A fellow colleague told me the story about a training organization that is not functioning very well. They are not paying their employees on time and have very little internal communication. Needless to say they are not working as effectively and the morale is at an all time low. This obviously affects their service delivery as staff do not feel valued and also impacts direct business. Their enrollments for courses and workshops are struggling to fill up. The energy is negative and thus so is the results that they are getting. From an outsider’s perspective I ask " if you do not have integrity and value towards your employees how can you attract new business and retain good working relationships with your clients?". As I often say, if you work on the internal and get this right then the external will match this, as you become congruent with your environment and you begin to attract opportunities and meet the right people that will help you on your journey. As a coach, ...

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Keeping a relationship sweet with a spouse or partner over the years can often be pretty challenging. The same can also be said of business relationships. Put the two together and WOW! The concept of 'relationship skills' will take on a whole different meaning! Having lived and worked together with my husband for over 20 years, both in a  home office and away from home premises. Needless to say there have been “moments”, while we’ve learned a lot about how to run a micro business together, we've also found ways to keep our personal relationship interesting and romantic. Here are some of the strategies we have developed: • Keep the space between you clean with regular WIFLS (What I feel like saying).  Often before we go to bed at night, or even during the day if one of us can feel some tension, we ask, “Have you any WIFLS”.  This can quickly handle any misunderstandings over something the other has said or done that we disagree with or are upset about.  It ...

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I admit I’m a compulsive responder and acknowledger when it comes to emails. I send thank you notes, got it notes, get back to you soon notes, confirmation notes, and so on.  Unfortunately people don’t always send them to me so I’m often concerned that my email might have got lost in cyberspace or is lying trapped and helpless in a spam filter.  Or I reluctantly decide that the person I’ve communicated with is either inefficient, ignorant or just downright rude. “But I don’t have time to reply to everything”, I hear you say.  Or “I pride myself on only answering what I absolutely have to” or “but I didn’t have anything to tell you yet”. Good on you for your time saving diligence, but what you are saving in time, you could well be losing in good business relationships. As a coach I’d like to point out a couple of distinctions that might make you think again about the benefit of email acknowledgement. I am not talking about responding to unsolicited promos or mail....

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Where did the year go? It feels like yesterday that we send out our last Christmas cards and now we are in  November already and Christmas is around the corner . This is the perfect time to get in touch with people that you feel close to and also with people you want to keep in touch with. We at Click A Life Coach use this very effectively to keep in touch with past and existing clients. Plus our service providers that have given us excellent service. Before last Christmas we were sending out electronic Christmas cards to everyone and handwritten cards to a selected group of customers. We received great feedback about the handwritten cards, but no feedback whatsoever for electronic greeting cards. After looking at my Spam Folder, this didn’t surprise me. Just before Christmas or any of the big holidays, the number of greeting cards that I receive multiplies by 50. None of them is legitimate, all is Spam. I actually stopped looking at anything that says greeting card. I am sure I a...

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