149: 9 Important Lessons I’ve Learned From 9 Years In My Coaching Business

It’s hard to believe that I have been in my online coaching business for 9 years! 

The unexpected truth behind running a successful coaching business for 9 years…

From overcoming life's toughest challenges to the surprising shift in mindset, I hope that by sharing these 9 key lessons from 9 years in my coaching business, it can help you to change the way you approach your business.

The last nine years of running my online coaching business has been a rollercoaster ride! Through navigating motherhood, loss, divorce, health battles, and some of life’s toughest stressors, I have gained a lot of insight into what it truly takes to keep a coaching business thriving amidst life's toughest moments (and biggest global and economic changes!!). It’s been a bumpy ride, but it’s been a blast!

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Have a question or topic you’d like to see covered on the podcast? Go to www.lifewithpassion.com/podcast and I’ll create a custom episode just for you!

Transcript

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Welcome to let's get visible entrepreneurs. This is the podcast where we bring you the secrets behind what it actually takes to get seen, get known and get more clients. I'm your host, Christine Ammerman, and I'm sharing my best strategies from over two decades of experience as a media marketing and messaging expert to help you expand your exposure, grow your personal brand, attract dream clients and more, all while staying true to your authentic, self unique vision. If you're a passionate, heart centered entrepreneur, thought leader or expert looking to stand out from the crowd with confidence, you're in the right place. Are you ready? Let's get visible. Today I want to give you the top nine lessons that I've learned from the last nine years of running life with passion. My online coaching business. As you might imagine, it has been quite a journey. And during that time, I've navigated becoming a mother, I've navigated loss, I've navigated divorce, I've navigated health challenges, kid challenges, extended family challenges, friend challenges, team changes. All of these different things that I think give me the ability to really speak to. What does it take to keep running a coaching business full time through a lot of the toughest, most stressful stuff. Oh, moves. A lot of the toughest, most stressful stuff that life can handle or life can throw at you. Let's see if you can handle it, right? If you google the top life stressors, I have really experienced many, many, many of them over the last nine years. And so I want to give you some insight into what I believe are the top lessons here. And also really, this expands into my, my 20 years plus of helping people grow their businesses with different hats on, right? As a marketing agency owner, as a consultant, and like I said, for the last nine years as a coach. So all that to say, I have been there, seen that, done, that helped other people through just about everything. And I want to bring you those lessons today. So nine lessons I've learned from nine years in my online coaching business. Here we go. Number one, done is better than perfect. I tend to work with a lot of perfectionists and high achievers because guess what? Me too. And this is one of the biggest lessons that I've learned and also that I help my clients to work through. And I know we've all probably heard that and we're like, yeah, yeah, for sure, done is better than perfect. How does this show up in your life? You might have a lot of resistance, have a lot of fear to putting something out there that's not perfect because perfect is how you got attention. Perfect is how you achieved. Perfect is how you quote unquote, survived, right? Whatever that looked like for you. And then when we become our own business owners, we become our own bosses, we immediately are faced with this. Oh, my gosh. In the past, I checked the boxes of my employer. I checked the boxes of my teachers and my professors. Now I'm the one who makes the boxes and then checks them. If you wait for things to be perfect, though, you're never going to take the action needed to create a six figure multi six figure, seven figure, and beyond business, because you are creating inaction. You are creating inaction. And imperfect action is going to win over inaction just about every single time, in just about every single scenario, because action is what moves you forward. And we're going to get into that in a second. But one thing I wanted to mention is this idea that progress is better than perfection. Progress over perfection. And this is maybe something that you've heard as well, just like done is better than perfect. But I see people setting goals and then beating themselves up when they don't attain them, even though they did what they could to move toward those goals, and they didn't realize that some of the parts of them were actually out of their control. I can remember feeling this way and having a big perfectionism piece pop up for me. Very, very black and white thinking come up when I was quitting drinking. So if you don't know, I quit drinking alcohol at the end of 2022. And I had this perception that while other people told me any kind of behavior change, Christine, happened slowly over time, I had decided that because of the way that I heard people speak about drinking and quitting drinking, and they talked about really, like, this is the day and this is the decision. And I've never questioned it. And all of that, I was like, oh, that's how it should be for me. That's not how it was for me. I questioned it a lot. I had this habit that I knew my life would