The Fog of Possibility
December 21, 2007
Wednesday night I had the very special honor of guest moderating the Resource Group call for students in the Foundations Coaching class through MentorCoach. Kevyn Malloy, the very warm and gracious woman who taught my Foundations class, was the special guest that night. Kevyn shared the story of her path to Coaching and things she learned along the way.
It was especially important for me because Kevyn told us not to get too fixed on a path or a goal, but to stay open to opportunities that appear. She talked a lot about serendipity, the idea of purposeful chance intervening to bring things into our lives when we need them.
Kevyn discovered Coaching during a time when she was taking a break from being a therapist and trying to restore balance to her life. Sounds kind of like my twisting road. She started the training and began Coaching part-time, not sure what role Coaching would ultimately play in her life. I’m feeling pretty comfortable hearing about her twisting road.
As she worked longer in Coaching, she found areas of specialty where she enjoyed her clients and offered her most inspired Coaching. These areas weren’t the ones she would ever have guessed before she got there. She discovered them because she was willing to try new areas and see how it went. She was willing to accept opportunities that colleagues presented to her.
It was an important time in my life for that message. I’ve been sketching my “ideal client” and trying to decide how much of my business I will dedicate to individual coaching and how much will be group coaching, training, writing, and producing information products. Any answers I come up with are completely guessing and I don’t have a clear direction. But that can be okay—or so I’ve been told.
A friend I knew many years ago told me, when I was early in my therapy career and trying to figure out some long-term goals, that sometimes we don’t see that far ahead. Sometimes we just see the next step. Actually, he was finishing a divinity degree, so he was talking about God revealing only the next step and not the whole path. I’ve never fully embraced that message, even though I keep hearing it when I’m trying to see farther down the road.
This week I moved forward in little steps, writing more articles for my Blog-Zine and sketching out some ideas for topics next year. I’ve spent some creative planning time looking more closely at what characteristics in clients will bring out my best work and what ways of interacting and serving I’ll do best. I’ve started planning ways to keep creative ideas flowing and try out new things.
Little steps are all I can see right now because the distant path is too cloudy. I still don’t like not knowing! But not-knowing is the path to discovering, so I have to embrace not-knowing and look forward to the discoveries.
Clear direction is the end of possibility. When you choose something, you choose not to do something else, at least for a time. I think I’m so enthralled with possibility that choosing feels limiting.
In this coming year, I will choose to try new ideas and explore new directions, always staying open to new opportunities. Man! I sound like a Coach!
May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,
Steve Coxsey
Resistance??
December 14, 2007
Lately on the Fast Track Your Dream forum there have been discussions about the idea of resistance. We’re trying to figure out what it is and what it isn’t.
Here goes. Resistance refers to an internal inertia, that inner ball and chain that keeps you stuck in a rut and away from taking on risks. Risks can be too–risky. According to Barbara Sher, this rut-resisting urge is a very primitive form of fear. It keeps us from venturing into dangerous territory so we won’t be harmed. It’s a survival thing going back to primitive man. It’s also about as dumb as primitive man, and doesn’t distinguish between risks like dying and risks like being confused and embarrassed while learning to do something new.
I’m not sure myself if it’s a primitive man thing, but I do like to think of resistance as a primal response that keeps us afraid of change and comfortable with the known. But the known gets boring, so we decide we’re going to jump out of the rut and make some changes! Then resistance says things like, “It’s kind of cold. Wouldn’t you rather stay inside where it’s warm?” and “Who do you know at that group you want to visit? You’ll probably be lonely and you won’t fit in.” It also says, “You should probably organize those files before you try something wild and crazy like writing an article.”
The twist that we’re bouncing around in discussions at Fast Track is that sometimes we resist doing things for perfectly good reasons. We might resist taking a step because we know it’s something we’re not very good at it. The ideal solution would be to ask for help or pay someone to do it for us, but we don’t think that’s reasonable so we try to make ourselves do it. Sometimes we resist a step because it truly is too risky, such as quitting a job and then looking for something more interesting to do. The group also realized we might resist change because something about the direction isn’t right. Maybe it’s a little off course, maybe the timing’s not right, or maybe we sense we’re doing things out of order. It’s a gut feeling, our intuition holding us back without us understanding why.
