Career Coaching Secrets

The Real Difference Between Coaching, Consulting, and Mentoring with John Losey

• Davis Nguyen

Share episode

In this episode of Career Coaching Secrets, host Davis Nguyen sits down with John Losey, founder of Into Wisdom Group and a seasoned coach and consultant with over 30 years of experience helping leaders and organizations grow. John shares his journey from athletics and education into leadership development, coaching, and consulting, as well as his philosophy that effective coaching is about clarity, curiosity, and building competency—not just fixing problems. He explains the differences between coaching, consulting, and mentoring, and why certifications alone don’t define great coaches. John also introduces his vision of creating coaching cultures within organizations through accessible models and community-driven guilds. Whether you’re a coach looking to scale your impact or a leader curious about building stronger teams, this conversation is packed with insights on growth, clarity, and sustainable leadership.


Connect with

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/johnlosey
Website: intowisdomgroup.com/


You can also watch this podcast on YouTube at:
https://www.youtube.com/@CareerCoachingSecrets

If you are a career coach looking to grow your business you can find out more about Purple Circle at http://joinpurplecircle.com

Get Exclusive Access to Our In-Depth Analysis of 71 Successful Career Coaches, Learn exactly what worked (and what didn't) in the career coaching industry in 2024: https://joinpurplecircle.com/white-paper-replay

John Losey:

It's a challenge out there. My biggest challenge when it comes to the coaching stuff, I've got two different directions. First, I'll talk about just when you're talking about hanging out your shingle as a coach, where you are going to just you're going to be a coach and you're going to go into other organizations or with other professionals and do coaching. I think there needs to be an extra high bar in order to hang your shingle out. And it needs to be more than a certification. It needs because I see and I looked into this was probably about, oh, gosh, eight years ago when I came Welcome

Davis Ngyuyen:

to Career Coaching Secrets, the podcast where we talk with successful career coaches on how they built their success and the hard lessons they learned along the way. My name is Davis Nguyen, and I'm the founder of Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to $100,000 years, $100,000 months, and even $100,000 weeks. Before Purple Circle, I've grown several seven and eight figure career coaching business myself, and I've been a consultant at two career coaching businesses that are doing over $100 million each. Whether you're an established coach or building your practice for the first time, you'll discover the secrets to L elevating

Rexhen Doda:

your coaching business. and teams, navigate complexity, build stronger cultures, and unlock their full potential. Through executive coaching, he partners with leaders to strengthen judgment, align vision with action, and expand leadership capacity. With organizations, John focuses on building resilient, high-performing teams, fostering collaboration, and shaping cultures that support growth and sustainability. And it's a pleasure for me to have him on the podcast today. Welcome to the show, John.

John Losey:

It's my pleasure. Pleasure. Thanks for having me here, Reggie.

Rexhen Doda:

Thank you for coming, John. So I wanted to ask you, when it comes to your beginnings as a coach and when you started your coaching and consulting business, so far it's been almost 10 years since you started Into Wisdom Group, right?

John Losey:

Well, it's been about 30 years that I've been in the coaching consulting world. I started off, well, I got interested in it just in growing up in athletics and I wanted to be a coach and a teacher in college. Actually, I wanted to be an orthopedic doctor in athletics and stuff like that, but I didn't want to spend seven years in college. So I switched over to coaching and teaching and learned that I really enjoyed helping people figure out what's next. And so as I continued through my path and I worked on college campuses, I worked at camps, I worked in schools, and throughout that, regardless of what I was doing, I always found that I was helping people figure out their next best step. And so that's been the theme of my career, my professional and personal life has been helping people figure out what's next. And so when I started, first, I started a nonprofit called Praxis Training Systems. And through that, I realized that, okay, I really like working with organizations. And through that, I've worked with people. And about, gosh, it must have been 25 years ago is when I started, I switched it over to Into Wisdom and Praxis was part of that. And now it's just Into Wisdom Group is everything. It really is coaching and consulting, but I've got a They didn't serve me very well. So I promised I'd never go through another publisher. So I started my own publishing business for mostly to, I wanted to publish my own stuff, but it took me 10 years before I published my own thing. I was doing publishing for speakers and consultants and people who wanted back table books. So it was a small boutique thing and I flipped the royalties so that the author would get as much as possible. I never promised to do promotion and really it was create a way for people to be published. other than themselves, so they're not self-published, and yet retain as much of the profits as possible. When I was online doing stuff even before the pandemic hit, but I started for a while during the pandemic, I would produce conferences, virtual and hybrid conferences and meetings and all that kind of stuff. So the Into Wisdom group was helpful to be able to move things in and out. But the constant thing that I do is consulting and coaching.

