Ep #22: Your Step-By-Step Guide to the Evolution of a Strategy

Hi, this is Lindsay Dotzlaf and you are listening to Mastering Coaching Skills, episode 22.

To really compete in the coaching industry, you have to be great at coaching. That’s why every week, I will be answering your questions, sharing my stories, and offering tips and advice so you can be the best at what you do. Let’s get to work.

Hey coach. How’s it going today. Okay, so first, two things; a little bit of housekeeping. First, on my website lindsaydotzlafcoaching.com. There’s a gift for you; a list of questions to use with your clients and how to use them.

If you were on the spot and you went there the very first time that I talked about it here on the podcast and you couldn’t find it, we had some small technical difficulties and I’m so sorry. It is there now, so go get it. Send me an email if you are still having any issues. But they should be resolved.

Second, a few weeks ago, I did a podcast about all things coaching strategy. And I have one correction to make. So, my amazing client Jess Johnson told me, she messaged me and said, “Hey, I just want to let you know, you made a mistake on your podcast.” And it is a mistake that feels important to me.

So, I mentioned EFT and I referred to it as Emotional Freedom Therapy instead of the correct name; Emotional Freedom Technique, or Techniques. So, I just wanted to share. I will not always correct every single mistake I make here on the podcast. But this one just feels really important to me because there is a huge difference between a therapy and a technique. Those are two very different things. And since this podcast is all about coaching skills and being a great coach and knowing your coaching methods, knowing what something is called in this case is important.

So, shoutout to Jess, Thank you so much. And just for that, you guys should all go find Jess. On Instagram, just search Jess Johnson and look for the beautiful arm tattoos and cat pictures. Jess is amazing. She’s an incredible coach. And although she’s my client, for the first time ever, I’ve actually been doing some work with her in EFT myself lately. She’s helping me with a personal matter. So, I highly recommend her. Go find her. She’s a general life coach. She used to be a therapist. She’s also a veteran. She’s basically all-around badass. So, thank you, Jess. Shoutout to you.

So, speaking of Instagram, you should also, while you’re there looking for Jess, come find me. I am on Instagram and I love it. This is where I share all the behind-the-scenes, funny pictures of my dog basically living her best life, thinking that it’s just basic and she can barely be bothered by me.

But I still take pictures of her because she’s pretty sassy, and I think she’s pretty funny. So, go there, find me @lindsaydotzlaf. I keep all things simple so you can always find me.

And last thing about Instagram. A few weeks ago, I asked some of you in my stories for what topic ideas you would love to hear me talk about on the podcast. And I got one that fit so perfectly after I did the episode about strategy that I wanted to go ahead and record it. I actually wanted to record it the next week right away, but then some things came up that I wanted to talk about and I had an amazing interview. So, here we are, wrapping back around to it.

And I love it because it is the perfect continuation. So, I did a whole episode on strategy, on coaching strategy. If you haven’t heard that, maybe go back and listen first to episode 17. That will be useful. And then come back here and listen to this one. If this is your first episode, hello, welcome. Go to 17. Then come back to 22.

Okay, so, the question from Katrine on Instagram. I’m going to read it just like she wrote it. She asked, “I know it’s similar to a lot of the topics you have already discussed, but something about how to create your own coaching material would be awesome. How can we go about brainstorming, creating, trying out our own materials to create amazing tools for our clients, kind of a continuation of the strategy episode?”

Yes, that’s exactly what it’s going to be. So, again, thank you Katrine. You are exactly right. This is a great continuation and it’ an amazing question. And it really got me thinking, even though I teach this, it really got me thinking, how can I explain it in just a succinct, short way for you here today?

So, there are two ways that I think about coaching strategies, and today I’m going to talk mostly about one of them. But both will apply to all of you in some way.

So, some coaches come into coaching already having a bunch of strategies for their clients. So, for example, I have a colleague who is a nutrition coach. She knows all things about nutrition and what women need to eat to perform at their highest level. And over the last few years, she turned that into nutrition coaching by adding in the mindset piece.

But before that, she already had an understanding of nutrition and strategies that’s he used with her clients that she was already working with. So, she came into her business with lots of strategies. And then, she learned to coach and wrapped that in.

On the other side of this, it’s kind of the opposite, and this is mostly who this episode is for. There’s the coach that learns all things mindset first and how to coach and later creates their own specific tools and strategies for their clients. Again, this is mostly what I’m going to talk about today.

