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.

“Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power.” Lao Tzu

How many times on average does someone attempt a goal before giving up? Would you guess one, two or three? The real answer is less than one. Many people give up before they even try.

Self-discipline is the trait that makes the difference. It goes hand-in-hand with determination and resilience. If you know you can rely on yourself to be disciplined in your approach, you know that there is a possibility of success. Without it, it is easy to feel defeated before you even start or to become easily distracted from your goal.

I work daily with experts who are at the pinnacle of their chosen profession in business, sport and every area of enterprise. When I am asked what is the one thing that sets those who succeed apart from those who fall short of their true potential? Or what do successful achievers do that others don’t?, the answer is always rooted in their self-discipline.

Successful people are willing to do the things that they don’t necessarily want to do in order to get the results they want. They tend to put the needs of the goal ahead of instant gratification. It’s all about desire, not denial.

They put in extra hours and effort to achieve the outcome they want because they always have an eye on the long-term goal. Rather than stopping to question whether they want to do something, self-disciplined people are more likely to get on with it!

A self-disciplined approach delivers improved performance and successful results – and keeps people on track. They know that, without self-discipline, nothing will ever happen and nothing will ever change. They will fall behind and lose control.

You can plan, dream, create and think positively all you want and still not make your business a success if you don’t take action in a self-disciplined way. Self-discipline feeds self-esteem and puts winners in the driving seat. I believe it is the core trait that sets successful people in every field of endeavour.

Mastering the art of self-discipline is like investing successfully in time. Those who plan ahead and who complete tasks within the time allocated develop the confidence to know they can achieve their larger goals.

Mastering The art Of Self-Discipline

• Self-discipline creates self-reliance, which feeds self-confidence. If you know you can rely on yourself to deliver results, you are more likely to aim high in your ambitions.

• Self-discipline goes hand-in-hand with effective planning and time management. It ensures that you are in control – and leading the action, rather than reacting to the others demands.

If you know what you are doing, and when and why you are doing it, you will be less likely to be taken off-track.

• Self-disciplined people have a long-term plan that sets out their goals and ambitions, supported by a short-term plan in the form of a daily ‘do it!’ list. The devil is in the do its! Don’t just list them – do them!

If you create a plan and stick to it, you will achieve more, more efficiently, and create more hours in each working day.

• Being self-disciplined sends a clear message to others that you can be relied upon. You will attract like-minded people to do business with you and work with you.

• A self-disciplined approach to life enables your auto pilot on those occasions when the going gets tough.

•   Self-discipline drives action. It turns targeted thinking into focused doing, even when you’d rather be doing something else.

Self-discipline is easier to maintain when developed as a habit in every area of our lives. Build your self-discipline muscle, daily. Ask yourself what changes in my own approach will make the most difference to my success?

Watch your attitude to food, exercise, watching TV, using social media, playing computer games and so on. Be honest with yourself – what are your distractors?

Do you get up as soon as your alarm clock rings – even when you don’t want to? Or do you tend to press the snooze button and start your day with a delay?

Do you eat only when you are hungry or do you tend to treat yourself even though you ‘shouldn’t’?

Are you the kind of person who is punctual, who is always on time for appointments? Or do you leave everything to the last minute?

Do you spend first and worry about the money afterwards, or do you always save up for what you want?

By becoming aware of your current behaviour, it becomes more possible to be increasingly self-disciplined in your choices and efficient with your use of time.

From the very moment of waking up and getting out of bed each morning, through each area of your working day, become watchful and aware of the diversionary tactics you may use to avoid doing essential tasks.

By matching your desires to the actions you need to make your dream a reality, you can begin to apply the self-discipline required to make your future a certainty. It is a skill that those around you will begin to learn and benefit from too – by following your example.

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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.

Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day, so why is it that successful people are able to achieve so much, when many others are left struggling to complete a few tasks.

As children most of us would have learnt to tell the time by the age of nine but we may spend a lifetime trying to master it. Ultimately, the story of your life would depend on how you use the time you have been given.

Your success in life depends on how you manage your own and other peoples’ time. It is our most precious resource.

Time management is of course self-management. It is a combination of planning, realism and self-awareness. But to control time we first need to understand our relationship with it.

It may seem harmless to say time and time again (pardon the pun) ‘I don’t have time’, ‘I can’t make time’, ‘Time just runs away’, or ‘Time is not on my side’ but these phrases betray a belief that time is in control of you, rather the other way around. Instead, try saying ‘I can always make time’.

Think about time as if you can manufacture it at will and you will always have enough.

Feel-good stories often start with ‘Once upon a time…’ the future is always rich with possibility and your time can be filled with anything you choose. Here are seven questions to focus your time management:

1. What decision would make the biggest difference in your life right now?

Whatever you do for a living you probably wish that there were more hours in the day. Investing money or resources in outsourcing can be an excellent way to free yourself up to focus on the elements of your life that need more of your attention, skills and vision.

2. If you stay on your current path, where will you end up?

Is your life heading in the direction you want it to? What is going well? What can be improved? How can you spend your time most effectively? Take 10 minutes to plan your day first thing in the morning and make sure you are not busy being busy.

3. What are you tolerating or putting up with?

Most people are ‘putting up with’ something that they feel would be too time-consuming to sort out. It might be the leaky tap, the over grown garden or even a puncture in the tyre of the family car. Whatever it is, there will come a point where there will be a cost involved in putting off the moment of the decision.

4. How different would your life be if you followed through with some of the things you are ‘putting up with’?

Take one at a time and consider the steps you need to take so that you regain control of the situation. There’s no time like the present, so take small steps to complete the tasks ahead.

Remember you don’t have to be complete it straight away, but by breaking the task down you will be managing your time more efficiently. Many people get caught up with the view that they need to complete one project before they can move on to the next.

5. What will you regret not doing in your life in later years?

Few of us give ourselves enough time to reflect on the whole life picture. A common coaching exercise invites people to write their own obituary, highlighting past and future achievements. This is ‘starting with the end in mind’ in a very real sense and can wake people up to the time they have to achieve their true goals.

6. What has lack of confidence or self-belief stopped you achieving?

It’s only human to have self-limiting beliefs of some sort. I once had a self-limiting belief about being able to talk to large groups of people; now I am not fazed if I need to speak to 1,000 people. If your beliefs are getting in your way, you can choose to make time to take advice on tackling these beliefs.

7. What is your life’s purpose? What are you passionate about?

If you identify your life’s purpose you can plan every decision to take you closer to achieving your goal. Every choice you make – from actions and reactions to promises and excuses – provides clear clues as to where your true motivation and priorities lie.

There is little point in aiming for something, if every time you are faced with a time choice you are diverted towards doing something else.

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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!