For many individual’s there is no more terrifying a moment in their career than an unsolicited call from a headhunter. On one hand this communication can be seen by the individual as vindication and recognition of their hard work in their industry. On the other the call can represent one of the most alien experiences which can inspire terror and nervousness. As such it is essential to make a few considerations on how to react if a headhunter does indeed call.

Why have they called?

Individuals who have little to no indexicology of dealing with headhunters may jump to the conclusion that the call constitutes nothing short of a solid job offer. This is incorrect. As headhunters are employed by companies to find candidates to fill a specific role, it is not unusual for headhunters to be keeping tabs on a small number of people at the same time. This means, in practice, that a headhunter may “feel out” a fair few individuals to see if they would be hypothetically or potentially interested in a new role at a different company. Having ascertained which individual’s would be open to such an opportunity a headhunter will then whittle down his shortlist from the remaining candidates before any formal offers are made. It is rare that formal offers at this stage will be anything strong than an invite to submit a CV or perhaps attend an interview.

Making Good Impressions

As the headhunters will be communicating with a plethora of individuals simultaneously a candidate should do the best he can to distance themselves from any potential rivals and to stick in the headhunters mind. Simply put, the best way of doing this is by dealing with a headhunter in the utmost professional manner possible – every interaction with them should, in essence, be treated like a job interview. As there will be a number of similar candidates, many of whom sharing similar employment histories and qualifications, small things such as a courteous and respectful manner can help separate an individual from the pack of rival competitors. Similarly an individual who lacks professionalism could find themselves removed from shortlists as nominating such a candidate may reflect badly on a headhunter who puts them forward.

The Initial Call

Much of a headhunter’s judgement on a potential candidate will be made during their first interaction, usually by phone, and, as such, it is important to get this right. Common mistakes often come from individuals who are not expecting such calls and therefore panic. One regular cause for concern for those being headhunted is how their details were obtained by the headhunter. Usually the answer to this is innocuous and quite innocent; it is not rare for a mutual acquaintance or colleague to have passed on the details or for the headhunter to have found the number on an internet directory. If an individual is to put these concerns to one side, rather than adopt an accusatory tone, they will be much less nervous and will fare better in their interactions. Another area of worry is for a potential candidate not comfortable with discussing opportunities elsewhere whilst still at the location of their current employment. This issue can be avoided by swapping details and arranging to speak on a different occasion. This also allows the candidate to prepare for the phone call whilst also researching the headhunter and the client they are representing.

What if the position offered is unappealing?

Many times a headhunter will begin to inquire if an individual is interested in a specific position and the answer, on occasion, will be a flat “no”. If this is the case then the best solution is to not just dismiss the headhunter out of hand but rather to be as helpful as possible. Even if an individual is currently very happy in their current position it would be foolish to deny a possible future contact as it is more than possible that circumstances may change. One way to be courteous and helpful to a headhunter would be to perhaps suggest another colleague for the position they are looking to fill. This course of action would prove favourable to all three individuals.

Kieron Casey

Kieron is a BA (Hons) Journalism graduate who blogs regularly on a number of topics including careers, employment, headhunters and executive search services.

NLP life coaching produces the results your clients want. It combines NLP, the science of the language of the mind, and the art and technology of coaching. A masterful NLP trainer can use NLP to restructure occurrences, eliminate phobias and effect alterations in many situations. Matt Brauning, the founder of Evolution Seminars and certified NLP Trainer, advocates a simple idea and strategy which can aid clients in understanding their behavior regarding punctuality, abiding by schedules and being in control of their time.

The Personal Time Line Concept

In NLP terminology, every person has a personal time line which can be drawn out by addressing questions to the person’s subconscious mind. During your NLP life coaching session, when you asked your client’s subconscious to “point to his past” he may point to his right, left, behind, diagonally, etc. Likewise, if you asked your client to “point to his present” he may point directly to the front, to himself, etc. Further, if you asked him to “point to his future”, you will extract still another location in his time line. In this manner, both you and your client can see his time line and the direction it is taking.

Decoding the Time Line

If your client’s time line ran left to right or right to left, he is a person governed by time. You can expect him to be on time for all his appointments. He likes following a schedule, is punctual and assumes other people to be also punctual. If you suggested “let’s get together for lunch” he wants to set a time and day for it at once. He is not wishy-washy.

