The Meaningful Coaches Path: Coaching, cognitive fitness and building business
By Sharon Todd & Jill Hewlett
Originally published in v11n2 and reproduced with the permission of choice, the magazine for professional coaching
Many people are choosing coaching as a career path, in order to create work that is meaningful and aligned to their personal needs and professional goals. Along with being skilled listeners and offering timely questions and insights, coaches are also entrepreneurs in how they manage, build their business and earn an income. Those who choose to coach are typically individuals who are self-motivated, creative, risk-takers and leaders by nature. As a coach, you have the innate knowledge that who you are on the inside, will make or break the success of your business, on the outside. Your roots will affect your fruits!
While you are the source of your own success, coaches are not superhuman and like everyone else susceptible to issues such as low energy, lack of confidence, poor focus, disorganization, communication blocks, and inability to relate or foster connections. When in this stressed state you’ve downshifted into your survival based brain stem, the place of flight, fight or freeze. Resources, solutions
and motivation become greatly limited.
In order to share your gifts as a talented coach, you must have clients. Your ability to promote and sell yourself as a coach will largely determine how successful you build your business and how large a contribution you will make to the world. Not all coaches have a sales background, but whether you have had sales training or not let’s consider using your neurological network to get you in an effective business ready state to achieve the results you want.
Conventional sales training focuses on sales techniques, instead of addressing the subconscious blocks and wiring that keep salespeople from achieving their potential. These very blocks also limit one’s ability to connect with others and with one’s self to improve quality of their life. When our deeper default wiring is not addressed, it’s like tending a garden by planting new seeds, but never weeding! Eventually the weeds take over, and there isn’t space for the fruits to grow.
While we all experience varying levels of rejection on a day to day basis, such as family members not agreeing with our suggestions or we did not make the cut at soccer try outs, people who are in the coaching business have to address sales regularly. How you handle and respond to rejection can either make or break the success of your business.
Think about how confident you feel after any kind of rejection. If rejection feels uncomfortable to you, your personal lens (based on
past experience) may have a negative interpretation associated to it. So when you attempt an action that has the potential for rejection, you may prematurely move into a stress based state and put yourself at a disadvantage. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot!
Brain Fitness works with neurogenesis – our brain’s ability to form new brain cells and can continue throughout life with the right
tools. It works with the brain-body connection and the science of neuroplasticity, which has proven that the brain can grow and rewire itself through experience.
The brain itself cannot distinguish between good and bad information. To the brain, information is interpreted by our personal lens and the beliefs that govern us. With this in mind, your brain wiring is key! The wiring system of the brain is created and affected
by how the neuro networks are activated and simulated. This will lead to how your brain interprets information in all areas of life.
For example, you are watching the news which is littered with content on how slow and distraught the economy is and by chance the next day you lose a client and then later at a networking opportunity all of your advances are rejected.
While rejection is a natural part of life and the sales process, it’s likely your brain will automatically make a link between the state of the economy and how your sales outcomes will now play out. Now the economy and your ability become one. Alas, more seeds limited by weeds!
This is completely overriding what you personally can do to affect and produce the results you want. By using brain fitness to create
neuro connectivity we can in minutes, remove the physical, emotional and mental charge or trigger that we have with an issue and shift our lens to a more positive outlook for business building skills, creativity, communication, curiosity, focus, fostering connections, listening, powerful questioning and so much more.
As we engage brain fitness movements, we shift from stress to balance and re-activate and strengthen those very parts of our brain that have become disconnected, so we reconnect with our whole brain potential, and function at our best, including building a thriving coaching business.
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