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How To Charge Money As A Coach

Byjack

I’ve been struggling with an idea recently, the question of how and when to charge for coaching services and when to propose coaching to someone.

The way most coaches approach this is by simply thinking about every hour they spend with someone as a billable hour. They do a “free” intro or demo sessions. I find this approach problematic for numerous reasons:

  1. I love solving problems and delivering value. The reason why I think coaching is the right career is that I would do this stuff even if it was for free.
  2. I hate thinking of every hour of my time as billable. Does every conversation that I don’t get paid for mean that I’m bleeding money everywhere?
  3. I don’t know how to propose coaching, what will the difference be from talking to them? Won’t they feel like I’m charging money for something that should be free?
  4. I don’t see why I shouldn’t prioritize my friends and help people for free? Why should I prioritize only people who pay me money?

 

I thought about it a lot and I realized that when I want to pay for a coach is because I want to be able to take it seriously. I don’t want a friend, I want someone who can help take me to the next level (emotionally, career and success-wise). 

I realized that I can help as many people as I want to for free. I can prioritize friends and spend time with them without thinking of billable hours. But coaching is different. It isn’t just about brainstorming solutions to problems or being an empathetic ear. It’s about taking professional responsibility for someone’s success. The difference between a friend who hired you as a coach from an ordinary friend is that by hiring you they are asking you to meddle with their life!

There are three questions I can ask to see if they would be a good client:

  1. Should they invest in themselves?
  2. Are they doing something that requires coaching?
  3. Do I feel confident that I will be the best coach for the job?

 

If the answer to all three is yes, I will push to sell them on coaching. If they are friends, I can tell them I will help them and give them advice for the rest of their life for free, but it wouldn’t be coaching until they invested in it.

The price of coaching is a mix of what would be an investment for the client, what would make ME invest, and what value I would be delivering.

In terms of differences in details:

  1. Much more structure (cadence for meetings, methods, note-taking etc.)
  2. Different mindset (clients’ goals are my goals, not my friend’s goals)

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Workpost 5: Panic Attack

Byjack

I was just on the border of a panic attack when I went to go exercise.

My Head Hurts

Eyes are swimming in a pain in the back of my head

Heart beating like its a race

And no matter how fast it beats

It isn’t fast enough

To catch up

With the work I want to do

After hanging for a little bit, I decided something. I need to go back to basics. As the level of work, my ambition, my organization go up…so have my stress levels. It is beginning hard to relax, hard to feel in the moment. It feels like I’m in an endless race with no chance to catch my breath.

So here are the basics:

  1. The planning I’m doing in these blog posts give me a huge edge in terms of direction and thought process in a huge number of goals at the same time. However, I now need to do the opposite. The basic I have in mind is this – focus on one thing at a time. Make a todo list. Create prioritization. Make it emotionally make sense (choose what emotionally feels important to focus on first, not logically). Clear all distractions and focus on one thing.
  2. Use the taoist approach to achieve fulfillment. Work until you feel empty.
  3. Use the coaching mindset…let the world come to you, have patience.

I also realized I did not work on the product research goal.

So here it is:

Goal: Create free products in 1 month | UNIT ONE: Complete research | Part 1 Transcribe and think, what is the million dollar problem or breakthrough?

  • One interview per day
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Profit In Peace 17: Preparation

Byjack

This morning I feel damn tired. And I feel stressed.

I know I have to pack my bags for home, check into my flight, and cook all the raw food in the fridge.

I also want to play more Valorant since I never have time for more than 2 or 3 games without interrupting my bedtime. I finally placed an alt account in Silver 1 and I’m loving it, not having to think very hard, just play for the fun of it.

I would also love to work on my French challenge and spend some time with the mimic technique. I was thinking last night about using connection theory to understand what it would take to think in French, instead of just being really good at translating in my head from English to French and the answer that came to me is that I just need to mimic a lot of French speakers, and not just mimic what they say, but how they say it.

Also, for today, right after my morning run, I would like to continue and finish my next section of my VOD review and perhaps plan out some posts for my art coach Instagram.

Just came back from my run and I have to say, I want to be out there more. A walk out in the world is a wonderful way to think through stuff.

A Sacred Thing

The biggest disservice that they did me

Was getting me onto the ideal of controlling

How others feel about me

Because controlling how others feel

Puts ME into a cage as well

The mask of their surface wants

Is forced upon my face

And I would trade my freedom

For their approval any day

I think, as I walk past people

That how someone feels about you

Is a sacred thing

There is no need to change how they feel about us

Just as much as we can seek to understand not control our own feelings

To look upon the world

Without fear

Means to own the world again

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Workpost 12: Deep Journaling

Byjack

I was doing some deep journaling in the form of questions and answers, where I would ask all the questions I have, feel deep in my heart what answer is coming to me, and then asking more questions about those answers.

For example, I will ask myself, what do I do about the anxiety with art? The answer that I feel come up intuitively is to create art which then poses the question, what do I do with art? Then I have the answer, use art to create richness in your life.