If your client’s time line ran front to back, he is an “in time” or now person. The only time that matters to him is right now. He abhors planning and disregards schedules because keeping one is such a hurdle for him. When he is engrossed in what he is doing, he loses track of time. If you suggested to him “let’s get together for lunch” he will probably reply “fantastic, we can talk about it next week” because he is uncomfortable to be stuck to a specific time and day.

The Time Line in NLP Life Coaching

The two categories of time line both show distinctive client behaviors and dissimilar expectations of behavior in others. The disparities when not appreciated can be a primary cause of relationship discord and resistance in meeting goals.

As an exercise in the NLP life coaching session, make your client physically stretch out, seize his made-up past and his future in his time line, put it in the other position and click it in place. Then ask if he notices any difference. The exercise is only a simulation for the client to get a better grasp of the other time model. Coach him to appreciate how his behaviors get in the way of his self-worth and triumphs.

Jeffrey T. Sooey
CEO, JTS Advisors
Founder, Coaches Training Blog community

Helps new and developing coaches with coaching skills and client acquisition by training and mentoring them in good coaching, sales, and marketing best practices.

Works with employers on eliminating hiring mistakes and implementing best practices in hiring employees commensurate with the job attributes.

Partners with executives on growing business and working with employees by combining forces, clarifying goals and articulating strategic plans

You have been working long hours without getting any desired results. All of a sudden everything comes together and voila! You start reaping the profits derived from your diligence and perseverance. You are now at the crossroads where the foundation of your business is cast. This is the tipping point in your life coaching business. You finally start to earn a respectable life coaching salary.

However, most people never arrive at this point in their business. They lose focus, get disheartened and admit defeat. This happens right before the tipping point! Right before they start to earn a decent income!

Not Earning a Life Coaching Salary is Distressing

Objectively, you cannot censure them for their decision. Turning your life coaching business into a profitable one entails tremendous hard work. It will seem it has taken over your whole life and all your free time. You have to constantly rationalize your being a life coach. Then you begin entertaining thoughts of having a job with fixed hours and a regular pay.

Life Coaching Business: What to do when you Feel Hopeless

Instead of having an exhilarating lifestyle, you are continuously working for a life coaching salary that cannot sustain even your library fines. Your love ones think you are crazy. It is difficult to see the whole picture when you are stuck. So you consider giving up the business and accepting a full-time job.

Unfortunately the miserable truth surfaces and you recognize that you were cut out to work for yourself, to be an entrepreneur. You can never be an employee again.

Here are your options to get out of your dilemma:

1. Cry to your mentor. This seems like the best option. However, unless you have a great teacher, crying will only make the situation worse. It will not in fact solve your predicament. It neither will improve your business nor provide you the income you want.
2. Quit the life coaching business. This is the easiest way out of your tight spot. But what if you were very close to your tipping point? What if you were at the threshold of your goal of producing the grand salary? You will never know if you quit.
3. Stay focused, tackle distractions as they come. Go for your goal.

Life Coaching and the Life Coaching Business Require the Same Perseverance

To get a stab at receiving an appropriate life coaching salary you have to carry on with the business until you arrive at this challenging point, regardless of the problems you encounter along the way. You have to advance in your practice that people say it is easier to undergo a prefrontal lobotomy.

To maintain your passion, review your progress from the day you started. This is more encouraging than trying to figure out how much further you have to continue. Cherish the journey and the scenery from the top will be delightful.

Jeffrey T. Sooey
CEO, JTS Advisors
Founder, Coaches Training Blog community

Helps new and developing coaches with coaching skills and client acquisition by training and mentoring them in good coaching, sales, and marketing best practices.

Works with employers on eliminating hiring mistakes and implementing best practices in hiring employees commensurate with the job attributes.

Partners with executives on growing business and working with employees by combining forces, clarifying goals and articulating strategic plans

When you become a professional life coach, you have to identify your groove. Initially establishing a niche distinguishes your position vis-à-vis your clients. You will be perceived as a specialist, someone who has specific skills and capabilities to address their needs. To this clientele, you are an expert who can respond to and make recommendations for situations that confront them.

The following life coach tips can get you started and put you on the right track.

The ‘Niche Creation and Exploration’ Tips

Life Coach Tip #1

Start with determining your coaching vision clearly by answering these three questions

• What do I enjoy and love doing?
• What can I be an expert at?
• What can I do to earn money?

These questions are simple yet require complex responses which you may not perceive as you are just starting to become a professional life coach. You may even need to get some general coaching experience before you can truly and objectively define your niche. You will realize that the answer to these questions should have something in common- that is where your vision lies.

