372. Advice for New Life Coaches

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, episode 372: Advice for New Life Coaches.

Did you know that you can live a life that’s even better than happy? My name is Jody Moore. I’m a master certified life coach and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And if you’re willing to go with me I can show you how. Let’s go.

Hello everybody, welcome to the podcast. Today I have some advice to share with anybody who is a new life coach or maybe not a new life coach but wanting to take things to the next level. Or maybe you’re just considering or thinking about becoming a coach or maybe you’re not even a coach but you have some other kind of a service based business or a consulting business, even if you’re none of those things, I think you’re going to find a lot of gems from today’s episode.

But I get asked all the time from people who are considering becoming a life coach or are new life coaches for advice. So, I do have a lot to say on the topic. And that’s what we’re going to do today. But before we dive in I want to tell you about a coaching intensive workshop that I’m going to be teaching in a few weeks. It’s called The Art of Happiness. And I created this because I spend a lot of time talking about what I think is the science of happiness. Now, there’s a lot more technical science of happiness that I don’t go into.

I’m not a psychologist or a chemist, or biologist, or anything like that. But the science part is more just the idea that our thoughts create our feelings. That’s sort of the A+B=C part of happiness. And that part is important and valuable to understand and even more important to learn how to implement in your life. But there’s this whole other level to it which is less about the science of happiness and more about the art of happiness. I love the idea that art is dynamic, and personal, and individual, and more complicated. And it takes really some discovery.

And so that’s what we’re going to be doing in this four day coaching intensive. I should say the day this podcast airs, we’re not quite ready to launch yet. The course will be open for enrollment on Monday September 5^th. So, if you’re listening to this before that date, give me a couple days. Sorry, we’re almost ready for you. But it’s only $19 and we’ll be together on Zoom for 90 minutes, four days, September 19^th through the 22^nd and you won’t want to miss it. And you’ll get all the replays if you can’t be there live. So, make sure you join me for that.

You can go to jodymoore.com/intensive, again it’s 19 bucks, brand new course, The Art of Happiness and I’ll see you there.

Okay, let’s talk about advice for life coaches. So, first piece of advice that I would give to anyone considering becoming a life coach or really any kind of coach. Maybe you want to be a health coach. Maybe you want to be a weight coach. Maybe you want to be a money coach, which is actually, those are all just different versions of life coaching. Live coaching to me is an umbrella term. And then what your specialty is fits underneath that. So, anything in life that you coach would fit under the life coaching umbrella.

The first piece of advice I would give to anyone hands down is go to The Life Coach School and get certified there. Now, here’s the thing you need to know. I consider myself part of The Life Coach School because I get to teach there on occasion but I’m really just a contract teacher on occasion. I do not have any kind of affiliate agreement or get any kind of commission, or anything like that from any of you that go to The Life Coach School.

So, I do not have any ulterior motive at all when I recommend The Life Coach School to you. I just genuinely believe it is the best coaching program on the planet by far. So sometimes I get people reaching out to me because it’s not inexpensive to go to The Life Coach School. And people will say, “I found these other schools that cost less.”

And in this case, maybe one day this will change but as of today you definitely get what you pay for. I see so many people that choose different options that end up coming back eventually to The Life Coach School because they get everything they need at The Life Coach School and there are just some pieces missing in most other programs. Of course, I’m not familiar with every program on the planet so I can’t say that is absolutely true. That may not be the school for you.

But if you can figure out a way to make it work it is well worth the investment. Not only for the program and the tools that you get to utilize but there’s ongoing help for building your business, for improving your coaching, for being part of this awesome community. So, it’s worth it for sure to pay Life Coach School prices if you can figure out a way. If you can’t or maybe you find another school you like better, great, no problem.

But I do highly recommend you get some kind of training or help because there are so many people out there teaching amazing tools, who have figured out how to do this. And why not let them teach you? Why not get some help rather than have to recreate it and figure it all out on your own? So that’s step number one, go to The Life Coach School and get certified and/or at least if you can’t do that, or aren’t going to do that, go somewhere and get some tools and some training.

Number two. Find a specific problem that you want to help solve, a specific challenge that people need help overcoming. It’s probably going to be something that you have experience with but it doesn’t have to be. But often we have an experience where we find coaching and it helps us to solve some kind of a challenge or problem for ourselves. And it makes sense that then we would go on and help other people who have that same challenge or problem.

