How is International Coach Academy’s Training Different?

Robyn: Let’s get started on the International Coach Academy difference. The reason we came up with this topic is because it’s the first thing we get asked a lot. What’s the difference? It’s understandable because students are going down the path of finding out what coaching is, feeling comfortable with it, wanting to become a coach. Then to the stage of I’ll get some training. And then down the path to I’d like some accredited training.

At that point, they’re looking around for which school and the differences. It’s quite difficult to sort it out just from reading all the various websites. So we thought we would put this call on.

That’s why Nick and Susan are two of the best people I could think of to be talking about this because they’re both in different roles. Nick was a community manager for years and Susan was a program advisor and still does. They have probably spoken to more students than anyone else in our company. Way more than I, so that’s why I thought this would be a great topic.

Respect for Students

Let’s start with the first thing that you think is the most important difference. This is completely unrehearsed, everyone. I haven’t asked before. We don’t have a list in front of us. I can always pull one out; we have heaps of material like that but I just prefer to do it like this. It’s interesting to see whether we agree on the most important differences.

Susan, I’m coming back to you first. What do you think is the most obvious difference between our school and other coach training schools in general?

Susan:  Robyn, I believe it’s that International Coach Academy respects each student for who they are, as a unique and creative individual and that just reflects in so many aspects of the program.

Robyn:  Interesting. The bit that I hear there with my educator hat on and coming from an adult learning perspective is we respect the student for the unique individual that they are.

I could actually do an entire hour on this just in terms of education generally and it’s no coincidence that my kids go to a Montessori school, which is also based on this principle. You know, normal schools, all the students sit down and it’s “Okay, today we’re going to learn dolphins.” They do that for an hour. “Put your pens down. Now we’re doing division.” It’s teaching and students will learn but it’s very teacher-driven. It’s not student-driven.

Now, the reverse of that which is also problematic in education settings is when you go to a completely student-driven approach where the teacher walks up and says, “Okay kids, what would you like to learn today?” That doesn’t work, either.

I think what we’ve done is create an amazing balance in there where we have a framework, we have curriculum, we have learning outcomes, and we have actual learning objectives for every single telecast. The way that we teach is that we don’t think that every student is an empty vessel and we’re going to fill their heads up with knowledge. We acknowledge and respect that they are amazing, have had an incredible life experience.

If they can bring that to the classroom and bring that to coaching, we’ll make them a much better coach and for much richer coaching. Is that what you’re thinking when you said that or have I just completely gone on a tangent?

Susan:  That’s exactly what I was thinking. We don’t want our students to be cookie-cutters. We want them to know who they are and what their coaching voice is. International Coach Academy helps the students develop that, which is critical as a coach.

Robyn: Yeah, I think it is. Nick, what is the one difference that you see as most obvious?

Nick:  Well, Susan, you took my answer.

Robyn:  Really? Is that what you would say, as well?

Nick:  That’s what I was going to say, but I have another one. I agree fully with what you guys said about that because it even goes to looking at our philosophy of our coaching model. We don’t have this coaching model in the sky which is a one-size-fits-all where we’re all supposed to cram into that or find our voice within that. Instead, we are able to design our own. We can be anything we want to be. In the philosophy it is to do our best to support your learning. I think it’s fantastic.

Sense of Community

But my real answer, Robyn, I would say looking at the sense of camaraderie that we have within the student body. When you think of coming to an online school, voice-to-voice training, you think that you’re going to miss out on connecting with your trainers and fellow students.

But I actually find that I have more connection here with coaches at International Coach Academy than I may have in a brick-and-mortar building. You’re rushing from class to class, or after work you go and take a three-hour class and then have to come right back home.

I find that there’s such a sense of support, a sense of cheerleading within, a sense of community. We say we are a coaching community. I think that is underplayed sometimes. When you’re coming in as a brand-new student or prospective student, you may not understand how important having a community of like-minded coaches around you will support you. Not only to learn but also to sustain that after graduation.

If you are in our advanced program and have lifetime access, then that is for a lifetime. It’s a group of people that are there to support you forever.

Robyn:  Interesting. I’m really glad you brought that one up because I think the whole online learning thing is very, very misunderstood. There are a lot of assumptions out there about it. It drives me nuts, actually. I’ll be in a meeting with completely unrelated people and someone will say something like, “Well, face-to-face is better.” I just have to sit on my hands and close my mouth because it’s not an appropriate time, but it drives me nuts.

