Success Clinic, part I: Presence • Program • Propellant

Strengthen these three key elements every day to cultivate your thriving coaching practice!

To grow a thriving coaching practice, you’ll need to cultivate your presence, program and propellant. Strength in all three areas makes you unstoppable as a coach. Without even one of them, you'll need a day job.

Let’s begin by examining presence.

Presence
Clients hire coaches because they consciously or unconsciously recognize qualities in the coach that they desire for themselves. A client may be searching for deeper meaning and desires the spiritual groundedness she witnesses in the coach she hires. Another client may feel overwhelmed and hire a particular coach because he senses that coach has successfully sorted through overwhelm. Yet another client may want to learn solid business skills for her new venture, and she hires a coach whose business sense she admires.

Cultivating your presence as a coach requires that you stand firmly in the center of yourself, allowing your unique radiance to shine. It calls you to own, name and use your specific strengths and natural gifts. It also requires that you “do your own work,” consistently moving beyond your own self-imposed limitations with your coach or spiritual teacher.

Radiant presence insists that you stand tall, with your head held high, speaking fully, from deep within you. Radiant presence shines, neither humble nor arrogant. Radiant presence doesn’t try to adjust to what you think a coach “should” be. Radiant presences allows you to joyously support a client in going well beyond where you have personally gone in any particular area.

Radiant presence never asks for perfection, but rather full humanness, with deep, consistent compassion for yourself and your client. Radiant presence calls you to model that connecting humanness, rather than isolating perfectionism. Radiant presence does not know self-consciousness. Radiant presence would rather fully engage in life and with the client than worry about bringing enough to the table.

To cultivate more presence
- Begin by acknowledging that cultivating presence is essential to growing a thriving coaching practice.
- Commit to tending your presence every day.
- Engage in the specific activities that you know support your most radiant presence. Unique as each coach, they could include activities as diverse as yoga, teaching art classes for kids, journaling, taking a personal growth class, napping, dancing, drinking more water, meeting regularly with your coach, training for a marathon, knitting, making love, walking, chopping vegetables, learning improvisational comedy, fasting, playing piano, meditating, taking amino acids, cleaning the house, skiing, etc. You get the idea . . . Every one of these ideas comes from a coach who swears by them!

Action item
Before we proceed to the program element, here is an action item to get you started on applying the three elements to your practice.

1. Once you have selected an activity that you know supports your radiant presence, go to your calendar and block out time each day or week for this activity. This is your sacred space and a significant first step toward a thriving practice!

© 2007 Ann Strong, All rights reserved.