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| Tom Stone |
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Coaching is a rapidly growing profession. More and more people are learning to be coaches with the goal of helping people with success, business, relationships, just about any area of life you can imagine.
But there is a disturbing issue within the coaching industry, which is that most people who go through a coach training program can't seem to make a living at providing coaching services. The stats are not that great - industry articles estimate that less than 5% of coaches make over $100k per year and there's a big portion of those who call themselves coaches who aren't making any money at all from coaching. Why is this?
Successful coaches might answer that most coach training programs don't really help you overcome your own personal barriers to marketing and selling your services as a coach. Although this may be largely true, there may be another, more important reason behind the general lack of people's success in making a living doing coaching.
Could it be that it is because of the quality of the coaching itself? Perhaps people just aren't that thrilled about being coached by the general graduate of most coach training programs. After all, in order to hire a coach and pay them the big bucks, don't you need to have the feeling that you would be coached by someone who really has something to offer you? Perhaps just learning some coaching techniques isn't really enough to give people that feeling of - "Wow! I want to be coached by that person!" Think about it. Do you want to be coached by someone who doesn't have their own act together?
To illustrate the point, a close friend of mine, Steve Straus, who has been a very successful coach for about 20 years recently told me that he had lunch with someone who was interested in becoming a coach and the person said to him, “I’ve been to some coach networking meetings and I have to say that I’m hesitant to want to call myself a coach if that’s what coaches are. Most of these people have no substance!”
So what's the solution? Is there even a solution?
The coaching profession is really still in its infancy. But one of the things that is becoming clear is that the personal development of the coach is really a major factor in what kind of person, and coach, a coaching trainee turns out to be.
Great coaching is the natural consequence of being a great person. Aspiring to be a great coach is one thing and expecting to become a great coach while still being stuck in your own limitations isn't realistic. This doesn’t just happen from taking some courses to learn how to ask questions and listen well. That's not greatness. And it doesn't lead to being a great coach.
It may be of interest to know that I have never taken a single coach training class. However, during conversations with the late Thomas Leonard, founder of Coach U, Coachville and the ICF, he mentioned that he had told a large group of people at a seminar he was teaching about the first coaching session he had with me. He had asked me to be his personal coach within a week of meeting me. He said that he is always watching for coaching mistakes and that most coaches make an average of 20 coaching mistakes in a half hour coaching call. He said that he told his audience that when he had his first one hour coaching session with me, that I had only made one mistake and then immediately caught it and corrected myself.
I am sharing Thomas' comments with you because they illustrate my point that a coaching expert and trainer such as Thomas was looking for certain qualities for his own personal coach and they had nothing to do with coach training. When Thomas asked if I would coach him my reply was, "Oh, I'm not a coach." To which he said, "Oh yes you are!"
The point is that the quality of your coaching is directly related to the quality of who you are being not so much what coaching techniques you know.
I have spent a life time working on my own personal and spiritual development and have been fortunate to have some great teachers. But it doesn’t have to take a life time of personal and spiritual growth work to become the kind of person who can coach from a place of grounded authenticity, penetrating insight, and power. I have distilled and synthesized the best and most effective things that I have learned over the years into a simple set of insights and techniques that can help you to rapidly remove the coverings that are hiding your greatness from you and from the world.
There is greatness inside of you, the natural greatness of who you are uniquely designed to be. Everyone has their own special kind of greatness. It is just a matter of peeling away the layers of conditioning that occur when you are extremely young. It is this early conditioning that leads to habits of not trusting and acting on our intuition, to becoming judgmental and to absorbing ourselves in all sorts of addictive behaviors. Our conditioning causes us to long for a sense of completion by finding the perfect partner, meeting all kinds of goals, and trying to force life to comply with our will. Who could have known at the time that these seemingly universal human conditioned responses would hide our greatness from us when we grew up? Even if we had known, we wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it at the time anyway. But now we can!
The insights and personal development techniques that I have discovered are now organized into a new kind of coach training program called Core Dynamics Coaching. One of the beauties of this program is that the insights and techniques that you will learn are both for your own development and they are the most important and powerful tools that you will use to help your clients uncover their own personal greatness too!
When you have a problem in your life, what's really going on?
Even though it seems like it is often our outer circumstances that are holding us back or that life just doesn't seem to be bringing us the fulfillment of our desires, what's really going on is that we are sabotaging ourselves with inner conflicts. As already mentioned but it bears repeating, the real basis of our inner conflicts can be found in our childhood conditioning. That's not anything new. But what is new is that until now, our conditioning has seemed difficult if not impossible to change. Now, however, changing this deep seated conditioning has become very easy with the development of the Core Dynamics and the Five Pure Awareness Techniques.
Everyone wants more out of life. But so often we can feel held back, and can't really seem to figure it out! It can be frustrating and discouraging. We want to make progress in our business, our career, our relationships, but it is as if some invisible resistance just seems to be keeping us from having the life we really want.
