 I'm hesitant to say what I'm about to say because I don't want to offend or discourage anybody, but I really believe in this message. I believe it's important to say this and I want to offer an alternative. So if you're open to the message, I hope you'll give it a try and let me know what you think. The message is basically this. Certification programs might not be an efficient way to spend your money and your time to reach career success, career or business success. And I'm talking about all kinds of certification programs for whatever skill you want to learn, whatever modality you want to provide to other people, why are you getting certified? Okay, so like I said, I have most of my clients, virtually all of my clients have paid thousands of dollars and months or years to get certified, which is why I'm hesitant about saying this, and I also have some friends and colleagues who provide certification programs. So I am not saying certification programs are all bad, but I just tend to be much more skeptical about them because I myself have gone through certification programs called getting a bachelor's degree from college. That's a certification program, essentially, expensive one, long one. I have an MBA, a master's of business administration, which is very well regarded certification in our society today, and I didn't use that certification at all. Everything I learned in business, I learned outside of my MBA education. And if you know anybody else with an MBA, master's in business administration, many of them will tell you the same thing. The MBA was expensive, it was a long time, it was so much work, and I could have spent those years and those tens of thousands of dollars much more wisely if I had known, if I had seen a video like this. Now I'm also talking about the life coaching certifications, the healing modality certifications, the certifications to learn this or to learn that or to become this kind of provider, that kind of provider. What I'm not talking about, I need to be clear. What I'm not talking about are the certifications that are required to practice legally. So obviously allopathic doctors, western doctors, or any kind of doctor, you need to be licensed to practice medicine to be able to claim certain things, or a lawyer, or a accountant. I don't know, I don't know about accountant. But anyway, there are certain things that obviously for legal purposes, psychotherapy, you need to have certifications. So I'm not talking about those. I'm talking about the ones that are optional, but that make you feel more confident. The certifications that make you feel like, oh, if I just take this program, then I'll know what I'm doing, I'll be a better coach, or a better healer, or a better service provider, and I'll be more marketable. So essentially the certification program sell you on these three benefits. Understand the modality to be a skillful practitioner, feel confident, so feel like you're ready now to provide it, and three, you're more marketable because you have the certification. Those of you who are still here watching this, and those of you who have a certification, have those things been true? Or maybe it is, yeah, I'm much better at the skill, probably, that's true. And so I need to differentiate between certifications and training. Of course training helps, of course taking classes and learning a skill helps, but what I'm questioning as the required path is getting that certificate, okay? Because here's why I'm such a skeptic about it. Here's why I think it might actually maybe even be harmful. Why can certifications be harmful? Because you are reinforcing the idea that you need an external authority to tell you that you're worthwhile. You need an external authority to tell you that you're ready, that you have a worthwhile skill. You need someone else to tell you. You need a piece of paper to say, ah, look, where am I pointing? I should even take this off. I put this up 10 years ago when I started my business, this is my MBA certificate. God, I need to take this off because I've been looked at that for 12, 15 years, and I really don't believe in it anymore. So I stopped believing a long time ago. And I get it, when you're not confident, you think, ah, this piece of paper and having gone through the expensive training program will make me feel confident. Has it? Yeah, maybe it helped your confidence. I'm going to tell you an alternative path that I think is a much better spend of your money and time and build better confidence, real confidence, and a real audience. So thank you for sticking around because I know that a lot of you watching this have already spent the five, 10,000, 20,000 or more, just like I have, in getting formally certified in something, and you don't have a viable business yet. That is my complaint with certification programs. A lot of them sell you on the idea that some of them literally say this and some of them kind of suggest that, hey, you go through our certification program. It's almost like you'll come out the other end being a practitioner who's going to have lots of clients. A lot of them don't say that literally, but you kind of fantasize that and they don't stop you from fantasizing this. Just like MBA, when I got my MBA, the idea was, oh, I'm going to graduate and I'm going to be in a field of doing something that I love, and my MBA particularly was in green sustainability, sustainable development. So I was like, I'm going to graduate and be able to change the world with green and sustainable business and maybe I'll go into a corporation and lead their sustainability teams or maybe I'll start my own green business. Sorry, my old business school or