Blog Post: Making the First 100 Hours Count

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In August of 2019, I decided I wanted to be a life coach when I grew up. Since I was pushing 53, I thought it best to expedite the process. My wife and I had recently sold Rock-N-Water, a Christian adventure camp we co-founded 29 years earlier. We loved our jobs there and both agreed that the easy access to helping people on our staff to develop was going to be what we missed most. When I realized how well a coaching career could satisfy my appetite for helping others progress, I was all in; ICF certification and all.

To my eager eyes, achieving the International Coaching Federation’s Associate Coaching Certificate (ACC) seemed like a walk in the park. You take 60 hours of classes, coach for 100 hours, take a test, and make a recording to show off how awesome you are. “That should only take me a few weeks,” I thought. Fortunately, I heard the warnings of those who had taken this walk before me. They say there is a surprisingly large and difficult hill you must climb in that park. Some see it as the “100 hour mountain”; getting in the required coaching hours for the ACC, at least 75 of which need to be with clients who pay or trade for it.

The thing about getting a coaching hour, I discovered, is that it requires two people. You have to convince someone else that coaching is actually a service of value; that it’s worth paying a novice to take up an hour fumbling out probing questions, while expecting the person being coached to do most of the thinking and talking. It can be daunting for even the overconfident extrovert to think about soliciting 100 hours of coaching as a beginner, so it’s not surprising to learn that many procrastinate on this part of the ACC venture, and that some never press through to the finish. It’s not a mountain for the uncommitted, but it is more easily conquered than most might think when approached thoughtfully and courageously.

In less than 4 months, before December of 2019, I had more than 100 hours of coaching experience toward my ACC. As I write this in March, 2020 I have over 225 hours, almost all of which are paid coaching hours. In this post I list the strategies and resources I utilized. If you are considering ICF certification, perhaps there is a tip or two below that will help you get those 100 hours surprisingly soon.

Start Coaching Now
It is impossible to wait until you are a decent coach before you start coaching, because it takes coaching practice to become a decent coach. You don’t need a certification or permission from your mother, (though I’m betting she would give it to you), in order to ask questions that help others move forward. You have to start before you are ready, so you may as well start now.

In order to start practicing, you do need to have an idea of what to practice. It’s fairly simple to discover what you need to work on. Here are a few excellent, quick and inexpensive resources so you can start learning about coaching and practicing that knowledge into skill.

  • Chad Hall has written several very short and inexpensive (99 cent) ebooks on coaching designed to help you take your first steps in learning. If it is not too late in the day, you can read one or two of them in the next couple of hours and try out what you learn on a friend, or your pet, tonight. (Not recommended for cats as they are seldom open to coaching questions.) I would recommend starting with The Coaching Mindset.
  • Coach Approach Ministries’ (CAM) podcasts are free and excellent. They are like a school in and of themselves.
  • CAM 101 is a short, pre-recorded introduction to coaching that counts toward your ICF certification. It’s also the first step toward CAM’s Certified Christian Leadership Coach (CCLC) program.

A couple of precautions as you start coaching: Confidence is good; pretending to be more competent than you are is not. When conveying where you are at in your development as a coach, always portray the truth. Second, you can get away with sneaking in a coaching question or two into most any conversation, but it’s best to ask permission before coaching anyone more than that. (Even the dog doesn’t appreciate being coached without consent.)

Acquiring coaching skills is foundational to gaining the confidence it will take to convince people they want you to coach them — and to climbing that 100 hour mountain. Learn a little and practice that little a lot.

Coaching Hours Count After Your First Class
The sooner you sign up for an ICF certified course, and attend your first day of class, the sooner you can start counting your coaching hours. Any coaching hours before then don’t count toward your ICF certifications, so sign up ASAP!

Ask Those Who Know, Like, and Trust You
Start your more formal coach practicing by persuading your friends to want to be coached by you. Although coaching is not advice giving, who has asked for your advice? Who calls you because you’re a great listener?…They may also be interested in your coaching. You need people to coach, but no one will benefit unless the person being coached (PBC) is motivated to progress through coaching.

