Mathias MaulMarketing at the Interface

I always thought that I was a good, if not great, project person. I have been quite proud that I always delivered customer projects in time, budget and quality. At the same time, I am quite good at slacking off from time to time and to get the rest and relaxation I need. And what can be better than having the freedom to lay a project aside for a couple of hours, or days, knowing that it will be ready on schedule?

Last night however, I got to know my limitations. I learned that there are projects that cannot be laid aside and I was first shocked, then amazed, that sometimes procrastination is not only undesirable but simply impossible.

Last night at about 3 am, my 13-day old son prompted me, with a cunning combination of scream and smell, to pick him up and change his diapers. Seconds later, I found myself standing at the dressing table, barely awake, barely asleep, with an adorable and rewarding, yet utterly smelly and screaming child an arm’s length away.

Can you remember a time during a project when you just wanted to slack off? To have a latte in your favorite coffee shop? To drive to the beach? Just leave the thing alone, sit back and relax? Procrastination can be sooo sweet sometimes, eh?

“Slacking off is for the mind and soul. It may not be a lot of people’s cup of tea, but it’s mine.” everything2.com

So as I stood there at 3 am, doing my best to console this beautiful thing with his flailing arms, I realized that this was a kind of, uhm, project that just cannot be laid aside. I couldn’t just say “Oh well, let’s finish this design spec tomorrow and have a coffee now. It needs some incubation anyway.” I could not just slack off and have a coffee. This task had to be dealt with now, and it had to be completely finished on schedule.

(Carrying the project management metaphor further, I could have escalated the issue to my wife, but the project was at a stage where adding more resources wouldn’t have helped.)

To be honest, this was a shock and awe situation for me: For the first time in my life, I was faced with something that had to be done, now. There was no back door, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and I was staggered. So I took a deep breath of fresh, warm air through the half-open window, looked at my little project and decided to hang on.

To my surprise, it was easier than I had thought. I knew what I was doing (having learnt the tools of the diaper-changing trade years before with my cousins), and the inevitable decision to hang on actually made the process – pun intended - much smoother.

The bottom line: Whenever you are faced with a – maybe already smelly – project that’s bugging you and flailing its arms, holding on to it may not be the most pleasant thing to do (especially when the coffee shop is just around the corner). But if it helps to get the job done, and if delegation is not possible, and if all other options would lead, predictably, to a failed project, an unhappy customer and a low paycheck, just hang in there and do it.

(And don’t you say this is a commonplace until you’ve been standing with me and my small, smelly, beautiful and adorable “project” at the dressing table at 3 am!)

Last week, our wonderful son was born, and we are full of joy. (Thanks to all of you for your congratulations, good wishes and presents!)

Talking of which—Is there a better motivation to implement Tim Ferriss’ “Four Hour Workweek” than knowing that each hour spending with your beloved ones matters so much more than spending it in the daily rat race?

It’s done! After weeks of painstaking research and many writing sessions (not to mention all those grande cappuccinos) at my local Starbucks, the first episode of the first ever mental golf coaching podcast went live today. It is available for subscription at the iTunes Music Store.

Read the press release here: Bridging the Mental Barrier to Success in Golf. Free audiobook reveals the secrets to the perfect game.

This project is just one example of what is possible when a cleanly defined niche market is addressed with targeted online marketing. What is online now is just the beginning of a funnel marketing approach, so stay tuned and watch out for what’s to come!

With so many people talking about Timothy Ferriss’ book, The 4-Hour Workweek (aff), I discovered that this book was exactly the right thing to enter my life at the exactly right time. I’ve been thinking about leading a more mobile life for about half a year, but with this book I gained massive momentum and increased my actions to actually do most of what Tim is writing about.

As I’m doing marketing consulting for coaches, I’ve been asking myself: How can someone who does life coaching (or personal coaching or whatever you might call it) combine his profession with an ultra-mobile lifestyle? So here’s my 0.02 euros on the Top Five Market Niches for Vagabonding Life Coaches

No. 5: Specialize in internationally universal issues

This is not as easy as it might sound. Unbelievable as it is for my stereotypically angst-ridden fellow German countrymen, there are countries or cultures where issues such as depression are nearly unheard of. But how about, for example, the catch-all of life coaches, “work-life balance”? In any given country that suffers from a 9-to-5-culture there are thousands of potential clients just waiting for an “expert from Germany” (or the U.S., or Japan, etc.) to arrive and assist them in escaping the rat race, especially when this expert (you!) has already collected experience about this universal issue in other countries.

