Thanks for giving me the opportunity to share with you today the love of my life, which
is professional coaching.
So I became a professional coach a little more than 10 years ago, almost 11 years ago
now, and I was living in Belgium at the time, heard of professional coaching for the first
time ever and they're saying 'Mais cela vient du Canada, eh?'
'Really?'
I didn't know.
Well not really.
It came from North America and the francophones learned it through Québec and in Belgium,
Canada is Québec, Québec is Canada, they don't know that there's this whole big country
outside of it.
So at any rate, when I learned of the coaching then I went online that very night, so it
was a Saturday.
That night I went online, searched it, I got home about 11 o'clock, so I was only there
a couple of hours.
All day Sunday I was on there, sent off two or three contacts from the academies that
were around the world for it and on Wednesday, I got a phone call while I was driving around
Waterloo from one student's place to another, and I gave my credit card number over telephone
to a stranger.
Never done that before in my life, I'm telling you it was just that much of a fit for me.
So not to go into too, too, too much of all of this stuff, but the fact is that fewer
than 10%.
Fewer than 10% of professional coaches whether they will be life coaches or business coaches
as I am.
I'm a business performance coach, and I suspect that most of you here are employees, however
what I do to help these businesses get much better results is I work with the people.
Especially the owner, because you've heard about what rolls downhill.
Well it all starts with the owner.
So I'm working with the owners, and what are we working on?
We're working on habits.
We're working on beliefs, what is it that we believe, okay?
So fewer than 10% of all the coaches, certified with a diploma like I have or certificates
that you get in North America or whatever, fewer than 10% are making more than 10 thousand
dollars a year.
So isn't that sad, they have this beautiful skill and a great message, I'm assuming, and
they're not sharing it with people.
Why?
Because they're not following through on their original idea to become a professional coach
to help people.
Now in my mind, everyone is born to serve.
And I’ll tell you when I say that to my male clients, they go, I don't think so.
Well, you're an electrical contractor, you're a mechanical contractor, you're a builder,
whatever, you are serving your customers.
They don't like that word.
They also don't like the word love, so I say can you handle 'like'?
So if you don't love serving your customers, like serving your customers.
And I'll tell you, it's just amazing the breakthroughs that these men have.
Now why do I keep referring to men?
Well, most of them are married.
Like 99.9% of them are married, not that marriages are terribly fun by the time we start working
together, but I specialize in the construction industry, that's all.
At the end of the day they're people too, but when you become a business owner, you
must niche.
Not it's a good idea to niche, you must niche.
And I chose construction because I was a general contractor building my own house.
And I went, whoa!
I'll never do that again!
But the silver lining behind that cloud is that I came to feel the pain of people in
the construction industry, because they like me got a diploma, a ticket, whatever you call
it for these guys to be an electrician, a plumber, that sort of thing.
And then they go hey!
But I've got an idea.
I'm going to go out and do this on my own.
But they never went to business school, nor did I.
But what I did do is I took the time to study and study and study, which these guys don't
have time to do, because they are out there working.