As an agile coach, are you getting what you want?
You likely got into agile coaching to help people, teams, and organizations shift their mindsets, and adopt agile principles, practices, and values. Most importantly you want to help your clients deliver spectacular results.
You believe in agile.
You’ve put in a lot of work to skill up and build your expertise. You’ve helped lots of teams become more effective. You’ve touched many lives.
You’re good at it.
But lately, you have been coping with less than what you really want. You wonder how you can get higher level coaching assignments at greater billing rates. You wonder how you can deliver even more value to your clients, more effective agile change, faster. You wonder how you can get more engaged and committed clients.
Moreover, it’s getting more and more difficult to compete in an agile coaching marketplace that has evolved and matured. There are more agile coaches than ever before. Everyone has tons of credentials and experience. Clients see agile coaches as offering similar services so they shop for low billing rates.
It can be discouraging when you struggle to get to the next level of your profession.
You want to stop coping with what you have and start growing your business – but you don’t know how.
Let’s take a closer look at some agile coaching problems and how you can effectively respond to these challenges.
Problem: differentiating yourself
As a coach, you are experienced and ready to advance to the next level of your coaching practice. But clients are offering you coaching roles and billing rates that do not reflect the level at which you want to practice. It may be because you don’t stand out in a crowded market.
The latest tools, credentials, and frameworks keep you abreast, but everyone is doing that. You cannot sufficiently differentiate yourself that way.
So how can you differentiate yourself? There’s a proven approach for this.
First, let’s look at another problem.
Problem: slow – or no – change
As a coach, you get frustrated when you can’t affect the culture change you – and presumably your client – desire. You feel discouraged when things go wrong or happen too slowly. You feel demoralized when your client demonstrates resistance, defensiveness, blame, excuses, and disengagement.
You find yourself hitting your head against the wall and blaming your clients, the situation, or yourself.
So how can you be more effective in helping your clients change their culture? There’s an effective answer for this.
Let’s look at one more problem.
Problem: feeling stuck
When you find yourself feeling less effective and valuable than you want to be, it may indicate that you are stuck.
“Stuck” means being blocked from getting something that you desperately want, and not knowing what to do about it.
When you are stuck, your mind keeps chewing on questions like “why?”, “how?”, “when?”, and “if only?.” You invest endless mental cycles wondering what to do, but nothing changes. You blame others, circumstances, or self, or you feel trapped in a pattern you don’t know how to change. You feel like quitting
You cope with what you don’t want. It’s tempting to think “that’s just the way it is.”
So how can you get unstuck? There’s a confirmed approach for this.
You’ve tried everything you know to address these problems. Maybe it’s time to try something different – something you don’t yet know.
Now is the time to take 100% Responsibility for your agile coaching career
Yes, you are a person of great character – an experienced, effective professional and a responsible citizen. That doesn’t mean you are taking 100% Responsibility.
There is a humongous difference between being a person of good character and taking 100% Responsibility for your career – and life.
Responsibility is your natural ability to respond (response-ability). You were born with this ability. However, you have likely not developed it. (Most haven’t.)
Why haven’t you developed it? Because society has focused on developing your intellect and character – so that you conform to expectations – rather than your ability to respond with your unique genius and inspiration. Also, society has taught you to think “that’s just the way it is.” This is coping, and coping is overrated.
When you take 100% Responsibility for your career and life, you stop coping, elevate your agile coaching practice, attract the gigs and rates you want, and shape your destiny.
You can do this
Everywhere in your coaching practice (and life) that isn’t producing meaningful results invites you to take 100% Responsibility.
Yes, it’s common to think that the reason you aren’t getting what you want is “out there” (out of your control). It isn’t.
Warning: one of many major Responsibility secrets spilling here.
The real problem is always “in here” (in your mind). Solving problems starts in your mind.
