My usual answer is pretty flippant – I don’t find clients, they find me. I don’t advertise or pitch. People hear about me via word of mouth and I’ll only work with them if I like them and find them interesting. So that’s a great place for me to be – I love it! – but it doesn’t answer the question: how can coaches find clients? It’s a really important question for a lot of people.

Finally I have a good answer. Actually the answer comes from my buddy Rich Litvin and his mentor Steve Chandler. They are coaches who earn A LOT of money. And Steve in particular has an amazing track record of teaching people how to go from ‘just starting out’ to having a full roster of high-paying clients – easily, ethically and with a lot of fun along the way.

Steve Chandler’s work with coaches has produced 18 disciplines for attaining clients and building a strong and prosperous coaching practice. On 3rd and 4th June, he will be in London for the first time and bringing his teaching into a two-day intensive workshop. He’ll be teaming up with one of his most profoundly successful graduates, master coach Rich Litvin. Rich is finishing a book on enrolling high-paying clients into your coaching practice and he has 81 principles he’ll be revealing for the first time ever. These principles are profound and jolting… a strong antidote to the problem of being “stuck” with too few clients and an income that does not light you up.

What I love is that Steve and Rich are creating this event in the same way they CREATE clients – by invitation and referral only. As a friend of Rich’s, I get to invite YOU.

Me being me, there’s no sell involved here. My invitation is simply to download a free copy of Steve’s book How to Get Clients and also the unique MP3 recordings that he and Rich have made available for you. Whether you then attend the event or not, you’ll already have a lot of solid material that will make it very easy for you to CREATE clients. Check it out. It works. There’s a page with the downloads here.

I love it.

If you’ve read it too, what did you think?

Merry Christmas!

“For a couple of years now, I’ve been sending a Christmas present to a random person who has a wish list on Amazon… just to bring unexpected joy to someone in the spirit of Christmas, surprising them with one of the items they wished for.”

Merry Christmas to Anja!!

They’re organising a ‘self help summit’ that sounds intriguing.

We’re bringing together some of the most influential names from the self-help industry, along with some of its most vocal critics, to debate well-being and whether the happiness business is really helping.

Those names include Alain de Botton (who I think is fabulous) and Professor Richard Wiseman (who I’m skeptical about, especially since he reneged on his promise to send me a KitKat… and I love KitKats).

The wonderful Oliver Burkeman is also involved – he writes “This Column Will Change Your Life”  in The Guardian.

I don’t know what the event will be like. Happiness is a multi-million pound industry and it’s easy to be cynical about that. I’ve also written before about the tyranny of self improvement. However, I’ve seen amazing things that fill me with optimism. Miserable sods really can turn into genuinely happy and creative people. The program I ran in Whitehall showed that even civil servants can be joyful!

It will be interesting to see what the ‘self help summit’ throws up.

Here’s the flow chart – beautiful in its simplicity:

You can listen live on the Radio 4 site or listen later on BBC iPlayer.

Please share your thoughts below. Can NLP ever be part of the mainstream?

The BBC sent me this promo:

Thousands claim NLP has changed their lives, but what exactly is it and is there any scientific evidence that it works?

NLP – Neuro-Linguistic Programming – is a psychological approach originally developed in 1970s California by John Grinder and Richard Bandler. It was radically different from mainstream therapies of the time, offering its users fast results instead of the years of commitment required for psychoanalysis.

Today NLP has found its way into all walks of life, spawning numerous practitioners and schools and offering many different ways to improve, from curing phobias or depression to becoming a better teacher, athlete or manager. Its most prolific gurus are multi-millionaires and, in the case of Paul McKenna, household names.

But for all its commercial success and numerous devotees, NLP is seen by its critics as just another pseudo-science without robust evidence to support its claims. So does NLP genuinely help with powerful behavioural change, or can its achievements be explained by the placebo effect?

William Little, journalist and author of The Psychic Tourist, finds out for himself what it’s like to experience NLP techniques, meets those who have used it to change their lives and interviews its co-founder Richard Bandler, the charismatic exponent of so-called “persuasion engineering”.