If you want consistent results, you’ve got to use consistent coaching models. So today, we’re talking about how to build coaching models for your brand.
First, a little background. We’re talking about building your personal brand, which revolves around finding your message, building your community and making an impact.
Impact starts with establishing coaching models for helping people, and that’s where we’re focusing today. How do you build those coaching models? How do you actually help someone in a consistent way that leads to transformation?
ESTABLISH YOUR COACHING MODELS
The first piece is having some kind of framework, theory, or philosophy that serves as an underpinning to what you teach in your coaching models.
Now, these are things that have to be yours because you want them to be ownable. And the goal is that you’ve been out there living in your expertise and doing something with it for a long period of time. You’re passionate about something, and that has driven you to learn and know things in your field.
Everyone knows a little bit of something in a field they are passionate about. They’ve done the work, gotten the experience, taken the classes — whatever it is, they’ve gone through the process of learning. I’m assuming you’ve done all that and have found ways to solve problems in your area.
So that’s a given. But what a lot of people haven’t done is used that experience to teach someone else. What everyone needs is to figure out how they can help people consistently through a coaching framework they’ve built.
MAKE YOUR COACHING MODELS OWNABLE
Coaching models have to be ownable because they have to be created by you in your own special way, as something only you offer.
Look back over all of these things you’ve learned, then take the best of it. Figure out those highlights and lay them out, whether it’s a few steps in a row, an order of operation, or key ingredients. Narrow it down to three to six things that make up your plan, your process for achieving this goal that you are setting people on.
My coaching model is to teach you the personal branding framework of message, community and impact. Every episode, I’m taking you through how to do this layer by layer.
You should build something for yourself that you can then teach other people. The most important piece is that it is yours, based on your optimization of going through and doing it for yourself or your customers.
You have figured out the best, most optimal, fastest, easiest, best way to get to the goal people are looking for, and you have the steps for them to follow.
KEEP YOUR COACHING MODELS SIMPLE
You should be able explain your coaching models to someone in an elevator pitch style: “I can go into more detail later, but a simple explanation is one, two, three, four.” When you can do that in a simple and understandable way, the person starts nodding their head and saying, “Yeah, that makes sense. Tell me more.”
It’s not the idea that needs to be technical. What needs to be technical is the steps they take. The execution of the concept can be very specific so people know what to do first, second, third, fourth and so on.
But your main coaching models need to be understandable and unique to you. Once you have that, you can brand it and start talking about it so other people can start talking about it — and you — by name.
For me, I offer the personal branding framework. It’s the Brands on Brands personal branding framework, my way of doing things. It’s not everyone’s way — it’s the thing that I’ve come up with.
You’ve got to have your own thing, too.
So come up with it. Create an acronym or a name for it. That helps other people explain your method.
TEST AND OPTIMIZE YOUR COACHING MODELS
Not every coaching model will work right off the bat. Maybe the concepts are right, but you need to run through the steps with real clients to see if there are things you could be doing better.
Possibly, the way you’re teaching is missing a step or resources that could really help people. Maybe a small change would make it work even better for your clients than it has for you.
Your goal is to continue to actually work with people one-on-one until you come up with something you’ve seen them thrive with. Start working with one or two people. Every time you do that, you’ll decide to change the way you explain something or the order of operations for how that process will go.
Whatever it is, you’ve got to test your coaching models, your special way of doing things. And as you find ways to do it better, you need to optimize it so that by the time you get to your fourth or fifth person, it’s running pretty smoothly. You should be getting to where you feel confident about it and are seeing consistent delivery.
CREATE REPEATABLE RESULTS
You have to be able to show consistent, repeatable results and successes so that every person who runs through your coaching models can point back to them and say, “I did these things, and there was this simple result.”
When you can do that, when you teach something the same way every time, not only do you start to see if there are things that you could be doing better. You also start to see that every person has a similar result. That’s when you know you’ve built something that works.
It has to be repeatable because you need to be able to teach it over and over and over again so that people are learning the same way every time. Then they can tell everyone else how they learned it from you, with the promise of, “It worked for me. It should work for you.”
If you have a program that’s not consistent, you’re not going to have repeatable success. You’ll have some people who you worked with on one thing, and they succeeded. Then you’ll have someone else who you worked with on something different because you thought that was their area of emphasis. That person didn’t show success.
Why? Because you didn’t work through the full framework — you just focused on one area of it.
