I have been running The Powerful Men’s Immersions every year, multiple times per year, since 2015 and attendees have come from all over the world, including the UK, Australia, Canada, Europe, and the U.S to join us in England for live part of these programs.
It’s not uncommon that many of the men who participated in an Immersion have come back again – even more than 3 times for some of them. Igor Furdik and Arthur Peters are an example of that.
On Sunday, Igor and Arthur shared their experiences and insights from the most recent Immersion that happened from March to September 2023.
Since each Immersion is different, this is a great opportunity to get a glimpse of what was like being in the room this time and what each of them got out of it.
If you are interested in learning more about the Powerful Men’s Immersion, please go to:
Chapters:
00:00 – Introduction
03:00 – Constant Conscious Creation and the Document
07:39 – Transforming Relationships Through Language
13:05 – Dealing with Boredom and Its Possibilities
20:59 – Summary and Closing Thoughts
To ensure that your group programmes always fill, here are some of the tips and facts I’d like to share in no particular order:
1 – Start by designing a group that you would want to attend
It might sound obvious, but if no one is joining your group, perhaps it’s not very interesting or intriguing for people to join. There would be certain groups I would want to be a part of and certain groups I would never be interested in joining. If I would like to attend a group, chances are high that other people would also want to do the same. My Powerful Men’s Immersion started because it was nothing like that existed and it’s something that I would have liked to attend. The same thing is true with my programmes over the years for coaches. They are designed to be something I would pay to participate in as an attendee.
2 – The first person you need to enrol in any group programme is yourself
If you’re not excited about the programme you’re selling, chances are other people won’t be either. This ties into point one: if you’ve designed something outstanding, you can get excited and enthusiastic about it. This enthusiasm will come across in any of your communication with people who might want to attend. If you enrol yourself, you will be able to have other people sign up to your programme via your genuine excitement for the programme.
3 – Don’t hold back
Once you’ve created a great programme and are excited about it, don’t hold back in telling people about it. This differs from one-on-one coaching, where a more personalised and individualised relationship-building approach is more effective. When selling a group programme, you can be more direct in selling it.
4 – Make it visible
If you are on Facebook, change your cover photo to reflect the group programme you’re enrolling for. The same is true for other social media channels. Make sure that if someone checks you out on social media, it’s clear that you’re selling a group programme and where they can go to sign up.
5 – Share all about it
If you have an email list, make sure your email list knows about the programme you’re running and has the links to sign up.
6 – Give the content away
Take advantage of the next point: If you have a sales page, ensure that you spend time and energy making the sales page on your website for your programme great. I used to rush this part of the process, and it was to my detriment. Now, when I run a group programme, I ensure the sales page is not just good but it’s valuable for people and contains content that would help people in some way to get the change that the programme is promising. I used to see sales pages from coaches with just a whole load of text without giving away any of the programme and I want to make sure I do the opposite. With the sales page for the AJC Coaching Career School, for example, there are links to interviews with faculty who deliver the masterclasses for the school. People can watch them for free without signing up to any email list and get an experience of the school.
7 – Leave people with an experience
It is fair to say “no one attends a group they haven’t already attended”. This was a piece of advice that Steve Chandler gave me years ago. It sounds strange, but you need to go beyond just telling people about your group and selling it. You have to provide them with an experience of it. There are many ways to do this, from creating content about what is shared in your group, doing webinars, and giving clips of you speaking at your last group if you’re rerunning it. You can get creative around this. You can even do this in a one-on-one setting, where when you have conversations with people, don’t just talk about the programme; give them an experience of what it might be like to be in the group.
8 – Limit the number of attendees
Set a limit on the number of people you want in the group. I suggest you are on the side of caution. So many coaches try to fill a group and have set themselves a real stretch target about the number of people to get into the group. I suggest that instead of doing that, have a number that you know that you can quite comfortably fill rather than going for a bigger number to push yourself. This will make you feel more at ease whilst filling the programme and is more likely to lead it to be sold out which will encourage people next time to sign up early and give you a reputation for someone who’s very much in demand.
There are a load more tips and ideas I could share with you, but here are some that will be helpful for you in filling your next group.
There’s another powerful audio file I want to present to you where I share an effective way to be direct with your clients and how it will benefit their lives. You can access this audio over the button down below. I highly recommend you listen to this.
Sydney Banks once said life is a contact sport. By that, he meant that even if you got an understanding of the truth he was pointing to – the fact that our experience of life comes to us via our moment-to-moment thinking – that doesn’t stop us from feeling certain emotions.
He was pointing us to the fact that as human beings having an experience on this planet, we’re going to experience a variety of emotions, which is very normal. The benefit of understanding how our mind works is allowing our feelings to pass rather than letting them overtake us or “keep” them around. We can learn not to indulge in the excessive thinking that creates certain emotions.
However, it is normal to feel emotions, from joy to anger, including grief and loss. When someone is dealing with grief and loss, some words from Sydney banks have been beneficial to me, which someone posted on Facebook several years ago, as he was also dealing with that. It’s pretty deep but I know you will appreciate this:
“(When you hear Truth)…you truly, truly know what death is, you know the supreme beauty of death. Death is nothing to fear. The churches talk about Hell. There’s no such thing as Hell. There really isn’t. The only Hell that exists is in the minds right now. We’re doing that. Put there by thought, our thought. This is the Hell. Death, the so-called death, is just a dropping of the body. Simple, really simple. It’s a dropping of the body, but the conscious state remains. The conscious state never dies. Never. This is why reincarnation…you return with the level of conscious state that you left with.” –Sydney Banks, 1975 Victoria Tape, side 2.
