Coaches and Money - What Is The Financial Reality In Coaching?

Recently, I have noticed a lot of misinformation going around on the topic of money and coaching. On the one hand, I see some pretty suspect training schools and various gurus inferring anybody, with little effort or preparation can leap into coaching and make a fortune, instantly. And on the other hand, I see some doom and gloomers, (and a few characters trying to scare coaches into working with them), telling the world that nobody in coaching makes a decent living.

While I suspect it’s part of our collective experience that many good people struggle to make a living at coaching, it is not true that coaching is a profession that most people can’t make a good living at.

As to the potential upside, the latest ICF sponsored study conducted by Price Waterhouse Coopers (in which some 5,415 coaches in 73 countries participated) showed the average annual income for a full time coach to be $82K, and that part time coaches on average earn $26k a year. In doing some prep work for a presentation I gave at the last ICF conference, I got some help digging through the tons of data that came out of this study. One of the interesting findings was that the average hourly rates reported by executive coaches were $299, business coaches $196, career coaches $161, and life coaches $136. (Not exactly starvation wages by most standards.)

As to a distribution of income, another study conducted by Grant And Zackon, which involved over 2,500 coaches and was published in the Autumn 2004 in the International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring, showed that 70% of all coaches were charging over $100 /hour, 25% were charging above $200/hour and only 10% of the total were charged over $300/hour.

Despite the evidence that many coaches are doing just fine, it is absolutely true that many coaches do struggle to earn a decent living. One of the frequent messages I share with coaching audiences is that, as an industry, we need to do more to raise awareness of just what it takes to succeed in this young profession. I believe it is a huge disservice not to openly discuss the real challenges people face when they consider a self-employed career in coaching. (Over the years I have had so many prospective coaches call to pick my brain on this topic that I finally put up an article on my site covering my best advice and estimates on the time, costs and challenges of a journey into coaching. http://www.acoach4u.com/Life_Coach_How_To_Become_One.htm )

It genuinely hurts me to see good coaches and great people contemplate abandoning their dream of coaching for a living. However, no matter how much information we get out there - on the need for potential coaches to acquire the basic financial/marketing/entrepreneurial survival skills - it is a sad fact that a high percentage of all small businesses do fail. (The figures generated by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics typically show that a full third of all Professional and Business Services fail in the first 2 years. And when you see how quickly coaching is growing around the world this adds up to a lot of struggling people.)

Anyway, the point is that there is a start up curve and a risk of failure for any new business. Also, not everyone is cut out to be a self-employed professional, and there are currently few opportunities for coaches to let someone else do the marketing for them. If you want to be among those that succeed in this vocation, you have to take responsibility and get prepared. No one else, not the training schools, your coach, or the coaching industry as a whole, can be of much use to you if you do not approach this journey with realistic expectations, sufficient reserves of time and money, and a commitment to learn the key business and coaching skills.

Maybe I have seen a few too many clips of Dr. Phil, berating his guests but I agree with one of his mantras, you really can’t change things that you don’t acknowledge. So, in service of raising awareness, and in hopes of minimizing the suffering of those who are called to coach, here is my list of the actions that have the most negative impact your ability to make a decent living as a coach:

• Get no training, or sign up with the cheapest, unaccredited school that will train you in a matter of weeks, via DVD, and promise you a quick path to success.


• Fall in love with the coaching skills, spend all your time and money learning them, and never think about, or budget anything, to learn the basic business and entrepreneurial skills.


• Jump into coaching with an all or nothing approach, without researching, or budgeting for, how long it will take and how much it will cost you. (Longer than you expect and far more than the cost of tuition.)


• Wait until you have finished all your training, all everyone else’s training, and gone on to get two or three PhDs before you believe you are finally competent enough to begin to coach.


• Never attempt to find an ideal client group (niche) and thus waste a lot of time and effort on ineffective, unrelated, marketing initiatives directed at people who cannot afford you or are too stubborn to get any help with their problems.


• Attempt to sell this new generic service called “coaching” - that very few people really understand or want - as opposed to finding an existing need which can be better solved through coaching.


• Never do anything to proactively manage your stress, so you will always be at level 1, reacting to the circumstances in your life instead of creating from them.


• Never grow as a human being, or develop a daily reflective practice, so you remain stuck in your habitual reactions, wresting with your shadow or pain body, and never grow in self awareness.


• Never aspire to master the coaching skills or seek a reputable independent credential that establishes your competence in the marketplace.


