Coach or Scammer?

Hi, everyone, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and leadership coach. Tonight I want to talk to you about something that is a little uncomfortable to talk about being a coach in the coaching world. But I feel it is very important for there to be a set guidelines for how you should be assessing coaches out there. Coaching the industry is not how highly regulated. It does have a regulating body called the International Coaches Federation that accredited accredits different training programs and gives people certifications to make sure that, you know they are who they say they are and they are experienced. But there are a few things that I want for you to know about so that if you're thinking about hiring a coach, you know what to look for and you know the different kinds of coaches that are out there. And hi, whoever's watching. I'm doing this through Streamyard as I normally do. So it's streaming to the Facebooks, it is streaming to Instagram and to YouTube. So if you comment, I really like this to be interactive. But if you comment and I don't say anything or I don't call you out, it is not you. It is just the technology. Sometimes a little imperfect, just like the rest of us. But anyway, so I want to talk about this. So there are three different kinds of coach in my, in my definition. So there is the classical coach, ok? And I just got a thumbs up for that. There is the classical coach. This means that you have been trained by a coaching program. You have the ability to coach on pretty much any topic. You don't need to know a lot of the background information. Coaching is not consulting. Coaching is not telling people what to do. It is asking questions. Asking questions in a very helpful manner to help your client get to where they need to go. The difference, I love talking about the differences between coaching and therapy because coaching is therapeutic, okay? It can make you feel better, it can make you feel clearer, it can help you do a lot of stuff. But the difference between therapy and coaching is. And for those of my therapists out there, I know you guys do a lot of coach like stuff. So this is not, you know, every single therapeutic or therapy experience. But generally therapy is, hey, you're screwed up. Let's look in the past and see where you got screwed up. Let's really understand it, untangle it, and then maybe you won't be screwed up anymore. And here's some behavioral shifts you can do along the way. Great. Totally useful. I recommend a lot of my clients go and see a therapist as well. But coaching is the other way it is awesome. You're screwed up. Everyone's screwed up. Where do you want to go with this? What do you want to make? Like, let's take charge of your life and figure out how you're going to do this. Okay. So that's very classical coaching. If you're looking for a classical coach, I want you to look for someone who is ICF accredited, meaning they have an acc, PCC or an MCC after their name. And if they don't have it after the name, they have it somewhere in their profile. I'm officially an acc. I'm too lazy to go for, you know, my PCC and my MCC anyway. I hate paperwork anyway. So you want to look for that. They also don't have to have accreditation, but you want to ask them where they were trained and you really want to look up that training program and make sure that it's accredited through the International Coaches Federation. Okay. Really important. Okay. The second kind of coach is more of a consultant mentor. Okay. It is someone who has had a long career in a certain area. So say there's a sales coach, okay? So it's someone who has had a whole career in sales. They're really, really good at it, and they're really turning around and using all the strategies and the ways that they were really effective in their job and they're training the people coming up behind them. Okay? So they're like passing knowledge on. It's kind of like the elder model. Okay. So I've gone before. I've seen the seasons. I know the poisonous berries. I'm going to pass this knowing on to you. Okay? Totally valuable. There are some excellent coaches out there who do this model. It is so valuable. If you are starting in a new career and you can get one of these coaches who is a decade or so ahead of you, go for it. Okay? It's going to save you time and effort and it's going to make you look real good. Anyway, so that's number two. That's the second kind. The third kind is I figured out how to do something and I'm going to show you how to do this thing. It is highly specialized. Okay? So Leah Turner is an excellent example of this. She has hacked LinkedIn. She's figured it out. There you go. And she's turned around and she started training people behind her. Here's how you do it. Okay? Copywriters can do this. Anyone who's in social media, Again, if you figured out a way to do sales, you could do this. I do a combination of the Three. Okay. I figured out how to do the small business thing. I have it down to a really simple approach, and I train on it. I also have a background in sales and in coaching, and so I consult on that as well. And then I also do that classical coaching where I see the scammers come through. And I'm so sorry. I wish. I wish this weren't a thing, that scammers weren't a part of our industry, but unfortunately, they are. I had a girl inquire with me over the weekend about working with me, and she had. And hi, Gabriel. Thank you. Welcome. And hi, Jordan. Great to have you guys. So she inquired about working with me. I looked at her profile, and she had one year of work experience and no training to speak of. And she's promising people promotions if they work with her. Not something you want to go near. Absolutely. Not something you want to