I think of this – I’ve been trying to think about what I would call this, and I think it’s just the evolution of a strategy. So, we might have some strategies that we learn when we learn to coach. But what I am talking about today is creating your own intellectual property, your own strategies.

What’s interesting about this is I’ve already talked about all of these pieces in other episodes. But today, I’m going to put them together for you in a step-by-step so you know exactly how to do it. Are you ready?

The evolution of a strategy, step one. Very basic. Learn coaching tools from someone else and use them. So, if you think back to the episode that I recorded with Stacey Boehman, if you listened to that, this is one main major thing that we talked about. In the beginning of your business, all you really need are a couple of great tools and you are set. Literally nothing else matters.

So, if this is you and you are brand new to coaching, this is exactly where you start. Learn a couple of tools and how to use them and get really good at this piece. So, even if you’ve been a coach for a while but you maybe kind of skipped over this piece or you went right into all the strategies and you kind of glaze over the mindset piece and the really knowing how to coach your clients, that’s okay. Rewind just a little bit. Go back. Learn how to coach and be really good at it.

Yes, you will be using someone else’s tools, but that’s okay. If you think about it, that’s literally how learning always works. First, we always imitate someone else. Can you imagine if we had to reinvent the wheel every time we decided to try something new? That would be exhausting. And we would just run out of options. At some point, there just aren’t new ways to do things.

So, if this is you and you aren’t quite sure where to start, there are two ways. One, find a coach certification or coaching program that teaches you coaching tools and techniques. Or, two, hire a coach and do some work on yourself and ask your coach to teach you some of their tools.

I want to add a caveat here, which is I am not suggesting that you steal someone else’s intellectual property. What I am saying is go learn it and use it with permission. Give that person credit. It always blows my mind how many of you think you have to have your own signature methods or tools or whatever right from the beginning in order for clients to take you seriously. But that is not true at all.

Just imagine – think about this. This is the way some of you think about it. If you went to college to be a doctor and immediately when you graduated med school. You decided that you weren’t allowed to use anyone else’s methods and you had to come up with your own unique way to do everything. My guess is you probably wouldn’t make it very long as a doctor.

Literally, this is how we learn all of the things. We learn someone else’s method first, and eventually we problem-solve when it’s not working the way we want it to. We’ll get to that.

Step two of the evolution of a strategy is spending lots of time in your clients’ minds. Remember this? I’m saying it again for the I don’t even know how many-eth time. I think it was episode two or three of the podcast, I did a whole episode on it and I’ve mentioned it many times since. This is truly the secret weapon for developing your own tools and content.
So, I’m not going to go deep into the how because you can go back and listen to that. But what I do want to talk about is the why and the who.

The why of this is because it makes you such a better coach. The better you understand your clients and their problems, their goals, et cetera, the better you are at coaching them. And over time, you’re going to start noticing similarities or patterns in your clients that come to you. And we’ll get to that more in step three.

When it comes to the who, there are options depending on where you are in your business. If you’re a newer coach and you just have a couple of clients and you want to spend time thinking about them, spend time thinking about those specific clients or you can spend time in your old brain, if it’s something you’ve worked through, take yourself back there and remember, what were you like? What were the thoughts you were having? What were the things you needed help with?

Or you could spend time thinking about a made-up person; your idea of the clients you do want to work with. If you are more of a seasoned coach with lots of clients, this is great news. Spend time thinking about all of your clients, either individually, sometimes I do it kind of different ways. Sometimes individually, sometimes as a whole.

And as your business grows, just be sure that you spend more time focusing on your best clients; the ones that are getting results, the ones you love working with. Because those are the ones that ultimately you want to create material and strategies for because you want to attract more of those best clients, not the ones that aren’t getting results, or that you just don’t love working with or love helping.

I apologize, I am a little horse today. I tried to put off recording the podcast until my voice was fully back, but I didn’t have that much time. So, here we are, halfway through losing my voice. I apologize.

Okay, before I move onto step three, I want to give you an example of why spending time thinking about your clients is so important and I want to do it using two of my past clients. I hope they don’t mind. I will tell them after I record this. I will have their permission. But they’re such a great example of why thinking about your clients is important.

So, I had two clients in the past, both of them weight loss coaches, both of them used this very ting to really see who their specific clients are and help them be on the way to creating amazing content and tools specifically for their clients.

So, one of them, her name is Jennifer Dent Brown. She’s a weight loss coach. She has a podcast called Stop Dieting Forever. The other is Laura Dixon, also a weight loss coach called Naturally Thin for Life.

