A More Balanced Coaching Business

This week I'm sharing a behind-the-scenes what led Chris to Scotland, how we shot an entire course LIVE with our community (even with kids in the background!) and what I learned from one of the most prolific high-performance coaches when he personally coached me live during my Certified High Performance Coaching renewal.  

Listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts here

Go And Grow! Hiring Successfully In A Coaching Business

Transcript of Podcast - May 29, 2022

Hey there, Amanda here and welcome to my front room. I hope you are having a good long weekend and I am having a pretty good one myself. So this week I am a mom at home with two wonderful kiddos and they're being pretty good this week. Chris is in Scotland and he is a living. Yes, one second. Okay. I had to mom for a second,

but while I was on pause, I just had to show you one of the cool things that Chris just shared with me from his trip to Scotland. He just got back from a, a camping trip and then immediately hopped in the car and drove to a training facility to learn how to do this. That's amazing. Oh my goodness. So he's having the time of his life in Scotland.

He's learning how to live on the land. He is learning traditional ways in Scotland, and he is of course doing training with some of the folks that are teaching him the ways of the sword and all of that amazing stuff. He's living his dreams. And that is actually a big part of me living mine. So one of the things that I really wanted to do as an entrepreneur and a founder of my own business was be able to create a company that would support my family,

being able to live wherever we wanted to, but also be able to support my husband, being able to do what he wanted to do. And that includes going to Scotland. When we first started this journey, you know, I was still working in my corporate job, but Chris was also working in his and we weren't totally aligned yet to the kind of work that we wanted to do.

And I'll be honest with you, you know, figuring out your purpose, your passion, your alignment is something that is not like, yay. I've found it. And you just know it forever. It's something that you have to figure out over time over the long-term and it's something you're constantly revisiting. In fact, I actually revisited this as part of my recertification recently for my certified high performance coaching.

In fact, I had this really cool moment when I was getting re-certified where I got to get coached by Brendon Burchard himself. And I got this opportunity to really ask him, like, when you're thinking about pursuing that new thing, when you're thinking about going after this new dream, this new thing, this new purpose, really what, what should you really keep in mind?

And he had three things to really impart to me. Number one, that you want to make sure that your house is taken care of, meaning like your processes, your things that you've already built are going to be okay. When you start to build that new thing, number two, you have to really make sure that you understand that you're going to be hungry and ambitious and,

and ready to pursue that new thing, just because you are a high performer and a high achiever and number three, make sure that you are pursuing that big thing with, with joy and with light in your heart. And that you're not pursuing something that is going to bring dread and burnout into what you are doing. I'm of course, paraphrasing, you know,

Brendan spent a good amount of time with me. I'm so excited that that even happened, but I really wanted to impart that to you because I think sometimes when we are imagining that future, that thing that we want to pursue, we can sometimes put it off on the never, never plan because we're thinking, oh, I haven't found my purpose yet.

I haven't found that thing that I want to do yet. And it's like this big moment in time when actually we're always refining that purpose. And it's kind of more like a balancing act of making sure things are okay while also pursuing that new thing while also having that alignment and that joy. And, you know, I'm just, there's so much joy for me right now,

knowing that my husband is doing something so amazing. And I'm also thinking about the future and what I want to do with the future self. And I mean, this is the life of high performance. The other thing that happened this week was we had, we hosted the coaching, the ultimate coaching lead course, which was shot live. And we had several members of the coaches,

Plaza, community come join us live. And you know what? This was an adventure. I've got to tell you, you know, I was shooting this whole thing, you know, live while I was, you know, basically I had to have things pretty planned. You guys, you know, Chris wasn't here, the kids were, we did it in 90 minute blocks and we shot the whole thing end to end no reshoots.

And it was a powerful three part course program. The feedback was been nominal. You know, people really, really engaged. And I've got to tell you behind the scenes, I really had to plan. I had to plan really hard for my energy. I had to plan really hard for making sure that the kids were set, you know, before and during and after the shoot times,

the team was amazing, you know, shadow to Rebecca and to Sean, our specialists for moderating shadow to Andrew and Hannah for being on point there and shadow to Heather, you know, for making sure that the wheels on the bus kept turning. Cause it, you know, it's a big deal to be producing another program on top of running everything else that we do as a company.

And then, you know, at home, I have to, like, I was some people in my life were like, are you crazy? Maybe the thing is that, you know, I'm always saying that you're building your business in the context of your life. And I really believe that wherever there's a will, there's always a way. And that's part of why I made sure that I was one,

I was doing things in 90 minute increments. The last time I shot a course like this, I was working more like in two, two and a half hour increments. And I just knew that with, you know, a four and a half year old and an eight and a half year old, that was probably asking too much of them. And so I went with shorter time blocks.

