Brain-based Business Building: How Brainalignment™ can bring you more clients, more money AND more joy
By Sylvia Becker-Hill, MA, PCC
Originally published in v11n2 and reproduced with the permission of choice, the magazine for professional coaching
When it comes to the business of coaching there are two kinds of coaches on the market, distinguished by their past which predicts a very different future around the success of their business in measures of reach and financial results:
1. There are coaches who come from a life inside the business world either as corporate employees or business owners and who – often through some kind of breakdown, crises of meaning or soul searching, turned to coaching and left the corporate/business world – bringing their business expertise to the coaching table and naturally building thriving practices.
2. Then there are thousands of healers, artists, health practitioners, therapists, energy workers, spiritual seekers … heart- and value-centered entrepreneurs and other highly creative free spirits who – often looking for a professional path to share their gifts with the world and discovering with delight the potential of coaching – bring their huge passion and deep modality expertise to the coaching table and struggle or fail to build a thriving coaching practice.
Those who believe in the unlimited human ability to learn might say, “well, the second group simply has to follow some successful business people and learn from them – model what they do and implement it. No big deal. Just a learning curve.”
This assumption doesn’t take into account how challenging business building is for certain brain types. This article is written for all great coaches who suck when it comes to business. When you already reach thousands of people every year and make a revenue in the mid six figures or higher with relative ease, you don’t need to read this article.
For everyone else, read on!
The image on the following page shows the main difference between the talents of the conscious and the sub-conscious mind. The seize-relationship between the invisible iceberg parts under the water line and above the water line expresses in a powerful way the invisible dominance of the subconscious mind.
When you consciously set goals for building your coaching business, your subconscious mind needs to support that.
Otherwise, you’ll drive your ‘car of change’ with one foot on the gas and one on the brake. How far and safe does that bring you? Consciously you might think, “I want to reach more people and make a bigger difference in the world while enjoying a rewarding lifestyle.” But unconsciously you might think, “I don’t want to become a sales-y marketer like a second hand car dealer. What if I really become wealthy and turn into a greedy monster losing my spiritual path?”
Guess what? You’ll end up spending a ton of money on sales and marketing training and business-master mind groups either implementing nothing, feeling stupid and being angry with yourself; or trying to implement just a bit with poor results; doubting yourself, blaming the economy and judging or envying the big seven-figures people in our coaching industry as superficial and manipulative in their marketing. Without Brainalignment™ – without your conscious AND subconscious mind pulling you into the same direction – you suffer the Titanic-Effect™ . Like the seemingly unsinkable Titanic met her master in the shape of a hidden
piece of iceberg under the waterline, your own subconscious mind pulls you and your business down.
The frustrating news for all of us is that the subconscious mind always wins in the end over the conscious mind. Conscious willpower is a depleting resource which runs low quickly in times of stress, physical arousal, mental anxiety, lack of sleep, decision-makingfatigue, lack of water and good nutrition.
In cases of strong disagreement between your conscious and subconscious minds, you literally create an inner conflict that not only destroys your business building attempts but also your love and passion for coaching including your trust and confidence in yourself!
(And in the worst cases, can even make you sick. Your own body becomes a war-zone and starts to show symptoms that may later be diagnosed as diseases by your doctor.)
To make sustainable business building possible and to accelerate the implementation process of your learning, you need your conscious and subconscious mind to work together. You need to ‘brain-wash’ yourself regularly to create Brainalignment™!
The emotional/thought-content of your subconscious mind which needs to be cleaned can be sorted into 12 categories that all have an impact on how willingly and successful you are in the ‘4 Pillars of Business Building ™’: growing a business; relating to money; doing marketing; and focusing on the sale. Here are the most common reasons for lack of brainalignment for each of the four pillars coaches create:
Pillar 1: Growing a Business – material capitalism at its best
In the pillar of business building, most heart-centered spiritual coaches create a lack of brainalignment by identifying themselves with their business. Coaching for them is ‘living their calling’ which they understand proudly as their self-expression. This is a dangerous paradigm because you are too attached to the business.
Your business and you are literally ‘one’. In order to be able to think strategically, make sound decisions, take nothing personal, live a healthy lifestyle by paying yourself a salary … you need to see your business as an identity separate from yourself.
