Career Coaching Secrets

From Educator to Mindset Coach: Prajesh’s 13-Year Journey to Impact

• Davis Nguyen

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In this episode of Career Coaching Secrets, Rexhen sits down with mindset coach Prajesh Chhanabhai to talk about how coaching is not about selling — it's about creating opportunities. Prajesh shares his journey, challenges, and insights on growing a coaching business while making a real impact. 


You can find him on:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/prajesh-chhanabhai/?originalSubdomain=nz
You can listen to Prajesh Chhanabhai's podcast Baskets Of Knowledge on
https://open.spotify.com/show/4FJKnEdZSILs9re9P5pvBV?si=8e23cb9a003c4a75
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/baskets-of-knowledge/id1577123344
See more about Extended DISC - https://www.extendeddisc.org/


You can also watch this podcast on YouTube at:
https://www.youtube.com/@CareerCoachingSecrets

If you are a career coach looking to grow your business you can find out more about Purple Circle at http://joinpurplecircle.com

Get Exclusive Access to Our In-Depth Analysis of 71 Successful Career Coaches, Learn exactly what worked (and what didn't) in the career coaching industry in 2024: https://joinpurplecircle.com/white-paper-replay

Prajesh Chhanabhai:

many people in the world go like, I'm not a salesperson. If you just reframe the mind and go, actually, you're not a salesperson. You're not selling. You're actually giving people an opportunity. And the opportunity comes from them being able to give to you. And also, the only way that you can make an impact in the world is if you have money. So what does it mean? When you have money, you can make an impact. If you have no money, you can't make an impact in the world. It's not about getting rich. It's when you have money, you can make change. When you have no money, you can't make it. It becomes much harder to make that change there.

Davis Nguyen:

Welcome to Career Coaching Secrets, the podcast where we talk with successful career coaches on how they built their success and the hard lessons they learned along the way. My name is Davis Nguyen, and I'm the founder of Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to seven and eight figures without burning out. Before Purple Circle, I started and scaled several seven and eight-figure career coaching businesses myself and consulted with two career coaching businesses that are now doing over $100 million each. Whether you're an established coach or just building your practice for the first time, you'll discover the secrets to elevating your coaching business.

Rexhen:

So welcome again to the Career Coaching Secrets Podcast. Today, my guest is Prajesh Chhanabhai, a mindset coach, a mentor, a trainer who helps people navigate life's crossroads with confidence for Over 13 years, he has worked with young people, guiding them to shift their mindset and unlock their true potential. With a background in eDisc, NLP, MindsetRx, and mindfulness training, Prajesh plans science and strategy to empower individuals to break through limitations and achieve growth. His passion for understanding how people think and evolve is what drives him every day. I'm excited to dive into his insights. Welcome to the show, Prajesh.

Prajesh Chhanabhai:

Yeah, good. Thank you so much, and thank you to all the listeners out there. Excited to be here.

Rexhen:

Well, it's a pleasure to have you on the show, Prajesh. Tell me a little bit more about what inspired you to become a mindset coach.

Prajesh Chhanabhai:

