Reframing Perspectives: Truth, Reality and Commitments

The essence of coaching, I think, is in helping clients reframe perspectives that no longer serve your highest purpose or greatest need. Often that will call into question ways of thinking and feeling that you have held as true or real. For some, re-ordering these beliefs can be temporarily unsettling.

Truth and reality have many levels and colors. As children, many of us were taught that there is only one Truth, and one Reality. As we grow into adults we learn that what was presented to us as the one Truth or Reality was our parents’ or society’s explanation, but that what was unknown when they formed their truth and reality has since been replaced or augmented by new knowledge.

If we’re lucky to be well educated or if we are naturally open to the process of critically thinking for ourselves, we easily reframe the perspectives about truth and reality we’ve been taught in our early years.

But if we’re committed to sustaining a certain explanation, it’s much harder to reframe old, outmoded, dysfunctional views into new, more growthful, more healthy perspectives.

In coaching, we ask: what belief or assumption are you committed that might no longer be the version of truth you want to invest in? What reality have you been committed to that you now see has to change?

Change itself necessarily implies that there is an old version of reality and a potentially new one, an old truth and a new one. If this were not so, there could never be any change at all.

Growth by it’s very nature is change.

What is the central truth you are committed to right now? How does that commitment shape your choices, your current reality? How might you need to change that explanation of truth in order to have the choices and reality you really want?

What a Niche is, and What it isn't

I'm hearing coaching students voicing reluctance to declare a niche in the same way that my counseling colleagues are reticent to do so. In the coaching spirit of reframing and shifting perspectives, I offer these thoughts:

What A Niche Is

A niche is a magnet. It's a way of presenting yourself as a specialist in helping an identifiable set of people with a defined range of problems, and drawing those people to you to aquire your help.

A niche is a focusing tool. It helps you determine how to put the range of your skills into language that people who will want them can recognize.


What A Niche Isn't

A niche is not a description of you. You are not the niche. Your clients and their problems are the niche.

A niche is not a way to limit who you work with. It's a way to better ensure that some if not most of the people you work with will be ideal for you -- ideal as in, have issues you really like to work with and feel exceedingly expert at, and who perfectly match your preferred way of working, your personality, don't blink at your policies, and think you're worth every penny.

A niche is not about the work you do. It's about getting clients so that you can DO the work you do. Despite believing that a good coach can coach anyone who is coachable (or that everyone is coachable by a good coach), that idea is not helpful in marketing. In fact, it's counterproductive because it promotes vague, overly general, and confusing messages.

Prospective clients will not care or be impressed by the fact that you can coach everyone on everything. That actually may sound implausible and therefore suspect. It will make your marketing backfire.

We all feel special and unique, and when we need help we want the specialist who is expert at our unique problem. We don't want the jack of all trades.

Ironically, holding yourself out as a specialist in one area will make you seem more client attractive to others in other areas. They psychology is that if you are an expert at one thing, you're probably pretty darn good at a few other things. Whether that's true or not, it works for the purposes of marketing.

And that's why niche marketing works for coaches like it does for counselors.

The Gift of Time

Once a year we get an incredible gift – by the grace of whatever consensus that gives us the return from daylight savings time, we get to re-do an hour of our lives.

Sure, for most of us this occurs in the middle of the night, as clocks are set back at 2 am. And if you’re chronically fatigued like I am, you probably spend this precious hour sleeping. But think of it. What if you could use that hour to undo an argument, take back a harsh word, or remove yourself from a conflict? What if you could push against the obstacle just one more time and this time gain the breakthrough?

What if you used that hour to pause all the fear and worry, and look instead at what you’re grateful for, and at what makes your life content, if not wonderfully happy? What could taking advantage of this gift contribute to you?

Or, an even better question is, how might you use this small bit of extra time to contribute to making someone else’s life better?

Often, it’s not the big efforts that define a life, but the small, daily, unnoticed and unapplauded ones that create who we are on the moment to moment basis. It’s the unconscious, reflex reactions that are the evidence of what we truly value, and we rarely stop long enough to really examine how are beliefs and assumptions are getting put into action.

An hour is enough time to think a new thought, change perspectives, give forgiveness, voice an apology, ask for what you want, or finally own your power. It’s enough time to make a new commitment to yourself, and to specify at least three action steps for accomplishing that.

An hour is enough time to begin to change everything. How will you use your gift of time?

Economic Anxiety: A Prompt to Be More Creative

Show of hands…Anyone out there NOT feeling anxious for your business security? There’s no way to ignore the fact that business as usual is at least in limbo, if not in process of reconstituting itself.

You probably have heard that the Chinese character for crisis is made up of two elements – danger and opportunity – signifying the two mental approaches that can be taken in crisis. We can be consumed by the fear of danger, or we can look for new opportunities.

While the economy is reorganizing it’s a good time for sole proprietor business owners to think outside the old box and pigeon holes you’ve been operating with up to now. Ask yourself these opportunity oriented questions:

• Is a new client niche emerging for me from this crisis?
• What “dead weight” is this situation pointing to that I can eliminate?
• Where can I leverage my skills and efforts to maximize the available potential income right now?
• How can I work smarter, not harder?