Rexhen Doda:

So that's kind of like the main part, consulting and coaching. And how would you describe the ideal client profile that you typically service? Is there a certain demographic, psychographic, or a certain industry that you typically find yourself working with? As I mentioned beginning, there might be a percentage of them who are listening. So I wanted to see if we could identify them by listening.

John Losey:

So originally I was doing small, medium-sized businesses, nonprofits, non-government stuff across borders. And what I realized, especially when I went in, I worked at a law firm. large award-winning corporate university. And I found that most of what I do, now consulting, I need to know something about the business or organization. I'm more, I'm not a financial consultant. I am more of an organizational consultant. And in that, I can step into almost any industry and help that organization figure out how to develop itself in a way that's going to be beneficial for them. And working in culture is a whole different thing. There's a few things that I often have to do a lot of... I do work with auto dealerships, and that's a really unique culture to work with. And if you talk with them and they'll stress the fact, if you have never worked in an auto dealership, you don't deserve to talk to us. I can, and usually I depend on my colleagues, people who have worked in that world to help me out in there. Another one that's really difficult, if you haven't been in an actual classroom, you have no credibility when you go and work with teachers. They're sick of people coming in and telling them how to teach when they haven't been in of classroom for a number of years. So I try and work alongside the education world and say, you know what, I'm not the person to be in front, but I can help you figure out how to adopt experiential methodology into traditional class settings from elementary school up through higher education. Higher education is easier to get into because there's so many different facets of that. So I would say for my consulting, it's pretty, I've worked with everybody from accident reconstruction engineers, financial, like mutual fund people. I've worked in a higher education. I've worked alongside some other education stuff. I've even come alongside some different departments in the big ones, the Fortune 500 ones. I feel disingenuous when I say I've worked with Google, Disney, all that kind of stuff, because I've worked with small factions in there. I've never been brought in by the whole organization, but different parts trusted me enough to go in there. And as far as the coaching goes, I think that it's actually a detriment if you walk in and try and coach somebody from your own industry, because you're trying to solve the problems you had when they were in their situation and not hear them for what they're working on. And I just see it so often that people come in as they're not a coach, they're an expert. And that's a whole different thing. I really love, I love people who realize the best C-suite executives I work with are the ones who they don't come across as experts. They come across as beginners, as growth mindset. And the best CEOs I've worked with are the ones who come in and say, what aren't I seeing? What am I missing here? And instead of coming in and saying, I'm an expert, let me tell you what I'm an expert in. A beginner, an expert comes in and tells you what they already know. A beginner comes and looks around and says, what don't I know here? And those are wonderful people to work with because they're open to new perspectives. And it's not that when I coach, I don't bring new perspectives. I help them see and get clear on where they're going. And we talked earlier about, I do career coaching, but that's not what I do. Oftentimes when I'm talking to somebody, it'll turn into a career path, career tracking type stuff. I've also set up free. There's been several big layoffs this past couple of years. And when it impacts an industry, I know I'll set up and say, hey, if you just got laid off, come and join a group and we'll work on what's next. We'll work on the transition, their personal and professional transition, and then we'll help them target what do they want to become. So that's kind of, I don't know if that tells you what my target audience is. It's either I'm totally confused and don't know, or I'm open to anybody who comes to the door. I want to help you get clear on what your next best step is.

