Becoming a coach and launching a coaching business is an evolutionary turning point in your life.
Before your leap of faith, life was a familiar and possibly lackluster routine.
Maybe you had a steady paycheck and set schedule.
Your family knew what to expect of your time and attention. You knew what to expect of your day-to-day life.
In part, those things might have led you toward transformational change.
When you first heard about coaching, something in you sparked with new life and hope.
You awakened to a calling. You broke out of your mold. You saw yourself and relationship to others with new eyes.
This is your ORIGIN STORY.
When imposter syndrome sets up a refrain in your mind, remember that spark and fan it back into a roaring fire!
Let’s talk about the potential gravity pull to go back to your old life and how can you stay inspired.
Cross the Threshold into Professional Coaching and Don’t Look Back
Launching your coaching business is a BIG threshold to cross emotionally. You take on full responsibility for your role and business.
It’s not surprising that it comes with a healthy dose of doubt. It’s even possible that some resentment has crept in for all the stuff you must do to raise visibility and attract clients. Those were not what inspired you to become a coach in the first place.
Well, you’ve been getting a reality check. And that comes with every evolutionary change in life. Leaving home, marriage, parenthood, home ownership and other possible rights of passage.
That’s part of growing in to your full potential.
If you start sliding back to your old self and circumstances, remember YOUR origin story.
Reconnect with what attracted you to coaching and fully own the space that you’ve grown into. Align with the new you and your new career energetically. Realize how proud you’ll be of yourself for all of your current and future accomplishments.
I believe you have already changed deep in your essence or you wouldn’t be listening to this.
Urgent Questions Asked by a Newly Launched Coach
Another of my VIP Mentoring clients just finished developing her coaching business and is soon to launch. Woohoo! It’s a huge accomplishment. Well done!
For our last session, she brought a set of thoughtful questions. My answers might surprise you. I hope they will free you up and get you back in touch your why for becoming an entrepreneurial coach.
Two of her questions were connected:
- How can I stay motivated when I’m not seeing results in my business?
- What should trigger me to make significant shifts?
There’s a poignant underpinning to these questions indicated by certain words.
1. They reveal worries about the future.
2. There’s a presumption of initial failure.
Before I responded, I asked: What’s underneath these questions?
She explained they were spurred by a previous iteration of her business that didn’t pan out. And that was her impetus to hire me.
Then, she didn’t know what she didn’t know. She wasn’t able to look at the bigger picture or lean into strategy. That takes insight new coaches can’t expect to have.
Some part of her was still identified with that earlier try at her business. So, I invited her to catch up with herself by acknowledging the clarity and strategy
- in her new niche
- business model
- tailor made offers for her audience based on market research, and
- a client journey that weren’t in her previous business
Those are advantages she can leverage. She heartily agreed!
She set intention to follow intuition not fear and keep incrementally improving on little things.
I suggested that, instead of looking for indications that she needs to make a shift in her business, ask:
How can I better leverage the foundation of my business and my big WHY?
Another of her questions was:
What are the most important criteria by which I should measure success for my business?
She was wondering about metrics. Tracking various analytics closely can be a needless emotional roller coaster.
Because we developed a simple coaching business model for her business, I assured her: You DO NOT NEED…
1. High traction on posts
2. Huge numbers of followers or podcast listeners
3. Massive website hits
…to get hired by enough high-ticket signature program clients each year.
Instead, I suggested:
Measure how consistently courageous and determined you are in business.
That satisfied my client and she decided she didn’t need answers to the rest of her questions. Yay!