24. Why life coaching is a horrible business (feat. Billy Seol)

Reality check! Most coaching programs will tell you that building a sustainable business is just a matter of mindset, skills, and persistence. 

But the rarely-discussed truth? There are deeper structural barriers at play that make life coaching one of the most challenging ways to earn reliable income.

My brother Billy Seol, a software engineer and coach, breaks down exactly why life coaching businesses face such steep odds, even when coaching itself is transformative.

Listen to learn more about:

• The multiple skill sets required to run a coaching business (and why most other professions only require one)
• Where life coaching fits in economic sector models and what that means for market demand
• How social and financial capital affect your chances of building a sustainable practice
• Why coaching skills can enhance traditional careers more reliably than standalone businesses

Let us be clear: we love coaching, believe in coaching, and our aim is NOT to discourage anyone. Instead, we want to equip you with the information you need to approach this work strategically and sustainably, so that coaching enhances your life rather than draining it.

Transcript

Hey everyone. You are listening to Liberatory Business, and I'm your host, Simone Seol. Thank you so much for listening today. I'm having a conversation that might make some of you a little bit uncomfortable at first, but I'm hoping that by the end is going to leave you feeling informed, powerful, and liberated.

I'm joined by my little brother Billy Seol, who's a software engineer and a coach, and he serves as an assistant teacher inside many of my programs. I always say when I introduce him to my students — I kind of say this in a tongue-in-cheek way — that yes, my own brother is serving as assistant teacher, and yes, it is a little bit of nepotism, but also not, because there's no way I would trust him to help me in this regard if I didn't have enormous and singular respect for the skills and perspectives that he brings, which also happens to be in deep alignment with my philosophies and the spirit that I bring to my classes. So I guess that kind of comes with sharing our DNA and upbringing.

You're about to meet him in a second, but a while ago during a Q&A in one of his programs, a student asked him when the money would start coming in from their life coaching business, and Billy's response was blunt. He said, "I think it's much better for you if you just assume that your life coaching business is never going to make money."

Now, before you go away thinking, "oh, this is just more cynicism and doom and gloom," it's not that. Hear us out. Billy and I both love coaching. We've experienced its transformative power firsthand as clients and as coaches. We love this work. We love coaching and we love coaches, but we've also noticed something that this industry rarely talks about openly, which is the brutal economic reality of trying to make a sustainable living as a coach.

So in today's episode, Billy's gonna break down exactly why life coaching is what he calls "a horrible business," even though it's incredible work. We're talking about skill requirements, market demand, different economic sectors, and why even the most talented coaches might struggle to build practices that give them a sustainable living.

Let me be very clear. Once again, our aim is not about discouraging people. It's about equipping people to go into the sector with your eyes wide open. Because when you understand the real challenges, you can make better decisions about how to approach this work in a way that actually serves both you and the people that you wanna help and sets you on the best path towards sustainable growth.

So let's get into it.

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Simone: I'll just start by saying, if you were saying in my community that actually it's really hard—like life coaching is really, really difficult business model and there's actually not that much demand for it, and you laid out exactly why that is so. And neither you or I are saying it in a way where the point isn't doom and gloom.

The point is to be really realistic and clear-eyed about the picture so you can make, not only make informed decisions, but also be able to navigate the challenges when they come because they are gonna come. And I just thought everything you said in your argument, I 1000% agreed with, and I just haven't been able to put it in the way that you put it, 'cause you put it so well.

And so I wanted to ask you to kind of really not only rehash those points, but really fully flesh them out for our podcast listeners, because I really don't see this discussed in a systematic and neutral way. So go ahead.

Billy: So hi everyone. My name is Billy and I'm Simone's little brother.

And so the greater context around how this—basically my spiel was developed was throughout my May program, I ran a program called May You Offer, and it was basically making 108 offers in the Buddhist style.

Simone: 108 offers in a month.

Billy: Yep. Wow. So I ran that program and in one of the Q and A calls, there was a very good question that goes something like, "Hey, so making 108 offers and developing our capacity to do that and working on the offers that we are going to offer to people, that's all nice, but when can the money come in? When does the money come in?" So that was sort of the background question that was going on.

And at the time I answered kind of tersely and I said, "I think it's much better for you if you just assume that your life coaching business will never make money."

