Career Coaching Secrets

From Accumulation to Distribution: Blaine Bartlett's Secret to Scaling Impact

• Davis Nguyen

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In this Career Coaching Secrets episode, host Rexhen interviews Blaine Bartlett, a world-renowned executive coach and author. Having coached since the 1970s, Blaine shares his philosophy of "leading from behind," where a coach's role is to help clients find their own answers and focus on personal growth over simple goal attainment.

Blaine's high-ticket clients find him through referrals, not social media. His business is a "lifestyle business" focused on impact, not scaling, and he works with a select four to five clients per year. His most valuable investments include his work with Frederick Hudson and his ongoing pursuit of a PhD.

His biggest challenge is helping leaders navigate "relational disruption" caused by change. His advice to coaches is to become a "center of distribution"—giving away value freely to build reciprocity and have a greater impact.

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Blaine Bartlett:

I mentioned this earlier here. My role as a coach is to provide a structure that allows for content to be fruitfully explored. The client's role is to bring the content. What is it that you're wrestling with? What is it that you're unsure of? What is it that you don't know that you want that you're actually trying to achieve? Those sorts of things. So the questions, there's a structure to a coaching conversation that could look like, I mean, you know, It goes in this direction and then it focuses back down. So there's an exploration phase that...

Davis Nguyen:

Welcome 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 have been a consultant at two career coaching businesses that are doing over a hundred million dollars each. Whether you're an established coach or building your practice for the first time, you'll discover the secrets to elevating your coaching business. Hey

Rexhen Doda:

everyone, welcome to another episode of Career Coaching Secrets Podcast. I'm your host, Regan, and today's guest is Blaine Barlett, a world-renowned executive coach, keynote speaker, and best-selling author of Compassionate Capitalism, Journey to the Soul of Business. As chancellor of the Napoleon hit Hill Institute, co-host of Office Hours on Apple TV, and host of the Soul of Business podcast. Blayne is a leading voice in conscious leadership and enterprise transformation, with clients ranging from global CEOs to visionary entrepreneurs. His work centers on the belief that business is the most powerful force for good on the planet, if led with intention, empathy, and soul. And it's a pleasure for me to have him on the podcast today. Welcome to the show, Blayne.

Blaine Bartlett:

Reggie, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invitation to to sit and talk.

Rexhen Doda:

Cool. Great. Yeah, it's a pleasure for us. So I want to know how you started this. What inspired you to become a coach, then start your own coaching business?

Blaine Bartlett:

Well, that's a long story that I'll make very short. I started coaching, if I put a date to it, typically it would be around 1977. So I've been coaching a long time. We didn't call it coaching at that point in time. It was just part of what we did and the work that I was doing in the personal development space and then subsequently from that in the consulting space with organizations. And it was just an adjunct to some of the ways that we worked with our clients. And then fast forward about a decade and a half or so, I actually learned that there was a name for what I was doing. It was called coaching. And I got connected with some folks that were actually founding members of the International Coach Federation And one of the founding members there was a mentor of mine, Ian Frederick Hudson, founded the Hudson Institute out of Santa Barbara, which was and is one of the premier coaching schools in the world. And yeah, I did some work with Frederick, kind of codified what I was doing. And the rest is, I suppose you could say, history. Coaching has been a part of my consulting practice since the beginning. And this literally goes back to the 1970s.

Rexhen Doda:

Oh, yeah. Well, that does definitely go back in time a while back. Um, Throughout the years, obviously that has changed a lot. There was no Zoom or anything like that. It was mostly done in person, I believe. And like I said, you didn't even have a name for it back then. You didn't call it coaching. It was mostly something you would do. Right now, which part, would you say, which part of your coaching journey do you find the most rewarding since you started doing this?

Blaine Bartlett:

It's the one that actually was the most rewarding from the very beginning. And it's just seeing the transformation that occurs with people. One of the things that I recognize resonated with in the work that I did with Frederick Hudson. He had this way of describing the coach's role in an interaction. And he said that a highly effective coach leads from behind. And the implication of that is that the client has the answers inherent within them. And the coach's role is to provide a structure that allows for the content that the client brings to the table to actually be explored with an eye towards solving whatever problem it is that the client would like to have solved or move into a direction that the client would like to move that they haven't been before. But the intent here is that it's already inside. It's already present. And it just needs to be illuminated in some way, shape, or form so that nobody of leading from behind. When it's highly successful, there's literally this ta-da moment that occurs and the client is doing what it was that they had said that they wanted to do, their being who it is that they said that they wanted to be. The experience of fulfillment that comes with that is shared on both sides. I certainly get to experience it, but certainly my client does as well. The nature of growth is part and parcel of that. Clients will come, and I'll just kind of go down a little bit of a rabbit hole here, if I may, but they'll come with a goal in mind, typically. I've got this goal to have, do, or be something that I don't have, do, or be at this point in time. And there's generally some confusion about what the nature of a goal is. And most people think of a goal as something that they aspire to attain. So a goal is intended to get something. That is not the purpose of a high quality goal. The purpose of a high quality goal is to grow. And in the growing process, I actually get something. Ideally, I'll get what it was that I was setting out to achieve. But if I'm not growing in the process, it's kind of a fool's errand. So for me, For me, the idea of highly effective coaching has to do with the embedded notion that growth is what we're after, not just an iteration of what was. And so all of that kind of comes into play here. And that is intrinsically satisfying.

Rexhen Doda:

triggers them? Is it generally you're just like asking the right questions at the right time could potentially make someone think what they haven't thought of before? I

Blaine Bartlett:

mean, that's probably the simplest way to describe it. I mentioned this earlier here. My role as a coach is to provide a structure that allows for content to be fruitfully explored. The client's role is to bring the content. What is it that you're wrestling with? What is it that you're unsure of? What is it that you don't know that you want that you're actually trying to achieve? Those sorts of things. So The questions, there's a structure to a coaching conversation that could look like, I mean, it goes in this direction and then it focuses back down. So there's an exploration phase that is uncovering, exploring, noticing. A lot of times it's about noticing what I haven't been noticing. So in that exploration phase, there's a lot of questions that take place. There's a nexus point. There's a point where that exploration has been achieved sufficiently at a given point where we now start focusing on now what? What do we do with this? That's where, you know, game plans come into play. That's where we start looking at the question of how. And in that question of how, which is different than the question of what, and that question of how can get pretty granular. And that's where we begin to explore different choices about ways of doing things that were different than what we've done before, because we want to do things differently. The way that behavior changes is through awareness. And an increase in awareness increases choices. So ideally what I'm doing when I'm working with a client is Putting a spotlight on here's a choice that we haven't really worked with before. Maybe it's something that you did before, but it was historically not appropriate at that point in time. What if we did it this time and just explored what happened? So, I mean, there's just a number of different ways, but it's all embedded in what I call the coaching conversation. And I wrote a whole book about it.

Rexhen Doda:

Thank you. Thank you for sharing all of that. And so what is the type of client, the ideal client that you work with? And then we'll also dive into how the transformation looks like for them, meaning how the program works.

Blaine Bartlett:

So the first part of it would be, again, Who would be an ideal? The ideal client is somebody that is interested in growing, honestly. I mean, I've worked with clients that did not have growth as part of their makeup. They just wanted to get something done and move on. And if they're not going to grow, I'm not going to be the person that they're going to want to work with because I'm going to be asking questions that they're going to think are irrelevant to what it is that they're trying to make happen. but it is highly relevant to their growth process. And that's not for me to decide, but it's a litmus test that I use. And when I'm working with clients, are they coachable? And clients that the smartest person in the room oftentimes doesn't get as far as they could get because they are the smartest person in the room and they are not taking information in in a different way. And I work with highly intelligent people. Some of the smartest people that I've ever worked with have been my clients. The ones that have been highly successful are the ones that are open to coaching. They're open to different points of view. They're willing to challenge themselves. They're willing to challenge their thinking. And that's The nexus point is where how I think about something, how I describe something to myself determines how I feel about it, how I feel about it generates behavior. So it's the behaviors that I use to create results in my life. Most people are continuing to use habituated behaviors because they never question the description process, the thinking process that goes into the whole dynamic of producing results in their lives. So if a client actually wants to change their behavior, they have to be open to explore their thinking process. They have to be open to letting go of belief systems, changing belief systems, modifying belief systems that don't work any longer. So that's kind of where we're going with that.

Rexhen Doda:

Focusing on growth. So that would be the ideal client. And then when it comes to the program itself, if it is a program or how someone, let's say, I want to grow, how do I work with you? How does that look like? So we're moving from...

