What brought you to coaching?

I became very interested in self development and read a great book by Fiona Harrold called “Be Your Own Life Coach” and I wanted to apply this way of working to parenting so I went off to re train as a Parent Coach from being a Deputy Head Teacher!

What were your original thoughts for applying the coaching?

I love learning and I was ready for a new challenge so I read the brochure from The Coaching Academy and came along to a one day event – and I was hooked !

What did you find most interesting to learn?

The art of asking great questions and allowing people the space and time to ponder them. I just love asking questions to help parents find their own answers.

What was the most rewarding part of the training/journey?

Learning new skills that transform other peoples lives quickly and easily

Which bits did you enjoy the most?

I just LOVED the NLP training and I went on to train with Paul Mckenna and Dr Richard Bandler to become a Master Practitioner and Trainer.

How did the qualification slot in with your current life?

Seamlessly !

What else did you have to consider whilst qualifying?

Being structured and disciplined to keep up with the units

Where are you now? How are you using your coaching skills?

I am an internationally recognised Parenting Expert, Broadcaster, Speaker and Author of the Amazon best selling books “Parenting Made Easy – How To Raise Happy Children” published by Random House & “Raising Happy Children for Dummies” one in the famous black and yellow series as well as author of the highly acclaimed Parenting Made Easy CDs.

I have just launched the 1st in my series of Parenting Made Easy apps for iPhones and iPads. I offer practical guidance for bringing up happy, confident, well behaved children from toddler to teen.

I regularly appear on the award winning flagship ITV show “This Morning”, BBC Breakfast and The Jeremy Vine Show on BBC Radio 2 and is the parenting expert for many BBC Radio Stations around the UK. I have a regular monthly parenting phone- in on BBC Radio Surrey & Sussex and my parenting articles are published all over the world.

What is your coaching niche and why did you choose it?

I am passionate about parenting and making a difference in the lives of families from toddler to teen.

What is the best thing that could happen to your coaching business in the next 2 years?

I get my own TV series called Parenting Made Easy with Sue Atkins

What is your favourite coaching question?

If I could be your Fairy Godmother and wave a magic wand for you – what would you most like me to change ?

What do you enjoy most about being a coach?

The difference I can make simply by asking meaningful and empowering questions
What are your top tips for:

People who are looking at coaching?

Be very clear about your niche and WHY you want to coach in that area.

Those coaches currently in training?

Believe in yourself and don’t let doubts get in your own way

Coaches that are about to qualify?

Now go and celebrate! It’s important to pat yourself on the back when you achieve small and large goals as it keeps you motivated

People that are in a similar situation to yourself?

Be grateful for the journey and the difference you make to people that have never even met you but read your articles and books.

The temptation when setting up in business is to try to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Experienced coaches and marketing specialists warn however this is not the path to success but a fast route to frustration and ultimate failure.

Defining your niche and speciality is crucial to your financial success as a coach. A niche or target market, is one well defined group like small business owners, stay at home mums, parents, female executives or retirees.

You can see that by trying to attract all these different groups your marketing would be scattered and ineffective, whereas if you market consistently and persistently to only one group, offering services and resources that interest them, you’ll attract clients more easily. You have to choose a target market that you can relate to and have some knowledge about.

Contrary to popular opinion, narrowing your focus will result in more not less clients. A good niche will give you between three and 10 times more clients than general or unfocused marketing. It will also provide you with a long term, sustainable advantage in your marketing that will position you apart from all the competition and attract an endless stream of prospects.

The key to finding a great niche is identifying where your passions and strengths allow you to package coaching as a tangible solution to your target market’s biggest unmet needs.

One of the biggest mistakes is trying to find your niche too early on in your coaching career. Unless you know exactly who you will target you are encouraged to explore as many possibilities as possible.

Students come to the coaching academy with one main question in the forefront of their mind; ‘how will I find my niche’. The answer is simple… your niche will find you. Throughout all of your sessions you will attract a certain kind of persona, and would prefer coaching them to anyone else. This is your niche.

Once your niche has found you it would be time to focus on ways to target that market effectively. You must reject the ‘all things to all people’ model and adopt a narrow scope for prospecting. Do not fall in to the trap of the “trawl net” method of marketing: they drag their net over a huge area and hope they catch someone – anyone.

