By Hank Chin
Director, Asia-Pacific Impact Coaching Alliance

Backgrounder To Writing The No.1 LinkedIn Book In Chinese

Since I have dual roles in personal branding and job campaigning, it's always my desire and need to keep abreast and study trends as well as look into what the future may hold.

And some time ago, after signing up for LinkedIn very early (it still wasn't very popular then), I have high expectations of its potential and so I invested my time to learn LinkedIn's new functions and how best to use them.

It was clear to me that LinkedIn was a future star.

LinkedIn is a very good platform to connect with like-minded people from around the world, and if it is used well it can be a very powerful tool with which to build your personal brand.

So I stuck with LinkedIn, and then about 3 years ago LinkedIn started really growing rapidly, especially after the job search function was integrated into the original interface.

It was at this time, that I thought that it was great timing to introduce LinkedIn to the Chinese-speaking world. From there, I invited a friend to write a book with me on the subject.

Innovative Content Plus Thinking Structure

Since very few people in the Chinese-speaking world had a clear idea of what LinkedIn, I spent the beginning of my book introducing the important and essential functions of LinkedIn to help readers quickly become familiar with LinkedIn.
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I also clarified the difference between LinkedIn and a professional résumé, which confused many people at the time and which still confuses many peopel today. From there, I shared my knowledge and experience on how best to use LinkedIn to connect with both domestic and overseas jobs. 

Throughout the book, I focus on the practical rather than the theoretical by presenting 7 real cases studies about jobs searches, business collaboration and recruiting, all of which happened to me and to the other author. 

I also share my perspective about networking on LinkedIn, the Quality vs. Quantity argument. And I developed and presented a LinkedIn connection grid (LCG™) to help you understand which type of connection strategy would work best for you based on your circumstances. 

Our LinkedIn Employment Flow (LEF™) is included in the chapter on job search strategy. In it, we teach you how to integrate your LinkedIn profile and professional résumé into your job search flow to pursue the job of your dreams. 

After reading LEF™, you'll have a clear structure of conducting job searches on LinkedIn.

In addition to this, I also map out an 8-week personal branding plan to help you build your personal brand through LinkedIn. By establishing your personal brand gradually, you will have a good chance of landing a job of your choice far earlier than expected. 

Personal Branding And My Future Plan

In general, writing a book is not that hard, but writing a book that contains valuable content is extremely hard and it takes a lot of time to accumulate the proper data and materials.

As I coach people on their personal branding, I firmly believe my book will help shape part of my personal brand in my target audiences’ mind, and this shape can be good or bad, which is why I am so careful with it to ensure that I am always building a positive personal brand in their mind. 

I really enjoyed writing this book and I hope to reach as many people with this book as possible. So far, I've been lucky that this book has been one of the bestsellers in the job search sector in the Chinese-speaking world. 

But, I'm still working hard to promote it and with LinkedIn getting more and more attention in Asia, I believe the book can be highly useful for people who want to learn how to leverage LinkedIn in their careers and professional lives. 

I will keep focusing on my core profession as it relates to job searching, coaching, job search marketing materials, personal and employer branding, career coaching, and the Asia-Pacific Coaching Alliance to bring a positive impact and message to our audiences and members.

I hope you can leverage your LinkedIn network and create more opportunities through it. And while you're at it, don’t forget to sign up for APCA, where you can get more practical tips and strategies to jumpstart or supercharge your coaching career or personal coaching practice.

About Hank Chin:
Hank Chin is a Director of APCA, the Asia-Pacific Coaching Alliance, and also a Principal of Hank Spencer the Top Rated LinkedIn Consultancy in Taiwan and Great China.

http://www.hankspencer.com

HOW TO BECOME A COACH

I. Your Inner Voice
To be a professional coach you have to embrace thinking from the inside.

You have to ask yourself: “Do I  really have the self-generated passion to listen to and make sense of another person’s confusion, uncertainty or doubt, even though that may well drag me down in the process, too?”

That is the million-dollar question and it will greatly determine whether coaching is for you.

Being a coach requires a strong commitment as well because you will be asking your clients to carefully listen to their inner voices and then asking them to brainstorm with you to figure out possible solutions which will best enable them to achieve their goals.

However, if you don’t, can't or won't listen to and confirm your inner voice ─ PASSION ─ how can you possibly expect your clients to follow your instructions when you ask them to listen to their inner voice?

II. Mindset and Expertise
Secondly, after you confirm your passion the next question will be “Other than passion and empathy, do I have enough knowledge to coach my clients?”

If you think about it, being a coach is a very sacred responsibility. Someone has entrusted their well-being to you.

Whether you recognize it or not, your words, thoughts and actions will mildly to greatly influence your clients. You must, therefore, ensure that you possess a positive mindset, up-to-date and time-proven knowledge as well as have developed the habit of continuous life-long learning.

