1. What’s your business and who are your customers?

Decide for Impact helps entrepreneurs in Europe and the US to accomplish their long-term sustainable goals sooner. To do this we focus on inner development habits. The only way to accomplish your long terms goals is to work on the habits that support these goals. 

This means I am an accountability coach and work on inner development with entrepreneurs and their management teams, that want to create a sustainable positive impact. They have up to 30 employees in a B2B service environment.

2. Tell us about yourself. For example, what first got you started working on your business, and what motivates you each day to do what you do?

In 2006 I started my business because I experienced the superpower of online marketing and hyperspecialization for companies. Since it was important for me to experience my children growing up, I started working from home using online possibilities. I worked with lots of entrepreneurs on their online marketing and social media to connect with and attract new clients.

In 2018 I choose to shift my business to coaching offline and in person. Having real conversations and learning about their business by asking tough questions.

When the beginning of 2020 COVID hit the Netherlands, I had to shift again. I lost about 70% of my clients and revenue and was pushed back to online coaching. Now I coach online using chat-based coaching via coach.me and virtual meetings with entrepreneurs. 

My mission is to reduce social and ecological inequality. I will probably spend the rest of my life working on this goal.

The Inner Development Goals are a great framework that helps companies and organizations to work on Sustainable Development Goals (UN). As part of my mission, I promote and support the IDGs.

I am a habit person, focusing on daily processes with a clear inner compass, that helps me to work on my mission. Stoicism is my operating system, and I am a runner and soccer referee.

3. What’s your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

Some of the things I am grateful for are, combining happy clients with a happy family. That I am able to divide my days between long-term work and working with clients.

I published 15 books, wrote over 1000 articles, and published over 400 episodes in my podcast, organized events, and started communities.

Opportunities I get to help entrepreneurs work on their long-term goals and see them getting accomplished sooner than they expected.

4. What’s one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?

Picking yourself back up from the floor after difficult moments, again and again. There are only a few people that understand me. Most people are looking for stable work and income. As an entrepreneur, I often feel alone even though great entrepreneurs surround me. The tough calls always come down to me.

5. What are the top 3 tips you’d give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

Build a business that focuses on making a social or ecological impact. Doing something that matters, that makes you feel you are making a difference will make you happier than accomplishing the next revenue goal.

Support other young business owners. They have the same questions that you had years ago or even last year and are looking for your support.

Create an emergency fund that can support you for 6-12 months without clients. Pay off your mortgage. This will give you lots of mental space and calmness when things don’t go as you expected for a while.

Is there anything else you’d like to share?

Write down three goals every day that are important to you and your work. Don’t start doing anything new until you finish these three goals, not even social media or your inbox. You can accomplish more than you think in the long term, and less than you expect in the short term. Finishing three goals every workday means you will accomplish 195 important goals each quarter.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://www.ernohannink.com/ [English]

https://decideforimpact.com [Dutch]

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ernohannink/

Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@ernohannink

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Create a Sustainable Positive Impact – GoSolo interview

In this conversation with we explore:

• why being mission-driven is powerful,
• how to use scheduling to work for the present and the future,
• how I structure my coaching packages,
• why I offer a complimentary coaching call,
• how to think from the client perspective,
• and more!

I love working with coach.me as a habit tracker and as a coach. Helping clients to develop a new habit often has a bigger impact on their lives than just the one habit that we are working on. My first payment from coach.me was $ 25 and after that it was multiple months of about $ 40.

Participating in the HCC training made a huge difference for me. Getting one package up and converting for my target audience, changed everything. Last month, 18 months after that first payment, I got a payment of $ 995.42.

It makes me happy to help clients, and get paid for working with clients from all over the world. The HCC training is of high quality and at a great price for coaches that want to help clients to improve their lives with better habits.

Join me to help people to improve their lives.

My coaching profile

Other AMA’s on coach.me and coaching

• Ask-Me-Anything with Founder & Chairman Tony Stubblebine
• Ask-Me-Anything with Kendra Kinnison & Cherry Jeffs
• Ask-Me-Anything with Kendra Kinnison & Ramon Williamson
• Ask-Me-Anything with Kendra Kinnison & Nathan Sudds

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Coaching using coach.me AMA

What strikes me as I record these decisions in my decision book is that I think about them differently and more. Sleeping on it for me has less to do with using system 1 or intuition, but more with finding the arguments to fill in in the decision book.