Yeah, Rexhen, thank you. What a great question. So coaching, as you know, has now just become really mainstream over the last few years, but my journey started many, many years ago. So if I give you a bit of history, I grew up in Africa, and if you think about it, 20 or 30 years ago, You just had a fixed career pathway. You were born. This is the job that you did. You studied this. You became this X, Y, Z. One plus one equals two. And over the years, I've realized that this is not true. I worked at a university. I worked at a university in South Africa. I had my move to New Zealand, and I worked at a university here. And in my transactions, I worked with many, many young people. And as I was doing that, I just realized that I was sitting and I was teaching in a classroom and I was always pondering why one group of young people switched and got things and one group didn't. I did not understand that. It was really interesting to me. So I did lots of deep diving into this thinking here, and it came down to mindset. It came down to how we are wired. And, you know, some people have growth mindsets, some people have fixed mindsets. So what does that actually mean? It comes to the fact that sometimes, you know, growing up, our culture, our families tell us stories of awe. Give us awe. instructions that are just sort of fixated. If you are a doctor, successful. If you're an engineer, successful. If you're a painter, forget about it. If you're a policeman, forget about it. Those are stories that people get told and they get fixated on that there. And if they don't achieve, you know, being a doctor or an engineer, they think they're a failure. So when I went into this space, this work here, I realized that when you shift the mindset to go, actually, let's not think about what your peers or your family stories, but what your story is, what does it actually look like? What does that actually mean to you as a young person? You have to unravel all the layers, though, because it's not a simple conversation over one or two days. It takes a lot of time to get to that. And that's when I realized that before you can tell somebody or ask somebody why they want to do whatever they want to do, it's going back to the root cause, the root meaning of that there. And this has been my passion over the last, you said 13 years. I've been doing this for 13 years. But over the last, I guess, 20 years is when I've actually been in this field here. And that's what got me to coaching. So to take away from the traditional education system, which is where I work in, to actually use the traditional system, but also question that by going to think about these different questions. And this is what got me to coaching.

Rexhen:

Oh, wow. I was just thinking about, like, how can someone unravel that? And when you just said that it's not something that happens in an hour, it needs, like, time. It's like, okay. I was like, yeah, it takes time because I was not able to think through that and just try it. right after I was hearing you explain that. So tell me a little bit more about your journey from when you started your coaching business to where you are at right now. So notice you said you're also working at an education institution. Is that where you do your coaching or you also have your coaching business on the side as well?

Prajesh Chhanabhai:

Yeah. For some context, I work at a university, I work in education, and I use coaching every single day in that forum there. But I have my business, my coaching business, and that's where I do my majority of coaching in that space there. So at work, at the university, I use the coaching techniques, but my business that I run on the side is where I do my coaching. That's where I delve into that space there. So the two complement each other, but when I do one-on-one. So just say you were in my class and we're working, I'll ask you coaching kind of questions and then you might go, hey, I actually need a bit more work. We'd have a coach, we'd go to the business side and we'll do some coaching in the business. Yeah. Yeah.

Rexhen:

So how was the journey when you started? And it's been quite a few years right now. To where you are right now, how do you feel that that journey has evolved?

Prajesh Chhanabhai:

Yeah, so as everyone out there, it's not an easy journey. You go onto Instagram and you go onto those places and people are like, oh, in one week you'll be a coach and everything, you'll earn $10,000 a month. To me, I don't. think that works. That hasn't happened for me. And also to many of my peers that I work with, that is not the true story. You have to put in the work. So what do you mean by putting in the work? It's not hard with being smart. So when I started, it was very challenging because I had that mindset when I did my coach training. In my coach training, you learn how to become a coach, but nobody teaches you how to be a marketer. Nobody tells you how to be a salesperson. Nobody tells you those skills there. So amazing coach, Lots of amazing coaches, but they don't know how to sell themselves. So at the start, that was the hard thing. How do you transition from actually I am a really good coach or I think I'm a good coach to selling myself as a coach? So my learning curve was pretty exponential. It was pretty massive because you have to put aside the fact that you can coach to now think about the skills of marketing, the skills of selling yourself, the skills of why would someone pick me, all those stories. Because at the start, you're... get out there very confident, and week one, week two, a month, two months goes by, and you might be one customer, maybe, maybe nothing, maybe two, and you're like, what's going on? And you start second-guessing yourself. Then there's also imposter syndrome. Basically, the thing that you're coaching other people from becomes a problem for you as well because you start having those thoughts as well. So, yes, that was my learning process, and I then had to realize I had to actually find somebody to help me and the business side. Actually, how do I scale a business? How do I make a business? I think this is what a lot of people don't do, is they think they can do this themselves. And maybe you can. Maybe if we take 100 people, maybe 500 people can do it themselves effectively. I think the other 95 need some help. They need to admit that they need help. And this is me. I didn't admit any help at the start. And then I shifted and actually helped on how to actually switch my mindset. Because as you know, originally, when you're a coach, you want to help people. And helping people is why we do what we do. But you have to switch that mindset off a little bit and go, how do I make money from helping people? Because you have to make money to survive and do things. So that was a shift that needed to happen for me, which has happened now.