any business school didn't prepare me for that at all. I came out and I'm like, okay, I have to figure things out now after spending tens of thousands of dollars and what was it? Three years? Was it two years or three years? I can't remember, but it was a long time. So here's the alternative path. I'm going to just take, here's the alternative path and I actually took some notes, so I'm going to look at my notes to kind of share what that is. Instead of spending all that money and time, find some practitioner in the field that you want to be in and I'm not talking about apprenticeship. That actually might be good too. I don't know a whole lot about apprenticeships, but I want you to find a practitioner in a field that you want to get into that is successful, that is financially paying all their bills with the thing that you want to be doing. And then hire them as your mentor. It's going to be cheaper than your certification program. I almost guarantee it for the same amount of time, okay? But you'll get way more one-on-one interaction and hopefully your mentor also has several other mentees. So hopefully you're not the only client or mentee, you'll have several mentees that the mentor has several people that they're mentoring and not only do you get one on one mentoring, but you also get to role play or practice with the other mentees, okay? So here's the thing about one-on-one mentoring. And by the way, I don't offer this kind of program because I'm too busy now, so I'm not trying to sell you anything. And to be honest, I don't even know anybody who offers this. So if you offer it, comment below and let people know you offer this because I don't offer this. But I think it should be offered. Maybe in the future, I will create something and I don't know or encourage other people to create it. So one-on-one mentoring, hopefully in a group of mentees where you'll get a lot of one-on-one time but you also get to role play and every week, so you meet once a week and every week you learn just enough for that week's practice. And you are sent out immediately, like in the first month of your mentoring training, you are immediately sent out to get volunteer clients. So you, and this is usually true at the end of a certification program, right? Like a coaching certification program. At the end of it, they'll say, all right, you know, towards the end, sometimes towards the end, like in the first half, you like got all these lectures, like all this theory, which is learning in the classroom feels good to the learner. It feels like, oh, I'm getting something done. I'm learning stuff. Oh, aha. I didn't think of that. Oh my God. But you're not actually getting any practice. It's just a bunch of like filling your head with knowledge and actually what happens when you're, so this is interesting. When you fill your head with knowledge, but you're not practicing, here's what happens. You get more doubtful about whether you can do it. This is a weird psychological thing. I'm filling my head, filling my head with all these things that I should be doing, but I'm not doing anything. So then I get more perfectionistic when I actually get to practice. Instead, if the mentor just gave you just enough theory for the week and say, here's the thing I want you to do now. Here's the thing I want you to do this week with your clients. I want you to do this one thing or these two things. That's it. That's what all you practice and you'll be so. So anyway, most certification programs towards the second half, you have to go and ask your friends, your family and your colleagues, hey, I'm in the certification program and I need a certain number of hours, right? I need a certain number of hours to prove that, you know, I am now certified in this. So will you please be my volunteer client? I'm not going to charge you. I'm going to give you the service for free, but you can give me feedback, maybe testimonials, but I need to certify that I've gotten these hours. Okay. Same thing, exact same thing can happen with a mentor, except a good mentor will send you out the first week, the first month I would, I'm like, all right, you want to be an authentic business coach? First week, I'm going to send you out. I'm going to have you ask your friends, get two friends who are here in a coach now or whatever. Let's say I'm not going to use business coaching because, you know, I'm going to use something that many more of you understand. Let's say, let's say I'm a life coaching mentor, I want to teach you to become a life coach the very first week I'm going to teach you to go find three friends to say, Hey, I thank you for being my friend. And can I give you free life coaching? Just, you know, an hour a week, half hour a week, whatever it is. And I'm going to be trying things on you. And I believe you're going to be helped by this. And I love for you to give me feedback, you don't have to stay forever. But, you know, and so that's, that's the mentor would give you just enough every week, just enough theory, just enough next step. So you practice it right then and there. Okay. Now, the other thing about volunteer clients is that part of the deal is that, Hey, listen, you're my volunteer client. And what I need to do is I need to record our coaching sessions. Now, I'm not going to broadcast this recording, obviously, what the recording is for is for my own critique and for my mentor to watch. And my mentors mentoring me and mentoring, you know, three or five other people or whatever. And we might watch clips of this so that I so to critique my own skill of how I'm coaching you. Would that be okay? And it's completely confidential. We, you know, we'll sign