Why do you want to improve the decision-making process?

In you and me there are actually two people: a person who experiences everything and a person who remembers the events.

The experiencing person experiences everything, every moment, but does not remember anything. The remembering person keeps the memories of events, but does not keep every detail. The remembered self preserves the experience as a story built around the highs and lows.

From The Art of Living Well:

“While the experiencing self is wasteful (it throws almost everything away), the remembering self is extremely prone to mistakes and thus tempts us to make wrong decisions. Because of the appraisal error of the remembering ego, we tend to judge short moments of intense joys too strongly and too weakly in response to these quiet, sustained, non-exciting moments of joy. ”

Rolf Dobelli

Because we remember intense moments, we make choices for the future. A few intense moments with an employee or customer, in combination with the functioning of our brain, ensure that we cannot assess future situations. Our brain is also unable to estimate how long an experience has lasted (duration neglect).

Two or three moments with customers that deliver intense, fun experiences make us forget the long days when we toil to maneuver through all kinds of tricky customer systems and the extra work we put in. Especially when we have experienced the end as positive, we have a good memory of the project. As a result, we say yes to a new application without really thinking. Our experiencing self then runs into the same problems in the implementation as in the previous assignment and wonders why we accepted the assignment.

Or an employee who continuously shows in his daily behavior that he misses a certain core value. Your remembering self especially remembers the euphoric moment of an assignment that he won or delivered. While everyone in the company is bothered by this person’s behavior on a daily basis, which does not change (core value), your remembering self comes up with arguments to keep working with him.

Because of that valuation error that Dobelli mentions, in The art of good living, new projects where you are optimistic about good results for the future attract you more than steadily working on the ongoing projects that are now generating profit. My remembered self skews what happened in an ongoing project. Based on the highlights, I make wrong decisions for the future.

By improving my decision-making process, I pay more attention to decisions and I turn to help to gain other insights that are not necessarily supported by my remembering self.

The decision book is part of this. How does it work?

Filling in the decision book

I use Notion.so as a tool for developing and saving decisions. This is a handy tool, but you can also use a notebook, Word, or something else.

The core is the PMIXA method (Van Osch). Below you can see the parts that I fill in in my decision book.

Describe the decision

Here I explain in my own words what the decision is.

What was the background to the decision
What is the original reason for consciously thinking about a decision on this topic?

What emotions do you feel?

Emotions play an important role in decisions. The emotions are influenced by many circumstances, such as whether you slept well, whether you are fit and whether you were angry, sad or happy beforehand. If I write down the emotion as I feel it at the time of the decision, I can use this when I look back later in the evaluation of the decision.

Do you have a hunch? What does your intuition say? Also write this down so that you can later review how your intuition develops.

What positive consequences do you expect?

What’s good about it? Consider the pluses of the decision.

What negative consequences do you expect?

What’s wrong with it? Consider the minuses of the decision.

Interesting

What all comes to mind? Consider alternatives, for example. Also write down the possible costs if you decide not to?

Expectations

What expectations do I have of a positive outcome of my decision?

Actions

What action (s) will I take after making a decision? Who should I inform of my decision?

Schedule a reminder in the calendar

After making a decision, I post a follow-up on the calendar (for example 3 or 6 months later) to evaluate what I can learn from the decision.

Premortem

Analyze what can go wrong after making the decision. Then write down how you can prevent all these failure situations. Here you can read about the premortem.

Who can help?

Who can help provide other insights into the decision? Is there an expert by experience? Who can you turn to as the devil’s advocate to reveal potential problems?

Example of the decision book

I keep my decision book in Notion. If you are also working with this, I have a template for this decision book. Make a copy of the template for your own decision book here.

Learning from the process, not the outcome of the decision

It takes about half an hour to fill out the decision book for myself, especially when I have taken the space to think about the decision for 24 hours. In the meantime, I have already filled in the PMIXA in my head in the background. By consciously writing everything down now, I can look back and learn from my decision-making process. For example, am I being influenced too much by others or by my emotions?