I have first-hand experience of it because I studied post-graduate in change management and I did it face-to-face at a university here in Melbourne. I was working full-time at the time. I used to scream into there on Saturday morning; go and sit in the class, listen to the lectures, work out what I needed to do, go home, do whatever I had to do, get back to work. It was always stressful getting to the lectures.

I think I might once or twice have gone to the café and might have had a conversation with another student but I never really met anyone in that course. I just got the certificate and all that.

Then a couple of years later, I did a master’s in online learning and I did it online. It was amazing, the connections that I made with people because very simply I was coming to the learning when I wanted to be there. They call that “just in time” learning. It’s like when you feel hungry you eat. When I felt like learning I would log on and I would learn something. When I felt like connecting with other students I would log on and I would connect.

I made amazing connections that way and formed relationships with people I’d never met that are stronger than some of the relationships with people I have met. It’s quite amazing.

Nick:  When you connect with people here at International Coach Academy, like the whole peer coaching thing, you are coached by someone else. It may just be a conversation you’re having one-on-one with somebody else but you’re also learning from that person while you’re connecting and then sharing who you are. So it’s learning and connecting at the same time.

Robyn:  And you know what’s amazingly powerful is the combination of meeting someone like that online. It’s quite intimate, the phone. Just doing the phone backwards and forwards, there are no distractions or visual distractions, particularly when you’re coaching. Coaching is also a very intimate activity so it’s quite personal and you do form relationships with people.

It’s amazing to them they’re not face-to-face. It’s so weird. It’s like meeting long-lost family. We have a lot of Meetups happening around the world. In our forum there’s a folder for Meetups. There’s one happening in Singapore next week, actually. That’s also pretty cool.

Susan, how did you find the online learning?

Susan: It was interesting because it was the first time I had learned online and it was something that, like Nick said, I wasn’t expecting to form any friendships with it. I found the community was so collaborative. There was no competition. Everybody shared and wanted to help each other. In the forum the sharing of resources and ideas and insights, I found it amazing.

There was a group of us that graduated about the same time and we actually formed a MasterMind group. We still, to this day, get together once a month and support each other and coach each other and share resources. They have become such treasured friends of mine and I’ve never met any of them.

Connecting Through to the Learn Site and Student Forum

Question:  You said something interesting and important and something came to me about that. Do you have a platform? How do you connect? Do you have a team room or I-Cloud or a space to connect with each other?

Robyn: Yes, we do. We have an online learning environment. We call it the Learn Site. When we set about designing that the idea wasn’t to create something that was equal to face-to-face. We set about creating something that was better, that would be really flexible and would allow for students to connect. It’s in two parts.

We have a LearnSite where you log into and you download the lecture or the module. Let’s say the topic is “Powerful Questions.” You download the PDF on Powerful Questions and you read about it. Then you look up the Academic Calendar. We have a schedule of 70 teleclasses a week. You pick which class you would like to go to or you might go to three or four classes that week. You go to the classes. Then they would be more like a tutorial, I would say.

From there you go to the forum and you connect with your peers in the forum. The Forum is 24/7 so there’s always someone online in there and amazing conversations get developed. For example, in the module, “What is Coaching,” we discuss the difference between coaching and therapy. In class that might come up as a topic and people might debate the differences and similarities between coaching and therapy.

But that’s only an hour’s class. In the forum, that thread can get developed even further. People will add resources and references and sites, readings and journals and debate backwards and forwards. It could go on for 30-40 replies and get up to 700 views. So it’s quite developed.

Question:  On average, how many students are there in each session?

Robyn:  Well, this is a nice segueway back into the topic, the International Coach Academy Difference. I do know for a fact that many schools have 30-40-50 students in a class, which is fine. No judgment here. But our opinion is that we like to keep the classes small enough for everybody to contribute if they want to. So you don’t have to. Listening is a very valid form of learning. You might listen for three or four and then participate in the next. That’s fine.

So we keep it 12 to 20 students and we monitor it. We have a list of trainers and very, very active faculty who meet once every two weeks and are constantly talking in-between time. We will get a heads-up if a class hits 20. The trainer lets us know and then we wait for that to happen three or four times. Once we see a pattern, then we add another class in that exact same time slot.