No. 4: Specialize in issues specific to countries or cultures

If you’re planning to spend a couple of months in another country find out about culture specific issues that you can address with personal coaching or seminars. If you’re into crisis intervention, read the news about current events that might make people scared or frightened, and offer coaching specific to these events.

Keep in mind that while it is beneficial to speak the language of your destination country, it is not as important as you might think. Instead, invest your time learning the manners of your destination country. I once coached a gentleman from Saudi Arabia using only very basic English, and it worked out great. You can also hire a professional translator for your sessions or let your client bring one of his multilingual friends. This works even in intimate personal coaching and therapeutic contexts. Don’t underestimate the increased expert status you’ll have as “foreign expert!”

No. 3: Specialize in Sports Coaching

Mental sports coaching is a huge field. I’ve been doing Mental Golf coaching for a couple of years now, but there are dozens of other sports that benefit greatly from mental coaching. Just imagine: How much does the mental state of, say, a baseball pitcher, influence the quality of his throws? How about complementing Indian cricketers’ indigenous meditation methods with some left-hemispheric mental strategy coaching á la NLP? Or working with the coach of a soccer team and introducing modern hypnosis in the pre-game process? The possibilities are endless.

No. 2: Specialize in Coaching for Musicians

Often called an “international language,” music is very closely tied to a country and its culture(s). However, the issues musicians and vocalists are faced with are universal: Stage fright before performances is omnipresent, even with well-known (and well-paid) professionals. This is true especially in the field of classical performances, but I’ve also worked with jazz pianists who wanted to “get into the flow” faster. If you successfully specialize in mental coaching for musicians, you’ll never run out of clients and all-access backstage passes.

No. 1: The Power of Self-Referential Coaching and Training

Probably the easiest and most rewarding issue to specialize if you’re inclined to be a vagabonding coach or trainer: Teach others to do what you’re doing right now. Coach them to escape 9-to-5, coach them to build their own businesses, hold seminars on lifestyle design, and so on. If you’re travelling the world and want to coach or train people, teach others how to travel the world and coach and train people. Heck, you might even want to teach others how to teach others how to train. (Which is, incidentally, what I do most of the time.) Whatever self-referential topic you choose: You can be sure that it automatically comes with the added bonus of authenticity.

Go on and choose your preferred niche, or e-mail me with more suggestions. Now please excuse me, I’m off to Fiji finding new business opportunities …

As announced, I’ve condensed the results of my recent seminar on effective coaching and therapy into this post.

Many people have been writing or talking about the merits of maximal simplicity in various contexts; recent examples include John Maeda’s book and blog, or David Pogue’s presentation at TED 2006 focusing on simplicity in software.

It seems that in many contexts, simplicity is the basis for complexity, so why make coaching more complex than it is?

Take another example: During my AI studies, we equipped simulated ants with some simple, local rules. Then we watched our ant colonies evolve very complex behaviour patterns such as ant trails or elaborate attack/retreat patterns. It took only very few simple, local rules to effect large-scale, systemic change. Dee Hock carries this notion to extremes:

Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.
(Dee Hock, quoted in Getting Things Done by David Allen)

My goal is to make coaching and therapy more effective by reducing rules and radically simplifying methodologies. So here is my first, probably still drafty, attempt at a listing of all things necessary to be a great coach:

Step One: Prerequisites

1. Know Your Role And Responsibilites. Be aware of the role(s) you take on as coach or therapist. Are you a “helper,” a “supporter” or even a “saviour”? Learn to adapt your role to what serves yourself and your client best. Also, be aware that the client’s goals are not your responsibility but entirely his own. Your resposibility as coach or therapist is to do the best you can to support your client strengthening his responsibility for himself. The best way to achieve this is by taking responsibility for yourself. Once you get this right, you are out of the exhausting my-client-isn’t-changing-that-means-that-I-have-done-it-WRONG! issue that plagues many newcomers to the field.

2. Be Flexible. It helps to be able to adapt to the client’s point of view. It helps to have a radical constructivist approach. (Further reading: Paul Watzlawick, Richard Bandler, Ernst von Glasersfeld et al.).

3. Optimize yourself. Be aware of yourself and strive to resolve your emotional issues that arise before, during or after working with a client. You are doing yourself and your clients a big favor by staying alert, awake and mentally healthy.

Step Two: A Basic Process

This basic coaching process, cited by many authors, is all you need, even for large-scale systemic changework. Don’t be fooled by its simplicity; instead, be inspired.