When you take 100% Responsibility for your mind, you think at an entirely different advanced level that enables you to improve continuously – that is, stop coping and start growing. Everything in your life changes. You become a more effective coach – and a more fulfilled human.
Taking 100% Responsibility is a skill set.
With this skill set, you learn to see every problem and obstacle as originating in your mind. You realize that your mind is both powerful and limiting (in the sense of repetitive, unproductive thinking patterns – and getting stuck). You learn how to systematically change your thinking and tap into your innate mental power.
Consider these solutions to the problems above.
Solution: differentiate yourself
When you take 100% Responsibility, you immediately separate yourself from the pack because you:
- Develop ever-greater awareness and consciousness so that you become wiser at will and more authentic, intentional, and effective.
- Tap into your innate ability to lead yourself and others to produce results that matter in a way that is uniquely you.
- Handle your “stuff” (that is, do your emotional work) so you can be more available to help others handle their “stuff”.
- Show up with empathy and compassion so you can productively address lack of engagement, confusion, or resistance.
- Become a bold and courageous negotiator during the business contracting, statement of work, or project definition phase so you set yourself and your client up for success – become completely clear about your value, how it fits the client’s business goals, and how you want to deliver it – become direct and transparent about to whom in the organization you want access so you can ensure wins all around.
These exceptional skills enable you to provide far greater value and outpace your competition. Doing so clearly differentiates you.
Solution: change from the inside out
When you take 100% Responsibility, you demonstrate the very essence of agility and change because you:
- Lead others to take Responsibility for their lives and the changes they want or a change you are facing together.
- Develop profound awareness by accelerating your own ability to change and grow.
- Respond effectively to the unexpected (the essence of change) so people move beyond their natural reactions of resistance, defensiveness, blame, and feeling trapped.
- Expose faulty assumptions, limiting beliefs, false stories, and ineffective advice so you can see clearly and respond more rapidly to affect change.
- Demonstrate high levels of compassion for people resisting change so that your empathy softens them and helps them lean in.
These breakthrough abilities help you interact effectively with others, move beyond the constraints of current situations, and achieve more meaningful results.
Solution: get unstuck
When you take 100% Responsibility for your life (and your stuckness), you produce results that matter and feel more alive because you:
- Recognize quickly when you are stuck and know what to do about it.
- Free up unproductive mental cycles to be far more resourceful in identifying and solving problems.
- Tap into deep mental and emotional resourcefulness that you don’t even know you have.
- Apply clear intention to every situation to produce the results you want.
- Rapidly get past blaming people, circumstances, and yourself where you can start to see what is possible.
These advanced skills allow you to move off of stuckness, use your creative potential to solve problems, and become more effective in everything you do.
Let’s look at what is possible.
It’s not about what you learn, it is who you become
To recap, here’s how taking 100% Responsibility allows you to transform your life as a coach.
You don’t stay stuck, endlessly spinning (coping), trying to figure out what to do. Instead, you acquire mental skills for quickly recognizing when you are stuck and getting unstuck, so you grow and move forward.
You feel more effective in everything you do.
You don’t just apply the same old strategies to grapple with change and hope for different results. Instead, you affect change by expanding your awareness, engaging new mental skills, and tapping into your increased wisdom so you can show up at a whole different level.
You feel satisfied because you help people discover and get what they want.
You don’t just apply the same strategies and approaches as other agile coaches. Instead, you change your perspective. And when you see what no one else is seeing, you differentiate yourself and the value you provide.
You feel powerful because you get the coaching gigs you want at higher rates and know that you can deliver for your clients.
When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
If you think you are agile now, just wait
Hi, I’m Christopher Avery (Ph.D., if that matters).
I support agile coaches and leaders in generating far greater freedom, choice, and power in all aspects of their lives.
“Freedom” means release from limiting beliefs, traps, binds, struggles, and suffering. Your mind feels roomy and spacious, and you have a greater mental capacity for things that matter.
