Episode 336: Success with Journal-Based Coaching for Leaders

 Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

0:00:53 – (Brynne Tillman): Welcome back to Making Sales Social. I am thrilled to have Kim Ades here. President and founder of Frame of Mind Coaching and the co-creator of the journal Engine software, Kim is a pioneer in the field of personal development with a uniquely effective coaching style that helps clients not only achieve high levels of success but also personal transformation. Her work revolves around the core principle that leaders’ unique thinking patterns directly affect their, their outcomes, and that changing these patterns can unlock their true potential.

0:01:30 – (Brynne Tillman): Kim is going to share some insights into her innovative method of journal based coaching and how it’s transforming the art of leadership. Kim, welcome to the show.

0:01:42 – (Kim Ades): Thank you. I’m so excited to be here. I’m really, really looking forward to it.

0:01:46 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, I’m thrilled to have you here. You’re bringing in a brand new way of thinking and I’m excited for me and the listeners. So before I jump in to really your expertise, we ask every one of our guests one question, which is, what does making sales social mean to you?

0:02:09 – (Kim Ades): For me, it means making sure you’re selling something that somebody actually needs. And so what I mean by that is the social aspect is taking the time to really understand the person in front of you, what they’re struggling with, and whether or not your solution service product actually solves a problem or a need that they have. So it’s not just trying to shove it down their throats, but take that, taking that time upfront to really make sure that it’s a fit.

0:02:43 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, I love that. Yeah. So we’re selling in a way that we’re providing a solution, not just making a commission.

0:02:51 – (Kim Ades): That’s right. That’s right. And it’s really, it’s taking the social time to get to know someone before you know, you’re just trying to force something.

0:03:02 – (Brynne Tillman): Love that. That’s a powerful one. I appreciate that. Well, I’m excited to jump into your expertise. And you’re really known for the journal-style coaching, right? And the impact that has. So journaling is central to your coaching methodology. How does writing help your clients uncover and address those deep-seated beliefs that might be holding them back?

0:03:29 – (Kim Ades): Let me kind of explain the methodology or the process that we use for coaching. So, first of all, we coach very highly driven individuals. They often own businesses. They’re entrepreneurs or C-suites. They’re, you know, they’re achieving large goals and they’re doing well. But these people also struggle, and they struggle with all kinds of things. They struggle with isolation, they struggle with feelings of self-doubt or the feeling like they haven’t quite achieved everything they’re meant to achieve. Sometimes they struggle with friction with others, and a lot of times they’re not really taking great care of themselves.

0:04:04 – (Kim Ades): But, you know, just because they’re achievers doesn’t mean that they don’t struggle. And so my job as a coach is to try to help them get results quickly because they don’t have patience, right. These are high achievers. They’re like, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go. So what we have done is we’ve created a very intensive, intimate, upfront or front-loaded experience. And so what happens is we always start off with only ten weeks.

0:04:27 – (Kim Ades): And in those ten weeks we have a call every week. And in between every call, we ask our clients to journal in a private and secure online journaling platform that we created ourselves with their coach every single day. So we don’t give them any days off, no weekends, no vacations. At the beginning of the week, we give them a journaling question or a prompt, and then they journal with their coach. And every time they journal their coach again, I have a team of coaches is on the other side of that journal, and they read and respond to the journal every single day. And what is the coach doing? They’re digging deeper.

0:05:04 – (Kim Ades): They’re going beyond the surface. They’re asking questions, they’re understanding their storyline. But really, what are they after? They’re after they’re looking for patterns, patterns of thought, beliefs, behaviors, and really to understand how the person is wired and how their wiring impacts what they do and the outcomes they get.

0:05:23 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that. So ultimately, you feel that the writing exercise is more effective than kind of just having those conversations that a typical coach might have?

0:05:37 – (Kim Ades): Well, look, when you have a conversation as a coach, if I have a conversation with my client once a week, once every other week, I only get so much content, right? And I’m missing out on everything else. I’m missing out on what’s happening on a day-to-day basis. I’m missing the backstory. I’m just missing so much. And so when I get to that call, I’m catching up. And so there’s only so much I can do when I’m so busy catching up.