1. Find A Compelling Goal. This might range from simple issues such as “be relaxed in front of large audiences” to “knowing what my life is all about”. Use Steve de Shazer’s “Miracle Question” and/or NLP’s “SMART” process to find, formulate and fortify (alliteration not intended) a goal.

2. Test Whether You Have Reached Your Goal. As soon as the goal is found, support your client in staying focused and continually evaluate whether the current behaviors, emotions, belief sets etc. actually support reaching the goal. If not, intervene by using one of the tools mentioned below.

3. Continue until the goal is reached. As simple as that. Of course, the goal can be re-formulated during the process—Actually, in most cases it must be re-formulated because the systemic changes that happen during a coaching/therapy process can not be predicted when you’re defining the goal for the first time.

Step Three: Tools

Prerequisites and process are not enough. You need some basic tools to support your client to actually make the changes he desires.

1. Sort. It helps to know how to support a client in sorting his or her issues. Most clients enter your practise with little or no knowledge about the various aspects that make up their issue. Use Robert Dilts’ “Logical Levels” model to quickly scan through various aspects of an issue. (Yes, I know, the LL are neither logical nor are they levels. However, it is a vastly useful framework, and usefulness is all that counts.)

2. Listen And Talk. Be able to talk to your client and understand what he means be asking process-oriented questions. The “meta model” used in NLP, Robert Dilts’ “Sleight of Mouth” patterns and the type of circular questioning used by some systemic schools works wonders.

3. Decouple. You need at least one reliable method to decouple emotional reactions from external or internal stimuli. Cognitive behavior therapy helps a lot, even ultra-simplistic CBT tools like EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques® by Gary Craig) can clear out severe emotional distress in minutes.

I am quite sure that there is nothing more to add to become a great coach or therapist when you heed those recommendations. I invite you to prove me wrong, though! As always, this is work in process, so comments are welcome.

From tomorrow on, I will teach my regular four-day course on Brief Coaching and Therapy. When I conceived this course, I thought that four days would be enough to teach everything necessary to be an effective coach or therapist, assuming that the participants know about at least one basic methodology.

This time, I’ll see if we can make it in one day less.

I firmly believe that coaching and therapy is simple, really simple. Most of the coaching methodologies on the market are very similar at their basic level, yet they are “expanded” more and more with no end in sight. Don’t get me wrong here: I am all for progress, but why do so many trainers seem to favor complexification over simplification?

Additionally, there is just too much cargo cult going on in the business. Methods are “expanded” by adding more and more pointless rituals just for the sake of expansion, just to sell one more seminar day, just to register one more trademark, just to publish one more book, just to make more profit from gullible clients and coaching students alike.

Why? This just puzzles me. Why not just keep it as simple as it is? Supporting other people in reaching their goals and solving personal issues is simple, and it always has been. Don’t try to make it more complicated than it need be.

Anyway, I’ll be back after the course with the results. Stay tuned.

Today, Ryan Carson published a brilliant post on his blog Carsonified! on “How to Deal with Abusive Customers”. He talks about the story of one customer who turned abusive and concludes:

once-in-awhile, you get a customer who is just cruel and really doesn’t want to be helped. In those cases it seems best (to me) to state the facts to them in a professional manner, and move on.

Indeed, the old adage “the customer is always right” has its limits. There are customers who cannot be argued with reasonably. Customers can and do get abusive. And such extreme cases are a pain to deal with. Ryan’s suggestions are to the point: Stay professional and don’t let yourself get drawn into it.

This is quite easy when you’re selling a product or service that does not per se require an intimate relationship between you and your customer. However, there is a very ironic twist for anyone working in the personal coaching or therapy business. I’ll try to explain:

Working with a coaching client (“coachee”) requires a special kind of relationship: A mixture of genuine empathy and professional distance. For an experienced coach, this is daily routine, but it can be daunting for newcomers to the field. This basic issue aside, what to do when a coachee turns uncooperative, demands a refund, or even gets irate and abusive like the person in Ryan’s story?

Of all the coachees I’ve worked with over the years, only two fell into this category. We had built up a working relationship and had a couple of coaching sessions. Then, suddenly, those clients became abusive, left irate voice messages and e-mails, demanded a refund, even threatened and tried to blackmail me.

In both cases, a “diagnosis” was easy, and I understood why they reacted like this: It was part of their underlying issue on which we had worked on during the coaching sessions. Ironically, as a result of the sessions, they regained their self-confidence (both were management type business people who had sought my assistance because of assertiveness issues) and tried immediately if it worked.