whatever, we'll sign whatever confidentiality thing. And if you're not comfortable with the other mentees watching, it's just going to be me and my mentor who watch this. Okay. And he's very professional. She's very professional. Okay. Would that be okay? All right. Great. So every week you come back to the mentoring with a video or two and you and your mentor watch part of your coaching session together and go, oh, George, I noticed that, you know, or, you know, Jill, I noticed that, you know, you started the session, you know, being very hurried and saying what you want to get done and what would have been more supportive is to ask your client, hey, how did this week go for you? Or, you know what I mean? I don't know what the mentor is going to coach you on or mentor you on. But that's what I mean. Like every week you come back and you just get a couple of tweaks to what you can do better and go and send you out the next week to try those tweaks. Essentially, what we're doing is deliberate practice. Deliberate practice, which is the best kind of practice to actually improve, to actually improve the most efficient way possible. Okay. Most certification programs, imagine you're learning tennis. You know, if a tennis student were instructed like most life coaching certification programs, here's what they would do. They would sit in tennis lectures, you know, for four months or five, you know, four months they would sit in tennis lectures, watch people play tennis. And then month five or month six, they'll find, all right, we're going to go and play tennis now or maybe during the certification class, you get three minutes of role play or five minutes of role play because they have to get to everybody, right? Or, you know, of critique. Like, okay, we're going to, you get to play tennis for three minutes while I critique you in front of everybody now. And it's like, the certification programs are not, are built, I'll tell you what they're built. They don't tell you this, but they're built to make money. Well, of course, because there's shareholders, there's the business owners, there's profit that otherwise how, and what certification programs, which I could totally start one, is the people who started certification programs love to talk. They love their own theory. They love to, you know, coach people and mentor, you know, they love to coach people, but they love to talk. So they end up talking a lot, like doing lectures and coaching and all that stuff. But it's not the most efficient way for the student to get the deliberate practice, which is one of the one-on-one mentoring they're supposed to do. That's what deliberate practice is. So that's, you can tell I'm kind of pissed about all my clients having gone through these certification programs. It's like, I wish they, I wish I made this video 10 years ago, and I wish they saw this video early on, because then hopefully we would have saved you $5,000, $10,000, $20,000. And now you, okay, so let me tell you what the, continue with the alternative path. One-on-one mentor who gives you just enough theory, just enough practical info every single week to then go into practice sessions with volunteer clients right away. And by the way, the mentor might even refer you to some of his or her own clients for additional practice sessions. That might be additional benefit for the mentor. The mentor is like, hey, I have these clients who are paying me. They're paying me for my coaching or my healing or my service. But as a bonus, I'm also giving them your volunteer kind of practice coaching for free, in addition. So that could be a cool thing. And then also a good mentor would also do this. If the mentor is helping you to build a, to help you build a business that they have, okay, here's what the good mentor would also do. They would also immediately have you start to write or make videos about what you're learning every single week. So if I were a mentor, so again, George Cowell's life coaching, you know, mentoring program, I would say, great. Dorota, this week, I'm gonna, you're gonna write one article or make one video, whatever you're comfortable with, about what you learn from your practice coaching this week. What's one thing you learned that the reader can take away? Like an office you're gonna keep your client confidential and all that stuff, but something you learned that, so you would start creating content from the week one of your mentoring with me or another good mentor. Again, I don't provide the program, but too busy. But you would start creating content from week one and hopefully the mentor would say, I want you to build an audience from week one as well. So learn Facebook ads or learn whatever way to distribute your content that you can start building an audience from week one with your articles or with your videos. So imagine that, that's so much of a better. So, okay, let's say a mentor charges you $300 a month. So most, I was looking around doing some research and these days, life coaching certification programs cost $5 to $10,000. So let's, and I saw several of them that were $5,000 for six months. Okay, so let's create a program for you. That's $5,000 for six months that builds you a business, not just ends up with a piece of paper and a few practice coaching sessions, even if it's 30, I don't care. It's not as much practice that you would get in this kind of mentoring program. Okay, so here's how it would be structured. The mentoring would be $300 a month. So you would meet with your mentor for let's say 45 minutes or an hour every other week. So twice a month, you'd meet with your mentor, okay? And there would also be maybe two other, small group