0:06:01 – (Kim Ades): But when I’m asking my client to journal every single day, I’m covering far more ground, but there’s more that’s happening. Not only am I covering more ground and I’m understanding this person better, but I’m also building a relationship. And you and I know that the only way that the client is going to move forward is if they have that relationship with the coach. That relationship is central. So imagine you’re journaling every day, but I’m reading and responding every single day. I don’t miss a day.

0:06:29 – (Kim Ades): So what does that mean? We’re traveling together. We’re in a boat, we’re rowing. We’re rowing. And you start to believe that I’m pulling my weight, that I’m rowing just as hard or harder than you. So what happens? Magic happens because now you let down your guard. Now we go down to the difficult, you know, more important issues that we really need to address and help you through, really understanding what’s getting in the way of your success.

0:06:57 – (Kim Ades): And so that relationship gets built and we go deep. So we’re going deep, we’re going fast, and we’re going together.

0:07:07 – (Brynne Tillman): So I love this. Talk to me a little bit, though, of how you kind of interpret some of those journal entries and how do you provide feedback to help that client grow?

0:07:18 – (Kim Ades): Okay, so it depends on the stage of the journaling journey or the coaching journey, right? So at the beginning, what I’m trying to do is understand a person’s storyline, understand how they show up in their world now in the past, right. How they interact with people. So I’m trying to understand what’s going on right now. So in the beginning, what I’m doing is I’m just asking a lot of questions. So, for example, if they say, here’s something that happened to me in the past, my question might be, but, so how did you react to that thing? How did you recover from that thing?

0:07:54 – (Kim Ades): Or I’ll give you a perfect example, like, I’m working with a new client. She’s a genius. She went to Ivy League schools, top 5% in her class and just crushed it all along. And she’s telling me about that experience she had. But now my question might be, well, what was your social life like? She didn’t mention her social life, but I’m curious. I want a more rounded picture. I want to know, did she have any romantic relationships?

0:08:20 – (Kim Ades): What was it like when she was away from home? And on and on and on. So I’m getting a well rounded story up front in that process. What I’m starting to do is connect dots. Oh. So this happened to her here, and she behaved this way. And now in her life, currently, she’s behaving this way. These two things are connected. She’s exhibiting a pattern, and that pattern is getting in the way.

0:08:46 – (Brynne Tillman): So interesting. So I would say the majority of the people that are listening to the podcast are in some kind of business development role. How can journaling help them do a better job of connecting with prospects and closing more business?

0:09:02 – (Kim Ades): I’ll tell you a very good story, okay? Like, it’s so good, it’s crazy. One of the journaling prompts that I give my clients is that I want them to write an ideal conversation. It could be with anyone they choose. It could be with someone famous, someone dead, someone they’re dying to meet, like an old boyfriend. It doesn’t really matter, right? Anyone. The only parameter is it must be an ideal conversation.

0:09:26 – (Kim Ades): So I had a client who was responsible for sales in her company, and she decided that what she wanted more than anything was to become secretary of state. And in her ideal conversation, she wrote an interview scenario. Okay? And so in the interview, they said, wow, we read your resume. It’s amazing. You look really, really qualified for this position. But tell me in. Tell us in your own words, what makes you the ideal candidate? What makes you truly the one that we should choose to? And in her journal, keep in mind, she’s journaling to me. She wrote, like, paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs about her qualifications.

0:10:01 – (Kim Ades): She wrote about her education, she wrote about her history. She wrote about her culture and how her family came from Japan and started a company and contributed to the US economy. Then she wrote a ten point plan about everything she would do in the role of secretary of state. And then they said, wow, you’re so impressive. And as soon as we’ve interviewed all the candidates, we’ll get back to you. And at the bottom of her journal, she wrote, how’s that for dreaming biggest?

0:10:27 – (Kim Ades): Brynne, I’m going to ask you, do you think she’s dreaming big?

0:10:30 – (Brynne Tillman): I think it sounds like she’s dreaming. Appropriately big. I don’t.

0:10:34 – (Kim Ades): I mean, it’s appropriately big. That’s an interesting word. That’s a cautious word.