Simone: Yeah, I always do that too. And people are like, "what the fuck are you talking about?"

Billy: Yeah. And so during the call, I gave a little bit of a rationale around why I said this, but then I felt like my students needed a bit of a greater exploration around why I am saying it like this.

And basically, the whole premise that I'm saying is that life coaching is great as a client. It changes your life. Life coaching as a coach is great. You get to relieve the suffering of someone and it's a wonderful feeling. But life coaching business—I think is a horrible business. And I'm gonna explain why.

I am a software engineer, and that means I can just be good at software engineering. I don't have to be good at design, because guess what? They hire designers. So in a lot of other businesses, in a lot of other sectors, you can make reliable money—not just money, reliable money—and depending on the industry, you can make a lot of reliable money by having investment in one area of expertise.

Like if you wanna be a teacher, you go to school and you learn teaching, you learn education. And then if you pass all the tests and prove that you know what it takes to teach and like if you know about education, then great. You get your license and you're a teacher, right? If you wanna be a lawyer, you have to go to law school, study law, pass the bar exam, you have the knowledge to be able to practice law. Boom, you're a lawyer. Like that's kind of how it works in so many industries that are normal to us.

And I'm not arguing that all of those are easier than life coaching business, but what I'm saying is to run a successful—whatever successful means to you—life coaching business. One, you need to be good at coaching, that's a given.

But number two, you also kind of need competency in a little bit of social media, like technological things. And also number three, you kind of need to be good at writing also. Number four, you have to be a little bit comfortable on camera and you need to be able to speak coherently. Number five, you also can benefit a lot from having a little bit of design expertise, like you're good in Canva or like Adobe or something like that.

Simone: You don't need to be like an expert designer. You just need—it really helps to have basics.

Billy: Yeah. And also it really serves you well to be good at sales. I mean the having the art of conversation, of getting people to agree on something—like it is a skillset and you also need to be like whatever, like the term marketing is. You also need some bit of an expertise in marketing. And so I can go on and on and on, but the point is this: in all of these fields I just listed, if you just had that skill and worked in that sector, you will be making reliable money that doesn't depend on your client acquisition.

Simone: Wait, wait, give an example of what do you mean by that?

Billy: Yeah, so again, being good in Canva and design—like that, you could work as a designer.

Simone: Mm-hmm.

Billy: Being good at sales. You can work as a salesperson. I've seen a lot of life coaches come from a sales background, so they know what it's like to sell something that's not their life coaching service.

So basically, same goes with the technical and if you know how to code, if you know how to set up websites and things like that, you could totally have a job just based on that.

Simone: Easier than making reliable money as a life coach.

Billy: And so that's the other point, right? You have all of these skill sets that you are somewhat competent in, and that doesn't guarantee that you're gonna have a client. And also, even if you do have a client, what if you're caught in the, okay, but when does the next client come in? When does the next client come in? So even at its best, you need a certain degree of business acumen to make it into a reliable income model, and that is yet another skill you need to put on top of the existing pile of skill sets that you need to have to at least start making money as a life coaching business owner.

Simone: Yeah.

So the premise is, so that's why I am saying—

Simone: Wait, wait, hold on. Can we pause? Can we also talk about how much it helps to start out with economic and social capital and how much that can soften what you lack? It's not enough. It can kind of soften the impact of your maybe deficiency in some of these areas. 'Cause for example, like if you are very wealthy and if you are well connected to lots of people in your community who have tons of disposable income and they just don't know where to spend it, then you are gonna have such an easier time building up your initial practice, than someone who maybe has the same sort of deficiencies in certain skill sets than you do, but is starting out with no network of people around them with disposable income. Right? 

So social capital is so big with so many of these sort of service based businesses—who you know to begin with is so big. And secondly, financial capital, right? Because if you have financial capital where you are lacking in one area, you could hire someone to do some of the design for you. You could spend some money, take a class on some of the technical stuff. You could take marketing class upon marketing class until you figure out your own style of marketing.

A lot of that—I'm not saying it's automatically easy and instant if you have capital. But it is made so much easier when you do have capital and let me know if you disagree with anything that I'm saying. And also I think some people might say, "but I don't think you need to have skillset in all of these areas. 'Cause I know somebody who doesn't do any video at all, and their practice works or I know someone who's a terrible writer and they never write and their things spread word of mouth."