improve if I walked away from. And so I wanted it to be as clean and as simple as going, oh, I'm done with this, and never picking up another drink. Well, that's not how change happens. But I had this perception that to be perfect at doing a thing, at making a big change, and this is how it showed up for me, that it should be this way when it came to drinking or not drinking. And I share that because I think maybe you can relate to that with some habit that maybe you've wanted to change. And you're just like, I'm gonna go to. I'm never eating sugar again, right? Or I've never. Whatever it is, I'm gonna exercise every day for a half hour. It's gonna look like this. It's gonna be great. You know, fill in the blank. That's not how we actually take on and integrate change. So I want to encourage you that you probably have heard people say, like, fall in love with the process as well, and that the progress that you're making. I know this might sound really cheesy to you, and you might go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's nice for other people. I believe that in my head, but, like, I'm better than that. I really want to challenge you. And that's why I shared a story about what it was like for me to quit drinking. It became a daily habit until it became a long stretch of time, and then I was like, oh, this is what we do now. Instead of having a glass of wine at dinner. Oh, this is what we do now instead of, I don't know, drinking to celebrate. Right. It took conscious change. Progress is better than perfection. And am I progressing, and am I learning, and am I practicing the process and recognizing the progress I am making rather than focusing on the perfection of the outcome of the goal? Okay. Number two, clarity comes from taking action, not from thinking about it. Clarity comes from taking action, not from thinking about it. This builds on, number one, done is better than perfect. Because I mentioned imperfect action. We are often so lost in what we call thinking, thinking, thinking that we get totally overwhelmed, that we get confused, that we dissociate, and we can get into analysis paralysis. We can get into decision fatigue. And yet, if we take 5 seconds of action. Thank you, Mel Robbins. If we take five minutes of action on something, we could feel completely different about it. We can shift and have more information than we did when we were just thinking, thinking, thinking about it. So sometimes I get overwhelmed about a task that I need to do, or I have resistance. I think it's tax time at the time of this recording, and I think this is a great example of it. Maybe I just go in and set up the Google Drive folder and grab a couple things from my email that I know are there. Maybe if I need to respond to a bunch of comments on a post, maybe I just say, hey, I'm going to go in there and I'm going to pull the thing up, and I'm going to do responses for five minutes. Taking that action or even writing it out or just talking it out, getting it out of your head. Getting it out of thinking. Thinking. Thinking can be so helpful. And not only helpful, but really, really give you clarity on your next steps. Helpful. Getting out of your head, clarity on your next steps. Number three, really, really knowing that this is not, even though it's so often presented this way online, it is not a linear journey. It is not a linear journey to create the business of your dreams. There are a lot of winding paths, sometimes circuitous. Sometimes I'm thinking of, like, hiking trails, right? Sometimes you might feel like you got there and then you took some steps back. Sometimes you might be on a long and winding road. Sometimes you might feel like you have a detour. But I want you to not be afraid to take those actions. Maybe even we might call it failing and survive them. Right. When we survive something that we were afraid was going to happen, then we prove to ourselves that we can. Right? And this is coming from somebody who has created three multi six figure offers over the course of these nine years in three different niches and using three different primary platforms to do it. So these coaches who say, oh, I launched my instagram and the next week I had 100,000 followers, and the next week I made a million dollars. Okay, first of all, it's never the whole story. Second of all, you are going to have people who naturally understand, intuitively understand maybe how to grow an audience on a platform. And that might be the only thing that they know how to teach, right? Or maybe they were really, really good at sales. They came from a sales background, and so when they started their business, they knew exactly how to sell people into their program. And all they know how to teach is their style of sales. The best coaches are going to be the ones that help you develop your own style and your own platform, your own content, your own marketing, your own messaging. Copycats are boring and they never work in the long term. So I just want to mention that, because as we talk about this nonlinear path, I want you to see like, I'm still here after nine years, having worked with people in multiple different ways over the nine years, and deciding to pivot multiple times, deciding to be visible in multiple different ways, nine years is a long time. You can accomplish a lot of things. So be willing to make a change when it's the right strategic time for you, and be willing to make a different change at a different point. Number four, find the why behind the why. What is your deeper purpose? What is your deeper purpose for your business? So that when you get discouraged, right, you have that anchor to come back to and then around your offers, the way that you market and the