Category: Management Tips

How much do coaches make?

8/1/2016

Coaching might be an incredibly fulfilling job, but not necessarily the most rewarding one. A staggering 84% of coaches make less than £2000/$3000 per month, and 40% of them earn less than £500/$750, according to Anastasia’s survey conducted in early January 2016*. Only 8.6% coaches take home more than £3000/$4500 per month from coaching.

Interestingly, £2000/$3000 in monthly earnings seems to be the most difficult barrier to overcome for coaches after the initial barrier of £500/$750.

Notably, most of the respondents (87%) came from the developed English-speaking markets, so these rather disappointing earnings figures do not reflect the level of economic development, but rather the competitiveness of the coaching market, as well as the fact that aspiring coaches might be spending their precious time on things that are less important, than they think.

Having only a few clients is one of the reasons coaches earn so little – 44% of coaches serve 5 or fewer clients, and nearly 4/5 – less than 10. At the same time, coaches who serve more than 10 clients start earning considerably more. It feels like some of us find ways to serve most clients.

Another reason for low earnings might be that coaches spend too much time trying to formulate a niche or getting locked in one (21% claim they haven’t defined a niche, but are trying to do so, and 15% that they only have one niche), whereas the highest earners claim they either have no niche at all and can’t bother to define one, or that they cover several niches. Both of these approaches seem to work.

(The lack of) experience seems to be relevant only for the first two years of your coaching practice. Two years seems to be the time when we are figuring out what and how to do. The two top earners have 8-10 years of experience, but two mid-range ones only have 2-4 years, and one claims to have 5-7 years of experience. So if you have been in the profession for more than 2 years, in theory there’s nothing limiting you – apart from yourself.

The moral is, if you’ve been in coaching for less than 2 years, don’t waste your time on defining your coaching niche or coming up with complicated marketing strategies – try to get as many clients as you can, and things will work out. Also, don’t leave your full-time job just yet (or make sure you’ve got someone to support you through the first 2 years).

If you’ve been playing with coaching for 2 or more years, and are still earning less than £2000/$3000 per month (and come from a major English-speaking country), maybe it’s time to face the truth that things aren’t going to change unless you make an effort, and you might as well continue to earn the same for the next ten years. Get over this psychological barrier of £2000/$3000 per month – somehow only a few people are capable of doing that, and once they’re on the other side, there isn’t much competition there. So do everything to cross this line – and maybe you’ll make it to my next year’s report as a top-5 earner.

*About the survey
This anonymous survey was conducted by Anastasia from between the 4th-8th January 2016. It was published in 5 online professional coaching groups and communities (two on Linkedin, two on Facebook and a forum of CTI graduates) and collected a total of 58 answers. Participants from USA, the UK and Canada gave 87% of responses. Other respondents came from Australia, Germany, India, Israel, Peru, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates. Because this study was conducted online only and participants were self-selected, one should not assume that this survey is fully representative of the situation with the coaching industry as a whole. However, we believe that the trends outlined in this research are representative enough to generate a discussion of skills coaches need to get to grow their businesses.
USD/GBP exchange rates are not entirely representative, as USD rate has been rounded to the nearest hundred.
For press enquiries, please use the contact form. Any republishing only with the link to www.anastasia.tips website, please.

Do you want to make a breakthrough in your coaching practice?

Anastasia worked for 10+ years in senior positions in digital marketing before founding her two coaching businesses. One works with highly sensitive people and the other is a digital detox business.

I work with highly sensitive people, many of whom choose to be in helping professions. In spring 2016, I will be running Career Booster workshop for highly sensitive people, teaching them to use their sensitivity and intuition to build their successful business or career.

Whereas many of you have invested a lot of time in learning skills how to be a great coach, and thanks to your sensitivity you are very capable of delivering great results for the client, you might be lacking business skills, or feeling overwhelmed at the idea of having to expose yourself online, market to the unknown people etc.

However, digital marketing doesn't have to be inauthentic or overwhelming. If you want to have a breakthrough in your business based on who you are, you are looking for authentic ways to express yourself online and get new clients, the spring edition of Career Booster is for you. Read more, or ask me any questions!