I don't think you need to be equally skilled in all these things. I most certainly wasn't evenly skilled across all these things when I was starting out. I still am not. However, when you see someone have an obvious deficiency in one area—and when I say deficiency, everybody understand, I'm not saying like you're deficient as a person. I'm just saying like, you're deficient in technology or whatever. That's what I mean about specific skillsets, right? If you have or someone has an obvious deficiency in one or more areas and they're still making it work, they probably have an extraordinarily developed skillset—like way above average—in another, right? 

So you could be shit at tech, you could know very little about sales and your design could be horrible, but maybe you are an incredible writer, right? And your writing is very persuasive, right? Or maybe you come from a sales background and you are not really great at any of these other things, but put someone in front of you and you know how to get them to a yes. Right. So if you're like, "oh, I don't know how to do that, I don't wanna learn," then you better have one or more areas where you are exceptionally more skilled than the average person trying to enter the field.

Do you disagree with anything that I said?

Billy: No, I actually just 100% agree and in fact I wanna add onto that, but I wanna add onto it after talking about some other points. But we're definitely gonna come back to it because you made so many excellent points about like, as a Buddhist right, there's no such thing as absolute better or worse. And Simone definitely does not mean, Simone is not saying like, "Hey, when you have capital, it's definitely better." No, it's just different. But it's definitely different in a way that matters IRL in real life in the 3D world. But let me come back to this topic, okay.

Because I wanna provide some more background information about what I wanna say. So until now, we've established that having a life coaching business has a kind of a high barrier to entry. Okay, so now the second portion comes in. Even if you have a somewhat functioning life coaching business, a lot of coaching teachers put it in this exact words: "Nobody wants to buy coaching." So what do people actually mean by that? What do we mean when we say nobody wants to buy coaching? There's no demand for coaching. What I mean by this is I'm not turning a blind eye to all the people who actually buy life coaching, but we need to be—

Simone: You have bought tons of life coaching. I have bought tons of life coaching. Obviously people buy life coaching, but we say there is no demand for it because—

Billy: Because in comparison to other markets, let's look at life coaching as a market comparatively. So in this model of viewing things, when we're trying to compare markets, it really helps to understand that there's this economic model that people use and as a model, it's an approximation of the world. But I think it does a fine, good job of illustrating my point. It's called the three sector model, and everybody probably understands this when I say it. There's a primary sector of a market that's based on basic human needs, like food, like clothing, like shelter. If you are in this industry, you will never have the problem of no demand, but you will always encounter the problem of competition.

Simone: Hmm.

Billy: Because that's how widespread it is. No one is going to not eat. No one is going to not have shelter. No one is not going to have clothing. So that's the primary. And on top of that, you have the secondary sector, which is like manufacturing, which is like mining. In order for you to eat the food in the primary sector, you need fork, you need spoon, you need chopsticks, you need tables. So all of those things have to be manufactured. They have to be harvested, they have to be collected, they have to be manufactured, processed, delivered. All of these things are related to the secondary market. And then you have the tertiary market, which is basically services like massages or cleaning and things like that, gardening and such.

Now the temptation is to think, well, life coaching is a service, but traditional economics, the three sector model was developed way before life coaching was even a thing. So to keep up with the times, they have proposed an added two sectors. You might think maybe life coaching is the fourth sector, but no. Fourth sector is the information technology. So remember when iPhones were starting to just come out, iPhone, iPod Touch was a thing, and Twitter was just starting to come out. If you told your parents that you're gonna work for Twitter or Facebook, they would've been like, "What are you doing with your life?"

Simone: Yeah.

Billy: It was that new at the time, but enough time has passed where infotech is a legit market. Tech, personally targeted ads, lead geolocation data.

Simone: Not only is it a legit market, it feels like the dominant market nowadays.

Billy: Yeah. It's basically like, you know, so the numbers like primary, secondary, tertiary, it's kind of being, the numbers are sort of becoming meaningless, but basically it's built on top of the existing three sectors.

Simone: Mm-hmm.