The outcome of almost all decisions you make is much more linked to luck than to your own expertise. We overestimate ourselves on this point. You have no influence on the environment or how others react to your choice. The only thing you can influence is your own behavior, how you react to the result of a decision. Because I record my decision in the decision book and thereby improve my decision-making process, I deal with the consequences of my decisions in an increasingly balanced way.

That is what I help entrepreneurs with: coaching in the decision-making process, so that they take the right decision step by step, in order to ultimately create a healthy growth engine, so that the company runs naturally. Do you also want to get started with this? Check out Set Priorities For Your Day.

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Improve your decision process with the decision book

Show Notes

You can find and connect with Sanja at:

• Her website
• Her Facebook
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• YouTube

Sanja is a Transition Coach, Speaker, professional Mentor and Founder of Blue Gerbera. She specializes in coaching young adults finding and actioning their passion.

Sanja’s mission is to enhance human potential through her story, skills, and experience, globally.

Sanja possesses a Bachelor Degree in Human Resource Management, she is a certified Neuro  

Linguistic Practitioner and a Qualified Trainer.

Sanja is currently writing a book titled “Born to Bloom” about her life which she will launch in

November 2016 with the aim to inspire others.

I liked the following quotes and remarks from the interview:

• I assist young adults to find and action their passion. This sounds interesting and intrigues a lot of people, they start to wonder about their passions. A lot of people are in jobs and careers in which they are not passionate. 
• The war in Croatia had a big influence in my life, also my career. When the war started I was eight years old and we were refugees for 5 years. During these 5 years, I changed schools 5 times, so I was always the new kid. When I came to Australia, I couldn’t speak any English so I was the new kid once again. 
•  I learned to adapt really quickly and I found out about my passion for humans. I studied Human Resource Management and became a manager in the corporate world. And all this time people kept telling me how passionate I was, so I wanted to do something about that. I decided to start my own coaching business and help other people find their passions. 
• My book is an autobiography, so written in the first person. I am writing it about my experience from the age of 3 till today. The book has 2 parts, transitioning into each other. The first part is about my life, transitioning into some lessons in life. The aim of my book is to help people recover faster from traumas and not in 7 years such as it did take for me. It contains some knowledge but also some practical tips that people can implement for a more speedy recovery from trauma. 
• I really started to look inside myself and this made me a victor instead of a victim. This was a real turning point in my life. Sitting on your traumas does not help. I got external help so someone could hear me out about it. I started to invest in myself and I tried a lot of very different techniques such as yoga, meditation, acupuncture, and natural therapies. I did all this to develop myself to understand what happened to me and accept it. 
• Set goals for yourself. Always have a target ready so you can live up to that and always be ready to explain that. Show your passion. Be genuine with people, this really helps your character and build your credibility.

Sanja mentioned Wilbert Molenaar, you can reach him at http://www.mindacademy.nl/nlp-trainers/wilbert-molenaar

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Find your passions to help you in life – Sanja Tesuc

Show Notes

You can find and connect with Lorraine at:

• Her website
• Her Facebook
• LinkedIn

Using a blend of powerful mindset work coupled with extraordinary communication insights, Lorraine’s clients stand out from the crowd so uniquely and authentically, it’s as if the competition has melted away.

I liked the following quotes and remarks from the interview:

• I help my client stand out so uniquely that the competition will melt away. There is always an obstacle blocking your growth, blocking your path. We start by taking that obstacle away, the fear. Then we start looking for the true value that the client can offer.
• I spent a lot of time with my clients determining where they want to position themselves in their market, what their goals are and who they want to work with. In order to do this, we have to disconnect self-worth with pricing. After that, we find a way to really put your value in the spotlight.
• When people enter the market, I usually have them set a higher price than they had in mind for themselves. This is because they don’t have a large reach yet and it is wiser to set your price al little higher. After a while when you reach increases, you can start to compensate this with a price that is a bit lower.
• I can do really new and exciting things while staying calm. My nature is being calm. I always follow my intuition in difficult situations, for instance when there is fear involved in making a decision. There will always be an underlying sense of calm and my gut will tell me that this is the right path. I see a lot more results for my actions when listening to my gut. This is really satisfying and this is what is trying to implement with my clients.
• Take all of that money that you are using on training and hire somebody that can really help you implement knowledge rather than learn you more if you are having trouble with that. Taking this action will give you the feedback and help you find out the next step for your business.

