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Question Your Way to a Six-Figure Coaching Income
Published in The MentorCoach THERAPIST AS COACH eNewsletter ‘Training Accomplished Helping Professionals to Become Extraordinary Coaches.’
www.mentorcoach.com
May, 2004 Volume 5/5
by D’Arcy Vanderpool, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
- Are you an excellent listener?
- Can you give straightforward, immediate feedback?
- Is it easy for you to move conversation from the global to the specific?
- Are you equally good at supporting and challenging?
- Can you allow others to create their own mistakes and successes?
- Are you at ease adding lightness and humor to difficult situations?
- Do you have a strong sense of self?
- Are you confident around those in positions of power and authority?
- Can you stay focused on results?
- Are you a systems thinker?
If you answered, “Yes” to all ten of these questions, you have what it takes to be an executive coach.
So often, I hear coaches say they want to pursue executive coaching, and enter into the world of corporate coaching, consulting, and big business. And, they want the money that goes along with that world.
To do this, use your skills above to focus on three areas: get into the right conversations, ask the right questions, and turn your conversations into contracts that could easily be worth $20,000 to well over $100,000.
Get Into the Right Conversations
Have you ever wondered why some people seem to have great opportunities fall into their laps? Their lives sometimes seem so easy. No matter what they do, they seem to succeed. I believe these people follow their passions, their hearts, and their inner guidance.
They go to parties because the evening will be fun. They offer to give presentations because they know it will be a pleasure to share their knowledge. They ask others whom they haven’t seen in awhile for coffee because they feel it’s “just right” to do.
Go out and meet new people, talk with them, mingle, and participate in gatherings of folks whom you like or with whom you share similar interests. Attend charitable events and hang out with the people who get things done in your community.
And, don’t stop there! Expand your horizons. Be on the lookout to meet people outside of your circle. Be courageous, open, supportive, curious, focused and in the “flow”. Be in the moment as much as you can. Really be with the person to whom you are listening. Meet people and find out as much as you can.
Get in conversations with leaders, listen deeply, stay focused on their goals, and find a way to demonstrate what you do. Coach them in vivo. If you stay focused on their challenges and goals, you can build credibility as a business partner.
You will continue to build credibility by linking business challenges to the leader’s challenges. And, you NEVER have to “sell yourself” or discuss your desire to coach the leader; you are already doing that. He or she will experience the joy of dancing in the moment with you. You are expanding his vision by connecting new issues, insights and experience with you to his passions, concerns and interests.
Ask The Right Questions
The purpose of your conversation is to develop the leader’s thinking about the relationship he has with his team and the expectations he has of and for them. Here are some questions for you to ask, to get more deeply into a conversation about the leader’s goals:
- What are the key business challenges facing your organization today? In the next two to five years?
- Given those challenges, what leadership skills, knowledge, abilities and strengths are required to succeed?
- What do you want to accomplish in this effort?
- How have you successfully met these types of challenges before?
- What might stand in the way of meeting these same kinds of challenges this time?
- What is keeping you from getting the results you want?
- How do you account for not being able to accomplish this so far?
- How have you responded to this?
- What do you need from yourself to overcome these challenges with success?
- What do you need from your team to overcome these challenges with success?
- How many on your team know as much about this right now as I do?
- What was helpful about this conversation?
- What clarity do you have on these business challenges?
- How do you think I might be useful to you?
You are assisting your prospective client in taking ownership and responding with resilience. These are powerful and insightful questions requiring answers that you can meet with understanding, support, challenge (the more trust, the more you can challenge), and affirmation. You will have many opportunities to develop many questions of your own as you progress through the conversation.
This conversation will also give many glorious opportunities to say a resounding, “Yes” to the leader’s goals. These opportunities open the door for you to describe your change-agent tasks that will help him further define and achieve his goals.
Most executive coaches are called upon to carry many change-agent skills in their briefcases: consulting, facilitating, training, mediation, data gathering, analysis, and project management, to name a few. Remember to always articulate your role from the perspective of the leader’s goal(s).
Turn the Conversation into a Contract
If your timing is good, your coaching great, and your connection excellent, the contract will be automatic and outstanding. There is a natural and expected point in the conversation where the leader will ask you what you can do to help him accomplish his goals, if you are available, if you do this type of engagement, and other such inquiries. Of course, that is the time for you to say, “Yes!”
Let me to share a couple of examples of my success with this process:
I once asked an architect some questions about his unhappiness in working for the firm in which he had been employed for 15 years. Many questions later, I had consulting contracts with three firms, and coaching contracts with six architects, a business manager, a secretary and seven executive couples. These contracts were worth well over the six figures that many of us desire.
Not long ago I asked the boyfriend of a previous coaching client about his band. Those questions led to consulting with two bands and coaching with a singer, a sound man, an equipment-man, two dancers, a realtor, a hotel/casino manager, and a CFO. The line of referrals from that initial contact are still coming in.
Absolutely! Go out and create conversations, ask questions, and achieve a six-figure income and the many other rewards through engagement with others. Remember, there is nothing like a good question.
D’Arcy Vanderpool is a business and personal coach, corporate consultant, trainer, author, and happiness expert with a long and impressive 25-plus year list of business and corporate clients. She is the founder and CEO of D’Arcy Vanderpool and Associates in Las Vegas, Nevada. Currently, she serves as a Senior Trainer on the faculty of MentorCoach and Pod Leader for Authentic Happiness Coaching. A PhD student in Coaching and Human Development at the International University of Professional Studies, D’Arcy is currently conducting a research project on happiness and the belief in free will. She has been active in both leadership and membership with a number of professional associations. In addition to coaching and consulting, D’Arcy provides marriage and family therapy, invests in real estate, and remodels and redecorates homes. She recently opened The Happiness Retreat, a beautiful conference and retreat center in southern Utah, overlooking Red Mountain in the shadows of Snow Canyon State Park. D’Arcy is currently in the process of writing a couple of books and is preparing a new (her second) radio show featuring topics and advice from a positive psychology perspective. In her leisure time she loves sailing, interior design, gardening, collecting antiques and entertaining friends. D’Arcy can be contacted by phone at (702)243-4299 or by e-mail at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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