• Try to do it all by yourself, instead of connecting to colleagues (free coaching circles, ICF chapters, using this network, hiring your own coach, etc.) for the support, information and shortcuts you will need.


• Try to reinvent the wheel as relates to finding out what works for marketing coaching services so you can fall into the very same potholes that all the coaches ahead of you have, and quit when you get discouraged. (And you will get discouraged dozens of times along the way.)


• Price your services on your fears and insecurities, as opposed to actually doing the marketing work to see what other professionals charge, or what your clients actually use the service for and can afford.


• Believe you need to be some kind of business whiz with a Harvard MBA to coach anyone in organizations or small businesses.


• Offer only one solution, 1 to 1 coaching at one price level, so you only have one offering on the shelves of your virtual store.


• Don’t keep track of how you spend your time and money each week, and have no idea how long you have to launch your practice before you run out of money.


• Don’t have goals for your practice and have no idea how much time you must market each week to achieve the number of new clients you want.


• If you are not getting any clients from your current marketing efforts, keep doing what you have been doing until you run out of money.


• If you are not getting the results you want, believe it is because of your inherent incompetence, or unworthiness, and shrink away from the world. (As opposed to trusting we have all gone through the same thing, (and we all have our fair serving of incompetence and insecurities), and ask for help.


• Coach just for the money, never treat your clients - your brothers and sisters - as the great gifts and teachers they are, and never be grateful that coaching is giving you an opportunity to be of service to the world, every day.

A good measure of struggle and even the occasional business failure does not mean you are a bad coach or a bad person. It is often simply the price you pay to learn how to be self-employed. I know many great coaches who are struggling to make it through their first few years. I know many good coaches who have to transition into coaching while keeping their day jobs. Many other good coaches have had to go back to work part time when their coaching business took longer to get off the ground than they had hoped for. Failure in business is not failure in life. Usually you learn a ton from it, and come back wiser and stronger.

If you are called to do this work, my hope would be that you find the information you need to succeed as a coach with the minimum amount of struggle. And even if it takes you 2 or 3 years, or 2 or 3 attempts, to find a way to earn a good living doing what you love, I hope you can keep going.

This work is important and the world needs you.

Good luck,

Steve

Yearning For Yin

To the ancient Chinese, the Tao (or Dao) symbolized "the way of nature", a way of living wisely achieved by careful balancing of the "yin" and "yang" energies of life. To Taoists, the yang represents the energy of doing, of moving into action. The yin is the energy of being and going with the flow.

The ancient Chinese sages taught that too much time spent in either the yin or yang can lead to imbalance, and that the universe will always act to restore balance. While it is possible to be stuck in the yin energy (I think we all know a few world champion couch potatoes), in our modern culture it is far more common to be addicted to the yang energy. We are raised to; do, accomplish, overcome, strive, accumulate, achieve, exert, etc. While the yang energy is essential to the success of many endeavours, if it is not regularly balanced by yin activities, (truly restorative, reflective time), it can lead to trouble.

Nature teaches that if you want to build a muscle, it requires some stress, followed by a period of rest. If you choose to continuously stress the muscle it will lead to injury. In our busy lives, when we chronically stress ourselves the injury can show up in strained relationships and a general loss of joy, direction and meaning. We can become far more fearful, more compulsive and more reactive. If we continue to ignore the yin, burn out and physical illness can follow.

Most people would acknowledge the truth in this ancient teaching. However putting this wisdom into practice is an entirely different matter. When you are stuck in a particular energy, it is our human nature to stay with what we know. For example, a super high achieving "yangster" might seek "renewal" in an exhausting physical workout. (For many individuals the very idea of completely unplugging and relaxing on a daily basis can seem preposterous.)

Without sufficient yin time or balance, life can become one long, joyless, exertion; a constant act of will.

With balance comes greater clarity and alignment, and we move into action from a place of joy and enthusiasm. It is easier for us to access our deeper wisdom and creativity. It is from a balanced perspective that we can begin to strip away the layers of conditioning and fear and begin to truly open our heart. It is only with an open heart that we can become truly inspired in our life.

As simple as this concept of balance may sound, the impact of its practice can be profound.

Happiness Redux

Here is a great article on happiness, that succinctly summarizes all you really need to know.

http://pathwaytohappiness.com/happiness/2007/05/15/controlling-your-happiness/

Cheers,

Steve

AFRICA

Recently I had the pleasure of going on a small walking safari in Tanzania. For those of you who have expressed an interest in learning more about the trip, and seeing some of my pictures, you will find them at Africa.