Rexhen Doda:

So you would say when it Coaching is there's a specific kind of focus and there's a kind of like slightly different focus when it comes to consulting or you'd say they kind of still merge together in a way.

John Losey:

No, you can't do consulting without getting into coaching and you can't do coaching without getting into some sort of organizational consulting. I learned that when I was working in a large organization, I was kind of the inside development guy, personal professional development and also organizational development guy. So a boss would come in and say, hey, this guy, Sam over here, he really needs some coaching. I go in. and go, yeah, you know, everybody can use coaching, but I tell you what, there needs to be some organizational straighten out to help him excel. And then somebody else says, my organization is horrible. I hate it. We need to work here. I said, yes, every organization could use some fine tuning. However, you could use, you might be able to use and get some benefit over getting clear about what you're about. So they're all consulting and coaching are two very different things. As a consultant, they're purchasing my ability to come up with solutions, interventions. As a coach, I'm not there to fix them. I'm there to help them get clear on what they want to accomplish. And it's really one of the big things is to help them redefine. They come to you with an issue or something is there and the temptation is to fix that issue. What I want to do is help them redefine it into what does this look like if you're successful? If this isn't an issue anymore, tell me what it is. And define, create a success statement. That's what we can work towards. And most often we can work to something where they already have, we'll get as many answers and possibilities as we can. And they'll find something, they'll bring something up themselves that will really work. If they don't have it, if they don't already have the competency capacity, that to me points to, all right, my coaching is to go get some training and to gather those skills. So that's the difference is that I'm not bringing solutions as a coach. I'm helping build your competency and capacity.

Rexhen Doda:

I'm

John Losey:

not here to fix you. you. I'm here to help you get clarity and help you see what the next best steps are.

Rexhen Doda:

Interesting. That makes sense. And when you say that, it makes sense what you said earlier, where helping someone from your field as a coach is actually to your disadvantage because you tie in what you like, like your experience, and you know the field too well to kind of like be curious about it. While if it's a completely different industry, then you are even more effective as a coach.

John Losey:

It takes a lot of discipline. It If you're working with somebody in your field or close to it, to be able to set your own experiences back. Because the temptation, I don't care if you're even in other industries, the temptation as a coach is to fix the problem you had when you were in their situation and not listen and create clarity about what they're experiencing. And we too often make it about ourselves. And my mentor, a guy named Fred Harburg, he always likes to say, coaching, I think about that amazing movie, The Incredibles, where Mrs. Incredible says, it's not about you. In coaching, it's never about the coach. It's about the performer, the person who you're working with. It is all about them. And you're at your best when you're holding up a mirror and saying, are you seeing this? Is this what you're saying? Is this what you're seeing?

Rexhen Doda:

And since you mentioned the mentor, how would you define that from my understanding of doing these interviews? Because I don't do coaching. I'm not a coach. I'm not a mentor. But what I've understood is a mentor is someone who is in your industry, is is already doing what you're doing and is helping you move faster or giving you advice, which a coach wouldn't in this case. It's not a consultant either because it's not solving solutions. It's not solving anything for you. It's just actually giving advice based on his lived experience. Is that how would you describe a mentor?

John Losey:

Pretty close. Yeah, I do think that there's a huge difference between coaching and mentoring. And if you're in a position, everybody deserves coaching. Even if it's peer-to-peer coaching, coaching up, all that kind of stuff, coaching is a way to enter into a conversation We like to call it a thought partnership. Mentoring, you can only really mentor one or two people because it takes a lot more time. You have to give them access to your life. You give them access to your network, access to your experience. And there is a coaching involved in mentoring. Of course there is, but it's much more than that. And in an essence, really what you're, you're becoming an advocate for that person in their career path. I do think when you talk about career coaching, one of the things that I would do in a, If I were in a career coaching thing is find somebody to mentor you. And you do that not just by position, but you do it by the presence that person has. Is there somebody in your organization or in your industry that you admire, look up to and would love to emulate yourself around? That is mentors much more time and personal resource intensive. I've worked inside a large organization and we got really clear about, first of all, the differences and also training people to become mentors and and also and we so if we set up a mentoring program where there was clear there's a clear bar that you had to pass in order to become a mentor but we'd also prep the people wanting to become mentored the proteges we would prep them on how to be mentored and because it's truly a deep relationship extended relationship long-term relationship that you're trying to build through

