Coaches! Are You Doing This?

If you “just” want to coach, listen to this…

I was up late last night with the phrase repeating in my head, “I just want to be a coach”

A client of mine has been doing a lot to build up her coaching practice. You know the story:

• Drop $10K on a certification 
• Agonize over the business name
• Try to figure out your “niche”
• Try to understand how to “get clients”
• Get frustrated because your certification promised you business training (and it wasn’t what you thought it would be)
• Give up for a while and focus on other things
• Pick up the project again, buying some templates online
• Then buying some courses to help
• And more courses
• And more courses…
• You’re now up to your ears in courses and you ain’t got no clients yet!

In frustration, you throw your hands up and declare “I just wanna be a coach!”

And you honestly feel this way.

You question whether there’s an honest way to build your business, whether it’s all just marketing tricks, smoke and mirrors, or maybe you just don’t have “that thing”.

I recorded this episode for you because I have been there. I just wanted to be a coach, and what I didn’t realize, was that one little word was standing between me and my first big sales as a private life coach…

Listen on, and be sure to join us in our Free Facebook Group Community, The Coach’s Plaza to chat about it!

Amanda

Coaches! Are You Doing This?

Transcript of Vlog - August 1, 2020

Hi there. My name is Amanda Kaufman (And I'm Chris Lavelle), and you are listening to The CRUSH Method Show. Join us each week for ideas to help you move your coaching business forward into service of others faster, and with better results, we're committed to professionalism and coaching. We want to help you get a jump on your coaching business. Okay, Amanda here. And I am so,

so inspired. I decided to do this special podcast episode that, uh, you know, there's no video with it. Cause I am literally sitting here on a Friday night and I was really, really moved and struck by something that a client had shared with me that really triggered something that just unlock this whole floodgate of memories and frustration. And I wanted to share it with you because you very likely have the same exact habit.

She said, I just want to be a coach. And I knew exactly what she meant. I remember when I was starting out, I had invested so much in coaches and training and courses and my certification. And I really love to coach. I genuinely love the practice of coaching so much that I do it all the time. And even now when I'm doing more marketing training and how to,

especially right now, because it's so needed, you know, you can't very easily go out and network with people. It's just, it's a very, very strange time that we're in. So I've really doubled down on sharing with people. How do you set up online marketing and online community building and how can you set that up with ease so that you can spend more time coaching,

which is what you want to do. And less time having to hustle are beyond this hamster wheel. And so when this client said, you know, I don't know if I'm up for this. If coaching means that I have to do all of this other work and you know, she was referring to of course, you know, sending emails and posting to social media and hosting marketing events and having a list and building a community and doing all of those things that,

um, that honestly is not required, right? Nothing in your businesses required. You're not even required to build a business if you want to be a coach. So I understand her sentiment, you know, I just want to be a coach. And there's just a couple of things here. You know, number one, no one is going to want your business more than you do,

right? So if it's on your heart, if you've been given this impulse or this need, or this desire to become a coach, you know, there are plenty of certifications out there that will happily take your investment. Um, and they're going to be good for getting the skill of coaching. But I think a lot of those certifications also tend to represent that,

Oh yeah, you can create a career as a coach and it's true, but that's kind of the shiny dream at the, at the beginning of the journey, they definitely give you the skill of being able to help people with coaching. They definitely give you the mindset that you will need to be successful as an entrepreneur. They certainly often give community so that you've got,

you're not alone in your desire. You're not alone in your pursuit. And they absolutely give you a lot of inspiration. The certifications, they really, really do that. Um, the thing is that they often don't give you the full picture of what you need to do to be successful as an entrepreneur. And I don't think it's because they're necessarily tricking anyone.

It's just that the business blueprint for every person is going to be a little bit different because everyone is coming from a different background. Everyone's coming from a different set of desires. Everyone's coming from different reasons for why they're even sitting there taking the certification. A lot of people get a certification as a coach so that they can be better in the job that they have,

or maybe they work internally as a coach, or maybe they're a leader of another kind of a business and they just want to be a more empowered leader. And so you have to, you have to kind of give those certification schools a bit of a break on it. I do think that a lot of their marketing misrepresents, what you can do with what they're teaching,

um, but it is also understandable why they would do that because they want you to come in the door to learn how to coach really, really well. So they're going to tell you what you need to hear to be able to make that decision. The problem is that yeah. Get into it. And you very quickly realize that because everybody's on a different spectrum of what they want.

And then they're even on different spectrums from each other, that it becomes very difficult in those large format organizations to really teach what it takes to be successful in business. So they usually do kind of a once over lightly tick the box sort of training. Um, but what they don't teach you is they don't teach you how to think about the financial fundamentals of building a business,

right? They don't teach you necessarily about sales and how to be really effective with sales, especially in a modern age where the average consumer is very educated on what the sales tactics are and the selling process. And so if you don't have a way to authentically connect, then how are you supposed to sell that coaching? And if you can't sell the coaching,

you don't have a business, right? You have a skill. And I remember getting trapped in this idea of, I just want to be a coach. I just want to be a coach. And it was such an insidious little loop because using the word just in that Was Meant to humble my ambition and humble my goals and try to make it smaller so that it became more achievable.

And there's a real danger in that, especially when you consider what a coach is and what a coach does. A coach typically is helping someone to achieve a goal or a dream that they don't presently feel supported in being able to achieve. So if we, ourselves, as coaches, conditioned ourselves to just be a coach and humble our dream down to make it maybe something a little bit more achievable,

but not as enticing or exciting there's irony in that isn't there. What really turned things around for me was to get very, very connected with my motivation for becoming a coach. And it's not just about, I want to help people and it's not just about, I don't want people to, to suffer the way I've suffered or have the same bad things happen to them.

