@Ngozi Obanye How do we cultivate the love for the aspect of business that we are less passionate about? How else - by examining our beliefs about it and adjusting our relationship with those beliefs, so we operate in alignment with our values. Damn, that makes it sound easy. Simple, yes. Easy, not so much. 🤔🙂 Scenario: The "client" values the coaching aspect of the work, but hates "business" side of things, the admin, the advertising, the constant tweaking of the systems. Reality: The business succeeds or fails on it's ability to attract new clients. The successful business allows the "client" to operate in their preferred role. Options: Split personality - not in a pathological sense... this is essentially what is already in place; there are two roles: behaviour which is unfavourable (the admin stuff), and behaviour which is more favourable (the coaching). It's functional, but only just, and it leaves the "client" feeling that they have to take "time out" away from their more favourable behaviour in order to function in it. Explore and reframe beliefs - I've not enough space here to do a detailed analysis but suffice to say that there are "reasons" the "client" hates the admin stuff, and we can identify these as beliefs. Now, despite their initial (probably well intended) causes, these beliefs are no longer serving the client well. The "client" values coaching so the unfavourable behaviour must be either discarded or else brought into alignment with their values by reframing or re-evaluating their beliefs about it. When a client can see, evaluate and esteem a behaviour as being in service of their values it becomes beneficial, no matter how unfavourable it was before that shift. (This is why self-deception is so pernicious: it works the same but the other way round!) Exploring, rehearsing, practising and reinforcing these alignment links are how we cultivate passion. It brings the client to the point where they effectively say "If it's FOR me and helps me towards my values, I can't help but engage with it. It's what I do, I just didn't have that relationship with it before".

How you go about getting your clients, your niche definition and ideal client specification will help to determine which comes first. If you market yourself to people who generally have it together but are stuck on a particular area and can't make progress, you're likely to be able to get straight in with the coaching. On the other hand if you're going broader brush, you're going to attract clients with a wide range of issues and they may have a great variety of reasons they can't make progress. It can be necessary to counsel broadly then coach a specific skill, then go back to counselling and coaching in the next area that presents itself as an obstacle. Ideally you'll want to be peeling down those layers and getting to the bottom of things rather than coaching/counselling on each new thing as it comes up, but either way this will be a cyclical process. Personally, my clients have a very specific issue. While the reasons they feel they have that issue may be different and the ways they experience that issue are various it can mostly be dealt with by psycho-education. I task them with the rehearsal of some key skills, and I employ coaching to troubleshoot how they are applying the skills to their particular problem experience. This means I can pre-record and re-use the education section and deliver 8 hrs of focussed session time in just 4 hours, without sacrificing on value to the client. I have developed a little library of variations to the tasking skills which I can make available to clients if they don't get on with one particular method, or lack the imagination to "filter" the information and apply it to themselves.

Thanks all. I just made a second sale from that list of 12 too. Boooom!

@Shanyne Milliner thanks

@Jim Stanton Having arrived at true happiness we go on to realise that our to-do list is in the back pocket of our "Lucky pants" which we wore to get here - which are now in the wash, list and all! Best start again. 😆

@Harry Ford feels like there ought to be a "in the presence of particular beliefs" statement floating somewhere in that equation.

@Lifestylist Shahid I followed some lessons from a guy called @Ed JC Smith 😉The Ad is a targeted poke at a small niche of cold traffic potential contacts. Keeping it simple, asking for one action to solve one problem, with one solution. If they respond to the Ad, they move up from being cold traffic; if they book a call, they move up again; if they buy the programme, they move up and so on. I'm starting from 0 audience, so as far as the Ad is concerned, it's all cold audience. As I gather Data over the life of the Ad campaign I can feed it back into the Meta audience definition to find others who closely match the profiles of the contacts as they progress through my funnel. Ultimately, by tracking and monitoring the right metrics, I'll end up with a detailed list of attributes that describes the people who buy my product, which I can then feed back to Meta. The practical upshot of that will be bringing down the cost of conversion and lowering the risk in that gamble. I hope that helps

@George Williams Yes mate, good shout! I'm doing some "manual outreach" too. The heart of my niche is technically "early to mid career musicians", so I'd be getting them a little prematurely if they're still in the academies and Unis, however a lot of pros teach as well, So I can always aim to hit the staff at such institutions.