Sadly, casting a huge net costs a lot of money and the catch is normally bottom-feeders not trophy fish.

This is where becoming a specialist comes in. when you focus on being the best at one thing you gain credibility. For example; would you trust your GP to do brain surgery or would you prefer to be in the hands of a brain specialist?

If you truly want to become attractive, and have credibility you need to stand for something. If you’re a generic life coach then know this: people want to be able to turn to someone for a specific area of life – this could be relationships, health, or wealth etcetera.

So ditch the shopping list right now – you can’t be the best at everything and even if you are no-one will believe you.

By focusing on providing solutions to customers’ problems, you’ll be able to make a strong, targeted promise. The result? People will seek you out.

When considering a niche you need to have the following:

Burning Need – is there an intense, perceived need for the niche in the minds of your prospects? Are they truly concerned with the issue that you can help them solve with your coaching?

Underserved – is your niche underserved? One of the factors to consider is how much training / consulting / coaching is already being offered to the niche. A coaching business will grow faster in an underserved industry than in a highly developed one that has many vendors trying to meet the given need.

Precedent – are there already successful businesses operating in this niche? If so, it suggests that people will pay to have a specific need addressed. Coaches can be more assured that there is a need that will be responsive to marketing than if the niche had never been defined and addressed before.

Some of the risk is reduced if you know that there are others who are successfully targeting the niche at a local level.

Being the first – take a successful niche and narrow it further. For example, if you are coaching youths in London, you could be the first to offer coaching specifically to public school youths currently doing their GCSEs in London.

Narrow focus – It’s much better to offer business coaching to a narrow professional industry. For example instead of targeting lawyers, which is very broad, what about targeting only divorce lawyers?

Industry focus – are members of your niche from a single professional group or industry? If you focus on a subset of a specific professional group, the niche is much easier to penetrate. You can email a specific newsletter to your target group.

You can make the niche group through its local, national and even international professional organisations. You can forge alliances with suppliers who serve the same niche.

Establish your niche – once you’ve decided upon a niche, you’ll want to launch it. Follow these steps to establish your coaching niche:

1. Research your niche – interview at least three prospects to identify what their needs are, how best to communicate with the niche, learn more about the competition, how to quickly position yourself as an expert, and how best to package your coaching as a solution to your niches greatest unmet, tangible needs that they are prepared to pay to resolve.

Package in this sense means arranging your coaching in some tangible parcel: six months of one-on-one coaching with specific content, workshops, and teleseminars for example.

2. Test market your solution – create a programme to try out your coaching solution, gain testimonials and learn more about your niche.

3. Roll out your finished product – seek every opportunity to speak, write, present or share you knowledge with your target audience to increase your exposure and solidify your position as an expert solution provider to this niche.

The greater the ‘expert’ profile you have with the group, the more responsive they will be to your innovation to participate in your programme.

4. Identify your speciality – your speciality describes the benefit your coaching will offer the target market. With both your niche and speciality clearly defined and articulated, you can come over as credible and knowledgeable rather than foolish.

To begin, create a hub statement, one short statement that demonstrates who you work with and what and how you can help them. All of your marketing materials, your articles, your workshops and public speeches should all be created with your target market in mind.

How do you butter your toast?

How do you pack your case before going on holiday?

How do you relax at the weekend?

How do you deal with stressful situations?

How do you respond to people who cut you up on the motorway?

Your answer to each of these questions tells you something about your patterns of behaviour or habits.

Some of your habits might be really useful, enjoyable and give you a great outcome such as working out at the gym after a hard day at work, laying all of your holiday documentation out and checking it 100 times before you leave to go on holiday or having a quiet coffee on a Friday afternoon in your favourite coffee shop.

Some of your habits may, in fact, be less useful, maybe even destructive such as aggressive driving and shouting insults at the guy who cut you up on the motorway or going to the pub every Thursday night and drinking 10 pints.

However, habits are habits for good or bad. When they kick in, you are usually not considering whether they are right or wrong you just go into the flow. Your subconscious mind takes over and plays out a well rehearsed set of actions.

Do you sometimes recognise patterns of behaviour that are starting to have a negative effect on you or people around you?