calls or one other small group call. I gotta figure out the pricing, but one other small group call. And for role playing or maybe there's no small group and there's simply, you get together with other mentees individually to do role playing and record those sessions and then get critiqued during your one-on-ones, okay? So that's another cool way of saving the mentor some time. So the mentor gets essentially $150 an hour. It's pretty good. $300 stable income for every mentee, good deal, right? So $300, so for six months, because the life coaching certification program several of them were six months long, $5,000, great. We'll do six months of one-on-one mentoring for $300 a month. That's $3,600, okay? $3,600, it's, anyway, do, you know, run them out. Yeah, 300 times six months equals $3,600. Okay, $3,600, great. Now, the mentor is also gonna go learn Facebook ads so that every week when you write your article about what you're learning in your practice coaching, you'll be posting those and you'll be running Facebook ads to build an audience so that by the end of the six months, you're not just graduating fresh with a piece of paper and now good luck, go and build your audience and try to figure out how to enroll people. You are building your audience from day one, from week one anyway, or from whenever you learn Facebook ads, maybe it takes you a couple of weeks to learn it, but you're building your audience way sooner than the typical certification student, okay? And I want you to spend $1,000, sorry, yeah. No, spend a hundred dollars a month on Facebook ads. Okay, so you're doing $600 in six months of Facebook ads, which is way more than most life coaches or healers or service providers spend. Most service providers don't know how to do Facebook ads and they do Facebook ads, like I've told everybody, $30 a month is a great way to start. There's a very low rate, you could build an audience that way, but if you spend $100, because we have a $5,000 budget here, $3,600, go to your mentor. $600 goes to Facebook ads for the six months. You'll be building a much better audience than most life coaches when they're starting out. By the end of the six months, you'll probably have $100 times six months. My guess is you'll have a couple hundred people regularly following your articles who are ideal clients, who are potential clients anyway, okay? All right, now you've spent $4,200 total, $3,600 for the mentor, $6,000 for the Facebook ads. In six months, you've spent $4,200 total. That gives you another $800 for business and marketing training, or VA, you know, virtual assistant, or what $800 to spend building your business software, whatever it is, which is enough money to be honest with you for six months, for sure. $5,000, you have a business now. You don't just have a piece of paper. So you can see, I mean, I just, yeah, I just so wish that people would have, I would have said this 10 years ago, or even a year ago, or two years ago, and saved a bunch of you a lot of money, and a lot of time, and a lot, and here's the thing. You have a choice here with this idea. On the one hand, you get a certification, and you reinforce the idea that someone has to tell you that you're worthwhile, that you're confident, that you are ready to go out there, okay? And it's an illusion, it's an illusion, because it's some experiences you've had in classroom mostly, and a piece of paper. On this other theory that I'm giving you, this other way of doing it, you now have real confidence, because you have six months of practice, guided practice with a mentor doing deliberate practice, six months of it. You have real confidence, built from actual service experience, and not only do you have six months of real practice, you also have six months of audience building. You don't get that in a certification program. So you're out six months now with real practice, and probably some real clients now, because the people that your friends and colleagues that you've been helping for six months, some of them are gonna be perfect for you, and some of them will become your paid client, or refer you, like, oh my God, this is my friend. George has been coaching me now for six months, he's come out of his mentorship now, and he's amazing, and please go with his company. So they'll be advocates for you, because they've got six months, or three months, or whatever, of your free service. They'll be completely advocates for you. Make sense? And then you'll also have an audience on Facebook, or wherever you've been building, that now, they've been following your journey. They've been following your journey the whole time, and now that you're saying, I'm completing my mentorship now, now I'm ready to take you all on. You've been seeing what I've been learning, are you ready to experience this? This is amazing, I'm like talking myself into, but it truly is, I wish this were, I wish what I just said could replace a lot of the certification programs, because again, the certification program creators love talking, that's why they create, they create a program, people pay them lots of money, so they can talk, and they can hire other people to talk. Not about talking people, it's about giving people just enough so they can practice. Now, I'm kind of guilty of this, because I sell courses all day long, where I love to talk, right? Make videos all day long where I love to talk, which is why I'm creating a new course now called Deliberate Practice, which is a lot, showing you a method where you can learn just enough and then become true master at whatever you wanna do. So anyway, I hope, I hope this video will be a game changer for some of you, or if you know the