So we run the global bridge lines 24 hours a day and we can schedule as many classes as we like. We often have three or four classes for the one topic just to cover all the time zones.

Multiple Models and Philosophies of Coaching

Let me just move to the difference of respect for the individual which was Susan’s and Nick’s was the unbelievable connections that are made in the community. I’m going to pick my main difference as a little bit like yours, Susan, but even going back a step before that.

What I see happening in the industry is that most coach training schools were founded by somebody. Generally speaking, that founder was a coach and they loved coaching and they thought, Great, I’m going to train other people to be a coach.

But what generally happens was most schools, the curriculum or philosophy of coaching that they teach, the coaching model, tends to be based on the personal philosophy or coaching model of the founder. So if the founder was a NLP coach you’ll get a course that’s very heavy in NLP. If the founder was a psychologist you’ll get a course that’s very heavy in psychology.

So I see one of the key differences in our program, and it goes right back to the roots of the program and then it filters through in all sorts of different ways, is that because International Coach Academy was set up by educators and based on adult learning principles and it looked at coaching as a new profession that was informed by many disciplines, the program is also set up like that.

So we don’t teach any one way of coaching. In our program we have a course called Frameworks and Theories and in that course, we give an introduction to four or five of the top theories or philosophies that have influenced coaching. Cognitive behavioral therapy, appreciative inquiry, NLP, emotional intelligence, mindfulness, and I can’t remember a couple of others.

We look at all of these. We don’t teach a course in mindfulness and we don’t teach a course in emotional intelligence because if you wanted to do that you could go and do that with a specialist provider. What we do is teach what emotional intelligence is. This is the background, this is where it came from. Here is where it intersects with coaching and here’s how you could actually blend it in more with coaching to create your own coaching model.

I see this as one of the really fundamental differences in our school. We don’t have any one philosophy or model and we really encourage people to look at everything and all the disciplines that informed coaching. Then from that comes the no one coaching model. We then also teach students to develop their own coaching model, which I don’t see happening anywhere else.

Susan, have you seen that anywhere?

Susan:  I have not seen it anywhere.

Robyn:  It’s quite unique, isn’t it?

Susan:  And it’s quite brilliant because you have a competence and an authenticity about your coaching that is so clear to your client.

Blended Coaching

Robyn:  And the other interesting thing is we were looking at some of our analytics the other day. When we started probably 80% of our students were leaving one career and moving into another. Career change people. They might have been an executive and they wanted to leave that and become a spiritual coach. So a complete shift.

About 20% were people adding coaching skills to what they already did. So they might be a teacher and they want to teach better. Or a management consultant and they wanted to do a leadership coach program.

What we’ve found is that that has slowly slipped over time. We have about 70% of students who are doing what we call “blended coaching.” They haven’t walked away from their background and from their expertise. They’ve brought that with them.

I don’t know whether that’s because that’s how we’ve taught it or it’s caught on or whether it’s the growth of the coaching industry, but people are more likely now to keep what they come with and to find a way to blend coaching into that and make it just one offering. They’re not setting up and just a professional coach offering 101 Coaching.

They might be a financial planner and so they learn coaching, they develop a coaching model that would fit in the financial planning industry. They run financial planning workshops and then they add their coaching in. Or they might be a yoga teacher and they learn coaching. They still run the yoga workshop and then they might also run some group coaching workshops or add one-on-one coaching as an added service to their clients.

Nick, have you found that, as well? That there’s been a shift in the type of students?

Nick:  I think so. I think you said, Robyn, I don’t know if it’s because we’ve been encouraging or if that’s the trend but I know looking at statistics from the International Coaching Federation that 90% of coaches nowadays offer more than just a coaching service. They are a speaker or they write a blog or a book or run groups. I think it’s really common for people to not just become a coach but to blend it with everything that they’re doing.

I think that’s smart because it goes back to what you said earlier, Susan, that everyone is respected. We all learn from each other. I know, even in classes, if I’m the trainer in class I still learn from students who have a background that’s different than mine. I think it absolutely is a trend probably with all coaches.

Online Learning Experience

Robyn: Okay, good. I think might stop and take some questions but before we do that I’m going to put Alex on the spot here. Alex, if you don’t want to speak up that’s fine, but I was thinking before when we were talking about the online learning and the platform, as somebody who had not done any online learning before I wondered if you could share your experience of how that’s been for you as a current student?