Life Coach Tip #2

Choose a coaching niche based on these four criteria:

1. Become a professional life coach for a particular group. This can be a religious group, a trade group, an all-female group, or a group that has a common objective, interest or advocacy. For instance, you would like to coach a group of female teenagers (13-19years old) who are engaged in sports. Although you can coach anybody beyond 19 years old who needs your services, the female teenagers is the group you will focus on- this is your target.

2. Be sure that you become a professional life coach in a niche that has likewise actively decided to search for solutions through a life coach. You can discover this by going to the Google key word search tool. Google shows you the exact key word phrases that people use to search what they require and how many times they use those key word phrases.

3. Your life coaching services should be the answer to the niche’s emotional or irrational need.

This tendency has been recognized by experts as the “oholic factor”.

Examples:

• People who are addicted to alcohol, chocolates, work, etc. are referred to as alcoholics, chocoholics, workaholics, have an emotional need.
• People whose home is to be foreclosed have an irrational desire
• Techies who have to own the latest gadget before their friends do, have an irrational desire
• People who are passionate about selling and being #1 have an emotional desire

4. Your target niche should have a few perceived options. They may have options, but they may not be aware of them or not see them as real viable options

Life Coach Tip #3

You will need to hire a life coach yourself who will help you through the process. Employing a life coach should not be an issue. To become a professional life coach demands that you appreciate the value of professional life coaching by becoming a client yourself.

These life coach tips will be invaluable in searching your niche. Some examples of niches are: wellness coaching, relationship coaching, parent coaching, life purpose coaching, career coaching, success coaching, wealth coaching, etc. The list is long. Just be sure that the niche you choose is where your passion lies. Remember that you have the potential of being the best professional life coach. Then you can serve your clients’ requirements and desires by offering excellent advice and solutions.

Jeffrey T. Sooey
CEO, JTS Advisors
Founder, Coaches Training Blog community

Helps new and developing coaches with coaching skills and client acquisition by training and mentoring them in good coaching, sales, and marketing best practices.

Works with employers on eliminating hiring mistakes and implementing best practices in hiring employees commensurate with the job attributes.

Partners with executives on growing business and working with employees by combining forces, clarifying goals and articulating strategic plans

Want to Become a Life Coach? Here’s what you need to be a successful today.

The modern world today is a very challenging time for the professional life coaching service industry. Before, becoming a life coach was as simple as hanging a shingle at your door and clients came. There was a lot of money to spend on this professional service then. Not anymore. Aside from the tough competition, people spend their cash on basic goods and services.

To Illustrate what is required to be a Coach today, Here is a Short Story, “Become a Life Coach” with a Puzzle for You to Solve:

As I was motorcycling through Nepal, a monk hitched a ride with me. We traveled until we reached a monastery hidden way up in the cold mountains. It was then that the monk told me that we had arrived at our destination. The Bodhisattva at the monastery took compassion on me and served me a meal before I left.

When I bade the monk good-bye, he requested me to take him back to where I found him. Remember that this monk rode with me all day just to get to this monastery and he now intended to go all the way back! I asked the monk why he was doing this, thinking that the wise Bodhisattva would explain.

Instead the Bodhisattva replied, “How can I drop an egg without it ever cracking open?” It was a mysterious response that I had to figure out for myself. So I dropped off the monk where I previously found him and went on my journey. It was only long after I had left Nepal and I was back in the USA that I finally got the solution to the puzzle.

The Solution to the Puzzle is Essential for the Practice of Life Coaching and Summarizes What You Need to be a Coach

In truth, I did not motorcycle through Nepal. The story and the riddle within it were actually quoted from The Monk and the Riddle by Randy Komisar. Komisar was the CEO of TIVO, one of the luminary positions in the web 2.0 world. You would learn a lot if you read his book. The story is as relevant today as before and will give you an insight on how to become a successful and effective life coach. Let me enumerate the “cracked eggs” or mistakes to be avoided.

Bad Egg Mistake #1 (Do NOT have a Short Term Mentality):

When someone decides to become a coach the first question that comes to his mind is, “How can I become a life coach quickly? Of course I can show you how to become a life coach and get you clients fast. But what I can explain to you will be useful only in the interim.

Genuine life coaching is learned through years of continuous study, practice and establishing a track record. The get-clients-fast is a short-term mentality that will make you lose your clients as fast as they came to you. Because they will discover that you do not have the expertise and experience to be an effective life coach. They will see through your lack of depth in rendering advice and solving situations.