2 Comments

Innovation, intuition and sensitivity: how to create innovation culture in your company

11/12/2015

0 Comments

So, you want your business to be innovative, your people to burst with ideas, and customers to queue for your new amazing products? And what do you to make this happen? Lead a brainstorming session? Get HR to organize a team-building exercise? Ask potential hires about how innovative they have been in their previous jobs? Or (my favourite) announce an intra-company competition for the “best innovative idea” (to be submitted by Monday in powerpoint)?

I’d love to hear from you if any of these really worked. No, really - I’d love to hear at least from one company out of many businesses who widely use these techniques that they work. Because from my experience (and from the experience of my multiple coaching colleagues) – they don’t. And here’s why.

What innovation is about

These solutions might generate you a few new ideas, but they don’t create innovation culture. Because innovation isn’t just about generating new ideas. It’s about observing and connecting the dots, seeing things from totally new angles, noticing the subtleties, underlying trends, exposing the unknown (often innovation happens when neither the question nor the answer are given).

Innovation is born in the culture of freely expressed ideas, doubts, where people can fail and try again. It’s thrives in an atmosphere where people aren’t afraid to speak up, and know that what they say may make a difference. Innovation is about using unconventional tools and allowing your employees to think different (and be unconventional/abnormal/different, too). It’s not about fitting into the “normal”, usual, conventional – because there is no space for innovation in the normal and usual. Innovation is very much about people who possess all of these qualities – able to freely express the ideas, challenge the status quo, think different, be curious without limitation, maybe look and behave unconventionally and likely not fitting in. They probably need space to sit and think, and they can’t guarantee the result by a certain date and time.

Do you like this description of a potential employee? I don’t think so. You probably want somebody a bit more agreeable, understandable, and predictable. Innovation is often born out of diversity, but modern businesses often misunderstand it. They say they want diversity and innovation, but they don’t people who don’t “fit in”. However, if you start listing all those qualities and ideal “innovation carrier” possesses, you may discover that these very people who do not “fit into” your organizations are probably your biggest innovation drivers – if you manage to find the appropriate roles for them and keep them motivated. If you constantly silence, control or ignore them, you will not create innovation culture, no matter how many thousands you pay to your Chief Innovation Officer, or to a consulting company to come up with a new strategy.

The tale of two tribes

Let me give you an example. Imagine we are back a few thousand years ago, and you lead a tribe. You hunt, there’s plenty food around and your tribe is doing just fine. However, there is one chap who comes to you and says: “I think we need to change the place. Magnolia this year has given almost no flowers”. You shrug the shoulders and carry on doing what you were doing, because who cares about the tree, if you primarily are a hunter. And he looks weird anyways, always wondering with his thoughts around, not much use during hunting.

He comes around another couple of times, and you eventually tell him “Look, this is a good place and has always been a good one, it’s proven by years and this is how we do things here, so stop annoying me”, so he stops saying anything (and perhaps leaves alone with a few other people – to your relief). However, in a few months you notice that the soil has become dryer, smaller animals are becoming thinner and weaker, there are fewer bigger ones, and long and behold, you are in the middle of a record drought. You ask priests to pray and make sacrifices, but it’s too late - most of your tribe members die because of the lack of food and water.

Imagine now that this watchful guy joins another tribe and tells them the same thing, and this tribe decides to listen to him. They ask him what is the correlation between magnolia and changing the place, and he says that he isn’t sure, but when the tree doesn’t blossom, he knows it’s trying to save its water, which means there’s no water left under its roots. They have a discussion inside the tribe and a few people volunteer to look for new places with plenty of water nearby. In a couple of weeks one of them comes back with news on a suitable place with a lot of food around, and all your tribe follows him and moves there. When the drought comes, they are still affected, but most of them survive. Next time when another member of the tribe notices something else, a couple of members of the tribe volunteer to test it, because in the past it has been hugely rewarded.

In first case, you failed to see the change coming and paid a price. In the second case, you gave space for observations, verified them by running an experiment (sending people to look for a new place). Based on that, you’ve changed your strategy, helped your tribe survive, and created an innovation culture.
The same is fully applicable to modern businesses.