go near. One year of work experience. How much experience does she have going for promotions herself? Okay. That's not something you can learn out of a book. It's just not. It's something that you have to go through. You have to be on the hiring end. You have to have a great deal of experience to even be able to consult on that in a workplace environment. Okay. And if she's trying to coach people through confidence or whatever, you need training for that. It requires training. There wasn't a lot of specialization there, so. So I obviously turned her down as a client. I wasn't going to be working with her. Other things that are red flags, if you will, that you want to keep a lookout for. If someone is saying, I can get you from point A to point B and I'm guaranteeing it. No coach can guarantee any results that their clients see. Okay? The reason for this is that they're your coach. They're not doing it for you. Okay? So if I'm a weight loss coach, I can't guarantee that you're actually going to lose weight. You have to actually follow the diet that we decide on. You have to actually stick with the fitness plan. You have to get enough sleep. You have to eat and drink enough water. Okay? Those are not things in my control. If you decide to have three bags of potato chips every single day, you know what? You're not going to see any results. The same thing with my work. You know, I work with clients who want to build their business. I can't control if you are going out and doing the steps that I'm putting in front of you. Okay? So if you're doing everything we talk about, yes, you're going to see results, but I can't control that. It's all on you. So any coach that guarantees that you're going to see results, it would be super hesitant to talk to them. Okay. It is just not something we can guarantee in this industry. One of the ways that we guarantee that we get close to guaranteeing it is we charge a lot of money to make sure that you have some skin in the game. Okay. So if you are wanting to work with a coach, I would be ready to invest some money. It's not going to be forever. Coaching relationships last anywhere from three months to a year. Okay. Shorter than any car loan you'll ever have. And it can really change your life if you let it, if you do the work. Okay. So, but that's red flag number one is if they're guaranteeing something. Oh, red flag number three is they don't have any actual testimonials. Oh, David Fryman, our LinkedIn lawyer. Gotta love those guarantees. Nothing says legit coach like a guarantee. Yeah, no, no. No guarantees. It's you're gonna do the work, you're the client, and that's that. But red flag number three is that this person doesn't have any testimonials from people who've worked with them for a long time, and they dress up their own success as proof that what they do works. Meaning. Say I'm a coach that trains on social media, okay. And I'm enrolling into a group class. And this class is to train other people how to do their social media. And I say that I've done it before with one on one clients, but I don't have any testimonials from those one on one clients. And instead of talking about what it is that I teach or what people are going to get out of it, I'm just posting the receipts of people signing up for me. I just made another $2,000. Oh, I made another $2,000. Ooh. This person paid in full and it was $4,000. Woo me. Like my program's awesome. No, that's not social proof. That is fake social proof. That is very superficial social proof. That is just proving that you know how to sell a program. Why should anyone give a flying fuck if you know how to sell a program? They shouldn't. It is what your program gets them that they need to care about. Okay? So if you're thinking about signing up for any programs that will teach you a specific thing and there's no testimonial, I would Ask for a reference. But then again, if you're on LinkedIn or if you're on Facebook or you're anywhere where things are linked together and you're able to go through and see the reviews and see what people have posted and you're able to, like, track people down. You can, you can vet if a testimonial or review is legit. Okay. You can figure it out. Okay. And honestly, if you're a happy customer. My clients are so happy to write testimonials, and I'm so happy to write testimonials for people that, you know, I've worked with who are amazing. Generally, people are very open about it. There should be no shadiness when it comes to testimonials and references and all that stuff. Jim, Katie, I love your honesty, integrity. Thank you, Jim. You know, it's easy to be honest and integrity when you practice your business in honesty and integrity. And unfortunately, there are some people in the coaching industry that don't. And so I want to make sure. I don't want anyone to get a bad impression of coaches. If you sign on and have a bad experience, I want you to know from the get go what to look for, what is essential, and where you're gonna have the best experience. You know, I think I wrote four things in the description, and I don't remember what the fourth one was. This is the problem with going live right off. I'm gonna have to look it up because I know I wrote something else. Oh, my gosh, this is so funny. I have to look up my own post about this, and now I'm watching my own life as I'm live. This is like a complete trip. Let me see. No coach training, minimal career experience, no testimonials. Oh, the last two are pretty much the same. They're using their receipts. Okay, awesome. So funny. Oh, and it's captioning me as I go. Okay. That's so fun. But you know what? As always, if you're. If you're hiring someone, I don't want you to just look at how they look on paper. Okay? I don't want that. I want