Photo courtesy of Nattanan and Pixabay
Welcome to part 5 in the series of articles on the 7 steps to earning your living as a successful professional in any field. Over the past year I’ve been isolating the specific steps involved, and refining them. What’s resulted is a ‘roadmap’, and while the version of it I’ve created is aimed at coaches, therapists, trainers and consultants, with a little creativity, you’ll be able to see how these steps relate to anyone who wants to transition to doing work that involves you being a ‘trusted advisor’ to others (e.g. expert / speaker / professional services etc).
I’ll be going through the remaining steps over the next few weeks, but if you want to download my new guide, “The 7 Steps for Earning Your Living As a Successful Coach” and get all 7 of them right away, you can get the guide free here. As you read this concise guide, you’re going to discover that it’s simpler than you may have been led to believe. So let’s look at Step 5 – Enterprise.
STEP 5 – ENTERPRISE: Develop sustainable income
It’s one thing to charge someone for spending an hour with you (whether in a coaching session or some other professional role). It’s quite another to develop sustainable income and grow a thriving practice. This can involve mastering a variety of ‘entrepreneurial abilities’, including (but not limited to) enrolment conversations, public speaking, visibility, tribal marketing, social media skills and other business fundamentals.
The Myth vs The Reality of Step 5
Many professionals assume you have to be all over social media, be a natural on camera or be comfortable speaking in public in order to be really successful. But the reality is that there are many ways to build a sustainable income, and the one that works for you will be the one that is most authentically you, and fits best with who you are.
Conventional wisdom will also tell you you need to ‘find your niche’, but the reality is far from it. If you’re early in your professional career, you may intuitively get that it doesn’t make sense to tie yourself to one specific niche. Your impact is what people pay you for. The more you’re able to deliver “dream come true” results and help your clients transform their lives, the more confidence you’ll have in enrolling clients and charging decent fees. If it makes sense for you to have a ‘niche’, you’ll discover it by enrolling and working with a number of paying clients, and getting clarity on who you enjoy making the biggest difference to.
STEP 5 FOCUS
– Become a master of having connected, effective enrolment conversations.
– Get clear on the kind of ‘professional practice’ model that makes sense for you (E.g. charge by the hour, packages, intensives, groupwork etc).
– Determine your ‘freedom number’; the level of income you require in order to ‘go pro’ in your chosen profession.
Next week we’ll be looking at Step 6 – Professional, but if you want to get all 7 steps right now, you can download “The 7 Steps for Earning Your Living As a Successful Coach”.
If you want to take a deep dive into the principles behind clarity, during the Certified Clarity Coach Training programme, we put a big focus on establishing and strengthening your foundations, and include plenty of practice sessions so that you start building the skills, intuitions and reference experiences for great coaching. We also focus on helping you get the kind of certainty in your own and your clients’ innate capacity for resilience, realisation and transformation (you may have got a sense of this if you listened to my coaching session with Pam Featherstone, or the ‘unpacking’ of it I did on my podcast here
The programme is a 10-month immersion into the principles behind clarity. It’s formally open for registration and it’s not just for coaches; we’ve had all sorts of people go through the programme including computer programmers, doctors, call centre workers, lawyers, parents, PR specialists, therapists, office workers, entrepreneurs, surgeons, people who are already coaches and consultants and trainers and even a professional footballer. If you’re interested, it’s worth knowing that we’re not running the programme next year so the intake that’s starting this September (2018) is the last chance you’ll get to join us until 2020 at the very earliest. So if you want to find out how to become a Clarity Coach and see what’s involved in bringing an understanding of these principles into every aspect of your life click here.
To your increasing clarity!
Big love
Jamie Smart
Sunday Times Bestselling Author, Speaker and Executive Coach
PLUS: Whenever you’re ready… here are 6 ways I can help you get the clarity and results that matter to you:
1. Listen to the ‘Get Clarity’ Podcast www.jamiesmart.com/claritynow/
2. Hire me to speak at your event: www.jamiesmart.com/book-jamie-to-speak-about/
If you’re a coach or interested in becoming one…
3. Join The Thriving Coaches Facebook group
4. Listen to The Thriving Coaches Podcast
5. Take part in the Thriving Coaches Blueprint. our 90 day, rapid-implementation programme to help you get more clients and grow your coaching or therapy practice (doors now open!)
6. Learn more about the Certified Clarity Coach Training Programme, our 10-month deep-immersion into the principles behind clarity (doors now open! The programme starts September 2018 and won’t run again until 2020 at the earliest.)
If you’re looking to change job, career or move from FTE to something more fulfilling…
7. Join the Transition Launchpad Facebook group
8. Learn more about Escape Velocity: The Transition Blueprint our 90 day programme to help you transition into doing fulfilling work.