High sensitivity and innovation

The watchful guy in question is likely to be a highly sensitive person. According to scientists (primarily Dr Elaine Aron who first spoke about the trait 20 years ago), about 20% of human population are highly sensitive. They have a very finely tuned nervous system that is able to recognize the subtleties in the surrounding environment. They process information much deeper than most people, are deeply intuitive and empathetic, and are great at connecting the dots and making sense of seemingly unrelated facts. High sensitivity has a huge evolutionary importance as it helped the survival of the whole human species, as highly sensitive people were the first ones to notice any change in the environment and report to their tribes.

However, high sensitivity comes with a price. Although it’s not a disease, highly sensitive people tend to get overwhelmed by too much sensorial stimuli (like noise, strong smells), they can appear shy, can easily get intimidated and afraid to speak up as they react very strongly to criticism. They can get very emotional for no obvious reason or seem too slow to react or learn (in reality, in both cases it means they can’t cope with processing so much information in a short time frame). They are also often feel discouraged to speak up if they cannot logically justify their decision, as intuition often appears before the logic catches up with it – especially if they are sensitive males (the trait is evenly spread between men and women). When constantly told that they are saying non-sense or ignored, they stop trusting themselves, and may shut down, becoming of no use to people around them. They need time and space to think, they find regular office environment especially open-plan offices overwhelming and draining. And yes, they often look, feel and talk different from everyone else.

What does sensitivity have to do with innovation? You might have guessed it already – highly sensitive people are those who’ll drive your innovation forward. They get the core of innovation process – observe, compare, synthesize information, connect the dots, pull new solutions from unexpected sources and other areas. For example, Dyson bagless vacuum cleaners were created based on a simple idea of a cyclone in the lumberyard, as using bags was keeping the dust inside the cleaner and preventing it from sucking dust fully.

What it means for your organization

First of all, try to identify highly sensitive people within your company (every fifth person on earth is an HSP so there should be a few), and make sure that their job description reflects their strengths – ability to synthesize information, work between different departments, with projects and tasks still not defined, and – very importantly – in their own rhythm. There’s a test you can use to check if the person is sensitive.
While doing this, you may discover that a lot of people who aren’t fitting in/have been reported as a problem are actually highly sensitive. They are no rebels by nature, not at all – they simply can’t find a place for themselves within your organization where they can “serve the tribe”, and is this has been happening for a while, they likely got very stressed, mistrusting to themselves and shut down.

Second – make sure that they are valued for their insights and nurtured for qualities that come in the same package as sensitivity – empathy, intuition, conscientiousness, ability to process a lot of different pieces of information and notice subtleties, and give valueable insights based on them. Encourage them to trust in themselves. Don’t judge them for being too emotional or overreacting to certain things. Don’t try to control them – they need to do things in their own way, as their brain works differently. You can support them by setting up mentoring programs, explaining to them and everyone else in the company the traits of sensitivity, or getting in a coach who works with highly sensitive people to have a training with managers on how to manage such people.
Create a culture where it’s safe to speak up. This doesn’t mean that ideas should not be discussed or criticized – it only helps when they are – but there should be room to implement those ideas, and also room to have weird ideas. And of course, criticism should never get personal.

Third – don’t force your people to use only one part of the brain. Encourage both right-brain and left-brain thinking, as well as using different senses. Design thinking is probably the most used process to create innovation, but it mainly relies on visual perception – but how about other senses?
In the age of big data, we are tempted to back up all our decision with numbers – but unfortunately, data can’t always answer all our questions. Any statistician would tell you that data can’t show you the causality, but only the correlation, and that data is meaningless unless you know, which question to want to answer using it – and often during the innovation process the question is not defined. Made.com, a UK online design furniture retailer, understood this principle really well and created an innovative culture that’s driven by a combination of data analysis and experiments. They use data to pick up a few potentially leading products, and then allocate small teams to launch first products and features based on their intuition. It doesn’t cost much money and effort and allows for more flexibility in case things don’t work out. Having small flexible teams experimenting with things and using both senses and two parts of the brain would work best.

If you manage to tap into the potential of highly sensitive people who already work in your organization, and create an environment for them that makes them flourish, you will guarantee your competitive advantage and constant flow of innovation for many years ahead.

0 Comments

Want Your Team to Perform? Be Positive (but Not Too Much)!

11/3/2015

1 Comment

Positive interactions is what makes a big difference in team performance, according to positive psychologists. Having studied records of 60 team meetings, researchers Barbara Fredrickson and Marcial Losada discovered that top performing teams had more positive than negative interactions among their members.