So maybe it’s based on a circumstance in your life, something going on with a particular child that coaching helps you work through, or maybe again it’s a health or weight loss journey that you go on. Maybe it’s overall your confidence. For me it was the way I felt about myself and showed up for my kids as a mother. My emotions, my emotional regulation, my ability to not yell at my kids. My ability to feel good about myself and fulfilled in my life in this role as mom. And because coaching helped me so much in that area I went on to help other moms who might be struggling in that area.

So, the reason I’m emphasizing this is because it’s tempting to, after you go through a coach training or a coach certification to just want to start offering coaching. Coaching is just the tool. Coaching is the vehicle by which you’re going to help people solve their problems. Coaching is not the thing people are going to pay for. That would be like if you’re a carpenter and you’re really good with a hammer, you’re not going to walk around going , “Does anybody want to hire me to hammer anything?” No one’s going to hire someone to come in and hammer things.

How much hammering do you want? For $100 I’ll hammer every day for a week or for $500 I’ll hammer every day for a month. No, that’s what people do. I hear them go, “For six months of coaching it costs this much. For two months of coaching, it costs this much.” Nobody wants to pay for coaching, you know what they want? They want help solving the problem or achieving the goal that they’re trying to solve or achieve in their life. So don’t offer coaching, offer a solution to a specific problem. And then use coaching as the tool by which you will help them solve that problem. Are you with me?

Number three. Just go start helping people. Don’t think, what do I need to do? Do I need a TikTok account? And do I need to get on Pinterest? And do I need to run Facebook Ads? Yeah, I mean eventually you might do some of that stuff and you’ll want to learn about that. We’ll get to that in a minute. But before we do any of that, just figure out where are these people that have this problem and how do I go start helping them? Be willing to help. Put yourself out there. Volunteer to speak for free at anything you can find where they need a great speaker or where they need some help.

Be generous with your time, and your efforts, and your talents, and your knowledge. Give it away for free. Give it away online if you want to give it away online. Give it away, I don’t know, I was thinking the other day because I’ve been watching – I have kids all different ages in school. And I’ve been watching their poor teachers try to navigate all the terrain they’ve had to navigate with COVID, and online school, and Zoom school, and then COVID protocols and just complete nonsense.

And I have seen in some cases the impact it seems like it’s having on those poor teachers. And I was thinking to myself, if I were a new coach, I didn’t have a full practice I would call up the principals at all the school and say, “Listen, I know the teachers are struggling and I can help. Here’s how I can help. Can I come to your staff meeting? Can we do a pizza night for the teachers? I’ll buy the pizza. Get all your teachers there and let me help them.” And I would just offer to do it for free. Only because that’s an area where I see a need.

And I haven’t been – well, I was a substitute teacher a long time ago but I’m not an experienced teacher but I’m experienced with feeling frustrated and overwhelmed with kids, and burned out, and irritated with administration and policy changes, and all of that stuff. I definitely can help them. I would just go in there and start helping people even if it wasn’t in what I think is going to be my business niche we might say, or the problem I’m going to solve in my business. I don’t care. I need to practice.

I need to practice teaching and coaching. And I want to just spread goodwill and help people because the more I help people the better I get at doing it and the more I learn what people respond to and where there they get confused and I can find my voice and so many benefits come. Now, again, if you know what problem you think you want to solve, and you can find areas to do that, great, even better. But maybe you’ll change your mind once you start helping. Maybe you’ll change your mind about what your target market’s going to be.

Or maybe you don’t know what your target market’s going to be and you’ll discover it as you just go start helping people. That’s number three.

Number four. Once you do that for a while and you decide, this is the problem that I like that I want to keep solving. This is the problem I’m going to build my business off of. Some people call it choosing a niche but other people get really tense and stressed when I say choose a niche. So, whatever you want to call it. Whatever problem you decide you want to help solve, create a program for it.

If you’re a Life Coach School certified student or hopefully whatever other school you went to, taught you enough tools, you can create a program, I promise you. You know how? All you need to do is outline what are the steps I need to take someone through? What would the journey look like? What is step one? What do they need to understand, or try out, or examine? And how long do I think that’s going to take? Is that going to be one coaching session? Is that going to be one week? Is there going to be some homework before or after?