0:10:41 – (Brynne Tillman): What’s that?

0:10:42 – (Kim Ades): That’s a cautious word. Yeah. So the truth is, I gave her a blank slate to create anything she wanted. Did she give herself the job?

0:10:50 – (Brynne Tillman): She gave herself an opportunity, yeah, but.

0:10:52 – (Kim Ades): She didn’t give herself the job. What she gave herself is a blank slate to prove her value, where she had to go to an extreme length to explain why she was worth it, why she was worthy. And when we looked at her sales, what we noticed was that she wasn’t closing deals. She was getting all kinds of opportunities. She was not closing deals. She wasn’t asking for the sale.

0:11:18 – (Brynne Tillman): She wasn’t asking for the job either.

0:11:20 – (Kim Ades): Yeah, asking for the job. And so when she realized this is what she was doing, this is her pattern. Literally, the following three months, she exceeded her entire previous year’s sales. And that’s because when you start to understand how your thinking impacts everything you do and how you execute and ultimately your results, your world changes. So am I here on this earth just to help people increase their sales?

0:11:49 – (Kim Ades): No, but that’s what happens.

0:11:51 – (Brynne Tillman): That’s a real mic drop moment. Like, that’s really, really powerful.

0:11:55 – (Kim Ades): Really powerful.

0:11:57 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. I love that. I love that. Wow. So that’s really a transformative story in how someone can really just shift the way they think about their dreams. So I understand now how the power of journaling and writing can really be effective. What happens when you have a client who’s resistant to that change? Like, what? And, like, what does that look like? They’re like, okay. Like, I guess they become.

0:12:27 – (Brynne Tillman): They, you know, they’ve got excuses of why or they defend their behavior. How do you overcome that?

0:12:35 – (Kim Ades): So, I mean, I’m going to answer you in two diametrically opposed ways. Okay. Okay. The first. And so. And they’re contradictory because that’s the way it goes. Right. So the first thing that I want to say is that people come to me for coaching because they know that they are going to get a whole other level of attention. And so journaling is part of the process, and that’s what they’re buying into.

0:13:00 – (Kim Ades): Right. So they know, they understand, and they journal. And most of my clients journal every single day, and there’s no issue. Sure, they’ll miss a day, you know, here and there. Family reasons, whatever. No problem. Does it happen that someone understands what they’re buying into, but they still struggle to journal? Yes, of course. And I’ll tell you a whole different story. I had a client who was always late for calls.

0:13:28 – (Kim Ades): He canceled on me all the time. When he showed up, he looked like he was always, like, tired. He needed to sleep, you know? And he was never journaling. Never journaling. And every time I saw him on my calendar, I’m like, oh, no. Like, I don’t even know what to talk to him about at this point. I feel like I’m super skimming. It’s not good. Like, this is not how I coach. This is not my ideal client. This is a disaster, right? And I was not looking forward to it.

0:13:56 – (Kim Ades): But finally I said, listen, like, you’re not journaling, you know, you’re missing calls, you’re showing up late. What’s going on? He’s like, I’m really tired. I’m like, why are you so tired of. He said I can’t sleep. I said, why can’t you sleep? He said I’m having terrible nightmares. I said, okay, we’re changing the way we coach. And what I did instead was I said, this is what we’re going to do.

0:14:22 – (Kim Ades): I’m throwing out everything I know about coaching, and what I’m going to do is I’m going to interview you. I want to know every single moment of your life from birth until now. And I’m just going to interview you. I’m not going to coach you. I’m just going to interview you so you can offload everything that’s brewing up inside of you so you can sleep better, right? And so he never missed another call.

0:14:49 – (Kim Ades): He was never late again. And he just started talking and talking and talking and talking. And I would ask some questions, right? I would take hundreds of notes, but we were recording every call so that he could have the transcript. In a way, that transcript behaved as his journal.

0:15:07 – (Brynne Tillman): That’s awesome.

