches set goals with their clients and just focus at the behavioral level. In the academy, though, we go very deep. We help peel back the curtain to really understand what are the...

thoughts that are holding someone back? How can you help people understand their own thinking? and be able to use that so they get sustainable results. So that way they're taking action that's going to actually move them forward and keep them going. Okay, so those are the top reasons why people hire life coaches.

I want to share with you just for fun some of the reasons people hired me when I started out. So when I started out, I was a general life coach. I didn't have a specialty. I just...

presented myself as a life coach to people. And you can do that. You don't have to have a specialty to get started. In the academy, We do have specialized coach trainings on so many different areas, and we give all of our coaches access to all of those specialty trainings because even if you decide to become a relationship coach,

You still want to understand health coaching because you might have a client who has, even though they're hiring you for relationship coaching, they might have a health-related challenge that comes up. So you want to be equipped to support anyone with anything. Whether or not you decide to specialize your business. So when I got started, I was a life coach. And I had one time, one of my earlier clients was a mom. And she was wanting to deepen her connection with her teenage son.

So I coached her and we had several sessions working through that. I had one client who was approaching her 50th birthday and a lot of things were coming up for her. She wanted to navigate how to embrace. this next chapter of her life in her 50s. So we did a lot of coaching on that. I had an organization. early on that hired me because they wanted me to support their executive team in being able to navigate some changes that were going to be happening in the company. So that was another...

Another way that I offered coaching. I had a nurse hire me early on because she wanted help changing her careers. She was a nurse for most of her life, her adult life. She was feeling overwhelmed at the thought of what to do next. So that was exciting to work with her through that. I had a... I had a wife hire me at the very beginning, and she wanted help setting boundaries with her husband, navigating through having stronger communication with her spouse. I had a client hire me.

who wanted to have a sense of purpose back in their life. They felt like they were lacking direction in their life overall, and they were wanting to have that purpose come back. So we did... Lots of coaching to explore that. I had a client hire me because they were having difficulty living a purposeful life. with Crohn's disease. So we explored ways for this client to have excitement in their life, even with

Crohn's disease, not letting that hold the client back. I had a client hire me because they recently graduated college and they were wanting to explore how to... to approach the next chapter of their life after their college graduation and making all those new decisions. I had a client hire me early on because she just wanted to be more productive in her day-to-day life. She wanted to get more things done.

This was really fun for me to go through my early notebooks and see how hopefully as I'm sharing this, you realize that. There's so many different things that people are looking for support on. This is why I think the work as a coach, it never gets old. It has never lost the novelty all of these years that I've been coaching. And every time I would enroll a client, it was always exciting to see what they wanted support on because no client was the same.

After a few years of being a life coach and helping everyone on everything, as you can hear, all those examples are very different. Then I started to specialize. I began to then offer specialized coaching for the LGBT community, wanting support navigating their life purpose. So I had a lot of fun doing that. Then I began to specialize even more.

And I started offering relationship coaching for single gay men. And that was also a ton of fun to do. And then I transitioned my niche to help entrepreneurs. Struggling with public speaking. So I coached entrepreneurs on overcoming challenges so they could become powerful public speakers when they are presenting in person and online. And that was also so rewarding and fun.

the coolest things about having a coaching business is that even if you decide to specialize or not, your business evolves as you evolve so it's not like you are locking yourself into a major and you can never change it right as i grew as my coaching business grew as i tuned into myself over time I just kept following where I was inspired to go and continued to put out new offerings and work with different audiences. And I found that to be so much fun.

You might be wondering that for yourself right now if you're thinking of becoming a coach or maybe you're coaching but you're trying to navigate those questions of who to work with, whether you should have a niche, whether you shouldn't have a niche. And I want you to know that. Inside the Academy, we'll put all those questions to rest. We will help you answer those questions so that way you feel great about it and that way you feel secure about the direction your coaching business is in.

As we wrap up this episode, I want to leave our episode with a little... snapshot of one of our graduates who is going to share their story with you and as you listen to their story I want you to be inspired I want you to really tune into what are the things that they did to make them successful this is one of our students who went

through the Academy. So enjoy their story and I will see you in the next episode. Hey everyone, I'm Jane. I live in New Zealand, a mom of two, a firefighter, and now pursuing a coaching career full-time. So I first got into coaching or thought about coaching a few months ago where I was listening to a podcast and it was about using your unique gifts and what are those? And it kind of made me think.

about what it is i like to do and what it is i give to people sometimes without even realizing and coaching came up and it just ticked all those boxes and i kind of had that realization of This is what I want to do. This is my purpose. I was currently firefighting, which I've loved and always have. But this was my new avenue to give back to people.

on a one-to-one basis um so as soon as i found that path there was no stopping me what drew me to thriving coach academy first was actually listen to frank's podcasts i had already done a basic course and got certified. And I knew with my vision through listening to Frank's podcasts, the kind of coach that I wanted to be and where I wanted to take my business. And I knew that I wasn't going to get there without.

better training better mentorship so I found Thriving Coach Academy through Frank's podcast I listened to those on such a regular basis and built quite an understanding of who Frank was and what he had to offer within the academy when i was deciding to enroll i don't think i had any fears it was all excitement i knew what i wanted i was going to be doing it um of course that's the there's the investment side of it so

um you know when we are faced with having to pay for whatever it might be um in this case obviously the um the academy um it takes a few moments to think about it but with me personally

I knew that this investment was for me and what I needed to do to get to where I wanted to be of my coaching career. So there wasn't much of a hesitation for me, that's for sure. My wins have been... consistent throughout the eight months that i've been in this tca program so to start with i gained confidence in my ability my skills and i learned and grew as a person as well having coaching within the academy myself

I've gained paying clients. I'm confident in what I charge. And a biggest win recently was seeking opportunities and those that arise. And since the last module. which we kind of discussed having a niche. Since then, a huge opportunity has come up where I am able to work with Fine Emergency New Zealand as a firefighter myself, but coaching women.

that are looking to go through the system so any new candidate that's going through i will be available to coach them through the process and beyond so a huge opportunity and something that i don't know if i would have ever got without the academy the skills and the mentorship that Frank and the community give me. If you're thinking of joining the Academy, just do it. You don't even need to think about it.

The benefits you get from enrolling surpass anything you ever expect. It's the mentorship. It's all of the skills and tools that you get. It's a lifetime. community and help whenever you need it it's the practice calls there's so much depth and so much knowledge that you'll gain and experience that you will have there will be no regret by joining the academy I suppose my advice to anyone would be trust the process, trust in what you have to offer to learn, trust in proven techniques.

and everything that the Academy has to offer. Trust the process. You'll learn our coach's secrets. to get started. I'll see you on the inside.