“Choice” means seeing meaningful options everywhere and knowing that you are at cause rather than at effect in your life. Things don’t happen to you, you make things happen.
“Power” (self-empowerment) means taking charge of your reality. You realize that you alone are keeping yourself stuck or moving yourself forward.
I’ve authored two 5-star books, thousands of articles, commentaries, and other content; designed award-winning leadership development programs; and taught leaders and coaches worldwide how taking 100% Responsibility works.
I gave the keynote address on Responsibility and Self-leadership at the 2004 XP/Agile Universe conference in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. I have since given keynotes at agile conferences from Melbourne to Warsaw and everywhere in between.
Here’s what an in-demand globe-trotting agile coach says about taking 100% Responsibility (he’s writing to a fellow agile coach):
Tim,
I recommend Avery’s Responsibility program to you in the strongest terms possible.
I signed up for the program quite a few years ago. I still find it tremendously worthwhile.
Christopher’s work deeply transformed the way I work with clients. I have come to regard him as a personal friend. I encouraged Christopher to find a way to scale his work, so it doesn’t require local presence — partly because the world needs his work and partly because I needed more access to his help. When he launched his first remote and scalable approach to Responsibility, I jumped in immediately.
Mastering personal responsibility is the foundation of Avery’s program. This is the most fundamental skill to behave in an agile manner. Every single agile tool I can offer a client is entirely negated if that client is operating non-responsibly. My ability to help them depends on my ability to help them rapidly return to a place of personal responsibility.
Avery’s Responsibility program is invaluable, perhaps indispensable, for anyone involved in coaching.
The jewel of Avery’s program isn’t only the knowledge he shares, it’s the opportunity for live practice. What he calls “Application Mastery” involves you and others bringing problems that they’re currently stuck on — and being facilitated through getting unstuck. Going through this process, and learning to help others go through it, ultimately increases one’s ability to self-facilitate getting unstuck. That change will not only transform your coaching, it can change your life.
It’s the most useful coaching tool I’ve ever found.
Best regards,
– Ashley Johnson
Experts say that the first principle for success is taking 100% Responsibility
But how, exactly?
The Responsibility Company has a research-based, proven system to take 100% Responsibility. It is the first how-to approach for understanding, taking, and inspiring personal responsibility.
And it is based on how the mind naturally works – this makes it powerful.
Individuals, leaders, coaches, and agilists use this approach to take charge of their mind and life.
Do you want to stay stuck in your current agile coach reality?
- Stuck wishing you could be more effective for your clients.
- Stuck repeating the same agile coaching approaches that aren’t moving the needle as much as you want.
- Stuck chasing the latest credential.
- Stuck competing in the commodity market with the gigs and rates that you now have.
Or, are you ready to move into a new reality of agile coaching?
Change your world today
I want you to learn what I call Responsibility-thinking. Taking 100% Responsibility means practicing Responsibility-thinking every day.
Responsibility-thinking is a proven technology — an applied behavioral science — for taking charge of your mind.
I invite you to sign up for a short series of complimentary emails to learn more about Responsibility-thinking and taking 100% Responsibility for your career and life.
The series — Responsibility-Thinking: From Coping to Thriving — is all content. No fluff. I go deeper into the most important tools so you can make an informed decision about whether Responsibility-thinking is for you. The series is three emails. One a day for three days — all value-packed, no selling.
At the end of the third email, you can request more information about our email training course – Launching Your Responsibility-Thinking Practice.
When you sign up for the complimentary email series, we’ll also consider you a member of the worldwide Responsibility Community to whom we send occasional high-value (no selling) content. We always treat you with the utmost respect. No sales ploys. No gimmicks. No pressure. Complete transparency. Our approach is to serve first with value and human kindness.
Sign up here
Expect to receive the first email immediately. Opt-out at any time if the series is not for you.
You may also receive a confirmation email requesting you to confirm your email address. Please click the confirmation link or you won’t receive anything.