Alex:  I was terrified about online learning because I’m a bit older. I’m not a kid here so it was something I didn’t really embrace or want to embrace. But I plunged in and I found the experience really amazing. It really has drawn me out of myself. I thought that I was a pretty good participator in life, and I am. I belong to some associations and I belong to a spiritual path and I’m quite involved with that.

At the same time, I felt that the online world was somewhat beyond me. It’s only because I just hadn’t gotten into it. Now that I’m involved I love it. I’ve met amazing people on the forum and I certainly have been engaging after classes with some of the instructors on certain issues.

What I’ve found about International Coach Academy as a general approach to coaching, and that includes all sorts of disciplines and getting to different aspects of psychology and really the top thinking of the last 20 years, is how much I’m growing and how much I’m embracing this wonderful depth of positive thinking and living that’s available to us all.

I have another friend of mine who’s becoming a coach now, too, with International Coach Academy and she and I worked together for many years in corporate America. We’d just bemoan the fact that had we had this 25 years ago, the difference we’d have had in sales meetings and in our dealings with management and our own development as managers. Becoming managers would have been so much more humanistic and thorough and real and authentic.

I’m not regretting that; I’m just saying if I was young I would be racing in coaching, especially if I was in the executive world. That’s really a very big part of my background.

Robyn:  You ARE racing in the coaching, Alex. The other point, when we were talking before that I also thought you could share is that thing about the hidden curriculum. Where you come thinking you’re going to be a coach and then you find a whole lot of value for yourself personally. Is that something that you’ve experienced?

Alex:  Absolutely. I think someone said this at the beginning—you may have said it yourself, Robyn. The immediate value is to you. I could just do this course, walk away, not be a coach, and I’ve gotten the most enormous value out of having been a student. To me this is a study in personal growth.

There’s absolutely no clearer aspect of this, but what’s brilliant about it is that you can transfer that into something that’s potentially quite a good money-maker for yourself, especially if you’re a younger person, I would imagine, as a lifelong career path.

Robyn:  You’re right. I agree. Sometimes students do walk away and they don’t actually do coaching. They might go back to their job as a branch manager or whatever, but they just go back to that job in a much different way, a much better way.

Alex:  People like John Whitmore’s book, Coaching for Performance and there is the Harvard book on coaching, as well, Coaching for People. Those books are talking to management and to managers about becoming coaches or at least using coaching techniques. There are a whole lot of things you could do even if you decided not to coach. As a manager you could go back into business and be able to make an enormous difference in your company.

Robyn:  Thank you, Alex.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS:

Is Fulltime Coaching Viable?

Lisa: Obviously, being an Australian and running your own coaching business in Australia we’ve got taxes and stuff like that to look after. And obviously in a global school if you’re learning about business it’s hard to do a one size fits all approach.

Before you were saying when International Coach Academy first started, people studied at International Coach Academy and became fulltime coaches and owned their own businesses. Now it’s changing a bit. Do you still see quite a few students who are going into a fulltime coaching career? That’s ideally where I would like to go and do more of a career change kind of thing.

Robyn:  We definitely still have a lot of students who do that. Just to be clear, mainly what I was saying is that they don’t leave behind their past as often as they used to. What area are you in now?

Lisa:  I’m in adult education. I own a company here is Brisbane.

Robyn:  Okay, so a facilitator in adult education. What might have happened in the past, which is still perfectly fine, is that you might have gone, okay, I will completely walk away from all that. I’m going to become a grief coach or I’m going to become an executive coach or something.

What we see happening I think has to do with the growth of coaching and the acceptance of coaching. You might instead say, “Okay, I have an amazing network because I’ve been an educator and facilitator for years.” So in terms of just pure business that’s a really good thing. You don’t want to walk away from that.

Secondly, you have extraordinary knowledge. I mean, you’re an educator, a facilitator. There is no lack of business opportunities for coaching.

Education is perfect. Like setting up coaching for principals of secondary schools would be amazing. Group coaching. Or training them in coaching and how they can use coaching in their schools. Or looking at teachers and studying how teachers can take what we call a “coach approach” to their teaching.

It sounds like a really flippant, easy thing to do but it’s incredibly difficult when you know the answer to something and you’ve got a student there, not to just teach them and tell them what that answer is. It’s very, very difficult to actually allow that student to find that answer themselves. I’m not talking months. You don’t stand back and let them fumble around. You understand what I’m talking about, right?