Rexhen Doda:

mentoring absolutely and thank you thank you so much for helping me understand that even more clearly right now and this is a question that coaches who are listening to might find interesting is when it comes to your clients right now and how you're finding them, is there a certain marketing channel that you feel like is working better overall? Nope, but

John Losey:

it's a challenge out there. My biggest challenge when it comes to the coaching stuff, I've got two different directions. First, I'll talk about just when you're talking about hanging out your shingle as a coach, where you are going to just, you're going to be a coach and you're going to go into other organizations or with other professionals and do coaching, I think there needs to be an extra high bar in order to hang your shingle out. And it needs to be more than a certification. It needs, because I see, and I looked into, this was probably about, oh gosh, eight years ago when I came out of the big corporate thing. Before I was a coach and a consultant and in the early 2000s, it wasn't what it is today. When I then go out and I realized I do a Google search and there's millions of hits when it comes to coaching. I said, okay, I've been doing this for about 20 years now. Let me see what's out there. And so I looked into getting certified and I realized that what I have a master's in human development that does more than if I wouldn't got certified. But I do appreciate what I looked at into the what it takes to become ICF certified. That's pretty robust and pretty good. Problem is the results I've seen people who are good coaches going in were good coaching coaches going out with better marketing. The people who did not have the chops of coaching going in rarely have the chops going out. until they have much, much more experience. So I appreciate the need to have some sort of certification after your name, but as people who are looking for coaches, look for more than that. I actually just had this conversation with a couple of people who have been in that world and then they got their master's degree in specific things. And that to me is if you see somebody with a master's and has experience, they probably have a deeper understanding of the approaches and processes than just the piece. Certification is good, but I do think there's so many people out there, and this is what makes marketing so tough for coaches, is that there's people out there with excellent marketing skills and marginal coaching skills. So it makes it very confusing for people looking for a career coach, a life coach, executive, whatever it is, an external, somebody who's hanging their shingle out there because they don't know what they're going to get. And it's just so muddy. But the way that for me, there's the piece of most of my coaching comes through my consulting contracts. And I go in, I come in and I do training. Sometimes I'll be brought in to address some sort of organizational issue. And the solutions are rarely just an organizational intervention. Usually it's a mix of those types of training and then also coaching for specific parts of that leadership team. So that's the challenge for me is getting in organizationally. And so my current strategy is talking to as many HR because that's normally where that stuff is bubbled up to speak to leadership teams and groups, trying to get into more industry stuff. And so I get in if I can get in and help them understand some of the needs that might help them out in the organization. That's when the coaching comes in. I do every once in a while. I will do like individual coaching contracts. Most of the time it's rolled into a consulting statement of work. On the other side of that, and this goes into kind of my other belief, is that, and this will seem contradictory, high, high bar for coaches coming in from the outside or you're hanging your shingle up. There should be zero gatekeeping when it comes to coaching internally in an organization. Everybody in your organization should understand how performance coaching works and have a shared language to talk about how do we develop each other. And not just, I was lucky enough to be on an enterprise-wide coaching initiative where we tried to bring coaching to all the leadership in the organization. And we're talking from, this is a 13,000 person organization. And we got everybody from the supervisors all the way up through VPs through our coaching program. So there's a shared language. And then it became part of the leadership development process. So all new leaders were getting the same language. And we realized that if individual contributors and new people learned the language, then coaching went much easier. So while high, high bar, for somebody to claim themselves to be a coach, everybody in your organization should understand coaching and development and have a shared language around it. And that's how you, like one of the biggest things, if you want to turn around an organization quickly, give them a

Rexhen Doda:

development mindset. That seems like a consultant's solution to offer internal coaching for the company while doing coaching at the same time.