Billy: So the fourth sector infotech sits on top of the existing three. But yeah, it is very important in this day and age. Then the fifth sector being proposed now deals with the human mind. But guess what? You might think that, oh, life coaching is this. So yes, technically it would be in the fifth sector, but if you compare like five years ago how therapy was received, when you tell people, "I'm going to therapy" five, just five years ago. It was a lot different then, but now therapy is more like owned, right? "Oh yeah. I'm going to therapy. Oh, I'm gonna meet with my therapist."

Simone: So, hey, five years ago it was more similar to now, I think maybe 10, 20 years ago was very different. Yeah.

Billy: 10, 20 years ago.

Simone: So what, are you crazy? Like why are you going? Like, it was very stigmatized.

Billy: Yep. So basically coaching is exactly that, like right now.

Simone: Hmm.

Billy: When the average Joe, someone average Jane completely outside of the world of coaching tells another friend, "I'm gonna get life coached." Like even Family Guy makes fun of it, right?

Simone: Yeah. Yeah.

Billy: So when they mean fifth sector deals with the human mind, what they really mean is like established religions and like professional therapy services.

Simone: Mm.

Billy: Because which are now more accepted and mainstream. Like, yes. If you say "I need therapy," for the most part, people are gonna be like, "oh yeah, mental health is important. Like, yeah, you should pay it." Like paying a therapist is considered normal now. And in a way that it wasn't even in the very recent past.

Simone: Yeah.

And I think it's worth acknowledging too, right? There's always, I think people forget this or they don't know if they're young, is that psychiatry and therapy were kind of sort of went through a long history of being really looked down upon, even in the medical establishment, right? Like I think, you know, there's a sort of derogatory word for therapists, which is that people use the word "shrink," right? Why do we call therapist shrinks? Is because therapists used to be called head shrinkers. Right, and psychiatry was considered for many years to be kind of like, you know, the bottom of the totem pole is kind of like pseudoscientific and not really as prestigious as the other branches of medicine, medical science, that concerned more like material, like research, right? And so it was very stigmatized for a long time. At the same time, that mental people were really not knowledgeable about mental health. There was very, very little research being done on mental health for very similar reasons. Like people just didn't think it was a thing, and in fact, only after World War II when veterans experiencing PTSD became such an unignorable phenomenon, it was only then that people kind of started looking at mental health. Like it maybe is a thing like trauma that like you hold in your head that's not a visibly obvious, like bodily injury can still harm you. And that was like the beginning of the field of psychiatry and like psychotherapy, beginning to like fight for legitimacy.

And so it's very recent history actually, that that we accept these things as like, "oh yeah," like no one's gonna laugh at, well, I mean, not no one, but you know, for the most part in mainstream culture, you're not gonna get laughed outta the room. You're not gonna be ridiculed for wanting to seek a therapist to deal with your trauma or for your, you know, for depression.

And that is a very worthy battle that was won I think by people who advocate for the importance of mental health. And I think, again, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think what you're saying is, however, like mental health and psychology, psychotherapy was looked at like a century ago, is how life coaching is being looked at now. Like we're in the beginning stages of fighting for recognition and legitimacy.

Billy: Yeah. And so the nice thing is you and I have the same father, so you and I both understand, like when our father was starting to learn hypnosis and he was trying to be a proper hypnotherapist, he went through so many struggles and so many episodes of cancellation, we can't even count. Basically throughout his entire tenure, he had to fight for legitimacy and hypnosis now, like I'm sure if my, you know, our dad was, or hypno thoughts where like people are having a conference about hypnosis and it's like this, it has this many people who are across from all the world. He would be genuinely surprised because it hasn't been like that.

Simone: Yeah. And nowadays if you tell someone, "oh, I'm trying to quit smoking and I saw a hypnotherapist." People like no one's gonna bat an eye. And again, not no one. I'm sure there are some people who are very deeply prejudiced until now, but it's very normal now.

Billy: Yeah. So what I, so what I'm really trying to say is, yeah, life coaching is, that's the reality of it. And to illustrate this, I posted in your community Google search trends. So there's this service from Google called Google Search Trend, and basically you can see the relative graphs of search keywords. And when you look at therapy and when you look at some alternatives and then you search life coaching. Life coaching is basically the X axis.

Simone: What is—okay. Translation.

Billy: Yeah. So basically when it's like comparing, you know, it's a full cup. You're trying to measure the amount of air inside the full cup. It's basically non-existent.