Negativity included criticism, not listening to others, and only concentrating on what issues important to oneself, whereas positive interactions meant participants openly appreciated others' ideas, gave feedback and were oriented towards solutions, and not criticism.

Researchers thought there was a specific tipping point when a number of positive interactions produced quality changes in team dynamics, making a team look for out-of-the-box solutions, be more creative and perform better. Although the precise ratio they suggested (1 negative to 3 positive) has been criticized by the scientific community because of the mathematical model used, their discovery is in line with the research on successful marriages, which says that happy spouses experience 5 positive interactions over 1 negative. So it's likely that the "ideal ratio" lies somewhere between these numbers.

How much positivity is healthy though?Again, you will have to find yourself the magic formula that works for your team, but there’s scientific evidence that team performance starts to decrease after a certain level of positive interactions is reached. In other words, be positive, but also stay authentic. Nothing can be perfect all the time, and you need to find constructive ways to express that, too.

Ok - but how do I do it? To make your team flourish, you need to reduce negativity and increase positivity. The following four tools might help:

Like what you are reading?
Sign up for my monthly coaching tips!
(I only share them with my subscribers by email)

1. Yes, and... tool to increase positivity
This tools allows you to make sure that in team meeting or brainstorming session everyone listens to everyone else. After a participant shares his idea, the next person to speak should say “yes, and…” and link their idea to what has just been said. For example, Participant A says: We should make sure that there's somebody in the office during lunch break to take urgent calls. Participant B might say: Yes, those who go out for lunch can get them a free lunch!

Instead of "Yes, and..." you can also say “What I like about this idea is…” and express whatever you like about what was just said, and add your idea on top. For example, Participant C could say about B's idea: What I like about this idea is that it creates a sense of community and taking care of each other. We could also do the same by organizing buddying experience, so that each team member gets their own buddy from the team for a month.

2. What have we learned to reformulate negative as positive

Allow mistakes to happen and be discussed, but make sure that you don’t spend time on dwelling on how bad things are, but concentrate on what you and your team can do different next time. The following questions might help (you may want to ask them aloud or build the discussion around it):

Is there anything to appreciate about this situation?

Is there any learning for everyone in what happened?

What can we do next time to make sure it doesn’t happen?

3. Reducing negativity: don’t allow these team toxins to spread

There are four major toxic behaviours that are poisonous to any team – blame, defensiveness, withdrawal/stonewalling and contempt (that includes sarcasm and irony). These are extremely contagious and the moment they show up, you need to act fast if you don't want the disease to spread.

The first thing you need to do to fight them is to simply name them: “Bill, it sounds like you are blaming X for Y”.

Second, explain why this type of behaviour might be dangerous and how it can impact the team performance. Do not blame the person - they might not know what their impact is!

Third, suggest alternative ways to express the same idea and be really patient – many people are not used to expressing their needs and ideas in a positive way, so help them do that! Say: I hear you are unhappy with what your colleague did. What you could you ask them to do in the future to avoid such situations?

Last but not least, make sure that everyone holds themselves responsible for sticking to the rules and notices toxic behaviours not only in others, but in themselves, too.

4. Creating a consistent result: no talking behind one's back!

This is absolutely crucial - if you want your team to stay positive (and therefore productive), you should not allow any negative talks behind people's backs. Lead by example: tell your people that you would not discuss anything about a third person that you would not be able to repeat in front of them.

This is the most important thing you can do to make sure your team is consistently positive, because when people interact behind one's back, they create a subgroup within a given group, so even if you make an effort to change the dynamics of a large group, the smaller ones will sabotage it over and over again without you being able to control that. So no discussions or complaints behind the backs if they cannot be repeated in public.

Stay positive and find your balance!

Was it useful?
Get more free tips by email every monthly - simply sign up below!

1 Comment

How to find your passion (what, you still don’t have any??)

27/11/2014

1 Comment

I have two questions for you.

First, what are you passionate about?

Second, what does it make you feel when I ask you this question?

The 'passion' question is one of the most commonly asked questions during job interviews and social events, yet a great deal of people struggle to honestly answer it. They might be ok with their current job, they might be even happy about it – but passionate?.. That’s too strong of a word. Let’s face it: there are those lucky chaps who knew what they wanted to do before they learned to walk and just went for it. Most of us are not like this.