That’s my theme this week. I finally bought Book Yourself Solid: The Fastest, Easiest, and Most Reliable System for Getting More Clients Than You Can Handle Even if You Hate Marketing and Selling
I discovered I don’t have a lot of enthusiasm for getting clients. I worry I’ll have to work with people who drain my energy and frustrate me. I don’t want to “book myself solid” yet because I’m afraid I won’t enjoy it very much. So I’m finally going to define my ideal client. I’ve never given myself that freedom, never believed I could choose. It’s about time I figure out who I can do my best work for and get excited about meeting them.
I’ve also been worried I’ll have to spend so much time on individual Coaching that I won’t have time to explore lots of other ideas I have for my business. I had planned to focus first on getting Coaching clients and then on other ideas. I’ve decided to change my plan. I’m going to spend some time each day thinking about other, future areas of my business. And I’m going to dream big.
May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,
Steve Coxsey
Twisting Or Roundabouts?
December 7, 2007
This week I spent a little bit of time writing for my Blog-Zine, more time planning the rest of this month’s and next month’s Blog-Zine articles, a lot of time reading and watching training DVDs, and a whole lot more time doing things that have nothing to do with my business.
In the “Design your life first, then design your career” model, you start with the kind of life you want to have and the priorities you should honor. From there you find interesting and creative work that complements your life. High up on my list right now is time for my sons’ activities, since my wife is gone from dawn to dusk or later four or five days a week. This week, even though I don’t have my new business up and running at full speed, I was still able to make their activities my priority.
It’s a blessing to know I can give them the extra time once in a while. But I still get anxious when I realize that nothing I did specifically generated new money this week, and my “productive” hours were spent planning, learning, and contemplating.
I still haven’t figured out how to get paid for that. I need to focus on helping other people plan, learn, and contemplate. That’s a paid service!
It didn’t feel like much forward progress. It felt like a lot of waiting. I’m waiting for my web site to be updated when my web master has time. I’m waiting to have more content developed and written so I can offer something—anything—to entice people to sign up to my list and maybe buy a workbook from me.
One of my ideas, which involves packaging training and time-limited Coaching around specific goals and life areas, got me a little excited. When I have been thinking about ways to market Coaching and training to some target groups, it’s felt unclear and I have lacked direction. Having a specific, focused approach for a set amount of time helps me see how to present it. Training and Coaching packages may not produce any more results than offering open-ended Coaching, but it sure helps me “get” the way to start telling the story about what I do!
So maybe it just looked like I was going in circles. Maybe I was seeing a similar view from a slightly different perspective. Maybe there’s a little progress on this journey in there somewhere.
May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,
Steve Coxsey
First Things First
November 30, 2007
I took my sons to a fast food (in name only) restaurant for fried chicken on Wednesday after soccer practice. The wait was long and we had to remind the people we were waiting for our food, but there was a silver lining.
My younger son’s meal came packaged in a box with puzzles and games on it. One had three panels of cartoon scenes that we had to put in the right order. His older brother and I got to show him how to decide what comes first—cause and effect. We helped him see that some things can’t happen on their own or without a set-up. You can’t trip over the roller skate until someone has left it carelessly on the floor. You can’t walk into a surprise party until people have shown up. First things first.
I had a similar experience this week when I was checking out some web sites for Coaches and career change consultants. I found at least three sites that had a sidebar button for newsletter archives and there were only two or three issues of the newsletter, stopping several months ago. But there was still a “Sign up for my newsletter” box on the site.
One guy I know, Ken Robert, started a newsletter based on helping people with creative ideas for career change. He refocused and started posting on creative thinking, brainstorming, and mind mapping for all sorts of problem solving. But he told his list he was making the change in focus and format and invited us along. These others just left people hanging.
Or did they? That’s probably the problem. They heard the normal mantra: “You have to have a newsletter.” They started one. They asked people to sign up. Maybe three or four did, but after three months of writing content and sending it out there didn’t seem to be a point.
