Part 3: What service is and what it isn’t
Ankush speaks about the things he wished he’d known when started coaching. In this part 3, he talks about how building a coaching practice is about service, not sales – and what ‘service’ really is.
Contact Details:
To find more resources for coaches, please visit https://ankushjain.co.uk/coaches/
To grow your own coaching practice and become a more impactful coach, check out Ankush’s online course with Dr Mark Howard: https://ankushkumarjain.podia.com/building-the-impactful-and-sustainable-3p-coaching-practice
Full transcript:
Ankush: I love that you mention the word service because I’d like to talk about that a little bit. Because that was something that was really big for me in terms of what I thought service meant, what I thought I had to approach because my first thought was, I needed to be a good coach and I needed to sell.
I thought there was a selling aspect, and what I realized was, it’s not really about sales, it’s not really about selling, it’s more about service. But I really misunderstood what the word service meant, and I kind of got that from retail customer service, and in my head it was giving the customer whatever it is that they want or whatever it is that they say they want and achieving a high satisfaction, but the way I look at service now isn’t that, and service doesn’t mean being subservient, it doesn’t mean just doing whatever anyone else wants or says they want.
Service can be quite tough, and I had a client or a prospective client recently, and they missed a couple of sessions, and I had to have a difficult conversation with them. Where I kind of had to tell them, “look, what’s showing up in your world, that I forgot about the session, they were really busy, stuff was going on.” I said, “I’m not going to really be serving you if I say, “don’t worry about it.”
” I’m also not going to be serving you if I have a go, if I tell you off. But service in that situation was letting the person know the truth, which is, their behaviour in that situation was an indication of their behaviour in other parts of their life. Which was having a negative impact and they were really grateful for that, and then that led to a much deeper conversation that we ended up having, which was incredibly powerful, but a couple of years ago I wouldn’t have been able to have that conversation, and I wouldn’t have had that concept of service.