Take an example of Kate, a friend of mine (no, it's not Kate in the picture although she's cute, too). She graduated with honors from a top-tier university, and now in her early thirties works as a lawyer for a large City finance firm. She does a good job and keeps her boss and clients happy. However, Kate is getting increasingly tired of an intense work style and wants to change it. She isn’t sure how she should do it though.

Kate has already had a few conversations with people who managed to change their careers, went through a couple of career-related blogs, and even bought a self-help book promising to help her find a fulfilling career. They all suggested to ‘find her passion’. This statement doesn't mean anything to Kate though and makes her feel confused, so she decides to make a list of things she likes. She lists dancing, hiking, cooking, and meeting friends, but doesn't know what to do after the list is built. She can’t pick one hobby and isn’t sure how what she likes can translate into a new meaningful career, let alone help her earn a comparable living. She adds more things to the list, but feels stuck, and eventually starts thinking that something is wrong with her, because she doesn’t seem to find her passion as easily as others do.

The good news is that there’s nothing wrong with Kate or with hundreds of other people who face the same challenge. However, Kate makes a typical mistake as she assumes that finding a passion is a rational linear process and therefore approaches it as she would approach reviewing a legal contract. It’s actually quite the opposite:

Finding one’s passion is a non-linear and an irrational process. One cannot predict where and how it ends up and how long it will take you to get there. It’s also a matter of trying and doing, and not thinking.

Let me explain. What would you do, if I told you that you could do anything and didn't have to worry about your income, house, or family? Probably, something that seems irrational and childish to you – I would love to be a writer, I would like to take a course in photography etc. Notice that tiny moment of an energy burst, of joy, of warmth inside that you experience when you say it before ‘but this is stupid’ kicks in. This is precisely the feeling that ‘passionate’ people experience every day doing what they love to do. This is the feeling that you may want to follow if you want to unfold your passion. By following I mean actually going and doing what you think you might like to do. Notice that this ‘passion’ might not yet have any business idea behind it and you should not have a clear plan of how you can earn cash, it just makes you feel childlike and full of energy.

So don't leave your boring job (yet) if you don't have an alternative guaranteed source of income, just go out there and explore 'ridiculous' and 'stupid' things you might want to do as step one.

Finding your passion is an exploration, a trip into the unknown that might not bring immediate results. You need to simply allow yourself to experience this warm joyful feeling first and follow it. If it disappears, you need to find another thing that triggers it. There is no inconsistency here, we are merely working on making you feel alive first.

I’ve recently been to a presentation at The Escape School, (a place opened by founders of escapethecity.org, where busy City professionals are taught to ‘get unstuck’ and find to do something different for their career. One of the presenters shared a great metaphor: finding your passion is like throwing a tennis ball to a dog, he said. You just throw it and see what happens. Sometimes you might throw too many tennis balls simultaneously and the dog gets confused - it's ok, too.

It’s a difficult idea to digest if you are used to behaving only rationally and always having a clear plan of action, but give it a try. You may also discover that a lot of things that make you feel ‘passionate’ will be very different from your idea of who you are and what you should be. It’s ok, just follow the bursts of energy inside you, the joy – or as Master Yoda would say, feel the force.

So what should my friend Kate do if she wants to find her passion? She needs to stop rationalizing and making lists. She needs to ask herself (or better, ask someone else to ask her) this exact question: what would I do right now, if I could do anything? Then she needs to go and try doing it for a few weeks! Then she might discover she doesn't like it and try something else. Or that she likes it but wouldn't want to spend all her life doing it. Things she will do probably won't bring her money (just yet), but the more alive she feels, the higher her energy level is, and the easier it becomes for her to pick the right people and circumstances to help her make this transition.

Sounds simple? Most people end up only thinking about what they might have liked, but never doing it. Simply trying out stuff is the most difficult thing in finding your passion – and the only one that really works.

Did you like this story?

Sign up below to receive similar posts and free coaching tips by email once a month.
You can unsubscribe at any time!

