The Seven Keys to Prosperity are:
1. Vision
2. Commitment
3. Focus
4. Integrity
5. Modeling
6. Leveraging
7. Prosperity Thinking

VISION

Every creation starts with vision. It is foreseeing the pathway to success. Strengthen your visioning skills by spending time focusing on what you want and seeing all the details as if they are already a reality.

Action Points:

1. Vision each day. Use the technique described in Four Simple Steps to Attract What You Want every day.
   
   
2. Ground your vision in the real world. Create your Simple But Essential Business Plan and keep this document alive, growing with you.
   
   
3. Go for your ideal. While it's important to be flexible and let go of attachments, you can vision for the ideal and hold that in your mind. Make sure your actions support that ideal - attract and enroll ideal clients, set the ideal fees and hours that support your revenue and lifestyle goals. Read Start With Your Ideal Business.
   
   
4. Believe in yourself and your vision. Act successful now.

COMMITMENT

True commitment means 100% dedication to your success by devoting enough focused time, attention, and sometimes money to achieve your goal. You may feel committed emotionally, but if you're not backing that intention with adequate resources, it won't crystallize into the results you want.

The truth is that building a business is a full-time job. Getting your coaching business to sustain you financially will require a lot of initial resources over the first few years until you have saturated your market and built up enough momentum to cruise with only an occasional burst of energy to keep it going. This is true for any new business.

You may need additional knowledge to succeed. No one knows everything. Commit some of your time to your development. And look for shortcuts to success.

Action Points:

1. Evaluate where you might be holding back resources. Often poor results stem from not dedicating enough focused time.
   
   
2. De-obligate your time in every possible way. Be ruthless in clearing away things that will put the brakes on your success, while you still honor your values. Your vision and purpose deserve the resources they need to thrive.
   
   
3. Delegate responsibilities, hire support - do whatever it takes to clear time.
   
   
4. Set strong boundaries around your business time so that you are not susceptible to diversions from family, friends and other sources. Remember, when you worked for someone else, you'd never dream of walking off the job unless it was an emergency. Give your business the same dedication and loyalty (and more)!
   
   
5. Learn - from others and from your mistakes.

FOCUS

Pinpoint your focus on positive thoughts, your goals, and what will bring about the results you want in the most direct way. If focus isn't your strong suit, employ these methods to build strength and surround yourself with focused individuals.

Action Points:

1. Go for impact. Every day and throughout the day, ask yourself: What can I do right now that will have the biggest impact on my success? Then do that.
   
   
2. Manifest what you want. If you find yourself thinking mostly about what you don't want, then you will attract more of that. Go back to your vision and focus on the actions that will bring you what you want. Use this four step model: Four Simple Steps to Attract What You Want.
   
   
3. Always work a plan to keep you on track. Have you created your Simple But Essential Business Plan? Have you created a Client Attraction Plan?
   
   
4. Create an accountability system. Hire a mentor coach or set up accountability with a colleague.

INTEGRITY

We are all guided by a set of values and internal guidance systems that help us determine what is for our highest good. Sometimes we need to turn down the competing internal voices to hear this guidance. While integrity includes characteristics like honesty, it also includes strong boundaries -- the ability to identify your own thoughts and feelings as being separate from another's.

The degree to which we've developed integrity will influence our motivations in coaching, which in turn determines the grace of coaching sessions and therefore to a large degree our client's results.

Coaching mastery is developed by intention, attention and experience. Experience is about time and opportunity. Intention and attention are about where you put your focus while coaching.

Action Points:

1. Notice your motivations when you coach. (See Motivation Matters) If your motivation is to fix, save, parent or teach your client, you are operating outside the co-creative relationship and may step over the most valuable piece -- your client's wisdom. If you are motivated to be right, be the problem solver or perform, you'll miss the most useful coachable moments that bring about the most dramatic shifts.
   
   
2. Learn the co-creative approach. (See The Co-creative Relationship)
   
   
3. Develop even stronger boundaries. Realize that each person knows what is best for them, including you.
   
   
4. Tap into your intuition. There is gold there, for both you and your clients.
   
   
5. Record your sessions or have a mentor coach listen in on your sessions (with your client's permission) to give you feedback. You'll learn new skills and finesse quickly this way.

MODELING & SUPPORT

You can be sure that anyone who is successful has mentors to learn from and emulate, and many support systems in place. Read Support is Essential.

Action Points:

1. Surround yourself with brilliance. If the people around you don't inspire you and support you to be your best, it's time to create a new community of friends and colleagues.
   
