Mindset #1: Do Good Work

Earlier this year, we introduced our 10 E Mindset blog series. We’re excited to dive into each mindset, the actions they can create, and how they ultimately impact your business in a positive way. By going on this journey and embracing each of the 10 mindsets, we believe you’ll give yourself the best opportunity to find your own success, fulfillment, and well-being as a mental performance entrepreneur. 

Ready? Let’s hit the trail. 

As we determined these 10 mindsets, the one we kept coming back to above all else became Mindset #1: 

Do good work, first and always. 

Let’s break this down: mindset, action, benefits. 

Mindset

The belief or attitude behind this mindset is this: If you do good work as a part of your business, the rest will eventually follow. If you don’t do good work, or you’re inconsistent, your business will likely suffer and eventually you’ll close up shop. So, we believe that in order to be successful long-term in private practice, you must do good work. “Good work” in its simplest form means that you are consistently helping your clients to improve their performance and well-being through your services and/or products, and that they have an excellent experience with you in the process. 

For us, this sounds like: “I believe in doing good work.” “I am committed to doing good work.” “Do the best work I can with what I know right now.”

Action

When you embrace the mindset and importance of doing good work, your actions will follow.

Early on in your business, this may look like:

• establishing your foundation in sport and performance psychology and in business/entrepreneurship (e.g., through our Establish course)

• obtaining the CMPC credential

• practicing mental skills yourself

• developing your own ways of teaching and training mental skills through a scientist-practitioner approach

• prioritizing session preparation, execution, and follow up 

• engaging in ongoing mentorship and self-care  

• soliciting feedback from clients through evaluations; reviewing and utilizing feedback

• engaging in ongoing reflective practice around your work and customer experience 

• participating in ongoing professional development and applying what you learn to your work and/or business 

As you get further along in your business or enter the mid-career phase, you may continue the above while diving deeper into:

• clarifying who your ideal clients are, what problems you help them solve, and how you are uniquely positioned to support them 

• iterating your approach to mental performance work and your customer experience to optimize outcomes 

• continuing professional development, perhaps with a specialization or niche focus to better serve your ideal clients 

• creating customized services and/or products that offer specialized support 

• connecting and collaborating with colleagues for ongoing peer support and professional development 

Benefits

Doing good work - as a mindset and action - ultimately helps you and your business to survive the first few years, then begin thriving. Why this happens, and why this matters, can be boiled down into three words: Net Promoter Score. 

A Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric that helps you gauge customer satisfaction and loyalty, as a potential predictor of business growth. In your client evaluations, this is the question phrased something like: “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend, family member, or colleague?” Based on your client’s rating, you can begin to understand how satisfied they are in working with you and how likely it is that they will refer you to others.

A score between 0-6 means that these clients are detractors - they are unhappy, unsatisfied, and likely to bad mouth you to others. Scores of 7 or 8 are passives, meaning they are usually satisfied with services they received, but they’re not loyal - they may discontinue working with you to work with someone else, or they may lose faith in working with a mental performance coach in general and give up (which negatively impacts our entire profession, by the way). Ideally, you’re creating scores of 9 or 10, which are your past clients who are promoters - your loyal clients who rave about you and your work, driving referrals to your business.

The 9s and 10s come from you doing good work - through the outcomes you create and your overall customer experience. 

Think about it this way:

When my husband and I first moved to this area, we found a pretty good pizza joint right around the corner - Rosati’s. We became consistent customers - and then started to realize it was actually kind of expensive (especially without a coupon), they messed up our order a few times, and in-person, the service was terrible. We quickly moved from promoters to passives to detractors, and we haven’t been back in years - even encouraging other people to not waste their time. 

A few years ago, some friends ordered pizza and brought it to the park while our kids were playing. We got to talking about this place - Italy’s - because the pizza was SO GOOD (which is saying something for the South, as my husband is a New Yorker). Overnight, this became our go-to spot - it’s reasonably priced, it’s delicious every time, and it never takes more than 15-20 minutes to be ready. The only “inconvenience” is that we have to pick up our order as they don’t deliver to our house, but it’s totally worth it. I can’t even begin to tell you how many people we’ve told about this place (and here I go talking about it… again!). 

What ultimately mattered? Two things: our experience as customers, and the product.

Your business is no different - you want current and past clients to talk about you, their experience working with you, and what you’ve done for them - positively. You want them to RAVE about you to other people. That doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t happen by accident. 

For people to refer you to others, they have to be willing to put themselves out there - it’s actually about their reputation, not yours. They need to be sure that you are worth it, because they don’t want you to make them look bad if you don’t follow through or you can’t help their friend.

Of course, we can’t control other people - but we can focus on doing good work with the services and products that we provide in order to give us the best chance to create positive outcomes with and for our clients. We can focus on creating an excellent customer experience from start to finish. 

The reality is: many mental performance coaches in private practice are mediocre at outcomes, the customer experience, or both. There is a real opportunity to build client loyalty and referrals by doing good work, consistently - which will help your business grow and become more sustainable over time. Word of mouth is still one of the best sources of marketing - you cannot pay for it, but you can earn it.

Time to be honest with yourself: are you creating 9- and 10-level experiences with your clients? If not, what’s missing?