Simone: Yeah. 'Cause when you said earlier right, the tertiary sector of like services and you said massage counts as a service tertiary sector, right. Massage counts this and that counts. But why does life coaching not count as a third sector if massage counts is because people will Google "massage in my area" or like it's something that is known and legitimized and that people seek out. That's what you mean.

Billy: Yeah. Yeah. And now the nice thing though about life coaching is you could argue that it permeates throughout the whole sectors, right? Because people can get coached about their relationship with—

Simone: Wait, did you say permeates?

Billy: I don't know the right pronunciation. Permeate. I dunno.

Simone: Permeate.

Billy: Permeate. Yeah.

Simone: So life coaching permeates throughout the process? No, I don't mean to, there's a bunch of words. I don't know how to, like, how they're pronounced, but, okay. Just permeate. Yeah.

Billy: Yeah. So like, it can, you can be coached on your relationship with food. You can be coached on your relationship with your body image so that you can wear different clothes. You can have a coaching relationship with like your home and how you feel about being at a shelter, like, you know, your primary domicile and you can be coached about your manufacturing services. You can be coached about, you know, massage. 

So basically you could argue that coaching is about everything. But as life coaching business owners, how well do we do that job of translating? And my argument is we are primed somewhat through the, you know, how we generally get educated as life coaches to not really work on that, but instead talk about life coaching in a specific way.

And you know what, I won't argue that it doesn't work, but we don't do a good enough job as an industry to kind of do more outreach work of translating the value of life coaching to real world things that people care about. 

And so that's basically what I taught in my standalone course around how to create offers and how to create products that people actually wanna buy because I feel like we're not doing enough of a job to actually do the work for them. Why should you care about coaching? Let me do the work for you and then I'll share my findings. You know?

Simone: So you think at a time when people are Googling, searching for a therapist, people are googling, searching for even like a nutritionist, right? Like a lot. I bet a lot of more people try to find nutritionist and say, you know, life coach that works with nutrition or even like acupuncturists, like these are all things that people, to a much greater extent, actively, voluntarily search for over life coaching. We are not saying this to discourage anyone or to hope to paint like a, you know, depressing, hopeless picture of what's in store for you if you wanna pursue this.

But we want you to go in with a clear understanding of this is the industry that you're entering, right? And so, in order for you to generate demand as a business, just like any other business, you need to bring something that is going to make people feel a desire that is essentially brand new to most people. Like most people have never bought life coaching. They've never thought about it, but they have consumed tons of products from the primary sector, tons of products from the secondary sector. They have consumed tons of services in the tertiary sector. 

They have experiences of all of this, but they have no experience, no context for what belongs in the fifth sector—one of the many reasons being that the industry and the whole discipline of life coaching is very new in the context of history. And so the burden of translating the value, if you believe that life coaching could be helpful for anyone, the onus is on you to translate how that is true in a way that makes people desire it. 

And I think that that point is so under communicated that I think what happens that people fall in love with coaching, which no surprise coaching is amazing and. You know, in the right hands with the right practitioner when you have a good fit.

And then so they're attracted to it and they pursue it. It's all, like you said, it's so exciting. When you have the skillset to genuinely help someone, and you know, I have written and spoken a lot about the critiques I have about the industry. I really, I'm not cynical enough to think that the 99.9%, you know, if not more, of people entered the industry because they genuinely had a positive experience that moved their heart and soul about what's possible with this work. 

So we get so excited and in our passion and enthusiasm it's easy to gloss over to, or kind of be in a kind of willful denial about the incredibly difficult position that the industry is in right now. Not because you suck, not because life coaching sucks, but because of all of these sort of macro factors.

Billy: And I think, you know, I wanna mention like the specific case of like, but there are people who buy life coaching, right? But I think in general, like there are people who—

Simone: Google, "I wanna find a coach." Like they, there are people like that. It's just, they're statistically very, very few.

Billy: And I think there are popular personalities that really drive that kind of a sector.

Simone: A hundred percent. And you might even, a person's name, you might even say it is almost exclusively popular charismatic personalities that drive those searches and movements.

