I have always been fascinated with the doubt and fear that many people have about moving into self employment.
My own journey started nearly 24 years ago as a business improvement and leadership trainer. I had just completed a Masters in Manufacturing Management and with the coaching of Dr Stephen Asbury got a Distinction. He then recommended me to a Business College, run by Dr Andy Cope before he went onto creating The Art of Being Brilliant, who were looking to run a training programme for a corporate client. Anyway Andy gave me my first gig, with the words, “You are not going to get a job are you?”
The first eighteen months were not easy but suddenly things started coming together and I realised with ten clients I had more security than I had as an employee. In March 2005 qualityculture Limited became an ILM Centre. I had moved on from consulting to being a full time Leadership Trainer with clients such as Alstom, Ricoh, NPower and Ibstock Brick.
In 2006 I signed up for my NLP Practitioner because I thought it would make me a better trainer. And it did! I still remember the conversation with Lorna Maskell asking if she thought I should do the course. “Of course you should”, she replied.
A year later I completed my Master Practitioner in NLP and went onto do my Trainers Training in July 2009. Not before setting up my first Practitioner course to deliver the following October. We had seven people, one of whom is now Managing Director and another who was in sales but launched a very successful hypnotherapy training company.
My passion for helping other would be entrepreneurs emerged around six years ago, around the time Kali Fraser joined us. We seemed to have a lot of delegates on NLP Programmes who were stuck in their present careers. They felt they were ready to move on – something was awakening inside them which was creating a desire to become self employed as a coach/trainer/speaker. But many were beset with doubt about whether they could get customers.
We realised that we were not just teaching NLP but had created a ‘vehicle’ to enable people like we were twenty years ago to have the confidence to take the plunge and create their dream.
So, we built a free 6 month group coaching programme, ‘Accelerate’, for people on our Master Practitioner and 3 Principles Coaching Course for anyone with the desire to start their own training, coaching or consultancy business.
For more information about any of our programmes, contact Lorna on lorna@qualityculture.co.uk or book an information call with her HERE. She would love to chat to you about how we can help you move past those doubts and fears about self-employment.