The Prosperous Coach | Steve Chandler, Rich Litvin

The Prosperous Coach is a book originally written for professional coaches to make them better in terms of economic gains. Although  I am not a coach, I learnt great insights from the book. There are many things in this book for every professional to apply to their business. Here are my highlights from the book:

Show your clients what they cannot see. Say to your clients what no one else would dare to say. And you will have all the clients you ever desire.

So, although I say I am in the miracle business, what I actually do is help my clients see their world differently. Because when you help someone see their world differently, their world changes.

When someone sees the world differently, they show up differently, and they create results that looked impossible a moment before. That is a miracle.

Confidence is a result of taking action.

The Pro coach has huge dreams and takes tiny steps every day.

If you enter a market and don’t know what to do, watch what everyone else is doing, and then do the opposite, if you want to be successful. The majority is almost always wrong. Earl Nightingale

The popularity of social media had somehow made me forget that it’s all about relationships. My great-grandparents were refugees from Eastern Europe. They built a clothing store in Waterloo Station in London, England, about eighty years ago. They didn’t have the internet or email or Google Adwords. If you came into their store they got to know you. They asked interested questions and they learned what you liked and what you didn’t like. They took down your details. And if some clothing item you might like came into the store, they contacted you. Great businesses have always known that the magic is in building great relationships.

Whereas the disciplines might have once been awkward and clumsy, they will become, if they are continuously practiced, natural forms of self-expression.

Enthusiasm has a half-life. So if someone is excited about working with you, they have a certain measurable level of enthusiasm for your work and your coaching. Please know and see and experience the fact that this enthusiasm will fade over time—it has a half-life. And so, a week from now, it won’t be as great and as strong and as vibrant as it is right now. No way to stop that deterioration of enthusiasm.

It does for anything in human life. Notice when you go to a concert and you love the concert and the next day you are telling everybody, “Boy, we saw Springsteen—it was amazing!” And then a week later you might talk about it a little bit, and a year later you’re thinking, “Did I go to that concert?” So enthusiasm goes through a half-life of continuous diminishment. However, if I can see that clearly, I can take advantage of that and make that play to my favor. I can always act now.

No sale has ever occurred outside of a conversation.

Anything needy is creepy to the other person. Human need in the world of business is really off-putting. It causes people to not want to work with you. So it must be stopped.

Let’s say a person leaves his place of business every evening and walks over to a lamp post and speaks to it. Maybe he vents, maybe he talks about the problems of the day and about opportunities for tomorrow and areas where he can make improvements. It’s just a lamp post sitting there. But if he returned to that lamp post every evening and shared his successes and challenges of the day and his goals and dreams for the next day, even that would make his life better, would help create a better person. Even talking to a lamp post every evening would be beneficial to a person.

If you can tell me why it’s not in your life right now, you and I might be able to create a plan to work together to make that possible for you. What would that be worth to you? Would those results be worth that investment? You tell me. I’m not going to tell you.

The truth is they don’t care if you’re a coach, a consultant or if you can sprinkle fairy dust on them. If you can help them get what they really, really, really, really want, then they will find a way to become your client. So the real magic is not in your diplomas or coaching certifications.

Show up. Be present. Be bold. Coach them powerfully. Be relentless. Be Sherlock Holmes and explore deeper into their lives than anyone has ever gone with them.

Let me be clear: you do not need coaching. In fact nobody needs coaching. The question is, do you want coaching? Personally, I believe in coaching so much that I have had my own coach for years. But that’s because I love having someone who believes in me. I love having someone hold me accountable to a bigger vision. I love someone who doesn’t believe in the negative stories I tell myself or the fears that hold me back. Not everyone wants that.

It’s interesting and relevant to coaching success, how a woman once described the difference between meeting Gladstone and Disraeli in the week that they were both standing for election as the British Prime Minister. She said, “After dinner with Gladstone, I thought he was the most interesting person in the world… But after dinner with Disraeli, I thought I was the most interesting person in the world…” Disraeli won the election.

To be great at something, anything, you must eventually enjoy the process from top to bottom. If you never enjoy it, you are never going to be great at it. Even if you have a good month here and there, it will never feel natural, and you will slide back into despair sooner or later.