Blaine Bartlett:

provide a structure and then the client will provide the content. My typical coaching engagement runs at least a year because we're really working with belief systems and whole paradigm structures. And paradigms are built over time. They don't just happen. So to deconstruct a paradigm and actually replace it with something that's more workable, more useful, takes some time. So the first piece is an understanding that there's going to be a time commitment that's engaged here. And we'll typically meet once a week, at least for the first quarter. once a week. Today, it's almost done virtually in most cases. And that is typically an education component. I'm talking about some different ideas that we might be looking at, but also exploring and unbundling. What just happened this last week? And let's unbundle that and see what worked, what didn't work. How might we do that a little bit differently? So there's that part of it from a formal perspective. There's also a standing invitation for people to get a hold of me at any time during the process. So I'm available pretty much 24-7 when I engage with a client. And the intent there is you bring to the table the content that you're dealing with in real time. Don't wait until it's blown up in your face. Don't wait. Actually get on the phone, ping me, text me, email me, whatever it is. We'll set up a meeting as soon as we can and we'll just walk through. Okay. Here's some scenarios. What can we do with that? So that's kind of the granular piece of it. On the front end, when we begin working with each other, I like to have people join me for two days here in my office up in the Seattle area. I live up on an island, so I want to get them out of their environment. We come up, we sit long and talk much. I mean, literally, it's two days of conversation. And the intent there is for me to map their thinking. And for them to get a sense of how does this work? How do I work with Blaine? Who have I said I wanted to work with here? So I'll spend two days with somebody. We'll have dinner together. Oftentimes, we'll definitely have lunches together. But I want to get to know the way that they think, not just what they think, but the way that they think. And then that begins to inform what we end up doing from there. Sometimes I'll bring in some psychometric tools, instruments and whatnot that we can use to just kind of illuminate a couple of different ways that people actually process information and that sort of thing. We get together once every quarter in a physical meeting. But the rest of the time is kind of staggered out, like I said, typically over virtual structures. Sometimes if it's an organizational issue that they're dealing with, we'll bring their team into the mix. And I'll actually do some work with their team because it's part of a whole system that they're actually interacting with in the system. Anytime you try to introduce change into an organizational system, the system is going to push back. It always will push back. So we want to be able to actually mitigate that. And that's some of the work that I'll do with the clients as well.

Rexhen Doda:

Thank you for sharing that. And when it comes to the clients finding you or you finding them, which marketing channel works best for you right now?

Blaine Bartlett:

Historically, and it remains this way, referrals. With the kind of coaching that I do, mass market doesn't work. I've got some lower tier offerings in terms of conversational touch bases and whatnot that I do with communities through Instagram, LinkedIn. LinkedIn is probably the modality channel that I use most frequently. But I've got an Instagram presence, TikTok presence, that sort of thing. But those typically are more just... branding more than anything else, I guess would be the way to think about it. The actual, if I'm going to work with a client, you know, that's often off of a referral, like I mentioned, and then we'll have a chemistry meeting. Yeah. Okay. What's up? Why do you want to do this? Here's what you're getting into. I want to be very clear about setting expectations on both sides of the table. that sort of thing.

Rexhen Doda:

And right now, what is the goal with your coaching business moving forward the next one to three years, short to medium term goal? How do you see the coaching business changing? Do you have any goals around that?

Blaine Bartlett:

The goals that I have have to do more around impact. So I'm looking continuously at how do I enhance the impact that I'm having with the clients that I'm serving. So yeah, I'm continuously getting myself into educational programs as well. So one of right now i'm uh finishing it by september hopefully knock on wood here touch base or touch wood I'll have a PhD completed. So I'm doing some educational work on myself that enhances the effectiveness that I can actually leverage with the clients with whom I'm working. So it's less about growth goals for the business side of things and more about growth goals for myself that translate into greater impact with my clients.

Rexhen Doda:

What are some investments that you've made over time in your coaching business that you feel like those have been very good investments and you've gotten a good return on those investments?

Blaine Bartlett:

Okay. Yeah, the work I did with Frederick Hudson, just investing in his coaching program, basically just to kind of get a framework for what I was doing already. It was kind of like, oh, okay, but now I've got a, there was now an intellectual framework for what it was that I was doing. And that's proven very valuable as I've continued to move. And a large part of that had to do with just the access to the ICF, the International Coaching Federation. I ended up actually coaching the CEO of the ICF for a good period of time coming out of that. I'm pretty eclectic in the way that I develop myself and I'm continuously looking for what's the area that needs to be shorn up. What's the area of greatest interest that might translate into more effectiveness with my clients. I've done a number of different programs with Joe Dispenza just on the nature of the mind and the creation of manifestation of reality. I'm a member of the Transformational Leadership Council and have been for about 20 years. And we've got an amazing group of folks in that. I mean, Jack Canfield with his success principles. Jack's a very good friend of mine. Bob Proctor was one of my best friends and he and I would continuously do a lot of interacting with each other. We actually taught on stage, you know, a couple of different times together, developed a program together. I mentioned the PhD program. I'm in the middle of that right now. So I should have my PhD again, hopefully by the early September, early fall. I hope. Get everything, get the dissertation. All the stuff that's involved with that. So those sorts of programs. I mean, I'm always looking for something that's on the leading edge that today is more around consciousness. How do we actually leverage this thing that we call consciousness? And how do we actually tangibly translate it into activity? It's one thing to become aware, but it's another thing to actually take action on that awareness. So I'm Continuously looking for ways to leverage that and translate it into a language that businesses can understand and actually resonate

