Hello and welcome to the Business Executive Coaching Podcast. I'm your host, Ellie Scarf, and I'm here to do two things. I'm here to share practical advice and stories from coaches out there doing it. To show you that not only can coaches build businesses serving corporate clients that are flexible, profitable and purposeful, but I'm also here to show you that you can do it too.
I think that as coaches working with organisational clients, we will create a positive ripple effect far beyond our work. And my job is to take all the business advice out there, combined with my 20 years as an executive coach and share what really works and what really matters so that you can change the world one client at a time.
OK, so we are officially into Q4. And a few weeks back, inside the corporate to coach accelerator, we did our Q4 planning. Now, I really love planning by quarter, so even for myself, but also with my community.
And it's a time frame that I find works really well for my brain. It is long enough so that you can really achieve something meaningful, but it's also short enough that it doesn't feel overwhelming.
You can see it, you can feel it, you can almost taste what you can achieve in that period of time. It feels very, very real, which is why I love it. Of course, the challenges with the quarterly time frame that I consistently see are that people overload themselves with priorities, which means that paradoxically, nothing gets done.
Now, you know this, your coaches, you see this all the time, but you probably know it for yourself. Everyone, including me, has been there and has experienced this. So I love nothing more than that heady feeling of setting outrageously challenging.
One might say unrealistic target, but time and time again, the reality of my capacity and just the demands of my life shows me that consistent incremental progress trumps the shopping list strategy.
And you might have noticed the same. Of course, this realisation doesn't mean that I don't recommend setting stretched targets. I truly think that a lot of our pursuit of business goals is not about the actual outcomes, but about who we become in pursuit of those targets, particularly when we incorporate identity goals into it.
And so I often recommend setting those stretched targets because it is not just the outcome. It is also the pursuit of the goal that is the growth that we want to see. However, when I see coaches who are really focused, and this is very much what I encourage in my quarterly planning sessions, and who set just a few really meaningful priorities, and they can be the stretch ones, that is when we see quarter and quarter progress that builds into some serious momentum.
What I want to share today is, I guess in addition to quarterly planning that I've made this year, which is that I'm asking my clients to include in their quarterly planning a specific and systematic focus on removing blockers.
Now, blockers in this sense are the things that, if you cleared them out of the way or resolved them, would open the path for you to go forward and grow your business with less impediment, right?
With more emotional energy, more bandwidth, some cases potentially more practical skills that you need. Now, when I'm talking to my clients about this in our quarterly strategy sessions, I ask them to really think about what it is that is getting in the way of either their business growth itself or the growth of themselves in business.
Like you can see that slight distinction. And the sorts of things that might be the blockers that come up could include, could be mindset blockers, things like a fear of visibility, a resistance around selling, a perfectionism that causes procrastination about posting on LinkedIn, for example, or avoiding an important task like outreach, right?
Mindset blockers, but getting quite specific on exactly what it is and what it's blocking. Your blockers could also be something that is more like a specific step in your sales funnel, that your stats are telling you are blocking progress.
So for example, it may be that you aren't getting the number of responses to your outreach messages that we would expect or within the band that we would expect or the conversion of your back and forth conversations with people is not resulting into sales calls at the numbers that we would be wanting or maybe the amount of sales conversations that are resulting in a real opportunity are not the number that you would be hoping for that we would see in our benchmarks.
Right. So quite specific steps in your sales funnel. It could also be a blocker could be avoidance, right? It could be that there are things you are simply avoiding doing. Now, this is very closely linked to mindset, of course.
So you might find it, it comes up there, but there's sorts of things that I see people avoiding consistently. Outreach are posting on LinkedIn consistently, tracking financial metrics, you know, really committing to some of those more business owner functions of a coaching practice.
Some other things that might be getting in your way could be more personal life stressors, right? So, and of course, many of the things that exist in our life, we can't really manage them.
There are situations that we, sorry, we can manage them. We can eliminate them. But what we can do and what we might really need to do to open up energy and band within our businesses is figure out a sustainable system so that we can keep going with our business goals, regardless of these things that are happening.
So for example, and this one really is kind of personal to me, you may have taken on additional caring responsibilities for, say, a parent or another person in your world.
And, you know, resolving that blocker doesn't mean that responsibility goes away, but it does mean that you can figure out a way to make it work in your schedule, a way to make it work energetically, a way to make sure that you have all the help you need.
Or it may be that you find that having to meal plan every week takes a disproportionate amount of your energy. And so maybe the solve is that for once and for all, you make a monthly plan and then you decide you're just going to repeat that month on month.
Maybe you tweak it each month. Maybe you don't. Or maybe it's a Claude skill that you build that reviews all your preferences and the preferences of everyone in your family, compares that to what's in the fridge and cupboard.
Your saved favorite recipes and it builds a plan and a shopping list for you every week. Or maybe it is that you choose to make that a task that someone else takes on, right? And you do some balancing and take on a task that feels less emotionally heavy for you.
So personal life stresses are also things that when we clear them in some way can open up a huge amount of bandwidth. And then I guess more prosally, you may have a system or a process issue, right?
That you need to work through and that doing so will open something up for you. So for example, it may be that you have never worked out your financial system. And so that means that you're not getting your invoices out in a timely fashion because you're doing the manually.
If tax time comes around, you're going to be really stressing. And so that is a blocker that is not just affecting those tasks. It's actually feeling like a bit of a cloud over a lot of what you're doing.
Or maybe you don't have a proposal template or you don't have a really good system for your contracting and onboarding with new clients and co-tease.
Or your blocker may be something completely unique to you. So I'd encourage you to really think this quarter, whether or not you've already done your Q4 planning this week, please apply this lens and identify a blocker that you could remove that is going to amplify your results in Q4 by giving you back time, emotional energy or something else of that nature.
And then I want you to think, what if you were to do this quarter on quarter? Imagine what that would feel like to be in business if you just systematically removed these energy drains. Incredible.
OK, please come and find me on LinkedIn and please share what is the blocker that you are going to work on this quarter? If you thrive with accountability, please come over and let me know. Also, I'm just curious about what it is for you and what's going on.
Now, as always, my calendar has a few slots open every week to speak with executive and leadership coaches who are exploring what support they need as they grow their executive coaching businesses.
I'd love to discuss your business, what we do inside the corporate coach accelerator and answer any questions that you have about business or how I work with coaches. I'll see you next week.
