Networking Unleashed: Building Profitable Connections. An Interview with Amitai Sela and Michael A Forman
- mforman521
- Mar 17
- 10 min read
📍 📍 📍 I've got a guest today and he's a speaker and a coach and everything else. His name is Amitai and he's worked in the industry in the IT industry and management for over 30 years and 10 years as a consultant. He started a, he started and sold several small businesses.
And it's a successful entrepreneur. Now, instead of me butchering the rest of his bio let me just introduce him to you first and we'll go from there. So welcome Amitai. How are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm not doing too bad. So give us a little background. Okay. I got my bachelor's in computer science.
I got my master's in management information systems. It's a master's in business and I'm currently working on my MBA. I have worked in companies as big as fortune 10 companies down to three person law firms. So I have a pretty big depth and breadth of experience there. I've worked as a consultant.
In a variety of companies doing going, I started out basically in help desk support, moving all the way up to senior architect. In over my career let's see what else that basically sums up my background. I am disabled and what I speak to mostly now is how to use the adaptations that disabled people, both non neurotypical and physically disabled people use and how to leverage those for general management and leadership.
And you do speeches and your yes life coaching and stuff like that. Yes. Okay. What inspired you to become a life coach? And how has that journey shaped your approach to coaching? What inspired me is my mentors and how they have coached me in my career, and I've also had some people who mentored me in my personal life journey, and I've learned a lot from them, and then I have just my own general experience of how to deal with stuff.
I've been studying life coaching as as a practice and theory behind it and so forth. And the principles of not just giving out answers, but helping my client discover the answers that they already know and creating systems and processes for accountability. And that relies back on my management experience to create those systems.
But the person who best knows about themselves is the individual. You're the expert on you, is basically the principle I operate on. So we use that to develop the coaching strategy for either life coaching or professional coaching. Okay. Many people see coaching, many people seek it, but they struggle to take action.
What's the biggest roadblocks and how do you help clients overcome them? One of the coming up in IT, one of the most dangerous phrases we learned was that's the way we've always done it. And you have to be open to change. If you want to engage with life coaching or professional coaching, the key thing is you have to start out being open to change.
If you're not open to change, then there's nothing coaching can do for you because you have to be willing to accept that accountability and that openness because obviously what you've been doing to this point is not achieving your goals. Like everything else from there. Exactly. And everything else, you have to be open to coaching to change in order to succeed or to be better than what you are.
You coach and speak to people one on one and you speak to an audience. How do you adjust? How do you adjust from one to the other? Audiences are more generalized. So I'm talking more about my personal experience and about. Whereas in a coaching session, one on one it's very catered to that individual's situation and their individual needs.
So I start out like the first meeting I have with somebody is just introductory of me getting to understand. What they're looking to accomplish out of coaching and what their goals are, and then we develop it each step and just using project management terms we meet, we review what we talked about previously we talk about our goals going forward and set action items, set some.
Not quite deliverables because they're not handing something, but just goals for them to accomplish or to work on and what difficulties they anticipate, how they can take an approach to adapt to those and preempt them and do stuff like that with a keynote or a workshop, it's really addressing it's addressing a larger group that is coming to hear About a theory or practice and learn from that and then take it back and develop it on their own.
Okay, what's a powerful mindset shift that this professionals can make today to accelerate their success? One of the key mindset shifts that seems to be what I've noticed a lot of. Management getting away from is the idea of listening with humility. A lot of managers when things are stressful or there's pressure, will fall back to a top down approach rather than relying on the ideas of their team and just being adaptive in that situation to what gets the maximum productivity out of their team versus Taking what gets the maximum productivity from themselves and just imposing that downward.
And it's that sense of humility of being willing to change and willing to listen that is one of the major things I'm seeing management going away from now. And it was moving in that direction for a while. But, COVID and now back to work orders and all that other stuff, you're getting a lot of shift and pushback because people are getting confused and tense with change.
Okay. Okay. How do you measure success in coaching? And give me some results you've seen with your clients. Success in coaching is achieving the goal, whatever goal we set out from initially. If it's a personal goal, one person I was working with on personally was she was having relationship issues and just was going through series of bad relationships and couldn't manage to break her bad habits.
And so what we set as the goal was to really set new paradigms for what she was looking for out of a relationship and what she had to do for herself to see these new relationships rather than just, again, go with the same old. She had to look at what she thought she was. initially attracted to versus what she actually wanted and how to look for that.
And then professionally we've worked on productivity and career advancement. And so when it's career advancement, it's pretty simple. If they move up in the organization, they've achieved that goal. When it's productivity we have to determine what the productivity measure is. In that situation, if it's a nonprofit, then productivity, it can be measured by how many people they've served or how well the interest of the nonprofit has been addressed.
If it's a corporation environment, then productivity is really how much results are produced per hour of labor. Okay, you've really explained what success looks like. What are some common mistakes that are made within the coaching industry and how can you overcome them? One of the most common mistakes I've seen is coaching being used as therapy and coaching is not therapy.
As a coach, I'm completely unqualified to give. therapy to people. I'm not a medical professional, and I don't pretend to be. If somebody's looking to deal with certain personal issues, then that is really a therapeutic role, and a lot of coaches want to veer off to that, because that's just our natural inclination, when somebody approaches us with a problem, is to give them a solution.