DON’T SKIP STEPS
If you miss a step, that person doesn’t get the benefit of the full system. Avoid the discovery call method of assessing someone’s problems and coming up with a unique solution for every client.
That means everyone is getting a different thing from you. What you want is something you can own, that someone can point to and say, “This is what they’re known for. This is the person that’s the best at this thing. It made my life better, and it can do the same for you.”
That’s the goal: to have this thing that you can consistently deliver on that people can then tell the world about.
So many people have a message and content they want to create, but they haven’t come up with these systems that can actually help people. And that’s what people need. They need the processes, the techniques, the systems to get through it all.
WHERE TO START
Now, how do you develop those coaching models? You do need to look within yourself and figure out what you’re doing that’s working. Then chart it out. Write out a bunch of the different things you’ve done and then start to prioritize.
What are the main things you had to do? And in what order? Start writing them out on a whiteboard, a piece of paper, whatever it is. The goal is to get a personal understanding of your systems and your experiences. You have to have examples to draw from.
When I left the ad agency world, I didn’t know what I wanted to be known for. So I went on my own personal journey. I knew that I didn’t want to be just a resume anymore. Instead, I wanted to have a reputation that lived for itself.
I didn’t want to be just the guy who was the brand strategist for Coca-Cola or the guy who was the brand strategist for Apple. Those were jobs I did for someone else. I wanted to be the guy for brand strategy, who will help anybody.
FIND KEY THEMES
I had to go through a lot of things chasing that down. But I started with content, which is the first thing in my framework of message, community and impact. In that content, through the action takers, I started to learn what I actually stood for and what my message was.
I started recording episodes of the podcast, writing blogs, recording videos, until I understood what themes started to bubble to the top. And as it happened, I started to see people reacting to it and saying, “I love this episode. This really spoke to me. This helped me move forward in something.”
I even saw in myself the things I became passionate about. So I moved through my message. And once I built my message, I started to know what I wanted to stand for. I could do that more consistently, and I started to bring a community into my world.
People started to gather around that content and say, “I want more of this. I’m happy to join your community. I’m happy to engage.” And once I started to bring people together, I would start to put myself around them at events and go to conferences and really engage in that community.
“What is it that you guys are struggling with? What’s going on in your business right now?”
I would learn what they were trying to accomplish, and as I learned their struggles, I came up with solutions. That’s the impact part of this “message, community, impact” framework.
By developing a program to solve their problem, I was able to say, “I’m going to model this.”
BUILD OFF THOSE THEMES
The thing I was passionate about was building brands around personal businesses for people whose reputation was their business. So I created coaching models to help people build a personal brand because that was the theme that kept rising to the top.
For me, the No. 1 way to build a personal brand is through finding your message and your voice, and the easiest way to do that as podcasting. It’s the fastest, quickest way for most people because we’re pretty conversational.
So I started a podcast coaching course. It’s not a branding course or a brand strategy course, even though that’s my history and my zone of expertise.
I can teach people because I’ve done it for myself. I built a podcasting course, and I know that this is something anyone can do as a first step to start finding their voice because I’ve done it successfully.
So those are my models. The next step was how to teach people to help other people and build a coaching program around that. Again, I needed a framework, and I’ve built it into what I’ve got now.
I’m still learning as I go to help people build a coaching business. But finding my framework helped me build a business, and suddenly, I had people coming in and saying, “That was super helpful. I told my friend, and they want it, too.”
START SMALL
The coaching program didn’t work immediately. It wasn’t firing on all cylinders until I had all the pieces in place.
That’s what you need to do. You need to go out there, put coaching models together that you can start to execute on, and teach other people what to do in your special way that you test and optimize. In a way that gives you repeatable success that makes you confident in teaching over and over again.
After working one on one, you can scale it, but you have to have the framework first. It won’t scale at first, but once you’ve got it honed and you’ve got it crafted, you can then start to move on to small group and workshop coaching.
From there, you can start to record these things and make them digital and make them teachable to a mass group.
Work out the kinks with individuals to make it better for everyone consistently. People will skip to a digital course that they’ve never worked through on an individual basis, or they’ll go try to create a brand and do a bunch of Instagram posts and get Insta famous.
But they haven’t figured out how to help people through coaching models, and all these things are integral in terms of a personal brand.
So if you want to have impact in your community, start with your coaching models, get your own special way of doing something, optimize it, and look for repeatable success.
Once you start getting consistent results, then you can scale and move on to the next thing.
MORE ADVICE AND INTERVIEWS
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Talk soon!