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When it comes to coaching, many folks think they need fancy qualifications or letters after their name to get started. But here's the thing… I was in business for 21 years before anyone asked me about my credentials.

That’s because most clients don’t care about the number of certificates you have hanging on your wall – they care about the results you deliver. Which is good news…

It means you don’t have to wait. You can start serving your audience and making an impact right now
Here’s why results – not credentials – are the real key to coaching success.

Hey, it's Jeff. Today I want to talk about two things that might not seem to go together but they do. I'm talking about credentials and coaching.

It's sort of interesting because after 21 years in business, a couple weeks ago for the very, very first time I had someone ask me about my credentials. It was pretty interesting. It was in an ad I ran on Facebook and someone said, “Well, what are your credentials to be teaching about launches?” And it was interesting. I think I just replied “Well, why don't you just Google me?” And that was it because I have this overwhelming preponderance of evidence that I know what I'm talking about with launches. But none of that evidence has anything to do with credentials or letters after my name or degrees or anything like that. It has to do with results. And I think it's telling that in 21 years, this is the first time I've been asked about my credentials.

So there's a couple different pieces here. I'm going to try to tease it apart. When I started publishing online, the first thing that I published about was  

the stock market. And there are a lot of – you can go get all kinds of credentials, you could go get an MBA ,you can go get a finance degree, you can get a CPA, you can get a RIA – there's no end to the letters you can get after your name but in eight years and publishing in that market no one asked about my credentials. Not once. They were judging me more on what I was publishing on my ability to decipher what was happening in the stock market and what I thought was going to happen. And it all made a lot of sense. And I had the authority in that. I was publishing even though at the start I was just publishing via email. I was just typing something out in my text editor and sending it in an email. There was nothing behind it except  for this idea that I was publishing.

So, there are a lot of people that are held back because they think they need credentials to get started publishing or to get started helping people, to get started coaching people. A lot of people are held back because they think they need credentials. There's a lot of people that are using that as an excuse. And unfortunately, there's a lot of people that are chasing after credentials thinking that those credentials are,  you know, if they get that degree, if they get those letters after their name, all of a sudden, their world will beat a path to their door. And that's not the case. I just got this comment  just recently on my blog fromJacqueline and she says, “I'm an expert. I have diplomas on my wall and $130,000 in student loans to prove it. I have an unsold National award-winning textbook. I  have an unsold course accredited in 130 countries. I have a five-star rating for two years teaching one-on-one online with an average income of $4.30 per hour.” And it just  goes on, it gets worse and worse. So there's someone who does have the official credentials but doesn't know how to market.

So this all sort of ties into this idea of coaching because I've got coaching all the time just recently, last season I got coaching and skiing I've recently got coaching in tennis. I got coaching on my posture. Just yesterday I spent an hour talking to a business coach about how to be a better leader for my team. So I'm just hungry for coaching. I know the fastest way for me to move forward is to get someone with experience, that's done those 10,000 hours to get the experience, and that can transfer that experience to me. It's  the absolute fastest way to success and most very, very, very successful people know this. And that's why they're super happy to pay for coaching.

So you have these couple different things. A lot of people are held back because they feel like, maybe they have experience but they don't have the  certification so they're scared to get out there and start training and start helping. You know, one of the questions I like to ask is for those people who feel like they need certification, you're looking to hire someone with certification, who certifies the people who certify people? So whatever governing board there is that issues certifications in whatever field you're in, who actually certifies those people? Who certifies them so that they can go certify people? It's a little absurd when you start to think about it. It's not  

to say that there are no quality certifications and there's no benefit to certifications but if you think that going and getting a certification is going to change anything for you, you're probably mistaken. I mean there's exceptions. If you're going to get a CPA, if you're going to pass a bar exam, if you're going to go to med school, something like that. But for most of us what you need is good marketing. And you need some clients. You need to coach some people because coaching, I think, is usually the easiest sale because if you can establish that you have experience and expertise then it's easy to make the sale. And establishing that is more about you having the experience and you having the ability to transfer that experience to a client or a student than it is about having letters after your name.

So for most people, don't go chasing those letters after your name. Go chase after getting a few clients so you can build success stories. When I had a tennis coach I didn't ask him about his certifications. I didn't. I don't know if he's a certified tennis instructor. I don't know. I have no idea. What I know is, I watch him. I did. I watched him hit. He was obviously a good tennis player. And then I watched him Coach some people and then I  had a conversation with him and asked him what that would look like to get some coaching from him, you know, you want learn from people with  

experience. And it was clear to me he had a lot of  experience. It's the same thing with my business coach, it's the same thing with the person I'm  working with my posture, and my skiing coach, and on and on. 

So you don't want to chase after credentials. You want to chase after experience and the capability to transfer that experience. And then absolutely foremost is the marketing skills to land those first few clients and then it just grows from there.

So I'm Jeff Walker, wherever you're watching this, scroll down, leave  a comment for me and let's go get him this week.

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