“The moment of death is the happiest moment of your life.” –Sydney Banks.
“When you die, you go Home. I guarantee you, you go Home to God … to the Energy of All Things.” –Sydney Banks, The Hawaii Lectures, (Lone Pine Publishing).
Sebastian Eck interviewed me a while ago about my past and my experiences with emotions like fear, frustration and stress. In the conversation, I share how we can overcome them. If you want to listen to this, click on the image below.
One of my clients once asked me, “how do you always have a resource that is appropriate and out for whatever I’m going through?” It’s a great question he asked me because whilst it might seem like I have a magical resource library, it’s actually one I’ve cultivated and grown over the years.
My coaches and mentors have often shared resources with me; when they do, I keep a note of them somewhere. Over time, this resource library of my content and the content by Steve Chandler, Steve Hardison, or Keith Blevens built up.
I was able to appropriately share these with clients because the content in them is so good. Some of the content is so amazing that if I worked with a client for a year and only sent them one resource a week, it would significantly improve their life.
Most successful coaches I know are voracious learners. They have consumed a lot of really great content. My advice to them would be to collate that somewhere where it’s easily accessible. And don’t be afraid to share content that other people create.
A coach in my online community once said that you should never share content you haven’t created because it will send clients to the person who made the content. That has not been my experience.
Most people don’t read a book and then hire the author. Most people don’t listen to a great podcast and then go and hire the person on the podcast. They appreciate the person who sent them the resource after telling them that it would be valuable for them while going through whatever they’re going through at that moment.
So in conclusion, if you’re willing to put some time and energy into collating the resources you appreciate, enjoy and consume. Be ready to share these with clients even if you haven’t created them yourself. With time, you’ll have an excellent resource library that will be very valuable for anyone who works with you.
My team created very special audio files about different subjects, taken from the webinars I did at the last AJC Coaching Career School. The one I’d like to share with you today is on the topic of “how to do effective coaching intake with simple questions”. You can access this audio over the button down below. I highly recommend you listen to this.
One of the things that’s really important to me is to be a role model for my son and to be an amazing father.
In fact, every morning and every evening, I say my set of declarations around who I’m creating myself to be and two of the declarations are:
I’m an amazing husband and father.
I’m an incredible role model for my son.
These two statements have been guiding principles for how I show up in the world. When there is a decision to be made, I often run it through the statements as in “Am I being a role model for my son when I did take this action?”, “Am I being an amazing father when I do this or don’t do that?”
I found that just having this as a direction to move has completely shifted how I show up as a parent.
I found that I end up spending more quality time with my son because that’s what an amazing father would do. I’m finding that I am turning into a better man, because it’s so important for me to be a role model for my son.
I don’t think that I ever was aware of what it meant to be an amazing father.
The “how to” as Steve Chandler would tell me, is never the issue. It’s the “want to” and when I got really clear that I wanted to be an incredible role model and amazing father for my son, I made that internal commitment to be that, and everything started shifting. Because the “how to’s” that I already knew, I started to actually do them.
I believe every father knows deep down a dozen things they could do right now to be a better father to their children. Here are just some of mine, in no particular order:
I tell my son every day that I love him, I’m proud of him and I’m glad that he’s mine.
I make sure I spend quality time with my son almost every single day. For me, this is reading him books during that time.
I am being a role model of eating healthily, which encourages him to eat healthy.
I set boundaries for him, and when he has crossed the boundary and he might get upset I let him know he is still loved.
I make sure I keep my word to him. If I tell him I’m going to do something or be somewhere or buy him something I will do it.
I ensure that I am financially successful and help him see that we are all powerful creators who live in abundance.
I remind him that we help out those less fortunate than ourselves.
I encourage him to be kind by being kind to myself.
When I have done wrong, I apologise.
I’d love to hear some of the things you do that have made you a better father.
Many coaches use formal coaching agreements with clients and sometimes people ask me what do I use.
Now whilst I do have a formal coaching agreement, it has really evolved over the years.
My coaching agreement is less a legal document that is protecting my business interest and instead it is a jumping off point for creating a powerful agreement in how the client and I will work well together and how they can get the most out of the coaching.
One of the ways that I do this is by spending a long time in our first session going through the coaching agreement and not only speaking it through but talking around the document what it means for the client and having them ask questions. This process can take up to two hours.
What I have found is this is not a waste of time. In fact, this is an incredible investment of time that makes the rest of the coaching way more impactful because it gets us on the same page. And it is the only time where I will offer the client a refund if they don’t want to continue.
I really believe that any coach who wants to be more impactful in the work they do can accomplish that by strengthening their agreements with clients. To not be afraid to ask for things, to have the client show up in a way that will have them get more out of the coaching, and to spend time going through this, so the client absolutely understands what they are agreeing to.
On the last AJC Coaching Career School, I did a number of practical webinars for coaches addressing every area of building a sustainable practice. Here’s an audio snippet from one of these webinars in which I talk about creating a strong context for the first coaching session. I highly recommend you listen to this for your next first session that you’ll have with your client.