Billy: So I would even argue, again, I'm not an economist, so I'm not sure about the accuracy of this, but I would even argue that it's almost like entertainment. If you're just genuinely searching for life coaching through, you know, influential figure, life coaching purchases that relate to that I think are not even in the fifth sector. It's more like the third sector where it's about like entertainment. You know, like, it's like buying a Taylor Swift concert ticket.

Simone: Well, gimme an example.

Billy: So like, you know, there are like, I'm not gonna mention names, but there are—

Simone: Oh, okay. Is it kind of like, like I'm Jay Shetty and I'm super famous. I'm in the media all the time. I am the life coach of all these celebrities, and then I'm holding a Jay Shetty event. It's about realizing your potential and all these people flock to Jay Shetty and he sells out the event like thousands of people. And in that moment it's technically about life coach or self development or whatever, but they're not really coming for that. They're coming to have this experience. Yeah.

Billy: So I would argue that's like a third sector thing where in the class, in the classification of like entertainment, you're looking to have a night out and an experience kind of a thing, you know?

Simone: Or like Tony Robbins, right? He's not selling life coaching. He's selling the Tony Robbins experience.

Billy: Exactly. Even if, even if the, and I'm not delegitimizing that, you know, whatever, like I'm not saying that people, some people aren't helped by it. I'm not saying that there isn't, whatever, but I'm just saying just Tony Robbins selling Tony Robbins life coaching, branded life coaching, Jay Shetty selling Jay Shetty courses. You cannot put yourself on par with them because you are not them. You are not a superstar, like internationally known celebrity. The game you are playing is entirely different from the game they're playing unless you somehow become that famous too.

Billy: Exactly. And the last kind of like, again, Simone said, this is not a doom and gloom kind of a thing, but the last piece of doom and gloom that I have to share for you is, there's this thing called entropy, right? So it's a concept from thermodynamics, but basically everything goes towards more disorder. So when you put a drop of ink in water, when the ink is just ink, it's 100% pure ink. But the moment it meets water, it instantly loses its concentration, right?

So why I am mentioning this to you is when you have a life coaching business, you need to understand that even if you make the most concise and well-formed argument, and great, you know, logic. The most beautiful design and flawlessly executed technology and et cetera, et cetera. The moment it leaves your hand into the post or submit button, it's going to lose like 99% of the potency that you feel in your mind because it's like that drop of ink being dropped in a bucket of water.

Because you are experiencing your content through your phone and your creative mindset. But guess what? The people who are gonna see what you write, what you post, what you shot on your video, they're gonna look at it as they're petting their dog. They're gonna look at it as they're scrolling in their toilet break. They're not going to look at your work the way you do. 

So combining the multiple skill competency that you need with the economic relative, practically no demand of life coaching, plus the human tendency and the physical phenomena of entropy. These are the reasons why I tell my students life coaching is a terrible way to make money. Life coaching business is a terrible way to make money, but I am a software engineer. I've been a software engineer for the past decade, but in the last three years, four years, I was a software engineer who knew life coaching. Guess what? I became the best software engineer I ever was, thanks to life coaching.

Simone: Mm-hmm.

Billy: If you take genuinely, if you genuinely take life coaching to the things that you are already doing to make money, I guarantee you it is going to be a great value add for you and I think that will make you fall in love with coaching more than you having a trying to have a coaching business.

And the more we have, the more we work on our coaching business, trying to CPR it, the more we slowly lose our love for it. I think that is a very sad thing because it's a truly great value add to anyone's life. It makes you a better partner. It makes you a better software engineer, plumber. It makes you a better chef. It makes you a better community member. It makes you a better parent.

Simone: It makes you a better activist. The better, like just everything.

Billy: Just by trying to make this business work, that light slowly dims and it becomes so hard, and you know, 108 offers the one I was talking about. Not everyone makes it. Some people do not. Everyone does. So it's really important to think about why am I not making offers? Especially when I know that offers are like the breath or the heartbeat of a business.

And not, this is not a shade to my students, but in the general inquiry, especially if I join the program, that the whole premise is based on, well making 108 offers. This is something I ask my students as well. We have to be curious about: "I intended to do that, but why didn't I?" And I think not enough people are curious about that gap between, "I wanna do all of it. Oh, when I think about this, this is exciting." But when it comes execution time, and we kind of take it as a necessity, "oh, of course you're not gonna do all the things that you intend to."