you to actually get on the phone with them. Okay. Anyone who is doing this kind of work who is charging more than $2,000 for their program should be willing to get on the phone with you and just have a chat. If they're charging less than $2,000, their program is not designed for them to have sales calls, but I'm sure they're willing to have an exchange in their DMs and get to know you a little bit. And usually if they're doing their job well, if they are putting themselves out there, if they are posting to social media on a regular cadence and actually showing themselves and not just like doing inspirational quotes all the time, generally you can gauge what their personality is like. It is extremely hard to fake a personality on social media if you're doing it because consistently for your business, okay, it's gonna slip through. And I think one of the things that people thankfully are finding is that authenticity works, okay? Authenticity being real, showing up without makeup, except for some colored, you know, lip balm, that works. People really don't care. They want to see how you deport yourself. They want to hear how you speak. They want to understand how your mind works. If you're shopping around for a coach online and you're able to get a sense of who someone is through their posts, you know, it sounds like they are an authentic coach and they are doing their thing in integrity and. Hi, Ron Joseph, thanks for joining. And I would love to hear from those of you who are watching. You know, what have you run into in interacting with coaches online? Have you seen people who look super scammy? Have you seen quality coaches who post things that you just super resonate with? My pet peeve, my pet hate, if you will, is the Instagram coaches who post all these influencer lifestyle, like, posts of them having, like, this idyllic life, you know, where they're hanging out poolside and they're drinking like a fancy drink with a toy in it, and they have their laptop in their lap and they're in their bikini and they're just reclining and they're like, yes, hello, this is me taking clients. This is how this goes. No, no, that is not how that goes. That is a photo shoot that is designed to get likes. It is not the image anyone should be promoting as. This is what coaching looks like. It isn't. Okay, for one, if you're out in the sun and you have your laptop in your lap and there's a sun out, your laptop's gonna overheat and you're not gonna be able to use it. The other thing is, let's talk about skincare. If you're outside in a bikini in the sun on a nice day, I hope you're wearing spf. And let's just talk about how greasy sunscreen can get. And you're gonna get that all over your computer. No one wants that, okay? No one is working on their computer poolside. And also, you know, the thing about coaching is that it doesn't matter what we do, okay? I am not. I'm not the product. I'm not the product at all. My client's transformation is the product. Okay? If I can speak honestly to what my client journey is like. If I can tell you that I've tracked my numbers and this is for real, I've tracked my numbers. My clients by month 2.5 generally get their first high paying client anywhere from 4,000 to $18,000. Okay? I can tell you about that transformation. Going from not knowing anything about how to run a business to getting that very first client in month 2.5 of my six month program. That tells you a lot. You don't need to see me like poolside or doing anything fancy if you can actually see what my clients go through. Ron Joseph, SPF 50 for me every time. Yeah, me too. Look at this. I'm pasty. Especially. Especially in the beginning of the summer. Oh my God. And I hope everyone takes care of their skin. You know, let's. Let's prevent. I'm pro. Let me just be open about this. I am pro plastic surgery, but I am pro plastic surgery at the latest possible moment, okay? Because we don't need to be like Joan Rivers. I love her, she's amazing. But we don't need to be like her and get completely screwed up by going under so many times and then dying early. So let's moisturize everyone, okay? Let's just moisturize, use spf, you know, all the things. And find legitimate coaches to help us live our best lives. Anyway, that is all I have to say tonight. I actually have a meeting with one of my coaches. If you don't know this about me, I actually hire. I have. Oh, my gosh, how many coaches do I have right now? I have three coaches right now. And I generally spend between 4,500 and 7,000amonth on coaching. Okay? It is no joke. But the ROI is incredible. And I work with these different coaches in three different areas of my life and business and it, honestly, it's a game changer for me. Obviously, I'm a huge advocate of coaching. I've devoted my whole life to it anyway. But I have that session in about three minutes and I probably need to prep for it and drink some water before I get on with her. But anyway, I hope this is useful for those of you who are thinking about hiring a coach or have been hesitant to even look at it because you're not sure, you know, what is legit and what you need to watch out for. And if you have any questions on any of this, please reach out to me. I am more than happy to be a resource to you on this and any other topic. Anyway, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and leadership coach. I look forward to talking to you tomorrow and every day this week. I'll be going live except for Freddie. I will be talking earlier because Friday night I'm actually getting my first Pfizer shot. So hopefully that happens instead of it getting canceled again like the Johnson Johnson. Jim, thank you for joining. We need to catch up soon. Anyway, I hope you all have a great week and I will talk to you soon.