Dawn Campbell is an author/co-author of a dozen published health and business-related books. She says ‘Regardless of your background, age, weight, or work-life situation, it’s never too late to fulfil your dream of a happier, healthier and spiritually wealthier lifestyle’.
Consequently, she has been helping clients ‘add years to their life by adding life to their years’ through health & fitness and lifestyle coaching, so they too can ‘live the life they love and love the life they live – even longer‘!
Dawn is a Living Foods Practitioner, Natural Hygienist, Permaculturist, Nordic Walking Instructor, Author, Coach & Mentor, Thought Field Therapist (tapping) which enables her clients to choose the Pic ‘n’ mix modalities that appeal to them. Dawn has been coaching for nearly two decades, and she notes that there have been ‘many gracious moments and touching connections made’.
Why your coach/mentor accreditation status matters
Industry accreditation sets us properly trained, insured, and independently accredited practitioners apart from everyone else who isn’t properly trained, insured, or accredited. Therefore, accreditation helps us stand out as experts, especially if we’re also authors, in what has become a noisy digital space. It helps clients easily identify you. So, accreditation is important because your clients increasingly seek it as a quality differentiator!
Whether you work in the public or private sector, most companies (and increasingly the same goes for the public who hire coaches for help improving their personal and or professional lives) want assurances in your evidence portfolio to include training certificates, your insurance, and to know that you are accredited with an independent, professionally recognised industry related authority. This is simply a routine part of a client doing their due diligence.
Therefore, even though coaching is an unregulated market, and even though coaches go through accreditation from a voluntary point of view, they know it is a way of saying ‘I’m a best-in-class practitioner coach and or mentor, that I am an expert in my field, and I have been independently assessed right across the industry, not just my training academy!
Consequently, we sign up for a Professional Code of Conduct and belong to an internationally registered body of Practitioners. This quality assurance enables clients to confidently complain in case there is something they’re not happy about that cannot be resolved between you and your client.
An accreditation body is there for both of you and will help mediate unresolved issues in exactly the same way as the body for therapists, accountants, and driving instructors does. These industries and more tend to be part of international registered bodies as standard, and the coaching industry shouldn’t be any different, but it is. This is an issue because people tend to assume everybody they’re dealing with is properly trained, insurance and independently accredited when in fact the majority are not, hence complaints can arise.
So increasingly, coaches are applying for their accreditation as a way of saying ‘I am a best-in-class practitioner’ because they want to demonstrate that they have the capability to deliver what they say they can deliver. How do they achieve this? They have their certificates authenticated, and their experience validated, and they take a live coach/mentoring assessment call. This voluntary process is about being proud of your industry; it’s about demonstrating your confidence to deliver a high-class service, so it’s about proving you care for your clients.
When you’re a new practitioner and you’ve opened the doors to say ‘Hey, world, hire me’ that’s when I typically hear from student and graduate coaches saying ‘It’s three months since I graduated and I haven’t got a client yet. What do I do?’
So I ask them ‘What are you doing to grow your business while you’re waiting actively to coach’?
How are you getting on with laying the foundations of your business?
What about sales, what about marketing, what about networking, who have you identified as a potential joint venture partner, what systems do you have for building a pipeline and so on?
There’s a huge amount of things going on in the background while you’re waiting to fill your diary with coaching client calls.
No business is an overnight success. This is when the hard work starts as everyone who’s been in business for a couple of years knows, what you do in those formative years sets the scene for later on. So it’s about creating systems, creating structure, getting testimonials, networking, writing, building a brand and much more. It’s all to do with discipline, a plan and best practices.
It takes a lot of effort to make things look effortless
At the IAPC&M we are passionate about CPD and business building, which is why we provide weekly, complimentary master classes from people who look like overnight successes; great coaches, solopreneurs, and authors, and they have shared all shared their stories, detailing what they did in the early stages to make their business look so effortless. Evidently, there was a lot of hard work that went on behind the scenes!
That’s why we’ve created a fabulous twelve-modular online business-building program. It’s complementary, it’s self-taught, and it takes you through the structure of what and how to set up your business from creating a niche; writing a business plan; looking at a pricing structure; a marketing plan and much more. It’s all in there – written material; videos; master classes, and there’s also a monthly Q&A clinic. It’s a programme that’s been broken it down into bite-size chunks to avoid overwhelm.
Finally, we encourage every coach to benefit from attending our annual weeklong, complimentary online event, we have a one-click registration to you access time to all 20 International Coaching Week speakers
CPD credits (1 hr CPD = 1 credit) download our complimentary log here