For example, eating when you are feeling a bit down, snapping at a colleague who always (to your mind) makes stupid comments in team meetings, flopping down on the sofa in the evening rather than taking some exercise.

If you have, then perhaps you are looking for a way to break those patterns of behaviour and create new habits. Ones that will give you a more positive outcome such as help you get fitter, lose weight, build better relationships at work, spend more time with your children, get ahead at work and so on.

Developing new habits is remarkably simple to do (believe it or not!). All it requires is time, patience and determination. Are you up for it?

Maxwell Maltz was an American cosmetic surgeon who tried to help his patients deal with their self-image and limiting beliefs so that they could deal with their body image more effectively.

Through his research he found that if positive mantra’s or affirmations were said by his patients every day for 21 days, their self-perception changed and they began to feel more confident about the way they looked.

Maltz’s research has become the foundation for recognising that new habits – patterns of behaviour or thought – can be generated in 21 days through repetition.

So, there is your first step to creating a new habit……repeat whatever it is that you want to do or think every day for 21 days. Simple!

Actually, it’s not that simple! If your aim is to change an existing habit, you have to replace the current behaviour or thought pattern with the new one and that can take 100 days.

Think of your habit as a comfortable pair of shoes! You have worn them so many times that when you put them on you don’t even know you are wearing them. They fit perfectly and enable you to go about your daily business as you have always done.

You trust them because you know how they are going to look, what outfits they go with and the fact that they don’t give you blisters.

You know that they are really old looking now and people are starting to comment on how bad they look but the alternative is going out there, trailing around hundreds of shops to try and find an replacement pair. You just know the process will be long and painful and you still may not end up with such a good pair.

So…..you stick with what you know, despite the feedback other people (perhaps including yourself) are giving you.

To change your habit you need to consider what the benefits of that initially painful process of change will be. What will this new habit give you? What will it enable you to do that you can’t do now? How will it impact on other people who are important to you?

Once you have given yourself a compelling reason to make the change, you then need to do 4 things:

• become aware of the behaviour or thought that you want to change and specifically when they act out (you may want to write it down so that you can start to recognise the pattern)

• every time you feel yourself doing or thinking that thing, pause, take a breath and change your physiology or your environment

•  identify what behaviour or thought you would like to have instead

• start doing it and keep doing it for 21 days

Then you will start to see the benefit. You will have “broken in” the new habit, just like that new pair of shoes, and, if you keep focusing on your compelling reason, you will be eventually be able to replace the old with the new and very soon your new habit will be just as comfortable as the old one!

Graduate of The Coaching Academy, Nelia Koroleva, helps her clients overcome their personal challenges on a regular basis as a professional performance coach. Here she shares her experience with managing personal influence and bias for the better.

What you say

What you say says a lot about your personality and your influence.

Many people focus solely on negativity and criticism, when they communicate with each other. It is a quick way to disengage and damage your reputation. Your influence would be proportionally diminished to the intensity and level of your negativity.

For example, you’ve delivered a feedback, appraisal or performance review. Your words were judgemental, harsh and overly critical. You were looking for errors and jumped to conclusions by passing judgment. The problem is, the more you stew in the negativity, the deeper the pathway becomes.

Even though you might have a position of  authority, you do not have the right to be negative Critical Parent to your employee, colleague, associate, friend, partner, child, etc. You verbally attacked the person who challenged your way of thinking, doing and being. Change it!

Always make sure that you choose appropriate words, whether you’re a parent, a boss, a colleague, or a friend. Your words are incredibly important for your own well-being. When you focus solely on negativity and criticism, you cannot be happy.

You can’t neglect words that bring you and others motivation, encouragement, development and growth.

Focus on what you are saying, and remember, when you pass judgment, you immediately lose the ability to establish a rapport with others and influence them. It’s much more liberating to take responsibility for your own feelings and encourage people than to criticise and blame them.

Challenging Exercise: Banish Your Negativity Bias.

If you don’t like your own image, and you are unhappy /cannot accept yourself, you will often feel unsatisfied/ unable to accept and like others.

Look at yourself in the mirror and speak with yourself for about one hour. YES, ONE HOUR.

And just like any strengthening exercise, the work requires activity and repetition to reinforce the new learning. So, every time you want to criticize someone, find a room with a mirror, speak honestly to yourself about your frustrations by looking at yourself.