The other thing that I did is I was very thoughtful about meal times and meal planning. And so the last time that I shot a program like this, I did different hours than I did this time. Was it slightly less convenient for our community base? It might've been, but one of the things that I'll tell you is is that if you have a really compelling and interesting topic,

people will make the time to come. So I did my best to choose a topic that I knew would really serve the community. And I did my best to, to encourage people to come and to do it at a time that was going to be the best of both worlds. And I think that I'm often talking about building a business in balance. That's what balance is balance often is trade-offs,

it's never going to be perfect for everyone. And I did my very best to be as accommodating as possible while at the same time, just recognizing that if my kids were going to be, you know, really, really hungry or, you know, really, really irate that, that wasn't going to be the best of both, both worlds for everybody,

because I would have been interrupted during the stream. And, you know, then that have been a good experience for everyone. Something else pretty incredible that happened this weekend is I actually weighed in and I have finally lost the baby weight from my oldest child. You know, I actually have four kids, but the first two, I didn't carry myself because there were my step kids and that the one I've got the arrow pointing at is going to be turning nine in August.

And I lost the baby weight. I stepped on the scale this weekend and I am the same way or a little lighter than I was before I was pregnant with him. And, you know, I still have a ways to go in my health journey and continuing to work on my health, but that was a really significant milestone for me personally, because I have struggled for basically my entire adult life to make the time to basically focus on my health as a priority,

similar to the priority of taking care of family and taking care of business and taking care of taking care of things. And I think this is a really common trait among people who choose to get into the service industry and choose coaching, for example, as a vocation and, you know, care I've, I've had the pleasure of meeting a lot of people who,

for example, choose nursing or other care based type roles and self care is a challenge I find among that set. And so that's a really significant milestone, but I'm really, really proud of. And I think, you know, we can have lots of conversations about body health and about body image, health and self love. And I'm just going to go ahead and say,

yeah, but here's the thing taking the time to take care of oneself every day is never going to be a bad thing. I'm not about body shaming, anybody and love yourself at whatever size. Yes, sure. Good. Okay. I am saying for me, I have struggled with taking the time and prioritizing the time that it has taken and, you know,

to actually see my body responding to this and, and to hit this milestone is so significant. So huge for me, to be honest, I wasn't sure I was ever going to see the day and I did. And so let's talk about how this even happened. I basically credit this with a major change in attitude brought about by a mental toughness focus that I've had since about February of this year.

And I've really been exploring a change in mindset around discipline and around focusing on follow through, which is really interesting because I've actually had quite a bit of discipline, quite a bit of a focus on follow through, but I have had it mainly in the areas of service and mainly in the areas of business and mainly in the areas of care of others and less so around self care.

And so I decided to do a mental toughness challenge that had several elements around self care, namely around fitness and around consuming, you know, water and sticking to a healthy diet and not consuming alcohol and really just respecting the temple of your body for 75 days. And so I've been doing, I completed 75 hard on May 9th. I started on February 24th and then I've continued on into the live hard program.

And, you know, I don't, I don't totally vibe with, with the, all of the rhetoric around the creator of the program, Andy Frisella, but I definitely agree with, with the core principles and the core principle is basically if you want something you need to show up and actually do the work, you do need to do the things and follow through.

I've seen it again and again in the rest of my life. But what I noticed is is that I wasn't giving myself permission in the area of doing steps. Like, I mean like literal walking steps. I wasn't doing it in a couple of other realms of just like creating an environment for my happiness in the realms of, of that self care. Because I always justified that I was taking care of someone else.

I was always justifying why I wasn't following through on these just couple of areas. And I realized that for me to really experience that next level of abundance, even in business, even in the areas where I was giving myself permission to have that mental toughness, truly that next level was going to come from being more holistic in allowing that mental toughness to show up.

So my favorite mantra to really get this whole point across is a rising tide lifts, all boats, a rising tide lifts, all boats. So put another way if you are, are really healthy, but you allow yourself to cheat of drinking too much wine, then it's like, well, you're healthy, but then you're tearing down your health in the area consuming so much wine if you're really healthy,

but you max out your credit cards. Every time you go into a shopping center, you're undermining so much of your good work. And so being more disciplined in overall mental toughness allows you to be able to shore up those areas where you feel like you have shortcoming. Okay. So final big thing that I'm working on this week is, you know, with all of this,

I've actually had more of my clients coming out of the woodwork and asking me about this mental toughness about shoring up the shortcomings about follow-through about the, the, the changes. And I think literally it's coming from just seeing changes in my physiology, changes in the physicality because it's, it's really undeniable. And so, you know, what we've decided to do as a team and as a company is we're actually hosting a focus group this week with some of our most engaged clients,

to just talk about how we can incorporate and infuse even more of this into our programs and into their experience as well. And so, you know, I just really want to encourage you if you are a coach, if you're a consultant that this is all about a refinement, all about a journey, it's not about doing everything all at once, but if you're hearing something today and you're kind of like,

man, you know, I would like to do a little more of that. That's all it is. It's a little more of that. You don't have to like, whole-hog do everything new or different, but you could, you could host a focus group. You could host a conversation. You could ask a question, you could run a poll. You could have,

you know, the, the whole philosophy behind what the coach has posit does that I think is pretty different than a lot of coaching companies is, is that we really believe in community and conversation and dialogue. And so I hope you really enjoyed hearing a little bit of behind the scenes of what I'm working on when I'm thinking about. And I hope that you have an amazing week ahead.

I hope that you're having some time this weekend to really think about your freedom. Think about your loved ones. Think about what you want to do with that freedom, what you want to do to really do what matters and live into that. And I hope that you have a really fantastic may long weekend take care.