David Wood | Inner Firewalking

About David Wood

For 20 years David has helped entrepreneurs around the globe to grow their results, by growing themselves. A former consulting actuary to Fortune 50 companies in New York, David quit corporate life to pursue his inner journey, which now deeply influences his work. A digital nomad, David is currently dancing salsa, paragliding, and coaching his rock star entrepreneur clients from Colombia. His specialty is doubling your productivity and profits, while halving your stress. If you become a highly authentic and inspirational leader in the process, well….that can’t be helped.

Ginger Cockerham on Telephone Coaching

The following is taken from David’s interview with Ginger Cockerham in 10 Super Coaches.

In the first year, what percentage of your coaching was face to face versus phone?

100% by phone. I started coaching by telephone and have only coached one client face to face since I began coaching. I coach all my individual clients and all my groups by telephone. My clients are scattered all over the country and the world – the telephone allows me to provide extraordinary flexibility and allows me to coach more people and groups.

Telephone bridge calls are a great way to stay connected regularly with many clients – and I feel people relax their guard and share more freely and openly on the phone.

Coach a LOT

The following is an excerpt from the CoachStart Manual.

So coach a LOT. It’s OK if you’re nervous, or even terrified of doing your initial sessions – coach anyway. And don’t worry, we’ll cover many tips in later chapters to help increase your confidence and make the whole process much easier for you.

In the extreme, if you had 20 pro-bono (i.e. non paying) clients, you would attract many more clients and feel very comfortable charging them your full fee. You would also be getting a lot of training and experience under your belt. However, it doesn’t have to be for free…

Once you have 10-20 clients, with the assistance of your mentor coach, your practice will naturally grow in number of clients, client retention (how long they stay), and income. Once you have say ten clients, you might begin to look at longer-term, sustainable marketing methods.

Mike Turner on Getting Clients

The following is taken from David’s interview with Mike Turner in 10 Super Coaches.

In order, what where the top three sources of your clients in the first 2 years?

From people who had been clients in the time before I was a self-employed coach. The work arose from on-going conversations with them about what I was doing and what the challenges facing them were. This was the main source.

From my website – this only brought a few clients but one at least has now been with me for 6 years off and on.

From a magazine article which mentioned me.

How Do I Keep Them Coming Without Product?

The following is taken from Get Paid University.

Well, the way I did it was just writing articles of value. I would solve a problem that they have. I’m going to go right now and you guys can do this too. If you go to solutionbox.com, I’m sure you could type this into the chat room /archive.htm and I’ll say it once more, solutionbox.com/archive.htm. Wow, you look at that and you’ll see 95 issues of the Mentor Monthly Newsletter and then below that there are 52 issues of Create a Life You Love Newsletter, and I don’t think they’re all in here. I don’t think we put them all in the archive.

Now, Mentor Monthly is about building a coaching practice. Here are some topics. The Vision Teaser Technique, technique you use with your client. How that came about is I used it with somebody by accident. I think I was coaching a woman and I got on the coaching call and I pretended that I was a customer calling to attend the restaurant that I knew she wanted to create. She wanted a Japanese restaurant combined with a wonderful modern gardens and I pretended to be a customer. I said, “Hey that should be called something.” We called it the Vision Teaser Technique and I wrote an article about it.

Ginger Cockerham on Choosing a Training School

The following is taken from David’s interview with Ginger Cockerham in 10 Super Coaches.

Are there any particular school(s) you would recommend?

I am a Master Certified Coach with IFC and a Certified Mentor Coach with Coachville. Also, I am a certified Teleclass leader at Coach University and at the Graduate School of Coaching at Coachville. I encourage clients to explore credentialing with quality organizations who train significant numbers of coaches that impact the industry. To be connected to a strong community of coaches is one of the most wonderful things about coaching.

Posts by David Wood