These coaches have a self-image of being an ‘artist’ or ‘spiritual.’ Yes, they want to be great coaches too, but they resist being ‘business owners’ due to a belief that they can’t be both or that the latter will turn them into someone they don’t want to be. Brainalignment means wanting to be a great coach AND a great business owner too.
Combine this wrong identification with the deeply rooted aversion against anything ‘business-y’ which comes from the negative paradigms that business is something evil and dangerous turning any good spiritual person into a manipulative crook it’s easy to see why most coaches don’t invest much attention into building a business and learning how to be a great business owner.
Pillar 2: Relating to Money – emotional hell of shame, guilt and fear
The more heart- and value-centered a coach is, the more often they are subconsciously stuck in an unhealthy relationship with money. For most people there are so many unhealed links to shame, guilt and fears conditioned in their early childhood that it is best to avoid money altogether. BUT: You can’t make money and a profit for your business and generate the resources to reach more people and live your mission in a big way with a dream lifestyle without creating a positive relationship with money. You need to wholeheartedly embrace money as something spiritual – to see it as an expression of spirit in order for you to learn how to make it, manage it, save it, invest it AND enjoy it.
Pillar 3: Doing Marketing – manipulative money draining exhibitionism
Most coaches see marketing (and sales) as something different from their ‘real coaching’. For them it’s an undesired necessity they have to do but don’t want to do. They misunderstand that good client-focused marketing is in its essence already part of the whole coaching process! Through marketing a coach gives valuable information to prospects so they can relate and see themselves in the offered material, which helps them to understand where they are and what they need to do next to move towards their dreams and goals. It opens the door for prospects to believe in their possibilities and move towards a commitment to change – the essence
of coaching itself!
Combine this marketing aversion with shame-triggering beliefs like, “I’m not good enough” and fears around approval like, “What if I make a fool of myself in my videos?” and it’s easy to understand why so many coaches prefer getting a root canal over constantly marketing themselves through speaking, networking, social media and video-blogging.
Pillar 4: Sales – the trade of the nasty/greedy/sleazy used car dealers
Have you ever met at a networking event a sincere passionate coach talking about her coaching and asked her what she charges? In most cases you will see a scary transformation in seconds in front of your eyes: your confident passionate communication partner turns into a stuttering, tight, inauthentic, bubbling, unclear information weirdo. Why is that? Lack of brainalignment caused by dozens of thoughts rushing through the coach’s brain: “What if my service is not worth as much?” “What if this person can’t afford it?” “What if he judges me as ridiculously overpriced?” These negative beliefs, assumptions and fears circling around the coaching
product, the coaching prospect and the coach herself need to be cleaned up and rewired in the coach’s subconscious mind to make sales a joyful powerful client serving conversation.
As it is with marketing, as long as sales is seen as ‘not part’ of the coaching process, it remains a necessary evil. To discover that a good sales conversation is a coaching conversation – helping the prospect to connect with his goal and the pain of the gap not being there already, showing him what’s possible and supporting him to make a clear decision of either ‘no, that’s not the right thing for me’ or ‘yes, I want that’ – is pure service and coaching. A sale equals a commitment on the client’s side, which is the most powerful
coaching intervention.
A final brainalignment assessment for yourself uses the scaling model below. Please close your eyes, breathe deeply and guide your attention fully into the different pillars of building your coaching business and asked yourself: “On a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 meaning I feel so much resistance towards that area that I simply don’t do it and give it no attention at all.” and 10 means “I love this pillar. I give it full attention feeling free and empowered. I can’t wait to act upon it.” Where are you in each area?
Your Brain, Your Business
Your level of brainalignment in all four pillars of brain-based business
building determines how much you commit to your goals
and dreams, how much you implement what you learn from mentors
and how much success you will experience. Your brain is
your business.
Our human brain is an amazing organ and unfortunately gets
neglected by most people in their everyday life. They brush their
teeth twice daily and wash their hair several times a week but who ‘brain-washes’ their
own brain regularly? Do you?
Our brain is an amazing association-making machine. Throughout our life it gets imprinted
with every thought, every feeling, every experience we ever had. Most of that
gets stored for hard-wiring efficiency reasons into our subconscious mind and resists
immediate linear access through sheer intellectual analyses. To understand how your
brain determines your level of success with your coaching business, you have to understand
the relationship between your conscious and subconscious mind.
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