Rexhen Doda:

with. And right now, what would you say is the main challenge that you're faced with in your coaching business? What is that one thing that you're trying to solve for next?

Blaine Bartlett:

I think a large part of it has to do with the nature of change. is certainly a part of that. But a lot of business leaders that I'm encountering and working with today, both on the Apple TV show that we do with Office Hours, because we do a series of interviews on that show. We're in our eighth season on it. And a large part of it has to do with just kind of the challenges of scaling my business, retaining workforces. This is the first time in history, literally the first time in recorded history, where we have six generations in the workplace at the same time. And the challenge is, that that presents to leaders is, it's unique. How do I actually lead a workforce that has six generational expectations that are not the same? They actually are very divergent expectations. How do I actually create a basis by which I can sustainably move myself and my organization forward given some of these disruptions? And I think the educational component on this is something that is a challenge for me. How do we educate leaders of the need to pay attention to the relational dynamic, not the business dynamic, but the relational dynamic that they're actually challenged with? Because the problem with change is never the change itself. The problem with change is the disruption to existing relationships that the change causes. And if leaders are not equipped to mitigate relational disruptions, that's where things go off the rails. That's where things get really messy really quickly. To the degree the relationships are... well, you got a pretty good shot at being successful. And these aren't just the interpersonal relationships. People have relationships with their, well, certainly with their jobs. They have relationship with AI. So AI is perturbing and disrupting incredibly the relationship that people have with work. They have relationships with vision, with values, goals, objectives. All of these things have relational components to them. Most leaders do not understand that that is what's in play. It's not the change. It's the relations. that are in the relationships. So that's the biggest challenge that I'm running into right now.

Rexhen Doda:

Do you have a team that is generally helping you with your coaching business? And how does that team structure look like?

Blaine Bartlett:

That ebbs and flows. This goes back to the mid-1990s, I believe it was, created and led a major chunk of Nokia's global leadership development process back in the late 90s. And one of the things, and we were one of the very first organizations that did this, we instituted a coaching component as part of the training, the leadership training that we were doing. And this was, I think, When we put that together, it was about a four-month coaching component that followed on after the training sessions that occurred. And so we developed a whole methodology around how that was done. And I ended up bringing on eight different coaches from around the world. We had them literally scattered all over the world. And that was the largest that we did in terms of a training or a coaching cohort. And it's kind of dependent on who the client is that we're working with. I'm not doing large enterprise work right now. I'm doing more one-on-one coaching. So my need for a large staff has actually been tempered quite a bit. And we've got a lot of virtual folks that we work with.

Rexhen Doda:

The reason why I ask that is you also mentioned enhancing your impact and getting more skill. And I was thinking there's definitely that limit that you reach when you're only doing one-on-one coaching or when you are the only coach. So that makes sense that you at a certain point in time had more in your team and then comes and goes.

Blaine Bartlett:

To that point, you know, one of the things that we did do following COVID, literally because it was one-on-one coaching, you know, it was a And consulting. And we had a consulting coaching business. And I had offices in four countries. And at COVID, when COVID hit, I mean, not an exaggeration, 98% of our book of business disappeared overnight. It just disappeared. And because I couldn't get on airplanes, I couldn't go meet with people or any of that stuff. And so we started, yes, unexpected opportunity appeared to reinvent ourselves in a different way. So I did not want to let go of the one-on-one coaching because that's actually where I think that I'm most effective. But we needed to find a way to develop delivery mechanisms that could satisfy some basic needs that organizations were, particularly as they started recovering from COVID. So we've got a mastermind program that runs for a year that is virtual. And we bring people in from around the world around that. And I lead it every week. So people have access to me. We've got a couple of other training programs slash workshops. coaching programs that we developed that leaders can actually take themselves, but also take into their organizations and facilitate. And it's pretty, pretty structured in terms of, you know, here's how you do this. Here's what it is that you're doing. And it's all modeled after our methodologies. So I wanted to have a low barrier to entry on all of that stuff. So we found ways to actually facilitate people having access to information, access to resources, not have to wait for me to show up someplace, because to your point, Scaling me is, I don't want to get on an airplane

Rexhen Doda:

anymore. And you also mentioned sometimes you have people visit you as well in your office. So that is also not always easy to scale. So yeah, that makes sense.

