The other day, I was reading through a Kindle book, an e-book, on how to become a coach. There are hundreds of books telling you exactly how to do it with step-by-step instructions some as low as 99 cents in fact. It’s quite simple, or least all of these manuscripts, e-books, or even sometimes free online PDFs would have you believe. There are always chapters on how to sell your coaching services, whether for business coaching or if you are running an online personal coaching business. I find that rather unfortunate because as a retired entrepreneur I do a little bit of business consulting myself, I call it consulting because I’ve never really liked the new age term; coaching.

You see, before I started out in my main business career, I was a high-performance athlete so when someone says the word coach I think of coach in athletic terms, not in the terms of a personal coach, or a business coach, because it insinuates that the individual getting the coaching is somehow similar to a high-performance athlete. I don’t find most people out there to be anything similar to our top-notch athletes, especially after watching the Olympic Games 2012 London. Furthermore, most entrepreneurs don’t make the grade, and pumping them full of optimism, and selling them back their own dream isn’t really coaching, that’s more like self-help guru-ism.

In any case, this is why the whole concept of selling when it comes to coaching services bothers me somewhat. If you are a good business consultant, or you are good at motivating individuals in a self-help setting to do their best, achieve their goals, and win in life regardless of the area or category of human endeavor, then you don’t need to sell very much because your current clientele will refer you to endless new customers. If you have to sell your coaching services, maybe you need a coach yourself. Maybe we need to get help to those who wish to become a better coach before they go out and solicit and sell trying to pick up new clientele.

Indeed, all I’m saying is that if you have to use tricky sales tactics to get people to pay you for your coaching services, then maybe you are doing something wrong, maybe you are listening to the wrong people, reading the wrong books, and not understanding the coaching process. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this before you use any of these high-pressure tactics, or emotional manipulation strategies that are recommended in much of the coaching material we read these days. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.