Rexhen:

So basically, as a coach, you also hired a coach to help you on the business side. So is it a business coach?

Prajesh Chhanabhai:

100%. I think what I'm going to say is every coach needs a coach as well.

Rexhen:

That's what every other coach that I've interviewed has said the same thing. So every coach needs a coach. This is a business coach, basically, that kind of helped you navigate through the marketing side, through the business operations side, right?

Prajesh Chhanabhai:

Yeah, it's actually two. It's a business coach and also a mentor. So the two are very, very different. So a mentor is someone who has done what I wanted to do and I can speak to them and they will tell me what to do. Then a business coach is someone that just gives you the tips on how to get there. Whereas a mentor is making sure that I'm on the right pathway. So I had to use both. Well, I still do use both to get me... on the right pathway because you don't know what you don't know.

Rexhen:

Yeah, exactly. You don't know what you don't know. As you've worked with the business coach as well, I'm guessing you have maybe a clearer understanding right now of what is your target audience and who do you work with and what transformation do you help them achieve?

Prajesh Chhanabhai:

Yeah, that's a great question. So for our listeners just before, Regine and myself were talking about about my coaching model. So I call myself a mindset coach, and I have two sides to my business, but we'll just focus on the one side. But it actually doesn't really matter. Whichever side you look at, at the end of the day, it's all about mindset. If you can't understand or work through your mindset, then nothing happens. So I work with two main groups. The main group that I'm really passionate about is young people between the ages of 18 and 24. And why that group there? Because to me, I find that is the group that requires requires the most amount of coaching because you have to dispel all the stories that have been told you know many many stories have been told but also they're the most valuable They're really easy to shift and change because they're more open to change thinking. Then I have another group that I work with, which are from mid-35s onwards, 35 as they go through career change, and they want to change their career, but they're not sure what that looks like because they've been doing a career pathway that they thought they were doing. They go to university to study, blah. They've done it for 15 years, and they go, actually, this is not what I want to do. So those are my two groups that I work with. My passion is with the younger people, so I really, really enjoy that. Like I said before, it's because they just come with a lot of energy, with a lot of inspiration, with but also lots of questions that make you think about the world as well in a different way.

Rexhen:

Interesting. So when it comes to the ones that are 35 or older, you kind of are helping them pivot to a different career or a different position. And for the ones that are young, you're kind of unraveling their thoughts that would be given by their families or when they were growing up and kind of like getting them from that fixed mindset to the growth mindset. Where do you find your clients currently? What is the main marketing channel that is working for you?

Prajesh Chhanabhai:

Great. I'm glad you asked the question because there's two very distinct markets. Two distinct markets. So with the young ones, which are 18 to 24, My main platform is Instagram because that age group lives on Instagram. They're very active on Instagram, so I use that there. And for the adults, the 35 and above, I use LinkedIn as my main channel. So the two very different cohorts, two very different content strategies, two very different results. One is a pivoting result, changing career. One is actually the start of your career path. What does that look like?

Rexhen:

Tell me a little bit more about maybe some... career coach is going to watch this later on, might want to know a bit more about the strategy that goes into Instagram. And then we can dig slowly into the strategy that goes into LinkedIn. And the reason why I put LinkedIn as a second is because LinkedIn is something that I talk about a lot. So Instagram is something I, at least in these episodes, we haven't talked a lot about it yet.