Blaine Bartlett:

So, I mean, honestly, I mean, I take about four personal clients a year. And given the price point we work at, that's it. something that's doable but yeah i'm very selective about whom i work with

Rexhen Doda:

yeah if you had the ideal client how much would you like to have for a year let's say thinking of like how much you want to scale when you say that

Blaine Bartlett:

well four to five clients a year is the term is a year i mean we'll work together for a year so uh we've been pretty pretty steady with that year over year you know We'll just kind of cycle things through. And I've got some clients that have been with me. Well, on the consulting side, I've got clients that have been with me. One client's been with me for 30 years. And I've coached just about every one of their senior managers in one way or another. But the high impact... one-on-one coaching, four to five clients a year is what I work with.

Rexhen Doda:

Cool. So it seems like you are already at that point. So what I'm trying to figure out is where is it going next? Kind of like, I'm getting a little bit confused.

Blaine Bartlett:

Well, it's the purpose of a goal is to grow. It's not to get something. So I'm not interested in particularly scaling the business. I built the business. Like I said, we had offices at one point in time in four countries around the world. After COVID, we retrenched. I don't have that any longer, which is just fine with me. Honestly, I've got over 5 million air miles. I don't need another plane flight. And yeah, at my age, it's kind of like I get to pick and choose. So the business today for me is a lifestyle business. And it's a lifestyle business organized around how much impact can I have in doing it the way I want to do it. So I'm pretty clear about that today.

Rexhen Doda:

I'm not interested in building

Blaine Bartlett:

another

Rexhen Doda:

empire. I've done that. Yeah, that's, that's why I wanted to clarify. So it does make sense. So thank you so much for today. I also have a final question, which is what advice would you give to other coaches who are just like you looking to scale their impact? And we'll talk about it a little bit, but is there any final advice?

Blaine Bartlett:

Yeah. Nature has been my biggest teacher. I grew up on a farm and yeah. I live on the seashore here. I'm looking out at the water right now. I live on about a hectare of land, about 11 acres, and it's forested. And I mentioned that because I walk every day. I walk through the forest and I just notice things. And one of the things I noticed years and years ago, and this goes back to when I was a kid, is that there is nothing in nature, nothing in nature that serves solely as a center of accumulation. Everything in a thriving ecosystem serves in some way, shape, or form as a center of distribution. If I'm looking to have impact, the mantra that I work off of today is, how can I be a center of distribution? What can I distribute? And I give a lot away freely. And it doesn't have to be a product. It can be advice. I mean, I'm always, you know, here's my number. Give me a call. If you want to talk, we'll have a conversation. Nobody abuses it. But I'm always looking for ways that I can be a center of distribution and plant seeds. And at some point in time, something circles back. I mean, that's just kind of the nature of reciprocity. So that's where the book Compassionate Capitalism came out of. The invisible hands of commerce that Adam Smith talked about were based literally on reciprocity. You win as a client. I win. as a provider. And if that is continuing to go, then things are working pretty well. And it's called the wealth of nations

Rexhen Doda:

for that reason. Thank you. Thank you so much, Blaine. It's been a pleasure having you on the podcast today. For anyone who wants to find you or reach out to you, they can simply go into LinkedIn, Blaine Bartlett, they'll be able to find you there. There's also your website, blainebartlett.com. And where else would you like to send people?

Blaine Bartlett:

Actually, they can take a very simple leadership quiz just to kind of, you know, what might my leadership blind spots be? And they can go to leader.blainebartlett.com. And that drops directly into a page that sets them up to take the leadership quiz. It's a free quiz. They'll get an immediate report back. It analyzes it based on our leadership model. Here's where you might want to pay some attention.

Rexhen Doda:

Thank you. Thank you so much, Blaine. It's been a pleasure having you again. Thank you for coming.

Davis Nguyen:

My pleasure, Regan. Thank you for the invitation. 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. This podcast was brought to you by Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to $100,000 years, $100,000 months, or even $100,000 weeks, all without burning out and making sure that you're making the impact and having the life that you want. To learn more about our community and how we can help you, visit joinpurplecircle.com.