Never underestimate the power of encouragement, says Terry Ingham, a highly successful Personal Performance Coach and Coaching Academy Licensed Trainer. A single encouraging sentence changed his entire life. By Marie-Louise Cook.
‘You’re rubbish’ was a phrase Terry Ingham heard so often growing up that it became a guiding principle throughout his early life.
‘If you hear something often enough, you believe it,’ says Terry, who is now an ultra successful performance development coach with an MA in Strategic Human Resources, a Licensed Master NLP Practitioner for NLP’s founder Richard Bandler and Paul McKenna, and a Licensed Trainer for The Coaching Academy. But at school, the boy from the children’s home fared badly. ‘I had a chip on my shoulder – or so I was told - I didn’t really know what they meant but every time they told me I went out of my way to prove them right. What people believe and look for they tend to find.’
He left school with nothing but a report that recommended he stay away from anything requiring academic ability and instead try a manual or craft-based career. Oh, and with his lack of sporting prowess, he shouldn’t think about any kind of sporting career, the report added.
Goodness knows what would have happened to Terry if not for the intervention of a sports coach named Margaret Johnson several years afterwards. Quick to spot his talent at Judo, she told him, ‘You’re good at this.’ That simple sentence changed a lifetime of negative affirmations and was to have a profound effect on Terry, who was by then in his late teens. ‘I was so used to being told that I was no good at anything that when I heard that it shocked me. It was my green light, someone saying I was good at something. It changed my world. From then on in, I chose to believe what Margaret Johnson said to me rather than what anyone else told me. I realised it was me who drove my brain, my behaviour and I could choose who I wanted to be.’
Within 18 months, Terry had earned a black belt in Judo – a level that can take less gifted or determined individuals many years to reach. He became a qualified Judo coach and worked with some of the top Olympic and international Judo competitors in the world.
Terry spent the next 30 years working in roles that would allow him to help others reach their potential, using what he had learnt as a sports coach. ‘Throughout my consulting life, I’ve used coaching to encourage people, help them change and help them to get to better places.’ During that time, he earned many qualifications and accumulated a wealth of experience working for some of the largest multi-nationals on the planet.
In his last role, he was the principal consultant for a large consulting group and responsible for the coaching provision, both internally to companies within the group but also externally for the group’s customers. The group employed about 135,000 people in over 120 countries.
For all his success however, Terry wanted to set up his own business and coach and mentor full-time so he created a company. Another 18 months passed before he felt ready to ‘go live’ and leave the security of his job with the blue-chip company.
Just in case things didn’t work out as quickly as he hoped with his company, he also signed up with a coaching consultancy in a part-time role. ‘I had my feet in two camps and if things didn’t work out, I knew I’d still have a bit of income and another option,’ recalls Terry.
His previous employer, the mammoth engineering group, became his largest client. ‘That relationship just keeps growing. I have become involved in quite a few things because of that relationship. I never really expected that. They have brought more work to me and asked me to take on even more.’
To attract new corporate clients, Terry knew he needed to be able to offer a low or no commitment sampler session. ‘I have my own material – stuff that I know works but I needed an opening piece of material.’ When he received a mailing from The Coaching Academy inviting him to become a Licensed Trainer and present its workshops, he signed up, knowing it would provide the material he had been looking for. ‘It is a good opportunity to have a very select, well-branded one-day introduction workshop that I can put in the top in the funnel and use to pull business out through the bottom, creating a much stronger business stream.’
The Licensed Trainer workshop gave him such clarity, he says, that within hours of finishing the course, he clinched a 12-month contract worth £72,000 to provide a coaching and management support programme.
Four months after signing that contract, Terry is now on the verge of signing yet another large contract – this one for a corporate culture assessment in a South African company – which could be worth £20,000 with a follow-up coaching programme worth much more.
The £72,000 Management Coaching programme is underway and the Managing Director of that company is delighted, says Terry. ‘He’s now getting the sort of behaviour that he wants. People are more aware of each other and of the implications of their behaviour on others, which is what it is all about - changing behaviour from where you are to where you want to be.
‘I’m pleased with the business’ development.’ So much so, that he’s recently resigned from the coaching consultancy because he’s too busy with his rapidly growing company. ‘The way things have worked out, I’m totally confident about the future. The people at the consultancy have asked if I would like to be one of their suppliers. I’m setting up an arrangement to work with them. It will work both ways – when they’re busy I know they’ll ask me to work for them but likewise my business is growing and I’m grappling with how to handle the growth and they said they’ll be able to support me if I need it. That’s great because I know the coaches there and will be confident about sending work their way.’
There have been other developments too. Besides running one and a half hour sampler sessions for networking meetings and business associations, and one-day ‘Understanding of Coaching’ and ‘Understanding of NLP’ workshops based on the model he learnt during The Coaching Academy’s Licensed Trainer Programme, Terry has been busy with a major cultural change programme for his ex-employee. ‘That’s quite a sizeable piece of work and as a result of the feedback which has been fantastic, I’ve been asked to put in a proposal to do the organisation’s management development for the next three years. We’re talking a lot of money – six figures easily.
‘I’m trying to keep my feet on the ground. Keep focussed. At the end of the day, my core business is about coaching … I wanted to do this full-time and nothing else because seeing people achieve things that they didn’t believe they could do makes it all worthwhile. I like applying what I have to make a difference to people – that’s what gives me my buzz. If I could afford it, I’d do it for free.’
And given the opportunity, what would he say now to those teachers who judged him so harshly back at school. ‘Look how wrong you were. You never know what people are capable of. All anyone needs is the right stimuli, somebody to have faith in them and to give them the support they need and they can achieve beyond their wildest dreams. I reckon I’m testament to that.’
FURTHER INFORMATION
You can contact Terry Ingham at his company, Positive Impact Coaching Ltd. on 01472 311 751 or visit his website at www.positive-impact-coaching.com. For more information about The Coaching Academy’s next Licensed Trainer Programme, please telephone 0208 789 5676 or email team@theacademyclub.com.
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