Coaches can help their clients do some pretty incredible things.

But we’re not miracle workers.

If our clients want to lay on the couch all day watching Jerry Springer, and work just five minutes a week on their goals, then our coaching will be useless.

(They’d have more luck taking a shiny quarter and chucking it into a wishing well)

In the “old days”, when I just started coaching, I didn’t really understand this …

If I was working with someone with poor motivation, I tried to make up for it by pouring more effort into our coaching relationship. If the client’s motivation was only 75%, I would give 125% to even things out.

This was the equivalent of my client laying down on the race track, and me having to throw him/her over my shoulder and carry them across the finish line.

Not only was this not fair to me (since it wore me down), it wasn’t fair to my other clients who were actually doing the work.

And it certainly wasn’t fair to the unmotivated client either.

I was enabling them, giving them a pass, and not doing my job.

When I stopped doing that and started calling those clients out on their lack of effort and the excuses they made, one of two things happened:

1) They swung things around and started doing the work, or

2) I chased them out of my world to pull that crap with other coaches.

Although I preferred that they choose door #1, door #2 was a better alternative than me picking up the slack for them.

Since I started taking this approach, the quality of client that I work with has dramatically improved.

One way that I began prequalifying clients better was by introducing an application form for calls with me. It’s not anything crazy, and can be filled out in just a few minutes. But it serves an important purpose: helping to determine how motivated a person is before I hop on a call with them.

The next step, the call, allows me to get an even better feel for the person’s level of motivation.

If someone doesn’t want to spend three minutes filling out the application, or are offended that they have to do it, then they’re disqualifying themselves as a potential client – and saving us both a lot of time.

If you aren’t employing this method already, I strongly encourage you to do it to find out if your prospects want it bad enough.

I’m opening my next group program soon and there’s one spot remaining. If you want success so bad you can taste it, hop on over and tell me more about what you want to do:

www.NaturalBornCoaches.com/call

See you at the finish line.