0:15:08 – (Kim Ades): Right? So do we sometimes need to change the game? Yes. But if we, if we approach every client individually, but we have a set of principles, a way that we operate, which is, for me, I started coaching 20 years ago, and when I started coaching 20 years ago, I had one question, and I became obsessed with this question. How do we deliver exceptional coaching? Period. End of story. How do we do it in such a way that they are sure they have no question about the value that you deliver, that it’s tangible and real, and that they go around telling everybody about you and your services and that when they need you, they come back when they do.

0:15:47 – (Kim Ades): How do we do that? That’s the question.

0:15:50 – (Brynne Tillman): That’s fantastic.

0:15:52 – (Kim Ades): The way we do that is by becoming intimate with our clients and giving them what they need when they need it. And sometimes it means you need to, you know, go away from your original plan for five minutes and then come back.

0:16:08 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, I love that. And I do love that. It’s really tailored to every client. That makes so much sense.

0:16:14 – (Kim Ades): Yeah, of course.

0:16:15 – (Brynne Tillman): So as we’re wrapping, coming down to kind of a wrap on this, my second to last question is, what question did I not ask you that I should have?

0:16:28 – (Kim Ades): You know, you might want to ask me, like, what’s the best way for people to reach me? Well, that’s the last question.

0:16:37 – (Brynne Tillman): That’s the last one.

0:16:38 – (Kim Ades): So I think, I think a really great question is, what’s a great journaling prompt that people can use to make some progress on their own?

0:16:46 – (Brynne Tillman): Awesome. What’s a great journaling prompt that people can use to make progress on their own?

0:16:50 – (Kim Ades): So I’m going to give you two answers to that. Number one is we have a series of journaling prompts that people can access on the website. And I’ll give that to you in a minute. But a really great journaling prompt is two questions, one and two. Question number one is, what do you really, really want more than anything in the world? Write it down. And I said two reallys, right? I said, really, really? What do you really, really want? Because I want you to think about what you truly, deeply want. Not what is expected of you, not what you think you should want, not what other people want for you.

0:17:26 – (Kim Ades): Not thinking about only what you can have. Right. Don’t think about what’s realistic, but think about what you truly, deeply want. The second question is, ask yourself, why don’t I have it now? What’s getting in the way? And write down all the reasons. And what I want you to understand is that your answer to that question is a function of your beliefs, of your mindset, of your perspective on yourself.

0:17:59 – (Kim Ades): And it’s a really great starting point to start to do a little bit of personal assessment or like really analyzing how your thinking is impacting you. And if you’re really bold, you can send it to me and I will respond to that journaling prompt. You can find me.

0:18:20 – (Brynne Tillman): That’s amazing. So where can they find you?

0:18:23 – (Kim Ades): So, kimraamofmindcoaching.com, for starters. And if you want those journaling prompts, go to frameofmindcoaching.com dot. You can find me there.

0:18:35 – (Brynne Tillman): Wonderful. Thank you so much. There were such great nuggets, and I am going to start with those prompts. Uh, I think that. I mean, it was a little gut punch when I heard the second question, which is, why aren’t you getting it now? And then I realized, wow, we got to know that.

0:18:54 – (Kim Ades): Well, it’s not that we got to know that. Most of us don’t know that because we. We will come up with all the reasons. But the real reason, the biggest, the biggest thing getting in our own way is, is the thinking we’re unaware of. And the process that I engage in is to make that come to surface so that we could really look at it and help you change the way you think, change your belief systems, to line up your beliefs with your goals so it becomes easy to get to where you need to go.

0:19:29 – (Brynne Tillman): Brilliant. I love this. Thank you so much. And thank you for sharing your insights with the audience.

0:19:34 – (Kim Ades): Thank you so much for having me on your show.

0:19:36 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, I love it. I can’t wait to hear all the great feedback because I know people are going to absolutely love this. So thank you so much. And for all our listeners, when you’re out and about, don’t forget to make your sales social.

Outro:

Thanks for watching and join us again for more special guest instructors, bringing you marketing, sales training, and social selling strategies that will set you apart. Hit the subscribe button below to get the latest episodes from the Making Sales Social podcast give this video a thumbs up and comment down below on what you want to hear from us next. You can also listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Play. Visit our website, socialsaleslink.com for more information.