This week I’ve heard and been reminded of about a dozen ideas for getting my message out to people. All these ideas have started with the presumed list. I heard ideas on what to tell my list and how to use creative new ways to package the information or make special offers. But I don’t have a big list yet.
First things first. I’m building a list, very slowly. I have all sorts of plans I can put into place once I have a larger list, but we’re not to that panel yet. I have to build my list or I’ll be wasting my time implementing to no audience.
I’ve had to remind myself that in the meantime I can still be working on things to have ready when the list starts growing. I can plan time-limited groups that combine training and coaching for parents. I can plan telecourses on creative career change ideas. I can put together workbooks to complement someone else’s book and sell them together in a package. But I can’t roll out any of these things without a list.
So I’m feeling a little bit like Noah—yes, delusions of grandeur and all! Noah built that danged boat for decades, with everyone asking him when it was going to rain. I’m not getting teased and no more people think I’m crazy than thought it before, but it’s causing a lot of self-questioning. I don’t have a history of designing programs or products that brought in money and satisfied customers to motivate me. I have to work completely on faith that what I’m doing now will bring revenue in the future. It leaves me feeling like I’m drifting sometimes. I’m pretty sure that’s what happens to a lot of Coaches when they try to get their story in front of potential clients but don’t get many nibbles.
And there’s a problem to be solved that can become a great business model. Hmmm…..
May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,
Steve Coxsey
Virtual Hiccups
November 23, 2007
Technology “dead-legged” me again this week. For those of you who didn’t go to junior high, “dead-leg” is one of the many phrases for the trick of coming up behind someone and pushing—okay, kicking—the back of their leg as they take a step. If you hit the right spot (Hey, come one! Like I would even know where that is? ;-) the person stumbles. It’s similar to, but not as elegant as, gently tapping the ankle as it’s moving forward, just before it moves in front of the other leg, so it winds up crossed behind the other leg. You can get someone to trip nearly every time with that one (from comments I’ve heard).
I had my three final articles for November loaded into my Blog-Zine site and ready to be published. My plan was to go click-click-click and have everything finished in a couple of minutes. But I posted the first one and noticed it looked odd. The formatting was mixed up. Same for numbers two and three.
I went into the edit mode of WordPress and the appearance of my article was different. It wasn’t simple font with some HTML code saying “strong” for bold or “em” for italics or things like that. It looked just like a Word document in Times New Roman with bolded letters and italicized letters. But the spacing was completely messed up, as in gone. It was one long paragraph.
I had to find the originals, copy and paste, and then re-format them so they would look right.
I’m pretty sure WordPress didn’t change, because I have to ask my site to upgrade or it won’t get a new version. My browser updated recently, but it was before I posted the new articles. I have NO CLUE what happened between me uploading the articles and being ready to post them. But they look fine now. Check it out.
I realized a while back that I need a little more technological savvy to get comfortable building a Coaching business. Now I post to this blog and occasionally my Evil Twin Blog in Blogger, I participate in a group blog in TypePad, and my Blog-Zine is in WordPress. I’m gonna’ be so confused!
I even volunteered to be part of the small committee for the Parenting Coaches’ group that will focus on marketing in general and blogging and web sites specifically. Who am I fooling? Apparently, that group! Actually, I’ve learned a few things that put me a step or two ahead of the crowd so they think I’m knowledgeable. Poor things. See how we’re doing so far. The blog is called Parenting By Strengths.
I added a little more confusion this week. I finally chose a theme for my own TypePad blog. I’m going to post about the struggles and finds of doing personal professional service marketing. I know! I can hardly wait, too!
Check out my Anything But Marketing! Blog. Post taunting or commiserating comments as you see fit. There are a lot of us who want to work with people but get completely stuck by the idea of having to market ourselves, which feels insincere and even cheap. Hopefully we’ll come up with some approaches we can at least tolerate and maybe even some we can enjoy.
Onward! Into the technological void! (no bathroom humor intended)
May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,
Steve Coxsey
-
Contact me by e-mail. Join the Ride
Tapa Palapa Podcast
Listen any time!
