“I am sure you have...”

That one sentence that came to me in an email had a massiveimpact on me and my business.

In that moment I was reminded how important having a coachis, even when you are a coach!

Recently I started working with Karolyn Gamble, an amazingmarketing coach that I had met at my B2B Networking meeting, and the rest ofthe sentence was “I am sure you will have your values done, we just need totalk them through”.

Well, I am a little embarrassed to say that I had never satdown to really consider my values for my own business. Despite this being oneof the first steps I take my clients through I hadn’t ever made the time toapply my knowledge to SMART Support.  

It really was a case of do as I say, not as I do.

I could make the excuse that my reason for taking clientsthrough the process is that it is a fundamental part of building a team, and Idon’t have a team.  

But I am not sure that is really the case. Instead, I believethat I had fallen into the same trap as my clients. I was so busy working in mybusiness and hadn’t stopped to take the time to work on it.

I realised that it was time for me to start to follow my ownadvice.

So, I took the worksheets that Karolyn had put together tohelp our clients define their values as part of a collaborative seminar we weredoing and sat down to work out what mine were.

The process really made me think and at first there seemedto be a lot of words that resonated with me.

But I trusted the process Karolyn had set out and started tonarrow the words down in the way she suggested. When I got to the last 12 wordsand there were suddenly three that jumped off the page at me.

They were connection, cooperation and balance.

The next step for me was to explore how those values influencedme in the work that I do and what those values would mean to my clients.

I will share more on those things in future blogs but throughdoing that I was able to see quite quickly how they shaped everything I do inmy coaching work.

But, what I hadn’t realised was quite how much defining themwould help me to clearly articulate my mission statement, my ‘why’ to use SimonSinek’s language, let alone help me to refine my niche.

From the work I had done before I had identified that my uniquenesswas the fact that unlike many other business coaches I understood both thepractical business side and the people side but added in to that Ireally understand the challenges of running an accountancy practice.

However, once I had done my values, I realised that theaccountants I really want to work with are those who understand that theirpeople are their biggest asset but either don’t know how to put the rightstructures in place or don’t have the time to look after them the way that theywant to.

From one small question so many great things flowed from it.

So, my question to you is what are you not doing because youare so busy working in your business?

Have you taken the time to define your core values for yourbusiness? Do your team know what they are if you have?

Like I did, who in your network can you get some supportfrom to help you in the areas you need help with?

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