friend, and I just, I wanna say, I know I've seen this to be true, I don't know, I'm sure there's some theory behind this, but I think women in particular have been raised in a culture that is, I don't know if it's genetic or if it's cultural, but I think women in particularly feel like they have to get more certifications, to feel like they're ready, they're worthwhile, they can put themselves out there. I actually read something where it's like, men feel like if they're 60% qualified for the job, they will apply, and women have to feel like they're 100% qualified to apply for the job. So that's in the job application world. Probably true for, of course, that translates into business building too, oh, I have to get this certification, that certification before I feel ready. And the problem, like I said, the problem with certification isn't just lost time and money, which is already tons, it's not lost, I mean, you get lots of training and some role play, that's great, but it could have been better spent, is what I'm saying, but it's really about reinforcing the idea of an external authority telling you that you're ready, and every certification you get, you just reinforce it even more, which I think is dangerous. So I'd say, as a man, of course, I would say this, right? Because I'm a bullheaded man who's like, oh, I'm 10% qualified for the job, I think I'll apply. That's what men in testosterone tends to do, right? So of course I'm the one giving this message, and not surprisingly, most of you who are watching this are women, because you have been tempted by a lot of certification programs. So anyway, I hope this is helpful. Thanks for those of you who are joining me, and let's see, I'm gonna read out some of the comments that are here. Yeah, Prem says, been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Yeah, much more than the t-shirt, you got an expensive piece of paper. And one of the great things about certification programs, you come out with some colleagues and friends. I mean, that's one of the things. Actually, like I've said, I'm pointing to my MBA certificate. I did have a lot of friends, but I really haven't kept in touch with almost any of them. So I don't know, I don't know if it's that helpful. Dorota says, I appreciate training and apprenticeship instead of certificates, some certificate systems benefit mostly the certificate issuers. Also the other thing is, so certificate programs, they're so good at selling us for a couple of reasons. One is they have a budget to do so because lots of you have paid them lots of money. So now they have a huge marketing budget to try to sell to you. But secondly, they have all the alumni, which I was one, when I first graduated from my business training, my MBA program, I was an enthusiastic alumni and I was trying to get everybody to sign up for my MBA program. I even became the admissions director of my MBA program. So I was trying to sell lots of people on getting an MBA and all that stuff. I don't want to say I regret that, but I kind of do because I was good at selling the people and you should get a certificate and then you'll be accepted in the corporations and you'll be able to have business skills and all that crap. Sorry, I hope nobody from my school watches this. But it's not my school, it's not my school. My school is actually compared to the other programs. It's probably a very good one because it's actually relatively practical, my school. But I'm saying most business schools and master's programs are like this. They have a huge budget to market relative to the one-on-one mentor. And they have these armies of enthusiastic alumni who partly, the alumni partly are thinking, if I get more people to sign up for this, the more people graduate from my program, the more valuable my program is because the more accepted my program is in the world, the more mainstream he becomes. And it's like, oh, you graduate from that certificate? I've heard of that. Yeah, so there's this whole movement in that direction which I'm trying to not fight, but like saying, hey guys, there's a different way of doing it that's much, much more effective use of our time. So yeah, Nick says, yep, weekly check-ins and assignments are great suggestions. So thank you, Sarah, for your comment there and for Prem. Yeah, Sarah says, I've seen this with so many of my clients. They've done practice sessions. They've done no practice sessions and so they don't have any confidence. Confidence truly, true authentic confidence comes from lots of practice and feedback from the mentor saying, you know what? Based on my best practice, based on my experience, what you're doing is effective and you'll get the true feedback, of course, is from the clients themselves. And Amparo, thank you for your comment and Noel says, you know, my program required that we had clients and we had to practice with them on regular basis had helped me be better. Great, so yeah, some programs are much more practical and I respect those programs a lot more, right? Okay, anyway, I hope this is helpful and I hope I didn't mean to offend anybody. I just have a real passion around this because of how much money I spent in this area myself and how much money my clients have spent and how I was the one selling these kinds of certification programs. So I kind of feel guilty about it, not guilty, but kind of atoning for at least finding a better way forward anyway. So take care, thanks for watching and any comments or questions or suggestions or if you provide this kind of one on my mentoring in your field or you wanna build one based on what I said, comment below and so people can sign up with you, okay? Blessings.