Lisa:  Definitely. It’s taking decision time. It’s not just dialing it up and going, “Here you go, have fun sorting it out.” It’s a process of self-discovery.

Robyn:  We definitely have students who are leaving what they’ve been doing and setting up as fulltime coaches but what I would suggest and what they are now doing is not setting up as a coach where you’re just looking for one-on-one clients because it’s very difficult.

If you want to sit down and just get a calculator out, unless you’re Tony Robbins charging $3,000 an hour, you don’t want to trade a job where you are getting paid sick and holiday pay. You don’t want to trade that for a job where you’re working just as many hours but just no sick pay. That’s just not going to work. You have to earn more money if you’re going to leave what you’re doing now. You have to earn more money and there are only so many hours that you want to work in a week.

Therefore, you have to leverage up. And to leverage up you need to run something in a group or some workshop or have some product or something that identifies you that you can carve out a niche and sell. And your

coaching will blend with that. Ideally, you don’t have to but it’s easier and quicker and stronger if you use the expertise and the passion you already have.

Lisa:  It makes perfect sense, Robyn.

Susan:  I’ve noticed lately quite a few students that I’ve enrolled have their careers and they’re enrolling in International Coach Academy to do exactly what you said, to add coaching to what they’re currently doing and enhance their performance. But they all tell me that in the back of their minds, they see coaching as their retirement. They’re looking at coaching as a long-term plan for when they retire to have that as a backup. So I think that’s interesting, too.

Nick:  Bringing it back to the International Coach Academy difference, what we do here is we provide for our students to go into whatever avenue they want. If you come in wanting to establish yourself as a fulltime coach with clients and that’s what your full focus is, we’re here to support you.

We have avenues to allow you to have your own business coach if you

choose to. You can take part in some of our business classes. I think just the fact that you can have your own business coach, that’s all included in the tuition, you can go anywhere that you want. If you want to have it as a hybrid with something else or solely coaching, that supports your ideas.

Robyn:  That’s a really great point, Nick. We haven’t even mentioned that. Another major difference with our school is that the costs are what they are. There are no hidden costs. You don’t pay extra for mentoring, extra for supervised, or extra for your own coach.

Just going on from what Alex was saying about the immediate value is for you. I really like the way you phrased that, Alex. Your immediate value when you come in is for you. You get a coach. So that’s great.

I’m really enjoying this call. It’s great because often these teleseminars, particularly if we get a really big audience for them, we don’t get to really go deep on any one question. So this is great.

How do Students Transition into Coaching?

Simone:  I was just wondering, when you’ve completed the coaching calls how do you help people to transition into using that as a business and making money? Is there any way that you will teach students to do that?

Robyn:  That’s a good question. A lot of students ask this question. First of all, we have a philosophy that you should start using this as soon as you can. So don’t wait until the end. It’s 126 accredited hours which, if you’re working and doing one or two classes a week, could take a year.

Often people come in wanting to fast-track but then like Nick was saying, they get to feel the community and they don’t want to fast-track. They appreciate that okay, I’m going to hang around a bit longer and take my time here.

You don’t want to wait. It’s confidence. You just have to be confident enough to coach. There are lots of coaches coaching without any accredited training and that’s fine, too. Personally, of course, my opinion is that accreditation is better. We’re aligned with that and like to support a profession, etc. But it doesn’t mean you can’t do it. You can coach today if you want to. So that’s the first answer to the question.

The second is just how to do that. It’s really interesting. We’ve looked at this so many times over the years and this thing about business building as a coach is very unique. Your business is not going to be the same as

somebody else’s business. Instead of running a 12-week business course as we used to do, or even longer, we now run what we call “business labs.”

Business labs are like a group coaching session but they’re not coaching. They’re actually mentoring, to be really specific and clear. They’re run by Merci Miglino, who is a business coach and who has run a successful practice for years.

Let’s say you enroll. You do a couple of months. You get a peer coach. You’re like, okay, I’ve got an idea. You go to the business labs core and you begin with working through your individual business model. What is it going to be, what is it going to look like? Merci supports you in that, and the other students support you in that.

That’s the second thing. The third thing is when you set up a business and you want to get clients, one of the most important things these days is people need to know clearly who you are as a coach. It used to be that you could set up a website. I’m a coach. I’ve coached everyone on everything. But there are so many coaches now that that doesn’t work.