way that you do sales, how aligned are they to your why and to your values? These are the things that keep you going. And maybe you're like me, where you started your business to serve people, to make this world a better place by helping people to live more fully into their gifts and share them with the world and create this compound effect of impact and income, and to also live a life with passion, not only purpose, but passion, not only impact, but income. Right? So remember, you're probably going to be thinking about the people that you're here to serve and also your why, of what kind of life you want to live. A life of freedom, a life of service to your world, people around you, and also to yourself and who you're here to be. A pro tip for creating your content is that you can get to the why behind the why or the benefit of the benefit of working with you or engaging with you or whatever. By including so that statements, people are usually not doing things for the reason that you assume they're doing them. They haven't maybe connected the dots in their heads, right? Because we are habit forming machines. And so get to the why behind the why, get to the benefit behind the benefit. And the so that statement is a really, really good way to prompt you to do that. And I learned that from one of my mentors, Lacy sites. All right, number five, your network is your net worth. You've probably heard this before. This can feel kind of transactional to me depending on how it's presented. And so I wanted to explain it in a little more depth so that maybe you have a different frame of reference. Now, I am such a relationship driven person, and if you are listening to this, you probably are as well. Relationships and being a connector are both really high values for me. So when I resonate with somebody, I naturally want to share their work, whether I'm an affiliate or not. Right? I want to tell people about this thing that I'm using that has really been helpful for me at this book or this person or this program or whatever. I do that naturally. And so when amazing people come into my life, it is natural for me to make connections and to do that in a business setting. Often, if you want to be a connector, are you doing that? Are you looking at ways that you can support other people? Or are you in scarcity all the time going, only how can they help me? And if there's not an obvious way for them to help me, then I'm not going to help them because I don't want them to take anything away from me. I've seen people with multi million dollar businesses have that attitude of being precious with what goes on their feet or, you know, where they share their voice or how they share their message or whatever, and I just disagree with that completely. I think it's a very transactional way of looking at things. So your network contains infinite possibilities for your net worth. And are you playing in that realm, or are you kind of constricting and going and making it one way? We highly, highly recommend that you create strategic partnerships that make sense, relationships that make sense, win, win, wins, wins for you, wins for the partner or affiliate both ways, and then wins for your combined audiences. We call this the collaborative credibility code because it explodes your credibility and your authority to be able to share, hey, this person is sharing my work, or, hey, this person is a fan, or, I get to promote this person's work because we're friends, right? This really, really is huge. And I think a lot of people working to six figures miss out on the opportunity. Maybe they don't know how they're intimidated and everyone's just a person. And if your heart is in it for the right reasons, they will feel that for sure if they're the kind of person that you're meant to be aligned with. All right, next. Number six. When people pay, they pay attention. And the more they pay, the more they pay attention. I see people all of the time wanting to think about slashing their prices because they think it will help them get more clients or, you know, they're in massive scarcity mode or they're undervaluing themselves. Right. I will tell you that every time I have raised my prices when working with clients, my clients have gotten better results. Why is that? It's not just because I become a better coach as I, you know, lean more and more into this work and get more reps in. Right. It's because they are more invested and they're willing to take more aligned action and they're willing to take bigger risks. This is also true for yourself. If you invest with an edge, you're more likely to pay attention. I have invested in a 30k mastermind more than once. And the first time that I did that, I basically shook for like three days afterward after making that commitment because I was so scared. I had never done anything like that. It was a multiple of the most I had ever invested before. And the content in there that was useful for me was like, less than half of the content of a previous program I had paid five k for. But at the same time I showed up so much bigger and I got way bigger results as a result. No, I'm not telling you to go out there and invest in a $30,000 mastermind. That's a conversation for a different episode. What I am saying is, lean into your edge. Find the support that maybe excites and makes you a little bit nervous. That's what I mean by that edge of fear and excitement and show up for it. Show up for it. And know that also your clients will show up. Not when you willy nilly raise your prices, but because as you get more and more sold on how you help people and the value that that provides, and you hold that space for people to pay more, they will pay more attention as well. Number