The 12 Core Dynamics model that is used in this new coach training program provides an innovative language and structure for understanding the nature of human conditioning and its incredible limiting influences on our lives. Here's the expanded Venn diagram of the model:
Behind each of these Core Dynamics is a unique and penetrating insight about the nature of early human conditioning. When we are very young and impressionable, we have experiences that we don't have language to describe. Instead, these early experiences are "felt," they are experienced on the level of our feelings, without words for them. One of the insights from the Core Dynamics is that we also make decisions during this pre-verbal, pre-cognitive time and these decisions are also made on a "feeling level."
These feeling level decisions are potent. One such decision that seems to be quite universal is the decision to try to not feel things fully, to shut down the access to and use of our natural capacity to feel. This is because we have numerous experiences of being overwhelmed by our emotions during our tender formative years. As we grow up and gain language skills, we start to rely on language and our thinking to make sense of the world and to communicate with others. The result is that we develop a life that operates inside of the limitations that these feeling level decisions without even knowing that we are doing this. This is the insidious nature of our early childhood conditioning.
Because our model involves universal insights into our early childhood conditioning, some people ask if Core Dynamic Coaching is actually a form of therapy. It is not. It is a highly effective form of coaching and of educating people in how to access and use their natural gifts and personal power. This can’t be done without learning new skills of how to do the opposite of what were have been conditioned to do so we have minor references to the past simply to be able to understand the universal nature of these limitations and learn how to resolve the inner conflicts that they tend to cause.
Inner Conflicts
 Inner conflicts occur between two kinds of thoughts, our natural desires or intentions and our conditioned habits of thinking. When we an intention to accomplish something and at the same time we have a conflicting thought of what we "should" or "can't" do, then the energy pattern of what we want is in conflict with the energy pattern of our conditioned response and the intention gets sabotaged.
Everything is made of energy so if we were to graph the pattern of energy of a desire or intention and the pattern of energy of a conditioned response it might look something like this:
We could think of our conditioned responses as the "bugs" in our inner human software.
Becoming the Kind of Coach that You Really Want to Be
In coaching, what happens is that if you have remaining inner conflicts inside of you that come from your early feeling level decisions, you will have a tendency to see the world make your decisions based on limitations that are similar to your client’s. It is sort of the blind leading the blind but in this case it is the conditioned leading the conditioned. This can only result in coaching that isn't all that effective. It's not that this is bad, per se; it is just that it isn't a kind of coaching that people are compelled to pay for. This is the real reason that coaches aren't making money. Think about it. If someone has even subtle feelings of low self esteem, low self worth, they will have a vibe of not being valuable enough to hire as a coach. This is not something that even necessarily happens at a conscious level. It is just that the potential client has this feeling that who you are is not someone that they want to be coached by. The client is likely to also be too imbedded in their own conditioning to understand or even be fully conscious of this feeling, but if they do have that feeling then they shy away from hiring you to coach them no matter what training certificate you have on your wall.
If however, you have done your own deep spring cleaning, if you have learned how to overcome the limitations of your own conditioning and you have resolved much of the unresolved inner conflicts of your own life, then you will be experienced as a very different kind of person. You will have become someone unique in the world today and someone who will feel very special to a prospective client. The client may not be able to articulate what it is about you that appeals to them but they know just from being around you or from talking with you on the phone that you are someone who has something that they want. You have the kind of inner clarity and connection to your essential nature that everyone, even unconsciously is longing to have in their life. You have a state of being from which life is experienced as in the flow, in the Zone, effortless and aligned with the power of the laws of nature. This is a life worth living and it is a natural attraction field for pulling those who want this kind of life to you.
What are needed are coaches who have already done their own work so thoroughly that they are no longer the product of their conditioning. They have liberated themselves from being the victims of their circumstances and the victims of the insidious limitations of their childhood conditioning. That's the kind of coach that people want. And that's the kind of coach that you want to be if you are going to be really successful in the coaching business.
Integrating the Core Dynamics with the ICF Core Competencies
The Core Dynamics Coach Training and Certification Program has been developed to weave together the Core Dynamics insights and techniques along with the International Coaching Federation Core Competencies. This means that you can become the kind of person who can coach powerfully from who are really are and at the same time gain the knowledge to be able to meet the requirements for obtaining ICF certification.
By combining the uncovering your own natural greatness with the power of the Core Dynamics insights and coaching protocols as well as learning the ICF Core Competencies and preparing yourself to become ICF certified, you have your best possible shot at overcoming the challenge of how to make a great living as a coach. To learn more about the Core Dynamics Coach Training and Certification Program see .
Enjoy,
Tom Stone
Founder – Great Life Technologies, LLC
About the Author:
Tom Stone is the founder of Great Life Technologies and is an expert in the application of biophysics and changing patterns of energy in the human body. Tom is pioneering the new field of .
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