John Losey:

If they're open to it, that's the first thing I say is if you want to prevent a lot of the issues that you're experiencing Get people to get your supervisors first to understand that when somebody brings something to you and this is they're creating a dependency on themselves. And it feels really good when people need you. But when the supervisor is staying late and working on weekends and all of his people just don't see you later, you've trained them to do that because you're fixing stuff. But if they come in and they have a question, first thing you ask them, this comes from a VP at a large insurance company. He says, you know, when somebody calls me, very first thing I think about, is this an opportunity? to develop that. If it is, we go into a coaching conversation. If it's not, then we go into solution-based stuff. And it's like, you know, you got to know the difference, but I do not want a paramedic that is a coach. I need them to fix all the blood that's flowing out of me. Yeah. If it's an urgent crisis situation, you don't necessarily want coaching to happen. Afterwards you do, but in the middle, you need to collaborate around finding solutions and fixing things and not, it's not a development opportunity at that point. And so yes, you're, you are totally correct. That's a great observation is coaching is also an excellent consulting

Rexhen Doda:

solution. And I like that you bring that in on the company as a culture for them in the future to kind of like utilize coaching in the future, because that is so valuable for them as a team. You brought also a few other good points when it comes to certifications, because I like that because I totally agree with you, first of all, since we've done the research. as well last year, what we found when it comes to investments for coaches is the investment that had the lowest return was its certifications. That's because, first of all, they're not cheap. They're considerably expensive. And if you haven't had any training, they're helpful to train or get training. But if you're getting them for the purpose of you marketing yourself as you actually are certified, they don't do as much for you. There's no return because if you're working with individuals clients, they don't know about the certification. So they're not going to care if you are MCC or PCC certified. That doesn't really make a difference for an individual unless they've worked with a coach before and they can actually make a difference. But companies, on the other hand, might ask you for, if you're working with companies, they might require you to have some sort of a certification that was actually the only case where the certification becomes useful. But with individual clients, they just don't know any better. So they're not going to find that very useful. Yeah.

John Losey:

What I found is that there's some service groups, they come in and they'll do programs where problem solving, team building, that kind of stuff. They'll bring facilitators in, but their coaches all need to be certified in some way. And usually the founders of that organization are certified in a certain way. So they want you to be certified in a certain way. I think that they want a shared language and they are offering a shared product. So that makes sense. But again, if you're just doing it to put some letters after your name to add credibility, I don't see the benefit of that. In fact, a friend of mine just did a cost benefit analysis. One of the best facilitators I know, a guy named Dan Miller. And he's just an excellent facilitator. And he looked into getting certified versus going to a master's program that does coaching stuff. I forget what exactly it's a master's in. And he looked at it and says, you know what? That master's degree will take me further and take me deeper because it's about me learning and knowing and not just getting the methodology. The other thing that I know is I've worked with, and I created, I didn't create a certification, but I have what I call a coaching guild, which is a, you work your way up to become a master coach. And the idea is, is purely based on community. I don't want to do certification. The only really kind of certify thing that I do is people who are going to lead the program have to show that they know the model and that they're actively working on what we call the advanced coaching cohort. And they have facilitation shops because the way we train coaches is truly an experiential facilitation model. But what I've noticed as I've developed coaches is if you have experience in facilitation, you much more naturally take to the coaching model because it's about observation. It's about asking really good questions and it's about letting the person make the choices and have more efficacy and control.