I promise, you will discover many new things about yourself, i.e. acknowledge your own shadows.

I believe, you will understand more than you ever did.

Do you need to break your behaviour patterns?

How you behave

How you behave is extremely important. Have you ever seen a healthy adult behaving as a child or as a teenager? It might be funny, shocking, sad, depressing, embarrassing and even tragic.

Consider your behaviour, and be smarter than 5-7 year old. Consider the effect your behaviour would have on others. You must do it, as too many seemingly simple habits can have a huge impact upon your influence and your rapport with your team, friends, colleagues and family.

For example, every morning after coffee you walked over to Elena’s desk and told her about her mistakes in front of the team. Would Elena feel pleased at your attention? Would she look forward to seeing you? Would she feel motivated and encouraged?

Would she prepare simple questions to clarify aspects of her work? Or would she develop a Pavlovian hatred for coffee and be busy elsewhere whenever you pass by? Of course, you would never be so destructive – provided you thought about it.

Research by the centre for Creative Leadership has found that the primary cause of derailment in executives involve deficits in emotional competence. The three primary ones are the following: difficult in handling change, not being able to work well in a team, and poor interpersonal relations.

Do you have such problems at work, which usually described in terms like: ‘Jack is just lazy’ or ‘Jackie is a bad-tempered old has-been’? On the one hand, such people can poison the working environment; on the other hand, these descriptions are totally unhelpful. Are you feeling tired, frustrated and ‘over it’?

Deeply frustrated person, who internalises secular values and dread change most, usually demonise those who disagree with them, attacking anyone who challenges their thinking and unaware reliance on antiquated instincts, out-dated traditions and destructive ideologies.

Many frustrated people waste so much time and energy resisting change rather than adapting that they fail to win satisfaction and success.

It is your responsibility to ensure that your influence is a positive one. Devote some time to changing this, and you will complete life tasks and enjoy rewarding personal and professional relationships with consistent satisfaction within your home, communities, companies, etc.

You are the only one responsible for your personal growth and professional development.

Exercise: Break your pattern!

This exercise will help you build rapport with someone, enrich work environments or ease tension in personal relationships.

Remember situations in the last two weeks when you behaved inappropriately, and answer the following questions:

• Does your behaviour affect your personality? How?

• How your behaviour has an effect on the behaviour of others?

• What situations generally create such behaviour tension and stress for you?

• What negative thoughts play over and over in your mind on a regular basis?

• Are these a true picture of reality?

• Are you afraid to share your needs and feelings with others?

• What is holding you back?

• How you can handle these situations /behave differently?

You (and others) deserve to have happiness and success in life and work.

You (and others) deserve to do what you (they) truly want – unless it’s not against the law or other human dignity.

You (and others) deserve to be what you (they) want and dream to be – successful, happy, full field and satisfied.

Did you know that The Coaching Academy has worked with hundreds of organisations across the globe, in sectors ranging from farming to pharmaceuticals through our corporate solutions division?

The growth in demand for corporate coaching has not just been a huge trend isolated to The Coaching Academy team.  According to CIPD, three-fifths of organisations report that they undertake talent management activities with coaching actually taking place in four-fifths (86%) of organisations.

The Coaching Academy’s Corporate Coaching division was a natural progression from our accredited coaching programmes that were first developed over 12 years ago when coaching was a relatively new phenomenon.

Having been approached by organisations ranging from SMEs to multi-national corporations, we launched the informative, innovative and robust corporate solutions offering in early 2006.

The Coaching Academy’s Corporate Solutions division specialises in providing bespoke coaching and coach training solutions. Our portfolio covers everything from one-to-one and team-centred executive coaching for senior management to full accredited coach training programmes. You can find out more by visiting our website:

www.tca-corporate.com

Being at the forefront of coaching, our trainers and corporate coaches are second to none and our people are our biggest asset.

Due to growth in demand, we occasionally need to access additional resources for delivering our corporate solutions to the vast number of leaders, managers and organisations that we work with.

If you are a qualified coach and have a wealth of experience in corporate organisations then we would like to hear from you. If you would like to be considered for placement on our preferred trainer list then please fill out the form below.