How did we come to this? So this is not a shade, because I talk about this in Simone's programs all the time. I bought summer camp, which is one of Simone's programs I did not—

Simone: What was it, four years ago?

Billy: Yeah, yeah. I did not look at it for a year until I decided to do it. So I completely understand what happens in the mind, but that's not a criticism. It's not a criticism. But we have to be curious about in this, in this worksheet for writing with the sword. For example, another one of Simone's programs, there's so many prompts, there's so many explorative copies in way of the Dragon, another one of Simone's thing. There's like all these things, there's all these questions that are designed for me to explore and truth are there, which is another one of Simon's programs and truth are there. There's so many truth are there questions and prompts? What happened to my intent to doing that? And again, it's okay if you don't want to, but at least we have to be honest with ourselves about maybe I just don't wanna do this.

Simone: Yeah, and that's okay.

Billy: And that I think will give you a lot of liberty if you're like, "ah, I don't wanna do this. But guess what? Like, Billy, after a year, a year after summer camp, I might wanna later." Just like a piano that's sitting, sitting in your living room. You don't wanna play right now, but you might. So all the resources that you already have, because you invested in becoming a life coaching business owner, I think if you fall in love with the intent that you had when you purchased them one more time. I think you are going to see all the material in a really new light, and that is accounting for all the things that we discussed today, the three, the, all the sectors, all the competency, entropy. Even with that, if you wanna still make your life coaching business work, like you don't, realistically, you don't need to invest more. It's time perhaps to pick up the books. It's time perhaps to explore inner, why didn't I do this work? It's time to ask myself, why am I doing this? Why do I want to do this? Even with all the hardships, especially if money is going to be somewhat easier in other ways.

So now is when I come back to your argument about having financial and social capital. So if you have financial and social capital, it is definitely great because you don't have to worry about survival and when your survival isn't taken care of it because of the way the human brain works. It has to take the driver's seat, but as a trade off, when you have the financial and social capital, now the only thing sitting in between you and the results is you.

Simone: Mm-hmm.

Billy: And when you are really not clear on why you're doing it. You're gonna spend a lot of time wondering, "why am I, I have all these, I have all this capital, but even with this capital and even with this stability, like what's missing?" But as a trade off, again, on the other side, if you are working towards your stability. You're still wanting to coach people for you, it's going to be really easy to figure out your why, because that intention is bleeding through your instinct to survive. So I think that's the trade off. That's why it's a different set of circumstances. But the whole reason why I'm talking about this today is I want, and Simone has been talking about this in one of her latest podcast episodes too, like, get a job, like take care of your security. And when you do that, life coaching is gonna be a great asset for you. It is going to truly make you shine in the pool of applicants, in the pool of interviewees, you in the pool.

Simone: You're the one colleagues pool being life coached. Yeah.

Billy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you take all the things that you have been coached on, or perhaps if you are a coach, right? If you take all the knowledge you have about the human mind and you apply it to the sector that you have a, you know, somewhat of a more reliable job in, you will truly stand out. And even if you don't intend to, people are gonna ask you, "Hey. You won't believe how many times this happens to me at work. Billy, like, you seem so happy."

Simone: What happened? How do you do that?

Billy: Yeah. And I guarantee you it's gonna happen to you too. This is what happens when people see the light.

Simone: So, so that, that kind of leads me to what I wanted to ask you, which is about maybe, you know, for some people it might be the elephant in the room, which is you are telling all this stuff about how, how impossible it it is to break through, how the odds are stacked against you, the economy, blah, blah, blah. But you're speaking as two people who are making money, right? Selling coaching and teaching coaches how to build businesses. So people might say, isn't that a contradiction? And if it's so hard, how are you able to do it? I think, I think people might think that.

Billy: Yeah. The grand premise for everything that I do, and this is my one-on-one life coaching and my business coaching is the removal of your suffering. When you come to me for life coaching, yeah, you can work on career, you can work on marriage, you can do whatever you want. But I want you to be happy. If you come to me for business coaching. I'm not really the best coach to help you make a lot of money, but I think I'm a pretty good coach if you wanna make $5, but in a really happy way. My entire premise is the removal of suffering. That's my mission as a Buddhist. So if you are going to do business, do it in a happy way. I would like to think many of my students are leading a happy business because of the Buddhist principles that I teach in my container. It doesn't mean they're gonna make a lot more money, but I have observed over time.