I was doing this exercise because I realized at this point in my life, I am so confused on what will happen next and what direction I want to go for my coaching, my career, and my relationship that the best way to serve myself is to get some clarity about what I am feeling and what I want. The faster you make decisions, the faster you progress. I felt that having clarity would make it much easier to make faster decisions.

I had quite a few revelations from this exercise I wanted to note down a few of the most important ones:

  1. I will achieve what I want in the field of AI not by working with others and creating a startup but rather by involving others into my creative process. Remember the energy of anything is possible. Solve difficult problems in practical ways and help people dream again. Change the world for the better.
  2. The long distance relationship does not meet the physical needs of closeness. I will need to dance more to keep in touch with the physical. I want to use emails and video chats to keep connected with my girlfriend on a spiritual level.
  3. I’ve lost a bit of my focus with coaching where it has become too much about the client. Coaching is not just about helping people create amazing beautiful art, but also to create a space of my design. Aka a space where connection theory and flow theory rule.
  4. Use your fear of not having enough money to fuel art that creates more wealth than money can buy (not about the value of the art, but the experience about having stories, music, and paintings so beautiful I may as well be rich).

One more note I wanted to make…I had a new idea with coaching a few days ago. I always wanted to create video clips of my coaching in order to show social media, but I was thinking recently, I can create clips that can be used to share something a package that can be used to motivate my clients (clips of songs created during the session, major breakthroughs etc.)

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Workpost 16: Risk and Challenge

Byjack

So I’m pretty frustrated because this is the second time I am writing this blog post. The first time I wrote this blog post, the post was bugging out and didn’t save properly.

Not too happy about that.

In the spirit of growth, I am going to let go of that blog post and focus on creating an entirely new one without losing the essence of what I wanted to say in the first one I wrote.

This morning I was feeling really stressed out and I was really enjoying my walk. I feel like this whole questions meditations thing has really worked out. I really like journaling at night, and walking during the day. Before when I was forcing myself to go outside because I felt like I had to, I kinda hated it. It was nice once I got outside, but before then it was pretty awful.

Now, since I know I’m going use the time to meditate on some of the questions I have in my heart, I feel really excited and motivated to go outside in the morning.

Here are the main things I was stressed out about this morning:

  1. My career, didn’t know where I was going next
  2. My medical bills, spent 8k on a new medical device, hundreds more for my GI doctor
  3. My financial issues, I spent 700 more than I made yesterday
  4. My coaching career, still not anywhere close to making enough money to be self sufficient
  5. I could move back home, but then I’m worried about having a place for my girlfriend to visit me

And through my amazing short 20 minute walk, here are the answers I got:

  1. Acknowledge that you are taking a huge risk by paying 1,700 per month on rent with very little income and building coaching business from 0
  2. Risk is not a bad thing, it is an incredible catalyst for growth
  3. Risk means, now is the time to shine. Focus on the few things that matter most
    • Building an really strong foundation of health, a very strong structure for getting stuff done
    • Changing the lives of my current coaching clients
    • Work slowly towards my career in AI
  4. It’s ok to invest money in the medical bills because they directly help with my foundational health goal. Double down on the investment by focusing a lot on sleep and digestion.
  5. Let go of all other goals and distractions because now is go time. Just work on small projects or really gradual work.

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Profit in Peace 4: Next Steps

Byjack

I was thinking in the coaching mindset today and here were the next steps that came to me:

  • Divide coaching call into 20 minute segments
  • Make Instagram page more developed, make it my main page
  • Invite all artists to the page
  • Make offer
  • 100% off coaching
  • Looking for feedback and honest testimonials

The Project Management Crash Challenge

Byjack

It is time for a crash course in project management!

Objectives:

  1. Understand and be able to apply major project management methodologies (PMP school, waterfall, agile project management)
  2. Review other methodologies that I already know (design thinking, OKRs, SRE, DevOps, UI/UX)
  3. Formulate resources and learning into distinct repositories of knowledge and simple shortcuts and worksheets that I can use as shorthand reminders and ways to kick off processes

Total time: 4 hours

PART ONE: Master project management (2 hrs)

  • Section one: Learn, research, and gather (1 hr)
    • Subsection one: Warm up via listening to videos and gathering resource lists (20 minutes)
    • Subsection two: Create own practice scenarios and find questions in them (20 minutes)
    • Subsection three: Consume and build resource repos off of resource lists and answer my own questions (20 minutes)
  • Section two: Create practice scenarios (30 min)
  • Section three: Question and answer (30 min)

PART TWO: Review other methodologies (1 hr)

  • Section one: write down everything from memory basic searching (20 minutes)
  • Section two: watch videos (20 minutes)
  • Section three: search for resources and worksheets (20 minutes)

PART THREE: Create and organize resources (1 hr)

  • Section one: create a structure for folders and docs (20 minutes)
  • Section two: create resources for project management (20 minutes)
  • Section three: create resources for other methodologies (20 minutes)

Here is a video that I started out with:

Project Life Cycle
Project Management Process

Links to the worksheets