Whereas as a coach, we have to guide them to finding their own solution. So it's as a coach, you're almost exclusively asking questions. Whereas in a therapy role, you are making suggestions. And as a coach you really, there, there can even get into legal issues with that. You cannot give.
Suggestions, because otherwise you're not fulfilling the coaching role. You're a guide, but you're not a solutions provider. Okay. Okay. How would you position yourself as a high value coach and speaker in a crowded market? It is a very crowded market. I think what makes my position unique is coming at it from a disability perspective and understanding a more out of the box type of thinking and thinking in more of an adaptive manner.
So taking the idea that A cookie cutter solution does not fit everyone. Let's look at what adaptations the individual or the organization needs to make. Excuse me. Needs to make in order to achieve their goal. Be it an organization. Sometimes a work from home solution works really well for some people.
I've seen other people that it's awful for. If they're not in the office, they don't know how to function. And the same thing with coaching is, if your approach isn't working let's brainstorm and think of other things that you can do that might be a better approach. For example, with this person with that I commented on with the relationship issues.
Maybe something like Tinder is not the best option for them, whereas some of the other apps, or even going back to the traditional of just meeting somebody in a bar or meeting somebody at church or something like that, where it's more of a face to face interaction where you can get a better read on the person rather than how they're presenting themselves on an app, which is always more it's a presentation.
They're not going to indicate their flaws, right? It's it's very cold when you go through texting or an app, and you definitely more. You feel the vibe of the other person to feel the vibe of the room, and you can give you a much better feeling. Yeah, I've noticed there is an age. differential there. Obviously the younger people are, the more comfortable they are interacting electronically, whereas the older people are they're going for the older methods of meeting the people face to face.
I've noticed a lot of interpersonal communication issues with younger generations because they just, Back in my time you had to talk to people. You do, or you did. Yeah. And actually you still do. I still operate on that. Principle. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's what I am all about. All about meeting and greeting and seeing the vibe of the person and getting to know them, creating a relationship because really relationships, what's in and building a client list.
That's really out the door. Today's day. It's more all about relationships. Exactly. Okay, so so give me a strategy that helps you attain and attract and retain clients and how can my listeners apply them to their own businesses. Okay. As far as attracting coaching clients, a lot of it is word of mouth.
Do post some ads on some local sites or targeted ads on Facebook, but they're very general. Like one of the ads I most recently did was, you have all these new year's resolutions and everything, but you don't feel like you can get to them. Maybe coaching is a solution for you and then I offered also with that, the introductory session is free as a get to know situation so that we can both see if I can take them on as a client and if I'm the right coach for them, but a lot of it is also referral.
If you're a good coach for somebody, they're going to refer you. And eventually word of mouth, it becomes your best situation. Let's bring this first full circle. And if you could leave my listeners with one game changing piece of advice of their personal or professional growth, what would it be?
I would say listen and divest your ego. Not everything is a personal attack. And even if it is, it's someone else's opinion. You don't have to take it on personally and let it impact you. Just be open to listening all the time. Feedback, both positive and negative, can always be learned from. And if you divest your ego from it, then you're more available to act upon it and see what's valid and what changes you can make if they're necessary changes at all.
Very good. That's very good advice. And and that's a very good takeaway. If somebody wanted to get hold of you, if they wanted to talk to you about coaching or speaking or any of that, how would they get hold of you? Our website is currently going through a slight overhaul, it's mostly done, but there is a slight bit of overhaul on it, but it the contact form on the website is probably the best way to get a hold of me, because it's It allows me to address the person when I have the time to get back and really discuss with them.
So the website is the word problem the number two resolution. com Okay, that's good. I can't tell you how great this was you gave a lot of insights to the coaching aspect of things on your side. And listen, if anybody wants to get hold of Amitai, just please do I think he's got a wealth of knowledge.
Thank you so much. I really appreciated this opportunity. I think what you're doing is really great out there, getting all this stuff out there. I'm glad you I'm glad you enjoyed it. And I'm hoping to spread your message all throughout. And I hope I wish you very much success. Thank you so much.
Well, hold on, folks. Don't go anywhere. Let me just read a few of our sponsors that we have. Struggling to reach success? Maybe it's time to quit. In Quit Your Way to Success, by Rodney Davis. This reveals 27 steps to breaking bad habits that hold you back. This powerful book helps you rewire your mindset, take control of your actions, and turn setbacks into stepping stones.
With real life examples, motivational quotes and actionable lessons, especially for sales professionals. You'll gain the tools to quit. What's stopping you and start winning. Transform your future today. So Quit Your Way to Success, by Rodney Davis, available now on Amazon. And this is a non profit called Rev'd Up Kids.
This is something I believe in wholeheartedly. Rev'd Up Kids is on a mission to protect children and teens from sexual abuse. Exploitation and trafficking. They provide prevention training programs for children, teens, and adults. To learn more, go to RevUpKids. org That's R E V V E D U P K I D S dot org.
Michael is a business networking expert specializing in enhancing professionals' networking and communication skills to drive profitability. As a leading authority in this field, he is highly sought after for his dynamic presentations and workshops. His extensive experience has consistently led to significant improvements in corporate profitability by empowering individuals and organizations to connect more effectively and efficiently.
Comentarios