Brin in the Coach, I'm Ready to Play

Written by Susan Dunn, MA Clinical Psychology, The EQ Coach


I get letters …emails, that is. Inquiries from prospective clients. They askrepparttar only questions they know how to ask in seeking a coach, admittedly a hard thing to do when you’ve never had a coach, and their questions reveal as much to me, in this joint-interview process, as my answers reveal to them.

While you’re looking for your Ideal Coach,repparttar 123422 Coach is looking for his or her Ideal Client.

Here are things I’m looking for in my clients, many of them Emotional Intelligence characteristics. However, since I coach EQ and teach these skills, I’m also looking forrepparttar 123423 person with low EQ who is eager to learn, “trainable,” and ready to commit to dorepparttar 123424 work.

1. Good Enough Manners

Being courteous onrepparttar 123425 phone call, or inrepparttar 123426 email, such as, “I was wondering if you have time to talk now,” or “Dear Susan” or some salutation. We are about to enter a relationship, and it needs be one of respect and dignity.

2.The ability to communicate with me in a common language.

Atrepparttar 123427 very minimum, a person must be able to realize she and I can’t communicate if she speaks Swahili, and I do not. It’s a bad sign when we both speak “English,” but they speak a dialect, such as Business-eze, or Psychiatry, and they don’t know everyone doesn’t speak it. This sort of blindness to social cues is a bad sign … unless of course they’ve come for Emotional Intelligence coaching, in which case, we have our work cut out for us.

Example 1: When your therapist says to you, “Okay. What part of ‘malignant regression and pathogenic reintrojection as a defense against psychic decompensation’ don’t you understand?” (Source: New Yorker cartoon)

Example 2: The client who thinks before he speaks –“ I want to ask her about minimizingrepparttar 123428 census onrepparttar 123429 QIW Ward. Now how can I put that in plain English?”

3.Empathy … enough

I received an email yesterday with “coaching” forrepparttar 123430 subject line, andrepparttar 123431 body ofrepparttar 123432 email contained this: “What do you do? Lillian.”

This is not a good prognosticator—oops, skiprepparttar 123433 jargon—this is not promising. For one thing, it doesn’t passrepparttar 123434 Manners Muster.

For another, I do 3 large areas of coaching—Emotional Intelligence, Marketing, and what I call “Helping People.” I call it “helping people” because I like to speakrepparttar 123435 vernacular (the language ‘us guys’ speak atrepparttar 123436 water cooler) so I avoid terms like “Personal Life Coach” (does this exclude public life or professional life? There’s no such thing.), or “Ontological Coach” – say what?

Now,repparttar 123437 prospective client doesn’t have to know I work in 3 areas, or that I train EQ coaches, or that I run a Distance Learning School, and in fact in some cases couldn’t have known, but they need to know that asking me “What do you do?” is highly unlikely to elicit a response they can use, no matter how smart I am.

Call it a basic understanding ofrepparttar 123438 field., i.e., in seeking a lawyer to do your divorce, you don’t need to know what a Public Bonds attorney does, you just need to know a Divorce Attorney does divorces and a Public Bonds attorney does not. That’srepparttar 123439 wayrepparttar 123440 field “is”.

Yes, we coaches have our “elevator speeches” ready, butrepparttar 123441 savvy client,repparttar 123442 one I want to work with, isrepparttar 123443 one who knows how to ask a question. They write, “I want to XYZ. Can you help me? Is thisrepparttar 123444 kind of coaching you do?”

4.EQ is better than IQ, but IQ has to be there

I received an email from My Ideal Client-NOT! saying: “What’srepparttar 123445 difference between a Business Coach and an Emotional Intelligence Coach?” One tells who you serve,repparttar 123446 other tells what you do. Not being able to grasp that general concept is a clue they aren’t “conceptual” enough to be my Ideal Client-YES!

5.Papa Bear, Mama Bear, Baby Bear … this is “just right”

I like a client who’s already developed a good set of tools, i.e., onrepparttar 123447 introvert/extravert scale, they test towardrepparttar 123448 middle. Onrepparttar 123449 left-brain, right-brain scale, they test towardrepparttar 123450 middle. If an individual is an extreme of anything, there will be more work to do. But of course that “balance,” is what Emotional Intelligence is all about.

EXAMPLE: An extremely left-brained client will continually be saying, “We weren’t talking about that,” or “That’s way offrepparttar 123451 subject.” A coach must gather information that may not appear torepparttar 123452 client to be relevant to “the subject.” Not trustingrepparttar 123453 process is part ofrepparttar 123454 client’s problem!

Expand Your Time

Written by Stephanie Yeh


In our time-crazed society, lots of time is what most of us don’t have. Yet, all of us would like to have more time. So what can you do about that? Expand your time. It’s simple.

You see, linear time is actually something that responds to our thoughts and feelings because time is a function ofrepparttar Universe. The Universe responds torepparttar 123421 way we feel about time by adjustingrepparttar 123422 amount of time we have.

If you feel like you’re chronically short of time and that you’re always PRESSED for time, that’s what you get – compressed time. It’s always a perfect match betweenrepparttar 123423 way you feel and whatrepparttar 123424 Universe delivers.

So, if you want to expand your time rather than compress it, all you have to do is expand your internal feeling about time. How? Simple. Whenever you feel pressed for time, just begin to act as if you had allrepparttar 123425 time inrepparttar 123426 world. Think about it. How do you act when you have a lot of time? You move at a leisurely pace and you enjoy yourself. You rarely do any ofrepparttar 123427 things that you do when you’re in a hurry – drop things, forget things, bump into things.

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