The other reason it doesn’t work is the growth of the Internet. People search now on very, very specific, what they call “long-tail keywords.” I’ve told this story before, but at my daughter’s seventh birthday party she wanted to have a One Direction party. So I had to organize a One Direction party.

She wanted to invite Harry. Now, Harry’s in London. I told her I didn’t think Harry could come, but she really wanted Harry to come. So one night I thought, gee, I wonder. I typed into Google, “Life-size cardboard cutout of Harry from One Direction.” Up came a company about 40 minutes from here who specialized in life-size cardboard cutouts of One Direction, so I ordered one.

Now, that’s what’s going to happen for you to get clients. They’re not even looking for coaching necessarily. They will have a problem that’s very specific and they’ll be looking for a solution to that problem. You need to appear when they look. So how you do that is by developing what we call a “body of work,” your coach portfolio.

This is one of the key differences between International Coach Academy and other schools. Because you’re developing your own coaching model and because you develop your own coaching power tool—which we haven’t had time to talk about here but it’s another course—because you’re doing that in the course, you will have materials ready to go.

If you’re in an offline business you can publish that into brochures and advertising materials for use if you run a workshop. If you’re online and you want a website you can use it there. Social media, you can use it there.

In the advanced course, we work with you one-on-one to really develop those into your business model. So that’s what we do.

Now, do we specifically do the how do you, Simone, get a client? We don’t do that but there are many, many places that you can go if you just want to focus on getting clients. What I would suggest is you go to b-labs first and figure out what your style of getting a client is going to look like. Then get specialist training in that area.

Some people use public speaking. That’s how they’re going to get clients. Some people use writing and become authors. That’s how they’re going to get clients. Some people run workshops. I could talk for another hour on that. It’s such a huge topic.

I hope that’s answered in some way how we approach it at International Coach Academy.

Simone:  Yes, thanks Robyn. That’s perfect.

Susan:  When I was a student I coached some friends of students who they didn’t feel comfortable coaching because they were too emotionally connected. I set it up where there was going to be x-number of complimentary sessions and then we would re-evaluate to see if they wanted to continue. My first few paying clients were friends of International Coach Academy students.

You’re right about the confidence level because I set a fee while I was a student, thinking I would raise it as soon as I graduated. After a few sessions, one of them said to me, “Susan, I’m getting a much greater value than I am paying you. I’m not congruent with this. I need to pay you more.”

And I almost fell off my chair as a student. It was like, oh my goodness. But that just shows you the power of coaching and even as a student the benefit you can offer to clients.

And then the referrals that come from your satisfied clients is just an amazing way to also build a business.

Robyn:  You know, Susan, on that note we have a lot of students who form companies together, global companies. A guy in Switzerland, a guy in Portugal, a woman in Germany, someone in Australia, this is a real example. They formed a company and offered a particular type of coaching. What they can do there is they can tap into the multi-nationals because they can offer a coach in any time zone. That happens a lot. It’s another part of the hidden curriculum of the program.

Conclusion

I’m just looking at my computer screen here, and I saw something just pop in from Facebook. I promise you, I’m not looking at Facebook while I’m running a teleseminar, but it’s jumping up at me.

It’s a post by a colleague of mine and it says:

“Why you should stop working at noon every day. Build a business. Live anywhere.”

That pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it?

The other day I got this new time tracker thing because I’m trying to get more productive. It’s a remote tracker or something and it works out how often when I’m at my computer and actually working. In my mind I work, I don’t know, 40 hours a week or something. Surprisingly, I’m actually only at my computer less than 30 hours. I do it in and around school drop-off. Basically when I feel like it.

It’s like the style of learning then morphs into the style of working when you’re a coach. You really can be location independent. You really can work when you feel like working. I’m not saying it’s easy. You’ve got to build it up. It’s a whole other conversation. But the end result, it’s not a bad result to aim for, I think.

Nick:  I agree. I think for me that’s been a big learning curve over the years, being in the coaching industry now for six-seven years or so. You do need to pace yourself, though. Ending your workday at 12 o’clock can be very difficult. You can become overwhelmed and do more work. But also you have the opposite, as well. You can take time off, you can do something in the middle of the day. I feel a sense of freedom that would not have been possible in any other line of work.