Is it going to take a couple of weeks? Are we going to do that for a month? What is the first thing, and then what is the second thing, and what is the third thing? And I don’t know, how many steps are there to get them to where you’re going to be able to take them as a coach? Where are they and where are we trying to take them, first of all? And then what are the steps in between?

Now, remember, if you’re a certified coach, you’ve been exposed to this stuff a lot. You’ve been exposed to a lot in coach training. And there’s a good chance you were exposed to it a lot before that, that made you even decide to become a coach. Assume that your client has not. Slow it all down. Go way slower than you think you need to. Simplify a lot more than you think you need to. The tools that you learn in coach training, you don’t have to teach them all to your client. They’re tools that you will use to help your client go through the journey you’re helping them with.

Just like I don’t need the plumber to pull out his toolkit and explain to me, “This is a wrench and here’s what it does. And here’s a different sized wrench we use in this situation.” I don’t need him to do that. I need him to use those tools to fix my plumbing problem. So again, sometimes along the way you’ll teach a few tools but you don’t need to teach all of that. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you’re teaching them the way you were taught in coach training. Use the tool and then if it makes sense to explain it, you can do that but slow it way down, create that program.

How long is it going to take? How is it going to work? When are we going to meet? How often? What do I want to make sure that they examine, or what process or journey am I going to take them through along the way? And then how much is that program going to cost? What do I think is the value of that program? What would I pay for that program? What do I think people would pay for it?

So, create a program, step four. And then here’s the second part of step four, are you ready? Test it out. Test it out. You know what the best way to test it out is? On yourself, if necessary. Let’s say you have something that you want to work on, create a program and put yourself through it. But if you already have again sort of figured out that challenge or problem and that’s maybe what coaching did for you. Then just test it out on a bunch of other people. And even if you do test it on yourself, I would still test it on a bunch of other people.

Get 10 volunteers who want help with that program. And put them through the program and see how it goes. See if people are able to progress the way you thought they would. See where people get confused and stuck. See where you need to clarify. See where you maybe need to speed it up, or where you need to slow it down. Put 10 people through it for free. Now, I want to say one thing about this step. You don’t want to be having people be at your mercy when you do this. You don’t want to go ask your friends and family, “Would you be willing to go through my program?”

No, if you do that, you’re going to get people that don’t show up, that don’t take it very seriously, you’re not going to get the kind of experiment that you need. You need to remember the previous step where we went and just helped people. As you’re helping people, encourage them to stay connected with you in whatever way.

And then when you’re ready you can say, “I have a brand new program and I am running a beta group. If you would like to participate here’s how you apply. And here’s the deadline to apply. And here’s what I’m looking for. And here’s the commitment I’m going to ask of you.” And make it so that you can get really qualified test clients that are really invested that want the help you’re going to offer that will take it seriously. That’s the only way you’re going to get an accurate test. That’s number four.

Number five. Coach your face off. Coach your face off. Coach as much as you can. You need practice coaching in the beginning. This is why I created an advanced certification program. It’s not open right now but you can go get on the waitlist if you want to participate in my program because I give you clients to coach because you need practice coaching real clients. The more practice the better. You need again not just your peers, that’s fine to coach your peers sometimes that are also coaches.

But at some point you need real clients that don’t know the model, that aren’t feeding you the parts of the model. And so, however you can do that, find people to coach and coach as much as you can. The more you coach the better you’ll get at coaching obviously, just like anything else, the more you practice it the better you’ll get. The more you coach the more your confidence will go up. The more you will figure out what kind of coach you really are, what works best for you and your personality to help get through to your clients. Coach your face off.

I always shake my head when I see a new coach get offered a coaching position somewhere at a company and they’ll say, “That’s not enough. I want to get paid more.” I’m like, “What, are you kidding me? I would be coaching for free if I was a new coach because I just want to coach as much as I can. You’re going to pay me a little bit, alright, I’m in.” Okay, coach as much as you can. That’s number five. Let’s go to number six.

This is really, really ideal if you can do this. Not everybody can do this. But I bet you can my friend. Listen, just like you became obsessed with coaching because you fell in love with it, because you saw how powerful it was in your life, you need to now become obsessed with online business. Think about it, as much as you binge listen to coaching podcasts or read self-help books, or whatever it is that you binge on because you’re so obsessed with self-help. What if you were that obsessed with online business? That’s what happened to me.