That happened to me. Like I think that's a very surface place to start with your why, and it's a fine place to start, but what really made the big difference for me to move from just being a coach, just being another person in the crowd, just being okay with average was when I said, but my why for becoming a coach, and this is my much deeper.

Why is I noticed in my life how often people who do have the power to change their life don't claim that power. In fact, they often give that power away to other people. And as a coach, what I love to do, I don't call it empowering anyone. I don't empower anyone. What I do is I remind them of the power that they already have.

And I realized that by saying, I'm just a coach, there was so much in congruence with that. How can I help someone claim their power and claim their ambition and claim their life of being able to make decisions and choices that suit them for their life. If I, if I'm, if I can't do that for myself, if I can't give myself the permission to think bigger and to,

to admire my own ambition, what hope do I really have for being effective with other people? And so I hear that I just want to be a coach and you want to know it's so funny is I used to tell myself, I just want to be a coach. And I would use that as a reason, not to learn the uncomfortable things. So for me,

the uncomfortable things were how to sell or how to be real about my financial commitments and targeting and how to be real about my personal performance and productivity and follow through. When I was just a coach, it was almost like this, this ready-made excuse that I had to not push myself to go to the level that I knew that I really could. And I'm gonna just let you know that it kept me small.

It kept me giving my coaching away for practically free. It kept me from meeting new people. It kept me from trying new things. It also kept me from learning marketing, ironically enough, you know, now I'm teaching marketing, but I was so afraid of it. I was so afraid of what I didn't know. And I told myself, I just want to coach.

And what's really interesting is, is that I did allow myself to embrace my ambition when I got really connected, when it got really right down to it, I knew I really wanted to do this thing. And so I swallowed hard and I invested in getting coaches that were really, really awesome. And they taught me how to sell. And they taught me how to market and how to engage with community.

And I read books and I read podcasts and I basically dared myself to stop saying, I'm just anything. And to start embracing that, what I want is bigger than what a lot of people want. And that's okay. It's okay to give yourself permission to have ambition. What wasn't okay. Was that I kept kidding myself that I didn't want it. So while I was stuck in this holding pattern of not learning the things I needed to learn,

I at the same time was starting to really doubt myself and really doubt my ability to help anyone because I was just a coach. And so really, I just wanted to remind you, or, or have a little conversation that maybe could lead to maybe some journaling is to ask you like, really why, why build a business as a coach? Why go and do this?

It's not easy to build a coaching business. I don't want to sugar coat that for you. And nowadays with everybody being online, guess what marketing does got harder? Not because not because it's technically more difficult, but because everybody is now needing to follow similar channels as each other. So it's gotten more competitive. And so knowing that, how do you keep showing up?

How do you keep doing what needs to be done? How do you keep going? When you know that maybe the odds are stacked against you. And that is when you formed the belief that you are no longer, just a coach, that what you're doing is part of a mission. And you're connected to that mission. And you realize that anything that's really worth having in life,

you're going to have to work a little bit for it. You're maybe even going to have to work quite a lot and take chances and take risks and learn things that you don't know today, and be willing to figure things out that you don't know how to figure out right now, but you know what? You can figure it out. You just have to stop marginalizing what you're trying to do by saying,

I just want to do this. You're building something glorious, maybe even something you were put on this earth to build. I really, really believe that. And if you believe that too, about what your here to do, you'll run through walls. You'll do whatever it takes. You'll send those emails. You'll write those webinars. You'll do the work.

You'll do what it takes. You will run through walls for something that you really believe in, but it really connects on a level that's much deeper than a surface desire. And it's about really asking yourself what happens if you don't, if you don't do this, you know, we all have those other paths. We all have those other options that we can go after.

I will sometimes be on a conversation with a coach. Who's thinking about building a business and they're stuck and they're swirling and I'll check in with them and I'll ask them like, well, why are you doing this? And they won't be connected with that answer. There'll be connected with how coaching makes them feel with how their coaching certification made them feel. But they're not yet connected with.

Yeah, but why build a business around it? Because business takes effort. Business entails risk. There's nothing. There's nothing guaranteed in business. Why take that on? And usually people tell me it's because they want freedom, but freedom. From what freedom from risk, freedom, from discomfort, freedom. From what? Because usually they tell me they want time,

freedom, but at the same time, they feel like they have no power over their time. They tell me they want financial freedom. And at the same time, they don't actually know how much they want to make. They tell me they want location freedom, but they can't tell me why that's so important because on a surface level, they're still thinking,

I just want to be a coach. When I let myself think bigger of myself and of my goals, I started to actually achieve them. I started to learn how to write, copy and do the marketing and do what was necessary to be able to just be a coach. You know, I don't spend my days doing much else other than coaching, because I learned how to do those hard things that were necessary to be able to create a community,

to create relationship with people. And I know what it's like to look at what other people have in their business and think, Oh gosh, I'm just filling the blank here. How could I possibly do anything bigger? And I just want to remind you, watch out for the word, just watch out, especially if it's applied to your goals and your dreams,

because it might just be the thing that's limiting you in your next big move. So I hope this was helpful. I hope this was inspirational. Gave you something to think about and you know what? You got this you so got this, have fun with that journal coach on that note. Thank you so much for tuning in. Can you please do us a favor,

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