For my first coach training I paid around 15.000€. It was a yearlong training offered by the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching (iPEC) to become a (fancy-sounding-title-warning!) Certified Professional Coach (CPC) and a certified *Energy Leadership Master Practitioner (*ELI-MP). **The training plus the additional coaching hours also got me another certificate – Associate Certified Coach (ACC) – with the well known International Coaching Federation (ICF).
I didn’t have the fee of 15.000€ at the time. I had to borrow the money which I normally never do. It was a hefty investment for me and still I would do it again. The training was excellent and I learned a whole lot! But… and that was the first big insight for me:
People care about real, actual support and results. Not a single client in 8 years has asked me for my certification in coaching, ever. This might be different for other coaches, I don’t want to generalize. But for me… nobody cared for my certificates and – oh boy – was that freeing!
I didn’t care and nobody else did. Wohooo! Finally it wasn’t about window dressing anymore. It was about a real and honest felt sense of this being can support me and I trust it.
Around the same time when I took the above mentioned first coach training I also attended my first retreat with Anthony Paul Moo-Young »Mooji« – who would later become my spiritual teacher. It was a weeklong all-inclusive retreat in the ZMAR ecological resort in Portugal. I think the investment was around 500€ if I remember correctly. I was veeeeeeery sceptical at the time and definitely had thoughts like this is a big ripoff! 1.500 people in a tent each paying 500€. Ha! This self-proclaimed guru is getting filthy rich with this scam!
Gladly I was not only sceptical, but also incredibly curious! I was open enough to dive deep into the experience of the retreat. I’m not saying it lightly, this retreat changed my life foreever. It was by far the most life-changing experience for me up until today!
You can imagine that I didn’t second guess the investment of 500€ anymore. Not only that… I wholeheartedly thought, that those two investments should have been reversed! I should have paid 500€ for the coach training and 15.000€ for the retreat. And I loved the coach training! That takes us to my second big insight:
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Investing in transformative life-changing experiences that take you beyond your comfort zone is worth all the money!
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Again, I’m not generalizing, but it surely is like that for me. So much so that it changed my whole attitude towards investments afterwards.