Prajesh Chhanabhai:

Yeah. So the one thing with Instagram is Instagram, I have found it's I get a bit like LinkedIn, but a very different LinkedIn because, and also the group I'm working with, when I first started, I was just posting career content on there, but there was no traction, and I realized this is a bit silly. So I shifted my modeling and I now create more engaging content so that people see my face. I'll talk to them. It's more of a conversation so people can see what I'm doing. I will ask them questions and people can respond. maybe do a couple of lives just to get people on to you. Because I think what it is in that age group of young people, they want to know who you are as a person. And when you're becoming more authentic and more real, but also you're living in their world and use their languaging, then it becomes real. You know, the languaging in their world is really important there. So just keeping up with those trends, keeping up with what's happening there, but also just being real and authentic is how people come to you because they see you as a person, see you as someone they can trust in terms of There's no big age gap. There's an age gap that disappears because of the way you're producing the content there. So that's the methodology I use. I do lots of my, when I do testimonials or video testimonials with young people, talking about the testimonials and what they've done, using various tools to do that. And then LinkedIn, you're probably not LinkedIn really well. as well

Rexhen:

yeah so basically with instagram is more of like a personal connection more of like a personal brand and more about you and um also a bit more about the testimony of some people you have well helped with it's more engaging uh in this context than linkedin and for linkedin you're also like posting content are you also doing cold outreach or no

Prajesh Chhanabhai:

yes so my linkedin is is lots of content. So, um, for those of you that want to follow LinkedIn, it's trying to do content because LinkedIn, um, what I've learned over time is to establish your expertise, that you're an expert in this specific space. People can then come to you. So, um, yeah, so LinkedIn is pure content, a lot of call to actions to, to get in touch with me. If you have any questions, the cold, cold, cold calling, I've tried sometimes, but I, it doesn't really work for me. It's more people come to me through my content that I produce. Okay.

Rexhen:

Okay, so mostly organic content.

Prajesh Chhanabhai:

Yeah, organic content, yes.

Rexhen:

And when it comes to Instagram, have you tried Instagram ads, or that's not a

Prajesh Chhanabhai:

tactic? I've tried it once or twice, but it doesn't work for me. It hasn't worked really well, because algorithm keeps changing every second week, so I just stick to what I know, and it... It seems to work well in that space. And also, for our listeners out there, I also have a podcast as well. Now, my podcast is basically talking to young adults and young people about their career journey. And I use that as a post-it into my Instagram as well, so people can see the conversations of the people that I've had about their career path, so they can see themselves. You know, they see themselves because what I've realized is when people can see themselves, they're more likely to make those changes or they're more likely to go, oh, I can see myself. So I use my content from my podcast as well.

Rexhen:

And which, by the way, we're going to link also into the description of this video. So for anyone who wants to listen to your podcast as well, they will find that into the description as well. Cool. So I want to talk some more about your growth journey for the future. Do you have any goals that you're working on towards for the next one to three years?

Prajesh Chhanabhai:

yeah so at the moment i work in um in the new zealand market of australia austin is the market and but increasingly i see the challenges of the bears that young people face is a global thing it's not just linked to new zealand so i would love to go a bit more global and i've started doing a high a volunteer for a company which does um student leadership across the world and we go across the world and we teach people young people how to make some decisions so my aim is to make this more of a global focus with young people and teaching and empowering young people to make those decisions from a young age so they don't have to always have a coach but if they have the tools because like I said it's about the mindset if you have the tools to understand your mindset then you can make those you make those initial conversations and those initial choices with more confidence as a young person as opposed to trepidation and worry about what other people think

Rexhen:

cool so basically a growing global outside of New Zealand. And in terms of... You did mention this a little bit at the beginning. You talked about how you started doing the business coaching yourself, but it didn't work out that well. And then you hired a business coach and you also speak with a mentor. Apart from that, what resources or support has been most valuable for you in growing your business?

Prajesh Chhanabhai:

Yeah. One of the things that I have realized, as you mentioned at the start, is actually using tangible tools. So... I trained as a coach and all good, but I found that people actually want a tangible tool as well. So one of the tools I really use is something called extended disk, which is different to disk. It's extended disk, and I use that as a profiling tool, which people can actually bring lots of awareness. When I introduced that into my coaching business, it shifted things dramatically because it now became you're selling a profile. And with the profile comes the coaching. So human nature works okay. It was very hard to sell the coaching, especially when you start, people don't know who you are, like whatever. But when you sell them a profile, hey, Ryujin, when you come and speak to me, we can look at your profile, we're going to get some awareness, and then that will bring some conversation. So once I did that, then once I realized that, then when I started working with it, with a business coach and speaking to a mentor, that's what they said. They were like, right, cool, young people, anybody, young people, old people, people who want something to take away, you know, something they can measure. And that's where I shifted and said, right, cool, this actually makes a lot of sense. So having a tool for me that was tangible, that people could see, that they could take away, I used that one tool. There's lots of tools out there, but this is the tool that I really resonated with.