So, first, shoutout to both of them. They are crazy, amazing coaches. If anyone’s looking for a weight loss coach, go look them up. Both of them help their clients create insane results. So good.

So, the reason I bring them up, they’re such good examples of exactly what I’m saying. Although they’re both weight loss coaches, their clients are totally different. So, over time, Jennifer really noticed that the clients that were coming to her, clients that want to lose weight, most of them has been on kind of a start-stop diet cycle for as long as they could remember and were putting off happiness until they were at their goal weight.

Whereas for Laura, a lot of her clients were coming to her as kind of what I would say, like, extreme high-achievers who use food to buffer over emotions, to not feel any of the things, and for the most part didn’t actually have tons of weight to lose, but really just wanted to stop obsessing over and thinking about food and weight.

As you can tell, those are two very different clients. And they’re going to need different tools. So, notice although these two people do the same thing, they’re both weight loss coaches, over time they started to notice, “Oh, but this is my brand of weight loss coach. This is what my clients need.” And they started creating their own amazing tools for these specific clients.

This brings me to step three, which is, with your best clients in mind, start creating new strategies. Create strategies for them when you see that things are missing.

So, if you just think about maybe two coaches who have the same niche, they learned to coach at the same place, so they start with the same tools. And after coaching for a while and spending some time with step two in their clients’ minds, they’re going to start to notice that things stand out about their particular clients.

So, think about for example two marriage coaches. They both start as marriage coaches that coach on all things marriage. But over time, they notice their best clients all have some things in common. This is completely made up. But maybe for one of them, their clients are all on the verge of divorce and trying to decide if they’re going to stay or how they’re going to stay because they want to.

And maybe for the other one, the majority of their clients are fairly happily married but have a difference in opinion about something that feels very significant, maybe like religion or politics and they want help navigating that from a coach.

So, they both start in the same place with the same tools, but as they spend time coaching, because ultimately a lot of times we attract people like us, so over time, these are the people that they’re attracting, they spend time thinking about them, and now they’re going in two very different directions, creating tools specific for their clients.

Maybe that first coach sees a need for a tool that helps their clients recommit to their marriage each day, or measure their level of commitment. So, she creates a brand-new tool that she’s never seen before. And maybe that second coach creates a how-to-disagree manual or something along those lines. Like, “This is a tool that no one has ever taught me, but I’m going to create it because it’s what my clients need.”

So, like I said, these are completely made up. But you see where I’m going, right? This is just the part where you say, “I can’t find a tool for this. My clients need it. And therefore, I should make one.” It’s pretty simple.

So, in this step, you just create the tool from your brain that is different from anything you have learned because you see a need for it with your clients.

So often, where this goes wrong is that many of you want to jump into this step right away and skip step one and two. And for a very, very, very small percentage of you, this might be possible because maybe you came into coaching for a very specific reason. Like you had a specific experience in your life and you are like, “I am called to help all of the people with this.”

You know exactly what your niche is. You don’t see examples of other coaches doing it, and you know right away that you need to create tools. That is a very small percentage of people listening.

For most of us, this is not the case. A lot of coaches start as general life coaches or even when you do have a niche, it’s going to be usually more broad in the beginning and it takes some time to really learn who your clients are and who you’re talking to. And also just who you love working with.

As coaches, we see that we have – at least this is my experience. I just saw, over time, I had preferences. Even though I began as a general life coach, I had preferences on what I loved to coach on. That’s not a problem.

So, the last step, step four of the process is rinse, repeat, and just keep going. So, the last step is just use your new tools with your clients, evaluate how you’re working, make any changes that are needed along the way and then just keep creating new tools when the needs arise.

And to be clear, I’m saying tools throughout this, but the same is true for material, content, podcasts even, et cetera, any of it. and I think one big thing to keep in mind here in this last step – I’m just going to reiterate this – you want to stay focused on your best clients. Of course, this is why creating some of your own stuff is easier when you have lots of clients to think about, not just a handful. Because when you only have three or four clients, it’s probably not clear who your best clients are.

So, to wrap this up, I thought that I would share my own coaching story, how I got into coaching, how I’ve grown my business, and what success has looked like for me all while interweaving my own evolution of creating my strategies. But then I realized, that’s an entire episode. So, you’ll have to wait until next week to hear me talk about it. See you then.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Mastering Coaching Skills. If you want to learn more about my work, come visit me at lindsaydotzlafcoaching.com. That’s Lindsay with an A, D-O-T-Z-L-A-F.com. See you next week.