   
2. Get help. Whether you enroll in training, hire a mentor coach, or use resource groups (like Prosperous Coach), get the support you need.
   
   
3. Emulate already successful people. Notice what they do, how they act. As long as it fits your value system, model that behavior. As you grow, you'll naturally shift to a new model.

LEVERAGING

Successful people don't have more time; they just find ways to leverage their time and efforts by creating systems. Then they continually test and tweak those systems to find the best combination of mechanisms to create the results they want. These are living systems so don't keep them static. If you look closely you'll see you do this all the time -- for instance, changing your schedule to fit in all you want to do.

Action Points:

1. Create templates for everything. Are you writing an email response to a prospect? Take the time to do it impeccably the first time, and then keep a master template of that in an easily accessible folder in your email program to use again. Customize it for the next use. Make improvements as necessary.
   
   
2. Make every effort count as much as possible. For example, if you're going to the trouble of doing a public speaking gig, make sure that effort is leveraged:
   
   
   • Aim everything at your target market. This is so critical for your success. If everything you do is directed at one narrow target market, you will be able to leverage everything. Otherwise, it's like starting over again for every marketing piece.
     
     
   • Capture names and email addresses. Invite all attendees to subscribe to your ezine. Rarely is one event or one time in front of a prospect enough to build the trust they need to buy your services. If you get their permission to stay in front of them with your ezine, you have kept the leads warm while you repeatedly show your credibility.
     
     
   • Have the next step ready for them. Provide a flier and easy registration system to enroll attendees in your fee-based workshop on the same topic.
     
     
   • Sell products. Have back-of-the-room sales for books, CD sets, workbooks - whatever you've created for your target market.
     
     
3. Create systems for everything. Administration, marketing -- whatever it is, systematize it. If you need help with this, hire an expert -- Virtual Assistants, bookkeepers, office organizers, etc. Read: How a Virtual Assistant Can Make You More Money.
   
   
4. Do what you do best and delegate the rest.
   
   
5. Let go of perfection. I know this is a hard one. But look around you. Successful people are far from perfect. They may have good skills or be highly organized. But if they are successful you can bet they have become very flexible and know the point of "good enough."

PROSPERITY THINKING

This is the master key that unlocks the door to prosperity. You've heard of the Law of Attraction. Simply stated it says: Whatever it is that you focus on will expand and be attracted to you. Put another way, whatever you're thinking about most of the time attracts what you'll experience most of the time. Our thoughts can make life a joy or a sad story.

No one is perfect. All of us have bad days and negative thoughts. And each of us has choice. We can choose to be at the effect of those bad days, our wounded past or negative thoughts, letting them create more of the same. Or we can choose to be at cause in our lives. This isn't about kicking ourselves when we're down. It's about noticing when our thoughts go sour. Taking the time to acknowledge and process the feelings, then allowing the feelings to move. With attention we shift from being at the effect to being at cause. Every tiny step results in significant empowerment.

Action Points:

• Value yourself, your services and your time in everything you do and say. This will make you magnetically attractive to clients.
  
  
• Be a creator. Remember your vision. What part of that vision can you create today? Engage your entrepreneurial spirit -- the creative force for your business.
  
  
• Choose to be at cause rather than effect. Empower yourself.
  
  
• Be the first to believe in your success. If you do, everyone else will follow suit.
  
  
• Project your revenue and expenses. Go ahead and do this seemingly conventional thing. Befriending money as a resource and taking a responsible approach with it will attract more of it to you. (Inversely, if you ignore this important aspect of business, it may ignore you.)
  
  
• Make obstacles into opportunities. See the gift in everything. When something difficult happens, throw up your hands and say, "How fascinating!" Then act like a magician -- transform the problem into a solution. Don't be afraid to try things and fail. It's how you'll become successful!

Each of the Seven Keys to Prosperity is an enduring success principle that can continue to teach as we move through the stages of growing an independent business. If you stay mindful of them, the keys can support you to move continuously closer to your goals.

Rhonda Hess is Founder of Prosperous Coach™ and a business success coach for professional coaches. She is co-author of the Coach Training accelerator, a comprehensive coach training manual, and senior trainer for Coach Training Alliance. She also wrote Working Websites for Coaches, an ebook available in Resources for Coaches. For more information about Rhonda, see: Contributors. For more information about Prosperous Coach, see: About Us.

Copyright © 2007 Bubbling Well Inc. All rights reserved.

If you want to reprint or share this article, please send your request to: support@prosperouscoach.com