Coaching, in my opinion, is the best job in the world. We get to gently (or at least compassionately) point people towards where they haven’t been looking and wake them up. We help our clients heal, grow, create, and thrive. We are, in a sense, professionally good human beings.

Yet, the shift from being a talented coach to being a professional coach can be a tricky one. You’re not only a coach now: you're also an entrepreneur, and in a business where a lot of the usual business advice doesn’t apply.

And there’s a lot of bad coaching business advice out there:

• advice that works for other businesses, but not for coaching
• advice that works for other coaches, but not for you
• advice that works for a particular stage of a coaching business, but not for where you’re at right now

​In addition, going pro is like a siren call for all sorts of unresolved personal issues to come forward. If you have any challenges around self discipline, people-pleasing, leadership, or money they are sure to make an appearance in the midst of you learning to meet, serve, and enroll coaching clients. This is often when coaches need support the most, and it is also when they are usually the most resistant to getting support. They want to do it themselves. They want to succeed and make the money, before they invest in help. (This is my story, by the way. I learned a lot, but I definitely did it the unnecessarily hard and painfully slow way.)

If you are in the process of going pro, or it feels like you've hit a plateau, or if you just want to strengthen the foundations of your already flourishing practice, I've created something just for you. I am now enrolling the Coaching with Integrity (CWI) coaching business school: a 6-month journey with a cohort of 12 coaches. It’s a ‘triple-threat’ format, including live immersion weekends, a wealth of video trainings, and an abundance of group coaching. In brief, it’s the school I wish I had when I got started.

The CWI approach is to grow your business by focusing on intimacy and impact, rather than marketing and sales. This is very much in the lineage of Steve Chandler, co-author of The Prosperous Coach. I attended his coaching prosperity school four times in a row near the beginning of my career, and credit my success to him and his teachings. It might sound naive, or too simple, or too good to be true, but I have seen time and time again coaches make the shift and start creating momentum by slowing down and focusing on one conversation at a time. I’ve coached coaches into their first paid client, their first $10k month, their first $100k year, their first $100k client. This school has been germinating in the back of my mind for over four years, and I'm excited to bring that dream into reality this year.

In addition to personalized coaching, there are three areas that I focus on teaching within the school:

Turn Pro

Understanding the business of coaching. Slowing down. Mastering time and energy and discipline. Bringing professionalism rather than people-pleasing, with no loss in compassion. The context of and around coaching conversations, and how to bridge the gap from strangers to being of service.

Serve

What it really means to ‘create’ a client, instead of ‘getting’ or ‘attracting’ clients. Understanding the value of coaching, and everything that’s going on beneath the surface of enrollment. Designing your pricing, offerings, and agreements to align with where your business is at and using everything as an opportunity to serve.

Grow

Stabilizing and creating momentum in your business, often through the efficiency of renewals, referrals, and mastery. How to extend the format of your business into events, groups, content, and tribe without any loss of intimacy and impact.

If any of these are areas you would like to grow in, the Coaching with Integrity school will help!

What's included:

• 6-month group program (May - October 2022)
• cohort of 12 coaches
• launch event and 2 weekend immersions
• weekly/biweekly group coaching calls
• over 20 hours of video trainings (released in 3 parts: Turn Pro, Serve, and Grow)
• structured peer support

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​Benefits

• a rich understanding (the ‘physics’) and inspiring examples of coaching business, instead of someone else’s brittle formulas
• the X factor in your coaching business, that can’t be taught but can be invoked
• living a life dedicated to being of service, while remaining professional and selective of when and how you serve
• bringing more leadership and loving disruption into your profession, while scraping away any people-pleasing
• gentle discipline: being your own best boss, and your own best employee
• creating and playing within your business as a game
• deep understanding of enrollment (under the surface) and everything that needs to happen for a client to hire you
• a healthy, creative relationship with money
• know the value of your coaching
• growing your business through referrals and renewals
• leveraging your uniqueness instead of comparing and competing
• the option to extend the format of your business into events, groups, speaking, content, and tribe

CWI is, in short, my love letter to the coaching industry.

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Find out more at:

P.S. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can watch the recording of the recent online class I led on Coaching Business Myths, which shares some of the fundamental philosophy behind with Coaching with Integrity school:

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​Michael McDonald​
Transformational Coach
​authenticintegrity.com​

This is an offering just for professional coaches. Click here if you're not a coach and I'll exclude you from future coach-specific offerings.