Once I learned a little bit about online business, and I started experimenting and playing with it a little bit, I became obsessed with it and I still am. I still listen to tons of podcasts, and read books, and I consume as much information, I’m constantly trying to learn more about online business. That’s what’s so fun about it. It’s constantly changing, so there’s always more to learn. If you can be obsessed with online business like you are with coaching that’s the magic combination my friend. Try it out.

You can if you try it because if you can get past the overwhelm part, and the self-doubt part, marketing and sales online is just coaching, that’s all it is. It’s offering people different thoughts to think. And showing them why those new thoughts are just as true as their current thoughts, and encouraging them to take useful action in their lives. That’s what online business is. So become obsessed with it.

And then last but not least, always be your first client. You need to always be your first client. In other words, you have to coach yourself. Being a coach doesn’t mean you’re not a human anymore. It doesn’t mean that you won’t still have a bunch of crappy thoughts half the time. It doesn’t mean that you are now empowered to feel confident, and good, and have no drama. I wish that were true but it’s just not. You’re still going to have drama. You’re still going to have thoughts that aren’t serving you. You’re still going to have emotions.

You’re still going to think that your thoughts are circumstances. You’re going to tell me about your business, if I’m your coach and mentor, and you’re going to think that you are telling me about your business. But what you’re really doing is telling me about your thoughts. You’re going to be telling me. When people say to me, “My Facebook Ads aren’t working.” I’m like, “Is that a circumstance or a thought?” They’re like, “Circumstance.” What? No. That’s not a circumstance. That’s a thought. My Facebook Ads aren’t working. It’s a thought.

You have to be your first client. Coach yourself in your business, coach yourself in your personal life. It doesn’t mean you have to be perfect but you’ve got to keep coaching yourself. And I think I said that was the last one but I lied. There is one more.

Number eight. Find a mentor. You guys, I highly recommend you find a mentor. Come and let me mentor you if you want to. You’ll have to wait till next year because my doors are closed for Business Minded right now. But whoever it is, find someone whose style you like, whose business you like, whose values you align with. Find someone that you think would be fun to learn from. Find someone that’s ahead of you by all means, not someone who hasn’t done it. Find a mentor and learn from that person, and trust what that person has to tell you.

And push yourself outside of your comfort zone. And be willing to do what they suggest that you do. Now, at some point you’ll get to where you learn when is the right time to question and push back on your mentor. But if you’re brand new, I used to go around to coach training when it was in person years ago and I got to talk to those groups sometimes when I lived in California and it was there. And they would ask me, “Why are you so successful in your business and other coaches aren’t?”

And I’d say, “Because I just do whatever Brooke tells me to do. She is my mentor, I trust her.” So, find a mentor that you can trust. I don’t mean blindly follow someone that you don’t trust or that doesn’t again have your same values, and goals, and things like that. But if you trust them, do what they tell you. For those of you that just joined Business Minded, I’m going to give you all the advice in the world, of course you’re going to have to make it your own. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m not saying, don’t tweak it to make it your own.

I’m just saying, don’t push back and think that it doesn’t apply to you or it doesn’t apply to your business. I promise it does. Alright, new coaches I hope that’s helpful advice. It’s a little bit of coaching advice, a little bit of business advice, both are important if you’re going to be a coach who owns their own business and you can do it. And I was thinking about this the other day because people tell me all the time, “Oh, Jody, why would I start a coaching business, you’re already doing it so well?”

And I was thinking about how tired I am the other day. I’m tired and not that I plan to quit what I’m doing. I’m going to stay here. I’m not going anywhere. But I can’t do it all, you guys. I can’t get to everyone. There is so many people that need help .There’s so many people that don’t even know that this exists. There’s so many people that have no idea about what you know. Please help me, I need help. I’m tired. I can’t do it all. I need you all to help me. Alright, that’s what I’ve got for you today my friends. I will see you next week. Have a beautiful week, bye bye.

Hey there, if you enjoy this podcast or even if you just find that it sort of piques your curiosity, or it makes you think, you’re going to love the book that I wrote. It’s called Better Than Happy: Connecting with Divinity Through Conscious Thinking. And it’s available now at Amazon in print or kindle version. Or if you want me to read it to you, head over to audible and grab the audio version. And why not grab a copy for your sister, your best friend, or your mom while you’re there too. Just saying.