As skill improves so does enjoyment, and as enjoyment increases so does skill. Joy and strength arise simultaneously for the person who stays in action long enough.

People usually get what they desire strongly in life.

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few.

Be bold. Say boldly what needs to be said. And hide nothing.

“But this is who I am...” is not an absolute. It is a choice.

As Sir Winston Churchill once said, “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”

John F. Kennedy once said: “The only reason to give a speech is to change the world.”

Coaching is not about “information.” It is about transformation.

Get comfortable feeling uncomfortable and your world will change.

Free advice is usually taken with a grain of salt. But a paid session can change someone’s life forever.

The best time in life to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time in life to plant a tree is today.

Don’t wait. Make bold proposals. Don’t wait.

Gentle in what you do. Firm in how you do it. Buck Brannaman The Horse Whisperer

All this coaching success stuff is practice, practice, practice.

The universe relies on a simple principle: energy out equals energy back.

Creating clients works this way too. When you put your energy into total service, the energy flows back to you in the form of clients and wealth.

Thomas Edison was a genius who invented the phonograph, the motion picture camera and the electric light bulb. But he was also a terrible fisherman. He used to spend an hour almost every day fishing but he never caught any fish. If you are wondering why a genius would be obsessed with fishing when he was so bad at it, you are not the only one. Someone once asked him why he was such a poor fisherman. He replied, “I never caught any fish because I never used any bait.” When they asked why he’d fish without bait, he responded, “Because when you fish without bait, people don’t bother you, and neither do the fish. It provides me my best time to think.” It was definitely no coincidence that the world’s best scientist was also the world’s worst fisherman. Edison really got the power of silence, the power of space and the power of slowing down. And one day, fishing with a bamboo pole, he had the insight to try bamboo as the filament for the first ever electric light bulb. Practice regularly setting aside time for yourself to do nothing. Put time on your calendar for committed, quiet, creative time.

If I have a game to play, my energy and hope are not problems. They are high. But if I have no game, no process goals, no scheduling of my own activities, then my moods plunge. It’s similar to this: I used to coach writers and authors when they were struggling with “writer’s block” and not making progress on their books. Their hope and energy were low, so they did not write. What I had them do was create a game, a scorecard, a schedule for logging the minutes or pages each day, with a win possible every day if they completed the assignments they gave themselves. I would ask them, “Do you think truck drivers have this same problem? Is there something called Trucker’s Block, where a driver wakes up and finds his mood isn’t right for driving today?” No. A trucker drives his truck no matter what his energy or hope levels are. He has a schedule and a destination map, and he follows it no matter what. So in coaching the trick for me was to find a way to make as many of my activities be lunch pail, blue collar activities as I could. So mood would not be a factor. Hope could come or go, it didn’t matter. My energy would be high or low and I’d still do what I set myself up to do.

Put up an activity scoreboard. Make it a game. Declare destinations. Follow your maps. A trucker’s life works for you, too.

Money is the most perfect expression of your creativity. If your bank account is low, it’s a reminder that it’s time to get even more creative.

If you want your practice to grow, design a routine. Then follow it every day. Then change the routine next week, but put a new one in place.

There will be times when nothing seems to work. Stay in the game. There will be times when everyone is saying no. Stay in the game. There will be times when you seem to make mistake after mistake. Stay in the game.

There’s an old riddle that says five frogs are sitting on a log. Four decide to jump off. How many are left? What’s your answer? Take your time. No rush. Take a moment to consider your answer. How many are left? The answer is five. Why? Because four “decided” to jump off. That’s all they did. And there’s a big difference between deciding and doing.

Don’t wait for one-hundred percent readiness. It will never come. When you are eighty percent ready, go for it. Run straight at it. Get exposed. Risk messing up.

Let go of any need for a “magic” system for creating clients. Instead, focus on the person in front of you right now. Ask yourself, “How can I serve this person so powerfully that they never forget this experience for the rest of their life?”

You know, life really can be exponential. You are far closer to everything you want than you could ever imagine. Miracles are far closer than you think. And there is no one “right” way to do anything in life. Woody Allen was correct when he said that eighty-percent of success is showing up.