Mentioned people :

• Nancy Marmolejo 
• Kevin Nations

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Make the competition melt away – Lorraine Hamilton

Show Notes

You can find and connect with Teressa at:

• Her website
• Her Facebook
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Teressa is a Holistic Business Mentor, Food And Wellness Coach, Author of Cookbook ‘Cheeky Wholesome Cooking’, Food Lover and Proud Mumma.
Teressa mentors virtual assistants, as well as startup holistic entrepreneurs like Health Coaches, Yogis, Personal Trainers, and other Alternative Health Providers. Helping them set their businesses up from the tech and admin foundations so that they can attract their ideal clients.

I liked the following quotes and remarks from the interview:

• I am a business mentor and I help new holistic entrepreneurs and businesses to set up. I help them with the technical and administrative side of their work as I help them get off the ground. I consult clients and sometimes I also do some practical work myself. 
• I came from corporate life, I was a banker and I was looking for my passion. This was after I got my son, about 2 years ago, my job took too much of my time.  I was a bit lost at first, but then I came across health coaching. This really inspired me and I loved it. The health coaching led me to my current work. 
• When I quit my job at the bank I really wanted to disconnect from there. But I realized that I learned so many useful things, businesswise. Things like time blocking for important things such as family, socials media and blogging. I also made sure that I measured and tracked my incomes and expenditures. 
• I combine food and health coaching with the mentoring and coaching of holistic coaching. I really didn’t think that I could have combined these two. I learned however that it is very important to help your clients understand what absolute value you can offer. My ideal client is a holistic coach. 
• Follow your heart and if it tells you to get out there, then just do it! I find a lot of people who get scared because people in their circle tell them otherwise. Be your own individual and make your own path.

Teressa mentioned Lisa Fitzpatrick, you can reach her at http://lisafitzpatrick.com.au/

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Be yourself and take your own path – Teressa Fisk

Show Notes

You can find and connect with Peter at:

• His website
• His Facebook
• Youtube
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• And at peter.odonoghue@predictablepipeline.co.uk

Peter is an expert in developing outbound sales systems to connect you to hard to reach senior decision-makers in highly targeted business with zero cold calling.

In short, his systems gets you the first meetings with your ideal prospects using a non-sleazy, professional and value-led approach that won’t cause rejection or damage your brand.

Please enjoy the tips and ideas that Peter shares in this interview.
Let’s get the show rolling….

I liked the following quotes and remarks from the interview:

• I help people who have trouble starting conversations with high-level business to business executives. I help a lot of coaches, consultants and also quite a lot of companies. I try to make people connect with senior decision-makers.
• There are two ways to generate business. The dominate way is all about attraction. Things as Facebook ads. You are trying to make people come to you, inbound marketing. Outbound marketing is about proactive contact. You make the first form of contact, you are proactive. This is sometimes called cold marketing.
• My most used method is using cold mailing to create a bridge to engage someone. E-mail is a very easy method to start. It is easy to get someone’s address. It also has features to reach a lot of people in a very short period of time.
• Found.ly, Sellhack.com, and SalesLoft.com are ways to get new leads. These are great websites that you can use to convert prospects into qualified appointments
• In these outbound e-mails, we introduce our client and try to elicit a response. These are very short e-mails, 4-5 lines, we never pitch a product or a solution. We have a very relevant and short message. We want them to respond because then we can start a conversation.
• My biggest tip is value and advance. Try to make clear what your value for the person in question can be in the first conversation you have with that person. This value has nothing to do with whether they become a client or not. I call this the myth of consulting selling.

Peter mentioned Kevin Nations, you can reach him at http://kevinnations.com/blog/

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No more cold calling – Peter O’Donoghue

Episode 44

Show Notes

You can find and connect with Sami at:

• Her website
• Her Facebook profile https://www.facebook.com/sami.wunder.5
• Youtube
• Twitter
• And her Facebook page

Sami is a certified love and relationship coach and helps women create the relationship of their dreams.

Sami specializes in helping smart and strong women to attract the right man for them and keep him in a forever intimate, passionate relationship. She also supports women, whose man is being withdrawn or passive in the relationship, to bring his attention and presence 100% back to the relationship. That every woman on the planet loves herself and be loved is Sami’s mission, passion, and driving force.