Enjoy,

Steve

The Power of Inspiration

So there I was, alone, in the cold black February dawn. We had come to Long Beach on Vancouver Island to watch the winter storms. I had woken early and leaving my dear wife to her dreams, had decided to walk along the shore. The tide was out. The monster North Pacific waves thundered to shore a quarter mile to the west of me. I was alone with my thoughts as I walked along the endless sandbar. It was a very peaceful moment.
Just then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw an extraordinary black shape speed past me, through the darkness. Startled, I squinted to see what other creature had invaded the remote beach.

Once the shock passed, I discerned the mystery shape to be a surfer, in a wetsuit, carrying a board. By the overall size, gait, and the zeal with which they approached the frigid water, it appeared to be a lone teenager.

I had a momentary thought to intervene. The waves were easily 10 feet high. It was freezing cold with a drizzle, and still too dark to see clearly. My thoughts raced. The surfer would be alone and beyond assistance should they get into trouble. Who knows what large sea creatures might be lurking out in the bay. But by the time I decided to check their mental capacity, it was too late. The surfer was long past me, in the water and paddling off to catch the first wave of the morning.

I couldn't help but watch out of concern. I grew up on the ocean and know its ways. I am a strong swimmer, and yet I knew that should anything happen to the lone surfer, there was no way I, or anyone else, could be of assistance. The distance was too long, the waves were too big, and the water too cold.

This kid was out there alone. I finished my walk and headed back to the lodge for breakfast.
As I sat in the cozy dining room of the Long Beach Lodge, enjoying a warm cup of tea, I reflected on what it takes to get a teenager out of their warm bed, overcome their fears, and endure the pain and discomfort (even in a wet suit this is no picnic) of a long winter swim.

I believe inspiration, is one of the most powerful motivating forces in the world. People have taken huge risks, and endured unfathomable discomfort, inspired and in pursuit of their vision. Inspiration in the heart of great teachers has changed the course of history. (Modern neuroscience is just beginning to understand the mechanisms by which these activating energies of the left-prefrontal cortex can override our usual cautious nature.)

If there is something you want to accomplish, no matter how impossible it might seem, if you can connect to an inspiring vision of the outcome you really want - you access the power to accomplish amazing things.

Sufficient inspiration, it seems, will always trump fear.

OUR GREATEST CHALLENGE

For someone with a degree in applied science, I should know better. Maybe it was just that as a resident of a northern climate, I didn’t see the problem with the earth warming up a couple of degrees over the next few decades. (I like the idea of warmer winters.)

Whatever my reasons I have to admit to being so tired of the drastic claims and alarms, and so unwilling to accept the possibility of the worse case scenario, that I simply tuned out the “debate” about global warming. (The world still looks fine out my window. Can these predictions of massive change really be true? Isn’t it possible that these are natural fluctuations of the earth’s climate?)

As much as I would like to believe there is still a “debate” about Global Warming, (I really do enjoy my lifestyle and don’t want to change if I don’t have to) the undeniable truth is that there is no longer any credible, independent, body of scientists that remain in doubt about what is happening. Consider the following:

Uncomfortable Realities

1 ) Is It Really Happening? - Contrary to what you might hear from many of our political leaders, there is no longer doubt that the climate is warming dramatically, and that it is caused by human activity. Here is an excerpt from Science Magazine that summarizes the science:

“The scientific consensus is clearly expressed in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Programme, IPCC's purpose is to evaluate the state of climate science as a basis for informed policy action, primarily on the basis of peer-reviewed and published scientific literature (3). In its most recent assessment, IPCC states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities: "Human activities ... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents ... that absorb or scatter radiant energy. ... [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations" [p. 21 in (4)].

IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years, all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members' expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements. For example, the National Academy of Sciences report, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions, begins: "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise" [p. 1 in (5)]. The report explicitly asks whether the IPCC assessment is a fair summary of professional scientific thinking, and answers yes: "The IPCC's conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue" [p. 3 in (5)].”

2) Who Cares If It Gets A Little Warmer? - Contrary to the widely held belief that a little global warming might hurt some, benefit others, and generally be manageable, the rising tide of independent science points to many unanticipated natural feedback loops that present catastrophic tipping points after which we simply cannot recover. For example, the rapidly receding ice caps are melting permafrost, which is releasing gigatons of methane into the atmosphere. As methane is 20 times worse a green house gas than carbon dioxide, its potential impact on the atmosphere is catastrophic. (The last time this happened, 251 million years ago, almost all life on earth was wiped out.)