Rexhen Doda:

It makes a lot of sense to me. We haven't looked at the data on that perspective, but it makes a lot of sense to me what you just said. I was also thinking about what you mentioned earlier when it like going through HR people or going through certain industry specific or communities groups where you can offer value. And initially you come in to help as a consultant and then you introduce coaching. Well, what I do is

John Losey:

usually there's some, I don't get any cold calls and I don't think LinkedIn and Facebook are places where people go to find coaches or find consultants. They go there to check up on you. And once they've got your name, they'll go check up on you. just like they do a Google search and just like, but having a social media presence is important, but it's not the entry point. Most of the time, every once in a while, I'll get somebody who just calls me from a referral, word of mouth type stuff. More often, it's I go in and I do some sort of a workshop or speaking engagement with an association or a chapter or rotary clubs, all that kind of stuff. And from there, they get to know me and they get to know what I have to offer. Then they go to social media and check up and make sure that I'm not some crazy guy because they will look. in your posts. So make sure that you're doing good posts. And that's how I will get in in a consulting gig. And again, the consulting usually in that interaction, there's some coaching, even if it's just with the person who's engaging me. I usually do my intake almost like a coaching session to help them get clear on what success looks like for them. So the coaching skills go into how I do intake for consulting. Cool. That makes sense.

Rexhen Doda:

And so right now, when thinking about that and looking to the future for the next one, the three years, what would you say are some goals you're working towards with your business, either consulting side or coaching side?

John Losey:

I think that when it comes, especially the coaching, I just went up and did a community college up in Sacramento and I'm slotted to do another one in a couple of months, different one. And that's again, community college, but I also am working on some nonprofit groups back East. I would love that to bring coaching into organizations, the performance coaching approach, to where they understand that everybody should know how to coach in an organization. I'd love to come. I've got a very accessible model. It's called Fact-Based Coaching by Fred Harburn. And it's a very simple, accessible model that you can literally... I did a day-long workshop last month and encouraged them, go home and do this at home. This approach is just better thinking. Start coaching today. Because if you have the right mindset and you understand that this is about solving problems about building capacity and competency, helping people do more better, you can step out and start using the model. Now, the more you use it and the more familiar you get and the more feedback you get, the better you'll be. So I would love it if in the next couple of years, I'm able to go into 10 or 15 organizations and get them not only to adopt what I call the total performer development approach and start coaching right away, but also to have them become part of what we call the coaching guild. And that is just a community of people who are all, they all share a same foundational understanding of coaching. And they come in and they start off as an apprentice and then they're working it. So they're a journeyman. And then they're into what we call like a more advanced coaching cohort or artist level. And they're working towards refining their skills by doing it in community sharing stories. And then if they want to, the way we don't do a certification test or anything like that, if you want to become a master coach, you have to get two other master coaches to bet their reputation on your coaching skills. So it's not a high stakes journey. It's about building relationship and demonstrating competency in order to get that level. And then in there as well. So if organizations don't have master coaches more rapidly, if they have some skilled facilitators who've learned the model and are actively working towards it, they can go in and be approved to use our materials. So that's like the only financial part of it is getting access to our coaching materials. Other than that, we are all just about getting becoming evangelists for this idea of developing each other so

Rexhen Doda:

you're thinking about this as kind of like a new offer entirely right where you kind of like bring coaching into the organization and with your materials you kind of like let's say you're kind of like validating if they're doing it correctly in a way but also training them to do it and then bring it in as a culture but is this like an offer in itself

John Losey:

yeah it's it is it's ultimately what i hope is that they have their own internal guild or internal coaching culture. And ultimately, it's not into wisdom that's doing it for them, but they are self-sufficient. And that's when you know if coaching becomes the default behavior choice when you start to interact, that idea of looking at that employee as a whole person and trying to develop them as whole people. The methodology around this is taking what we call the fact-based coaching model and using that to help them grow as a whole person and properly identify where they need to build competency and build capacity. And yes, it is an offer in and of itself. And usually what happens whenever I teach a coaching workshop, I always say, hey, here is this idea of a guild. You go out and start coaching now and use this structure of a guild to help reinforce the culture. Let's see, St. Exubery, or I can't remember who said it, but basically you put a good person in a bad system and the system wins every time. And we saw this with coaching, there was a huge uptick when I was doing it as an enterprise-wide thing. In the areas where it was supported through hiring, training, recruiting, all that kind of stuff, when the organization supported the behavior, it had huge benefits both in the position for the organization and for the individual. We saw much higher rates of, gosh, promotion for those people practicing coaching. In the areas where that particular department didn't support the coaching, we saw really huge benefits for about a month or two, but the behavior stopped happening because it wasn't rewarded or reinforced. So you put a good person in a bad system, the system will win. So let's change the system and create a culture that really, how many organizations you see nowadays that have, we are a growth mindset organization. We believe in continuous improvement and yet they don't do anything culturally to do that other than a bullet point on a mission statement.