Rexhen:

Mm-hmm. Cool. And we'll also link that to the description. And I'll also need to research that a little bit more myself and see how that might be useful. So how do you stay connected with other coaches as well?

Prajesh Chhanabhai:

Oh, yeah. I'm going to say one thing. I'm going to use an extended disc jargon as well. So, an extended disc, they talk about the different kind of your behavior type. So, my behavior type is called an IS, which means that I am a people person. So, I need to be connected to other people. Now, this became really apparent in COVID when the world shut down. Sad, but also... Amazing opportunity. Amazing opportunity because now this conversation we're having right now would not happen pre-COVID because it wasn't normalized. We need to talk to someone from Albania while you're talking about this. This is crazy, right? But now because of COVID, everyone was on Zooms or Teams or Google Meet or whatever. Through that, I have now been able to develop a coaching community across the world. So I have a coaching community that's in the Middle East, in Southeast Asia. in Europe and also in New Zealand. I'm part of the ICF committee in New Zealand. So definitely coaching communities is where I work in because my mindset shift to everybody that's listening to me as any coach out there is just remember In the coaching community, you are not competing, but you're collaborating and you're learning. And what I learned very quickly, I was like, actually, this makes a lot of sense. When you work together, you're able to get some amazing goals. Because at the start, everyone is like, oh, competing against each other. But there's 7 billion people in the world. And, you know, there's not a shortage. And you can't, I mean, one person can't deal with 7 million people or 7 billion people, right? Even if you get 100 people or 200 people that are your clients, but you work together with other people, your reach is magnified. So I am going to, one thing, if anybody takes away one thing from today's talk is get into the coaching community because in your coaching community, you're going to find people that have done what you're doing. at the start of the journey or in the middle of the journey, and you can learn from them and grow with them. And you can also teach them as well, because the best way of learning is to teach other people.

Rexhen:

Yeah, I really like that. So not a competition, it's a collaboration. And there's, like I said, seven, eight billion. There's a lot of people, basically. There's plenty of people potential clients so you can have more than you can cover. So collaboration is very important in that sense. What is something that you wish you had known when you first started scaling your coaching business? What is an unexpected lesson learned for you?

Prajesh Chhanabhai:

Yeah, the unexpected lesson that I learned was you have to really be confident in talking about yourself and talking about your business. And I think why I say this is, like I said before, many people go into coaching because they want to help people and they feel like, oh, I can't talk about myself. But if you don't talk about yourself, you are not going to be able to sell yourself. I use the word sell in inverted commas, but you're not going to be able to get out there to do what you want to do. And why is it unexpected? Because No coach training to tell you that there. You do coach training from any organization, they're not going to tell you that there. And I think this is where the biggest learning for me, the biggest takeaway for me is, you know, people, many people in the world go like, I'm not a salesperson. If you just reframe the mind and go, actually, you're not a salesperson, you're not selling, you're actually giving people an opportunity. And the opportunity comes from them being able to give to you. And also, the only way that you can make an impact in the world is if you have money. So what does it mean? When you have money, you can make an impact. If you have no money, you can't make an impact in the world. It's not about getting rich. It's when you have money, you can make change. When you have no money, you can't make it. It becomes much harder to make that change there.