1 Comment

Why avoiding difficult people is the worst managerial mistake you can make

13/10/2014

0 Comments

I bet you’ve met them many times – difficult co-workers and clients who seem to have mastered being a pain in you-know-where. They misinterpret every single phrase you say, undermine your work and status in front of the others, keep asking irrelevant questions, withhold necessary information when you need it most, or are simply rude with you for no obvious reason.

It can be particularly frustrating when you can’t avoid dealing with such people in your daily job. You may try to be professional and pleasant with them with (no result), or choose to complain to your boss, who probably says that you need to learn to deal with different people. You get reactive and start telling whoever wants to listen how frustrated you are, and how great it would be if they finally disappeared from the company and your life. It only provokes more rudeness and isolation. You end up either completely withdrawing yourself from the situation by looking for a new job, or becoming bitchy and unpleasant to everyone around you.

Can you relate to this experience in some way? If so, there’s one fundamental mistake you make dealing with such people: you think about them as a problem.

Difficult people are never a problem, they are just a symptom.

People in groups or organizations are part of a system. If you've ever heard of the systems theory, you know that systems function according to their own laws. A system is smarter than its single member and is really good at self-regulation.

A system largely dictates how people behave towards each other. Each person within the system has a particular role. Think about a system as a living entity, something or someone who’s not visible but actually directs who does what in the group. Every role a system creates serves some purpose. For example, a system may require an ‘inspirator’, someone who will inspire other members to reach for the stars. This is not an official position, so the ‘inspirator’ will not necessarily have an official leadership title. However, he will be the person everyone goes to for inspiration.

A system often also needs an internal ‘critic’ who will articulate any inefficiencies within that system and a member with more suitable background (maybe someone who was criticized a lot in the past) will pick up this role. This is likely to be your ‘difficult’ guy or girl from the first paragraph. The role of a systems critic is to articulate things that go wrong. The role of a rude and screaming person is to draw attention to emotional tension inside the system that needs to be released.

Because it's never about a particular person, but about the need for a particular role within the system, if you remove one person from the role assigned by the system, in a few weeks he will be replaced by another group member who suddenly starts behaving exactly the same way! He will even probably not realize that himself!

You might guess by now why I insist that the worst managerial mistake you can make is to get rid of or simply ignore a difficult person. Someone who voices a concern is simply articulating information that’s already in the system. If he disappears, the problem persists but will find a different way to express itself.

So what can you do if you come across a difficult collaborator?

First of all, change your attitude and acknowledge that this particular person is not the cause of the conflict, he merely articulates what's going on inside the system, he is a symptom of some inefficiency and the system is trying to self-adjust through him. Changing your attitude will immediately create a shift in the whole situation, because you will stop being emotionally triggered. Remember, you are also part of the system and the way you feel and behave impacts its other parts. If you want your colleagues or clients to be more positive, start behaving positively yourself.

After you unplugged yourself emotionally from the situation, ask yourself – what’s this difficult person trying to achieve for the system (probably, not in a very inefficient way)?

Third, consider other ways to achieve the same thing. When a system doesn’t need a particular role anymore, the person who was playing it disappears – they either move to a different job or change their behaviour.

I have personally witnessed dramatic changes in the behaviour of one very senior client of a large advertising company I was working with that happened within one month. All that the company did was to accept the idea I have just shared with you. After a month, this senior client who used to yell at people came to the agency and said how he really appreciated their work and that they were bearing with him.
When relationship between two groups of people improve, people who were symbols of a conflict step back and get replaced by the others, more peaceful and collaborative individuals.

As they say, you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.

Did you enjoy reading this post?

You can get more similar stories when you sign up for my free monthly coaching tips by email!

0 Comments

Need that kick to get your life going?
Sign up for free coaching tips!

Who is Anastasia?

Chief inspirator, start-up mentor, professional Co-Active life coach and career coach, systems worker and passionate tango dancer. Get to know me!

How much do coaches make?

Do you want to make a breakthrough in your coaching practice?

Innovation, intuition and sensitivity: how to create innovation culture in your company

Want Your Team to Perform? Be Positive (but Not Too Much)!

How to find your passion (what, you still don’t have any??)

Did you like this story?

Why avoiding difficult people is the worst managerial mistake you can make

Did you enjoy reading this post?

Need that kick to get your life going? Sign up for free coaching tips!

Who is Anastasia?

Categories

Need that kick to get your life going?
Sign up for free coaching tips!