Other emerging feedback loops that are accelerating warming concern two of the major mechanisms of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the oceans and the forests. As the oceans warm, their ability to absorb CO2 diminishes. As global warming changes traditional rain patterns, many of our larger forests (often called the lungs of the earth) are beginning to die off. The current severe drought in the Amazon is raising the possibility of a massive die off in the tropical forests.

So we are not talking about earth getting just a little warmer. What we are starting to realize is that we are in the midst of earth’s 6th mass extinction. There have been 5 mass extinction events in the last 500 million years. The last occurred 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs died off. This current extinction event is man-made and it is happening quickly. (Close to 70% of the biologists polled by the American Museum of Natural History believe we are in the middle of a mass extinction event. The normal rate of species loss is one every 5 years. We are currently losing over 25,000 species a year.)

3) Let Someone Else Worry About It – One of the unfortunate dividends of our materialist modern cultures is we are all too busy with our lives, careers and activities to get involved in bigger social/political/environmental issues.

We tend to delegate leadership and too many important decisions to our governments. (In the most recent Federal Elections close to 40% of eligible U.S. voters didn’t bother to voice their opinion - approx, 35% in Canada.) And it is my opinion that too many of our leaders, political and industrial, are too stuck in a win-lose mentality (maximize the wins for themselves of a narrowly defined “team”, even if it means a significant loss to others or the environment.) People are just too disconnected from each other and the world we live in to really see what is happening.

Clearly our existing leadership is not going to save us. We need to save ourselves.

What is Possible?

For over 400,000 years before the industrial revolution, carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere were in the rage of 190 – 290 PPM (parts per million). In the last hundred years they have risen to over 378 PPM. Many scientists feel that the atmospheric tipping point may be in the range of 450-550 PPM - as little as 24 years away at our current levels of production.

If we can all realize the severity of this threat, and act now, we may still have enough time to change direction. However our window of opportunity is small and closing quickly.

Other generations had their challenges. This generation is now waking up to the biggest challenge that ever faced humanity. Future generations will not forgive us if we fail to act.

What We Can Do?

Get informed - There is a lot of nonsense masquerading as science out there. To be a positive agent of change, you need to be well informed. Read. Listen. Watch. Learn. Come to your own informed conclusions on this important topic.

Get active – An issue this important and urgent cannot be left to others. We all need to take ownership of making change. Get involved. Support groups that are working on this issue. Raise money for political parties that are committed to initiate and support global (cross industry, multinational) initiatives for environmental change. (The cost per vote for the winning party in the last U.S. Presidential election was $5.92. To make a significant change in any election takes a lot of money.)

Walk the talk – Conserve energy wherever possible. Drive less, and if you have to drive, use more fuel efficient cars. At home, typically 60% of energy consumption is in the heating system, 22% in water usage, and 13% in lights. By shifting to more energy efficient technology you can dramatically reduce emissions. (By simply replacing my 18-year-old furnace, I cut the consumption of fossil fuels in my house in half.) Here are some other things you can do to conserve.

Raise Consciousness – Problems are always growth waiting to happen. Our biggest problem is that humanity’s power and knowledge has evolved faster than our collective wisdom and compassion.

We need to raise consciousness. We need to coach more people to begin to see how interdependent we all are, and how closely our own health and prosperity is linked to the health of the world as a whole.

Steve Mitten MCC

Life and Business Coach

WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT ARTICLE

Einstein once said that the greatest problems we face, cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that created them.

This principle is at work in all our lives. The big, recurrent, problems we face (in our lives, careers, and relationships) cannot be solved being who we are now. We need to grow. Growth shifts our perspectives, raises our level of awareness, evolves our consciousness and allows us to
transcend our current problems.

At it deepest level, this is a journey of spirit.

Unfortunately, based on how little effort our culture actually focuses on these issues, their is a lot of evidence we are all fairly addicted to our current level of narcissism. (Which is not good news for the planet.)

However, if you are one of the few who are interested in learning more about your own evolution, I can recommend the recent article in WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT magazine.

http://www.wie.org/j33/guru-pandit.asp?ecp=WIEN-0608

It contains a powerful discussion between Philosopher Ken Wilbur and WIE Editor Andrew Cohen.

I think you will enjoy it.

Life and
Business Coach Steve Mitten MCC