Rexhen:

I want to switch a little bit more into a challenge-focused question. What are some of the biggest challenges you face in scaling your coaching business apart from, you mentioned initially, the business side of it? Is there any other challenges? like challenge that you're facing or you're currently still facing uh in scaling your coaching business

Prajesh Chhanabhai:

the other big challenge is the amount of information out there you know there's so much information about there you should have a website you should do this you should do that you should there's just so much noise out there that is a challenge because you're always chasing and if you just stop chasing and this is i mean this is human nature we do this all the time and i find that as a challenge as well you know Another certification, if you don't do this, you're going to be falling behind. If you don't do that, you're falling behind. That's a challenge that I face all the time. I think it's a challenge we all face that we have to get the next certificate or the next thing to basically self-validate. The other big challenge that I face is because of, as I said before, we have a global community, but I live in New Zealand, and my time zone is terrible. My time zone is terrible. So I appreciate and acknowledge you for jumping out of this time zone. But if I'm just being really honest, the time zone is really bad. So trying to get into the European market, the North American market, the Latin American market is really quite challenging at the time zone. And yes, you can wake up at 4 o'clock in the morning or 2 o'clock in the morning, but how is it sustainable over the long term? It's not very sustainable. So that is a real challenge, a location challenge that I have to navigate with myself and think about how can I get over that. So that's a real challenge, I guess.

Rexhen:

Yeah, I've actually happened to work with a marketing specialist before he was located in New Zealand as well. And yeah, that was one of the things he had an issue with. He said that initially he thought that, okay, the good thing is that I could get rid of most of my meetings in the morning and the rest of my day. I can have to focus on work. But again, there's a challenge when there's only specific... time zones that actually you can make a call in the morning. Like in this case, you're meeting me. It's your morning time. It's my evening time, but not many other time zones might have that availability. So yeah, that's going to be very challenging, especially with your goals to kind of go global for the next two or three years. What advice would you give to other coaches? In this case, our career coaches mostly was going to listen to this. looking to scale their impact. Apart from the money that you already shared, is there any other advice you'd like to give to them?

Prajesh Chhanabhai:

Yeah, my other piece of advice is sometimes to scale, you have to start small. So what I mean by that there. When I first started, I was trying to go out into the world and trying to be big in the world and it wasn't working because I didn't stick to my home network. So my advice is even if you just start small, so you go to your the high school, the university that are right there in your doorstep, just around you, even in your city. It's going to change the way things happen for you. Why? Because when you start working locally, two things happen. Number one, you're going to get a lot more traction because people can see you. Number two, you're also going to be able to get lots of testimonials nice and easy. you're going to start becoming an expert in that field in your space there. So you might start maybe in your city, then you can expand to the next city or next city. And once you start doing that, then your name, the word of mouth, becomes the best marketing for you because you don't have to worry about the Instagram algorithm or the LinkedIn algorithm, which happens later on. But those algorithms start working better if you have other people talking about you. So my biggest advice for you, for any career coach, any coach listening to this, is get your network to be your first customers and get them to talk about you. And even if that means at the start that you do it for free, sometimes that's the best way to go, but also it helps you define who you are as a person. That's one piece of advice I'd give to any coach out there. You start small and then grow from there.

Rexhen:

Yeah, that's a great advice, especially like start small, start a new community, get those first testimonials out because that's going to help a lot. And then you can grow bigger and then you'll get more referrals and you can focus on other marketing channels. So yeah, starting small, getting the testimonials and then growing bigger is a very good advice. Thank you for sharing that. No worries. And again, thank you for being on the show today. It was a pleasure meeting you and learning from you.

Prajesh Chhanabhai:

No worries. Thank you for having me. And, you know, anybody out there wants to have contact, all my details will be in the show notes. Thank you for having me. And again, thank you for staying up. At 11 o'clock at night.

Rexhen:

You're welcome. So I'll also link your website here and your LinkedIn so they can see it on the screen as well as on the description of this video. So that will be shared there for anyone who wants to reach out to you. They can reach out to you directly. And again, thank you so much for the meeting today.

Prajesh Chhanabhai:

No worries at all. Thank you for having me.

Davis Nguyen:

That's it for this episode of Career Coaching Secrets. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can subscribe to YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this episode to catch future episodes. This conversation was brought to you by Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to seven and eight figures without burning out. To learn more about Purple Circle, our community and how we can help you grow your business, visit joinpurplecircle.com.