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Business Coaching: What do you say to people who want to "pick your brain?"
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Devesh Dwivedi, Strategy Advisor answered:

I come across such requests a lot and I'm always surprised that how people don't realize that we as service providers, coaches, consultants, invest a lot of time and money to acquire the knowledge (reading books, attending conferences, taking training, creating free content like blogs and reports etc all) that they just valued as a cup of coffee. Anyways, in the day and age of information being the king yet being pretty vulnerable for the abundance of me-too gurus, this is a challenge we all are facing. I actually named my 1-hr sessions "I need coffee".

I deal such requests with a simple reply asking them to either send me their questions and I'd consider writing a blog post to help everyone that may have such question, OR sign up for my biweekly free group conference call where they can ask me a question and I'd answer live though in a group and time limited format OR if they want 1-on-1 help then booking a call via Clarity (before Clarity I asked them to book a minimum of 1 hr session with me).

So far this has helped me out a lot in weeding out people who have no sincere intentions to ever pay or respect the time and are just wasting both mine and their own time. Also, those who took time to submit questions or sign up for the conference call are pretty qualified and filtered leads that I follow up with.

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