Rexhen Doda:

That is so true. And I really like it. I was just like thinking how impactful that offering itself is to the company and to future companies are going to do this with. And basically thinking about what success looks like is them being self-sufficient in actually applying the coaching in their organization.

John Losey:

Yeah, it's wonderful practice, but not great business. You know, I want to sell something different to these people. If I'm selling them the same thing over and over again, I think that's good business, but it's bad practice on my part because I'm not helping anything. I'm not helping them move forward. I am very, maybe overly cautious about creating an addiction to my services. If I'm not selling something new and different to them, then I created an addiction. I created a dependency. So I'm probably overly cautious about

Rexhen Doda:

it. What I've found from the most interviews that I've done with coaches is that typically coaches work their way out of the relationship with a client. So it's kind of like we have gotten to you to a point there. You can be self-sufficient. It's kind of like what your offer does in a way itself. If they want to keep working with you and improving more, they can keep doing that and understand your concern on that.

John Losey:

Well, that's why it's so crucial at the upstart, what we call the frame. The frame is where you clearly define what success looks like so you know when you're done. If you never get a clear definition of what success looks like, you'll never be done. And that gets frustrating for both the coach and the performer. But if we know that there's a clear, this is what success looks like and we're going to give it this amount of time to see how far we get, then we're evaluated. But I think the best coach is are the ones that are working themselves out of the job. And sad to say, that's not always the case.

Rexhen Doda:

Well, that's a beautiful offer. When that is successful, there's obviously a ton of other things you can offer because you're a consultant. There's also other spaces where you can offer value. So I really like that. And so what would you say is the challenge right now in either in working out this offer? Is it in finding the next 10 to 15 companies where you can apply this on? Is it on actually having the company be convinced that this is the way to go. Where is the challenge? This is why

John Losey:

I'm not a marketing consultant. To me, the whole marketing thing is a challenge because I just don't like that part of it. And so, I don't know, a lot of people have been throwing around the phrase connection before content is a phrase that's out there, especially in the training and facilitation world. Well, the problem is, as a presenter, yes, connection before content. And it's not just connecting with the people. It's connecting the people with the content and me with the content. It's the That whole relationship between people, content, and presenter. But as a facilitator, I don't do content. I do process. So I say connection before process, again, is getting people to connect with the process and me and them with each other. But then as business, I'm not selling content and I'm not selling process. What I want to do is I want connection before transaction. For me, and this has come to life, 15-year relationships that started out when we were colleagues and all that kind of stuff. Well, I got a call from somebody who's working at a very large service organization that works with, they basically sell product to somebody else. She says, we want to use your stuff because I know you've got it and we want to build it into our packages. And that's just because we remained in contact for 15 years. Another person reached out, she now is a program director at a nonprofit and reached out to me and just said, hey, can you do this? And then for the past five years, every year they'd come back and ask me to do more. But that was something that it was just, we were just friends. And so this idea, and too often, and this goes into networking and all that, but we go there and do our best to get contact information. And so we are trying to sell before we even connect with these people. And we gauge our success on how many warm contacts we got, how much information we got, how many business cards we got. And I get really frustrated whether it is a networking event at a conference or these networking groups that meet every month or so. They go in there and you do these speed dating type things where all you're trying to do is figure out what can I sell this person?