This will ensure that your client is taken care of professionally and just as importantly well cared for.

To ensure that you have the most up-to-date knowledge and coaching processes be sure to enroll in a trustworthy, ethical and most of all results-driven coaching organization, such as HICA, to earn your coaching certification. After earning your coaching certification, be sure to regularly participate in industry seminars and networking events.

III. Between You and Your Clients
Lastly, your ability to build mutual trust and commitment with your client is as if not more important than the earlier issues we discussed.

And as discussed before, mutual trust is the foundation of successful coaching.

So you must learn how to connect with your client through your initial interactions whether they are by email, phone, skype or in person.

Once solid and mutual trust has been established, you must know how to motivate and convince him/her to fully commit themselves to the accomplishment of each task as they strive for their ultimate goal.

Although both are not directly related to your coaching knowledge they are equally important as your passion and expertise.

IV. Real Coaching
After your clients have made substantial progress, gains and finally achieved their desired results based on your coaching, then and only then can you truly and honestly say that you’re a qualified and real coach because those actual results along with satisfied, empowered clients, speak the loudest.

We hope to see you in our community soon!

Whenever we've asked coaches and prospective coaches about the greatest difficulties they encountered in either developing and running a full-time coaching practice or simple breaking into the field, we've noticed the same themes appear again and again. 

1. For Prospective Coaches Considering The Field

• What does a coach do?
  
• How do I become a coach?
  
• What are the first steps I should take to become a coach?
  
• What should I expect and do immediately upon becoming a coach?
  

2. For Newly Minted Coaches or Part-time Coaches Transitioning To A Full-time Coaching Career

• How do I shift from being a part-time or weekend coach to making this a full-time career? 
  
• What are the obstacles and opportunities I will face?
  
• What are the principal threats and risks I will face?
  
• How do I maximize my upside while mitigating or eliminating the downside risk?
  

3. For Coaches (Established or Newly Minted) Looking To More Efficiently & Effectively Sign Clients

• Given the very competitive market for coaches how do I quickly and effectively sign new clients?
  
• How do I differentiate my services?
  
• How do I improve my marketing efforts and results (on a small or non-existent budget)?
  
• How can I drive more business from inbound marketing efforts?
  
• How can I retain exist clients longer?
  
• How can I leverage existing or former clients for referrals?
  
• How can I re-market to or reactivate former clients? 
  

4. For Coaches Who Understand The Critical Importance of Staying Skilled-up & Relevant

• Clients are expecting a new level of coaching expertise and experience, how can I deliver?
  
• The coaching field is getting crowded, what skills can I develop to differentiate myself?
  
• How can I meet and manage client expectations?
• How do I best keep my skills sharp, up to date and utilize them as a competitive advantage?

As we move forward, our High-Impact Training & Certification programs will address all of these common themes and issues.  Throughout the training our objective remains the same:

To help you become a more effective and productive coach, not only in terms of the results you produce with clients but also the ease with which you attract and bring in new clients while retaining your current clients.

We'd like to talk a little about our immediate plans for the Asia-Pacific Coaching Alliance in 2013 and then our plans beyond that.

The first order of business is to reach out to clients in Asia-Pacific and around the world to let them know about our organization and the unique benefits we provide while we build our membership rolls.

Beyond that, we will continue to build and offer original content and offer insights and analysis into coaching techniques and knowledge, client management and best practices.

We hope you'll join us on this journey!

We are pleased to announce that the Asia-Pacific Coaching Alliance's entire content and content archives are now fully indexed & searchable!

This will give our member's easier and more complete access to all the organizations content.

Greetings! And welcome to the Asia-Pacific Coaching Alliance.

The Asia-Pacific Coaching Alliance (APCA) is exclusively focused on serving the unique needs of the dynamic and fast-growing  Asia-Pacific market as an educational, professional networking organization and knowledge base.  

We cover the entire region from Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, India, Australia, New Zealand and Vietnam to Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and beyond by providing high-impact and ethically-grounded solutions for coaches of all disciplines: career, personal, life, executive, business, conflict resolution, personal relationships and performance coaches.

APCA is both industry-segment and industry-vertical agnostic, covering industries and verticals such as information technology, semiconductors, industrial, automotive, life science, pharma, fashion, consumer/FMCG, banking & finance, professional services as well as educational services, NGO's and government institutions through out the entire Asian region.

Woven throughout the organization are the core principles of ethical coaching.

Our organization's mission rests on three pillars: 

A. Educate
B. Connect
C. Protect

That's it. It's really that simple. 

We welcome you to join our organization and sign up for our newsletters.

James Santagata
Executive Director
The Asia-Pacific Coaching Alliance
Coach For Impact!