Simone: Mm-hmm.

Billy: When you're happy. You tend to want to do things more. When you're happy, you tend to not be so drained. You tend to have a bit more energy.

Simone: You have to have more to give to others. You tend to be more generous, you tend to be more creative, and on and on.

Billy: And my students can attest for this, but it's not all positive vibes and rainbows in my container. I really kick your ass a lot. That's, and that's why I have programs like making 108 offers. It's because if you are not happy having a business, it is very likely that you are not going to be able to focus on skill development.

This is something I say to a lot of people. There's no heaven that you can escape to and there's no hell where you willingly enter. So if life coaching business is meant to be like an out for you, there's no paradise where you can escape to. But if this life coaching business thing, you still wanna make it work because you love it and you wanna give it to other people. You wanna share the wisdom then, regardless of how hard it is, it still can't be that bad for you because you're willingly entering.

Simone: I agree. We're not saying do this, don't do that. Like this sucks. You know, this is good, this, that, that's not the point. The point is, here's the reality. Here's the objective reality and the place in your heart and brain that you're coming from is going to entirely determine what it feels like to be on the journey. It's probably going to determine your energy level and creative level, and it's going to also hugely impact how other people perceive you.

And psychiatry, psychotherapy fought for about a century, you know, if not more. If you look at the longer history of it to gain mainstream acceptance and I would imagine that most people, you know, at least most people who would be listening to this podcast, would say that that's a good thing. 

That's a good battle that they fought and won to now there's a point where you say, if I, if I say I'm anxious, I'm depressed, I'm having a panic attack. People don't look at you like you're weak or you know, just get over it. Or you're crazy. Right. That's a good thing. They have so many people have fought for it to be recognized. But, and so if you are a believer in life coaching or any other sort of, you know, fifth sector healing modality, self-development kind of thing, and if you really believe in it, hey, are you willing to go down as one of the people who fought for it and in the history of the next, I don't know, century, but I mean, I don't know if it's gonna, I don't know how long it's, I can't tell the future.

Or are you going to enter it and be depressed and anxious and sad and despondent that it hasn't replaced your day job in a year, and that people aren't just like showering you with acknowledgement and, and praise for, for what you're doing. Like that's, that's what I'm saying. And I think both Billy and I are very lucky in many ways, like we're able to have these businesses, you know, in many ways our businesses are very different, but because we don't have to worry about our survival, we live in stable—well, I mean, you live in America, so I don't know how stable that is anymore, but more or less, you know, we don't have to fear for our lives every day. And there's a lot of sort of, you know, political, economic, social structures that are propping up a level of security and prosperity that allows us to do this, and that's not afforded to everyone. 

So we are aware of it as this immense, you know, set of unearned advantages that we have. And so if you have, and this is, you know, something that we've constantly learned from our resident allyship teacher Rashida Bonds inside home, is that if you have unearned advantages, it's your job to use it as a weapon, use it as a Trojan horse to bring about positive change in the world. Right?

And so at the same time that we gave you a bit of a doom and gloom picture, I hope that this I, I would love for this episode to also serve as an opportunity to account for the resources that you do have and the skills that you do have and support you in being able to show up as a coach, as a healer from a place of overflow, right? 

Like if you have experienced the power of coaching, if you have skills, a skillset that can help somebody else, and you can use it on yourself too, that's a place of advantage that you're coming from, right? That should make you feel good. That should be a joyous thing.

And so are you gonna let that, that sense of joy drive your work? Or are you gonna let something else drive your work? And I think if you, there's no guarantees. If you let the joy drive the work, the passion for what you know is possible, drive the work, you are just gonna have a much better shot at making things possible. That may take a lot of resilience and long-term commitment to build.

Billy: A thousand percent agreed.

Simone: Okay. I feel like, I feel like that's a good place to wrap up. Billy, thank you so much for your thoughtful, wise insights and I am glad you're my brother. I'm glad we got to have this conversation. And if you are interested in Billy's work, I will leave his links in the show notes and I hope this was useful for you, my friends. We'll talk to you next time. Bye bye.