What worked well for me was asking my friends to trust me with a coaching relationship – a set of 12 sessions with at least the first few occurring on a weekly cadence. This helped me in several ways:

  • 12 coaching hours for each person I managed to talk into coaching. I had over 10 people who agreed to this package. That ends up being 120 hours in about 4 months.
  • I not only learned about coaching through each session, I also got a taste for the dynamics of long term coaching relationships.
  • Each PBC paid $5/session up front for the set, so the accounting was easy.
  • The amount of progress made after this much coaching, for some, was a powerful motivation for them to continue getting coached at a reasonable rate and to tell others about it.
  • I spent some great quality time with people I love, every week, and watched them accomplish some important things. It was the perfect way to fire up my coaching practice.

Care
Don’t get so distracted by the challenge of acquiring hours and skills that you forget to care about each client and each opportunity to help them. Without love, your coaching and your proposals to coach are just noise. Most people are excellent at telling when someone cares about them, and this is key to trusting you with coaching opportunities. This is the most important point in this article, as it is the most important part of coaching and the whole point of getting those hours, so don’t forget to do it every time.

Keep Track!
Be careful not to lose credit for any time you coach. Keep track of your hours, and partial hours, of coaching along with the client’s name and phone number or email. (The ICF Coaching Log asks for them.) On occasion, I will get a call from a friend asking for advice. Sometimes it turns out to be better to coach them through their challenge. When I get off the phone I smile all the way to my log.
(Side tip: I dedicated a calendar, within my Google Calendar, that has only my coaching appointments. Later, I can search a client’s name in that calendar and see all of our sessions in order to update my log.)

Get Coached
Experiencing for yourself the power and growth that comes from being coached will produce passion and resolve for coaching others, and will help you better explain coaching to potential clients (and to your mom).

Elevator Speech
It may serve you well to write out a few brief explanations of what coaching is and is not, and ways of offering to coach others. As you may have heard, people don’t buy coaching, they buy the results. So make sure that’s part of your spiel.

Charge Everyone but Your Mother and the Dog
When you charge someone, even just $5 a session, it creates a sense of buy in for the client. That gives you a better chance of having productive sessions, which in turn increases the probability that they will ask for more coaching or recommend you to a friend. Yes, it also establishes a low value for your coaching, but any amount is more than free and a low value can be increased. My first $5 client opted to pay me $200/session after completing her first set of coaching. We will do her 28th session tomorrow.

When you decide you want to charge a more appropriate amount for your coaching, you might consider the advice I took from a mentor coach; instead of guessing what a potential client will be willing to pay or having a set amount that does not fit everyone within the wide variety of people you are trying to coach, you can allow them to choose what to pay within a designated range. A good range seems to be deciding on the lowest amount you are willing to coach for as the bottom of the range, and then increasing it to three times that amount for the top amount for the range (e.g., $35 to $105 per session). For my coaching, the service is the same no matter the amount.

Coach as Much Like a Pro as You Know
No matter what they pay, coach every PBC like a professional whose client is wanting valuable outcomes. When you get to “good paying” clients, it should feel similar to when you were coaching your buddies for $5.

As you are practicing good coaching techniques, start practicing the other good habits of professional coaches so that your entire coaching practice is working well by the time you get to clients who expect such things:

  • Develop email templates for introducing new clients to coaching, invoicing, and asking for clients to help promote your business.
  • Start using a contract and have your buddies sign it as you will have other clients do.

The degree to which you are effective and professional with your first clients may determine how easily you get your next ones, and how easily you get over that 100 hour mountain.

I’m still pushing hard on developing as a coach because I might end up being a grown-up any day now. If I can maintain an average of 8 hours of coaching a week, I’ll have 500 hours before Thanksgiving, and will hopefully have all the training and skills I need for my Professional Coaching Certificate (PCC) by early 2021. At this point, it’s not so much about building up hours; it’s about having a flow of paid hours that is consistent enough to sustain a legitimate career. If I can do that, maybe I’ll write another blog and tell you about it.

Craig Lomax is a life coach. He and his wife, Marianne, live in Northern California and are parents to two adult, really cool kids. He also has a mother and a dog. You can reach him via his website www.craiglomax.com.

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