I liked the following quotes and remarks from the interview:

• My name is Sami Wunder and I am a certified relationship coach. I help women who do everything right in life, also do everything right in love. I help women who are single attract the right guy or a soul mate. I also help women who are in a relationship keep the spark in the relationship alive.
• At a given time in your life, there is one person who is right for you. However life evolves, you evolve, up grow, situation change. If that person is really right for you, he grows with you, changes with you and you stay together. If not, there is another one right for you. There can be more.
• I help quite a few women who are entrepreneurs and are just starting to make money. These women can be afraid that they become so successful that their husbands feel threatened or left behind. I then tell them that when they are at work, they use a lot of masculine energy in things as working on marketing or sales. However when they come home, their husbands expect a woman, so she will have to deploy her feminine energy. This often solves a lot of problems.
• When I was done with my masters, I was getting quite successful in life. However, I could not understand why my relationships would not last so long. After a harsh breakup, I decided that this would not happen to me again and I started reading about relationships. I learned a lot back then. I decided to start coaching myself. Within a year I had found a lovely man and after 9 months he was down on one knee already.
• At first, I was trying to get things right before actually executing them. Nowadays, I learned that it is best to just implement it and learn from your mistakes. This will truly help your business grow and help you grow as a person.

Sami mentioned Mama Gena, you can reach her at http://www.mamagenas.com/

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Just start, says the love coach – Sami Wunder

Episode 43

Show Notes

You can find and connect with  Jenna at:

• Her Facebook https://www.facebook.com/jenna.soard
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• And at You Can Brand!

Jenna is a design fanatic and branding expert. She loves to help you create a brand that is so personal, it will attract all of the amazing peoples that you want to be working with.

She was asked for the University of Oregon and The Forbes School of Business.  She taught branding, design, entrepreneurship, for 4 years, all while developing and testing core philosophies on how to take a non-designer and make them design like a professional in a very short period of time.

In 2013, she launched YouCanBrand.com and taught almost 200 small business owners how to design.

I liked the following quotes and remarks from the interview:

• My name is Jenna Soard and I run YouCanBrand.com. I teach entrepreneurs how to design for themselves, such as graphic design
• If you create a brand of your own, you can differentiate yourself from others in your field of work.
• We combine all the strategies of creating a brand and attracting clients in something visual.
• You need to find a niche, you cannot coach everyone, whilst you will not master your skill.
• Try and create and own philosophy, so you will stand out and people will notice you.
• Before I found myself capable of teaching in branding, I had to create a good brand of my own.
• During my time as a graphic designer, clients expected me to read their minds.  I started thinking about how it would be for non-designers to design for themselves and so the idea of my business was born.
• Today people usually cut up the solution of a problem to make more money, but it is not as effective as selling the whole solution.
• If you are not getting the sales you want, ask yourself if you are the only one doing this. Differentiate yourself

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Learn to design the branding for your coaching biz – Jenna Soard

Episode 42

Show Notes

You can find and connect with Kendra at:

• Her website http://kendrakinnison.com/
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• And at https://www.coach.me/kendra

Kendra L. Kinnison, MBA, CPA, is the General Manager for Port Royal Ocean Resort and President of PRexcel, a consulting firm serving the hospitality industry. She also provides leadership coaching through Coach.me to help people achieve excellence through habits.

Kendra is able to combine her job with coaching by using coach.me. She coaches on average 2 hours per day and has 80-90 clients. She uses her experience from her job in coaching on leadership and uses the experiences from coaching in her job.

As a final tip in the conversation, she suggests managers and leaders to also start coaching. So they can help others with the experiences of their work.

I liked the following quotes and remarks from the interview:

• When I am asked what my function is, I usually answer the General Manager for Port Royal Ocean Resort and President of PRexcel, a consulting firm serving the hospitality industry.
• I live very simply, I love all the different types of work that I do.
• I think that I wouldn’t have been a coach in the way that I am now without the help and structure of coach.me.
• Whenever I have spare time, even 30 minutes, I just get on the chat platform and interact with other coaches.
• I would encourage everyone just to try coach.me, see what the experience is like and trying out new things.

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Combining coaching and a job is possible with this solution – Kendra Kinnison