Becoming a life coach with a short term mentality is the sure way to failure in this field. Before you decide to become a life coach be sure to find out if you were ready to do what it takes to be an expert in that field. If you did not, you will never find the clients that “are the right fit for you”. Then you get frustrated and ultimately give up.

Bad Egg Mistake #2 (Do NOT Think you are Perfect and Put Down the Client):

If you thought that what you need to be a coach is to be perfect and being perfect is to embarrass and to “flatten” your client, then you are in for a great disappointment and eventually failure.

You cannot forever criticize and embarrass your client to satisfy your EGO. Constructive criticism entails putting yourself (the coach) in the client’s shoes, being able to empathize with him and therefore come up with solutions that best suit him. Every client is different. There are a multitude of reasons that trigger a client’s actions. Putting him down will defeat the purpose of life coaching. Then the egotist coach gets rejection after rejection which he hates. He will lose interest. Sooner he will ease into a speaking career, hoping to guest on Oprah.

HOW MANY COACHES HAVE I WORKED WITH WISHED THEY WERE GOING TO BE ON OPRAH? … Lots of them! Because appearing on the show would really be ego boosting!

If you got started in life coaching with a BIG EGO you have to change your attitude. A BIG EGO is not needed to become a successful life coach.

To be a Successful Life Coach in the Long Term, Find Something about Coaching that you are Passionate about!

What about coaching would you be willing to do or be involved with for the rest of your life?

Would you be willing to do the following for as long as you can?

• motivate others and improve lives?
• recommend solutions for others?
• operate a business that supplies personal development products?
• encouraged about being known as a job coach, or a business coach, or a life-purpose coach

Determine the part of coaching that inspires you. As you become a life coach, decide what you would be willing to stay committed to. When you have defined this for yourself, you will have identified what you need to be a coach at the level of greatness.

Then you will never give up. You will work at being a life coach regardless of the difficulties that confront you.

That is the answer to the riddle… “How can I drop an egg without it ever cracking open?”

Simple… Just drop it somewhere where it will fall forever.

Jeffrey T. Sooey
CEO, JTS Advisors
Founder, Coaches Training Blog community

Helps new and developing coaches with coaching skills and client acquisition by training and mentoring them in good coaching, sales, and marketing best practices.

Works with employers on eliminating hiring mistakes and implementing best practices in hiring employees commensurate with the job attributes.

Partners with executives on growing business and working with employees by combining forces, clarifying goals and articulating strategic plans

Any successful organization will have already reviewed what type of compensation packages they can give out and have a deep knowledge of executive compensation from sources such as Effective Executive Compensation: Creating a Total Rewards Strategy for Executives.

An executive position is a high profile position within a company and most businesses will go above and beyond to bring in successful talent to increase the businesses profit or decrease it’s bottom line.

When negotiating executive incentive compensation packages it’s important to align your needs and desires with what the company can afford.

Some of the more common compensation packages are incentive based. These incentives can be from any sort of goals that you and the company put together.

The reason that an incentive compensation package is important to an executive is because he will get what they put in. If the company takes off and has record profits, that executive will get his share of the revenue generated. On the other hand, if things don’t turn out the way they were meant to, the company will not have to shell out tons of money for goals that weren’t reached.

When the offer comes to the table, you may or may not be pleased with what is offered. Even if you are happy with the package, it may not be laid out how you’d like it. Whatever the case, you may have room to negotiate different terms or add perks that weren’t in the original package.

Just like any other negotiation, it may end at any moment. So try to get the items you want in your package, but know what you can let go of or leave off the table altogether.

With downsizing and layoffs, it’s important in today’s workplace to make sure you’re managing your career and your career development. Too many people depend on their managers or leaders within an organization to set their career path for them.

If you’re one of these people, you’ll probably be one of the first people to get cut. Even if you aren’t, your manager or supervisor may be. If they’re gone, what would you do?

Taking personal responsibility will empower you in your career, job search, or your own personal endeavor.

If you don’t know where you’re going, how can you expect anyone else to know where you want to go? This is a time that you have to do a deep dive into your own personal desires and decide what type of career development tools you need. Do you need to take some advanced classes? Do you need to work on some projects to develop new skills?

Your manager can help you, but you have to decide for yourself where you want to go. Once you do this, you can help guide your career to places you want to go and enjoy.