seven, the 80 20 rule as it applies to producing versus consuming. Creating versus consuming. What if you are creating four to five times more than you consume? What if you could move toward that goal? What if you are listening to less audiobooks, less podcasts, less scrolling, less procrastoscrolling, procrastilearning. And you were taking action and you were creating. That is my challenge and my invitation to you. I consulted with a friend who has a child who is of the completely consuming era where it's just overload, overload, overload. Just take it in, take it in, take it in. And I said to them, I said, your kid wants to be making their own content. What if they could be a content creator instead of just solely a content consumer, helping to influence from a place of value, from a place of service, a generation, that all they want to do is consume more, more, more, more without putting anything out, which makes stagnation, right? So could you be like this kid? Could you be a content creator instead of just a consumer? And look, I love audiobooks, I love podcasting, obviously. I love the fact that I can reach billions of people on social media for free. My business is built on these things. And I have noticed in myself as the more that I listen to myself, the more that as I'm driving to pick up my kids or I am taking a shower or doing something where I would normally listen to something be input, input, input driven in the past. Now I'm like, I'm going to listen to myself. I'm going to create some quiet. And I think that that's a result of going inside, listening to my intuition and my brain and body going, look, you have a lot to say. So what if you allow that to come through rather than listening to what everybody else has to say. Number eight, as much as you can document everything that you do record, this could not be easier to set zoom to automatically record your calls, and then it will also transcribe them for you. That's a setting that you can turn on anything that you create, any conversation that you have. Are you recording it now? If you're like me, you might not want to stop and go back and get organized with your notes at the same time. If you do this, where you document and you record what you do, and you capture what we call cloneable client language, in your sales calls, in your coaching calls, if you do this, you will never have to create content from scratch again. Not doing this is choosing to make your life more complicated, even if it's unconscious. And we have this belief that we have to work harder, which I definitely come from like a puritan work hard, poor, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, immigrant kind of lineage. So I often feel like I have to earn by making it hard. Right. We're also learning how to undo that and allow it to be simpler. And this is one of the biggest, biggest shifts you can make in your business right now. In order to do that, okay, record everything, go back to the transcripts, use your clonable identify and use your cloneable client language and use that to create posts and content. And you never have to start from scratch, scratching your head going, what am I going to talk about ever again? And then finally, number nine, if you haven't heard me say this before, this is so key. And if you have, listen anyway. It's not the best coach or consultant who wins, who builds the best business. It's up the best marketer. Most of us start our coaching businesses because we love to coach. Sometimes we say, oh, I wish I didn't have to do the marketing. I love everything about my business except sales and marketing. Right? Then we realize, hey, we got to do that stuff if we want to be able to coach and do the things that we love and run our own business. So we're wearing all the hats. And so I want you to ask yourself, how are you showing up to allow yourself to be supported? Maybe it's with a part time team member. If you're a solopreneur, maybe it's with a coach. Right? As a business owner, how are you learning to be that better marketer? Certifications can be, can be really useful. Are they teaching you truly how to market? Are they helping you get your hands dirty? Or are they some more letters behind your name that you're still going to have to get out there and get over your fear of being seen and mark it in a way that that actually works for you. Are you going to allow yourself to have somebody hold your hand and kick your butt at the same time and be open to who that is? Because there's a saying that, like when the student is ready, the teacher appears. Now, some other practical considerations. Are you clear on your primary platform where you're showing up consistently to at least ten k months? Are you creating content that you know converts? Do you have messaging that you know is magnetic? And most importantly, if you want to be the best marketer, do you have an aligned marketing strategy? If not, what needs to shift? Do you know what needs to shift? If your marketing is not aligned, it's most likely that you're like, I don't want to do this, I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this. Okay, well, what do you have the least resistance to doing? Because there are hundreds of different ways to grow a business online. There is not just a one size fits all, as I mentioned before, and I want you to be able to win at this by finding something that you love and will show up and do over and over and over again so that you can become that great marketer who attracts those ideal clients. These are the nine lessons I've learned from nine years in my online coaching business. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd love for you to hit follow, subscribe, and I look forward to