Rexhen Doda:

And the other person is

John Losey:

doing the same thing. You end up with a stack of business cards and no real connection. So connection before transaction, if you just go for transaction, you might get some early sales, but they don't last. So that's my philosophy on all this kind of stuff is I got to find ways to connect with people. And it's probably a big part of my personality. That's why I like going in and speaking with groups, getting an opportunity just to know these people before I try to sell them

Rexhen Doda:

stuff. And that's also the beauty of like being in podcasts like this, where you can actually express this clearly in a long form content like this. Because if people, if the right people were to watch this podcast and kind of like understand what you're after, how your offer is kind of built, what you're trying to do for these companies, they would be much, much more clear on like working with you and actually be excited to work with you. I'd actually be excited to work with you if that was the goal for the company. Yeah, I feel like doing more of these should be very helpful for you. And I also want to make sure that we give some extra sort of advice for other coaches as well. And this is the final question. Thinking about the coaches who want to scale their impact, just like you want to, what advice would you give to these coaches if they're anything else you want to add?

John Losey:

Scaling impact is different than scaling business. And I think a big part is always seeking to grow yourself. What we call that is in the synthesis part is turn every coaching interaction into an opportunity for you to reflect and get better at your coaching. Go out and look beyond what you know. Experts will go out and look for things to confirm their expertise. Beginners or the beginner mindset go out and looks for the stuff they don't know and work to get that beginner mindset. And what will happen is you'll continue to grow and you'll see things differently. And that kind of synthesis, reflection, even being able to debrief in a community is helpful. So that to me is to scale your impact, to scale your business, I think is be willing to suck at something. There's an old adage that says if anything worth doing is worth doing well, lesser known one is anything is worth starting poorly. And that, you know, be willing to suck in order to get good. And the idea being is that if sometimes in order to scale your business, you need to scale your offering, either by making it broader or making it deeper. Do what you do better, deeper, and that will open up more opportunities for you. Or get curious. What are good things that would go along with what you're doing? And could be that, you know, this is my career path. Some people say, you know, I like to say I have a diversity of career path. I've been everything from a CEO to a janitor, to a wrangler. I've spoken to groups 60 feet above in the air on a ropes course and 40 feet underwater during a live scuba presentation. And so, you know, I like to say I have a diverse set of experiences. Others say I just can't focus. Employ your curiosity. And, you know, you'll go down some rabbit trails, but you also go down some things that are going to be very beneficial to your perspective. So that's another way that you can find, you know, to be crass about it, you can find new markets and new opportunities by

Rexhen Doda:

looking in new places. Totally agree. Thank you so much for that, John. Thank you for sharing that. And thank you so much for coming to our podcast today. And for anyone who's listening and wants to connect with you or find you, they can go into LinkedIn and look up John Lucy. They will be able to find your profile. There's also the website into wisdom group.com where they can go in and find you. Is there any other way they could connect?

John Losey:

Yeah. If you're curious about like kind of my approach to things, I've got two podcasts and YouTube channels. One is called One is called Living Life Juicy, which is basically long format where I meet cool people that I think everybody should know. And we'll do a long format interview that way. The other one is Growing People, which is more about resources that people can use about how people learn and grow and how communities are formed. Those tend to be more short form. So those are two different ways that you can find it. Also on Medium, I do a lot of my writing in article format on Medium. So right now I'm actually in the middle of a series on coaching. I did a series on change and transition. Mostly the things that I'm just, that are festering in my brain is what I write about. So those are ways that you can, you can learn more about what I'm about. And again, if you're interested in joining me, I've got, you can easily just send me a note and I'll give you a way to find a spot in my calendar. I'm pretty open to talk to anybody. And if there's anybody who wants to connect and do a, I've been last summer, I did a whole bunch of Living Life Juicy workshop or, our podcasts. I've been on hiatus to work on more writing stuff, but I'm open to if somebody wants to come and chat for about an hour,

Rexhen Doda:

I'm up. Thank you. Thank you so much, John. We'll also put the website link to the description so people can find that easily. But yeah, thank you so much for coming to the show. It was lovely to have this chat.

John Losey:

Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you for having

Davis Ngyuyen:

me. That's it for this episode of Career Coaching Secrets. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this episode to catch future episodes. Thank you. Thank you.