As ironic as it is, simply understanding why they reacted like this did not help with the abusiveness issue. Imagine that, within the working relationship between you and your coachee, she turns irate for whatever reason and refuses to cooperate. As coach, you are supposed to support the coachee, right? After all, it’s written down in the contract and (hopefully) your work ethics. Now in a normal coach/coachee setting, you would tackle whatever issue the coachee has, but this requires her intent to cooperate.

The abusiveness, however, cannot be tackled within the setting, and as soon as you break the setting, you inevitably lose the coachee. It seems impossible to break out of this double-bind without letting go at least one of the two basic personality traits: genuine empathy and professional distance. Let go of empathy and lose your ethics, let go of the distance and get caught up in an abusive mud-wrestling.

Solutions, anyone?

In one of my two cases of abusive clients, I did not refund any money; in the other, I did. Both clients had similar basic issues and both reacted similarly (abusive language, threats, blackmail). However, considerations on the prognosis of their issues led me to the conclusion that client A was already stable enough to handle my “turning down,” while client B would probably have suffered an even more severe bout of her issue. I sort of invested a couple of hundred Euros on client B (by refunding her fees) in order to support her even though she did not cooperate overtly.

Thus, I kept my professional distance to both of them, and I kept my genuine empathy. Of course, I was p—-ed off at first, because I had thought that they were accusing me of something that I had (or hadn’t) done, but this anger faded when I looked behind the issues that had brought them to react like they did.

So here is to all coaches: Forget about keeping or breaking the setting and keep your focus on the client. Sounds easy, can be painful. (Seek supervision if it is.) At any rate, you will learn lots from your abusive clients. I’ve had my fair share of those and hope that you’ll have at least one as well. There’s enough for all of us.

If you want to get into the personal coaching business but don’t want to (or cannot) hire someone who assists you in marketing, here is a bunch of books that I warmly recommend to anyone starting, or optimizing his business. (Assuming you’ve already read the authoritative works of your preferred coaching/therapy methodologies.)

• Seth Godin: Purple Cow. Transform your Business by Being Remarkable. (aff) A modern classic, and probably the only book on marketing you’ll ever need. Except for Seth Godin’s other books, of course.

• Guy Kawasaki: The Art of the Start. (aff) The other only book on marketing (and starting a business) you’ll ever need.

• Richard Dawkins: Unweaving the Rainbow. (aff) Like any book by Richard Dawkins, this is a perfect companion for anyone preferring healthy skepticism to blind superstition. Chapters six and seven read like a survival guide for the often dogma-burdened field of personal coaching, therapy and training and helps to keep a clear mind when confronted with outrageous claims.

• William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White: The Elements of Style. (aff) All you need to know about writing short and long copy in style. A wake-up call for native and non-native speakers of English (like myself).

Note that none of those books is really specific to the field of personal coaching, training or therapy. That is because, frankly, I haven’t yet found one that amazed me as those listed did. E-Mail me if you have a suggestion.

You have just finished a personal coaching education and want to leave your mark in a crowded market? It’s easy if you adhere to a couple of rules that I have learned to be massively helpful in my own career.

1. Make your own mental health the number one priority in your professional life. Work with clients, in both coaching and therapy, can be a strain on your personal mental hygiene. Look after yourself, and when in trouble, ask colleagues for professional supervision. Nuff said.

2. With your mental health the number one priority, the number two priority is continuing and smart self-education. While this holds true for all professions, the coaching business demands special treatment. Ask a seasoned coach, and he will agree that roughly 90 percent of “new” methods in coaching or therapy are old ones in disguise. Don’t get caught up in me-too-seminars. Be smart, look behind the scenes and filter out what you already know from the never-ending supply of “new” methods. How? Just call the trainer and ask some pointed questions. (Speaking as a trainer, I know how important those questions are to me in order to improve my seminars!) Also, remember that every client is an opportunity for you to learn and improve.

3. Don’t try to enter the market as “personal coach.” Those are a dime a dozen. Typically, educational programs in personal coaching are quite comprehensive, so if you graduate successfully, you can work with a very, very wide range of clients’ issues. Rather, work on your specific positioning, find your niche and stick to it. If you had strong, constant pain in your wrist, would you go to your GP or a hand specialist?

These are just three points from the top of my head. This list will be continued in future posts. I appreciate your feed-back!