International coaching and technology

I took a class this morning about coaching internationally. One of the appealing ideas about the business of coaching is that you could potentially have clients anywhere in the world, thanks to modern telecommunications. After all, in my ICA classes, there are students from all over the globe on the calls. It’s not quite so simple, though. There are things to consider: differences in culture, language and understanding; regulatory or legal considerations; the process of collecting payment and the conversions of currency; and more. Still, the idea that I might someday have a global business is rather thrilling. For the younger generation, a lot of today’s technology and global business climate is simply how things have always been done. I may be “with it” enough to text message with the best of them, but I can also recall a much simpler time, when someone calling “long distance” was treated as royalty, and when other countries were places you might visit once in a lifetime but communications were only by handwritten letters that took weeks to arrive. When I was a child there were no pushbutton phones, there was but one telephone company, there was no such thing as an answering machine or voice mail, and computers were giant machines with no screens used only by some large data processing companies or the military. Technology has changed everything, hasn’t it?