547. Pro Coach Series Part 1

Hey, coaches, I want to speak to all my friends and fellow colleagues and coaches out there today. Whether you’re a health coach, a relationship coach, a midlife coach, a parenting coach, whatever kind of coaching you do, the next few episodes are for you. I’m doing a special series called the Pro Coach Series.

Now, if you are a coach, chances are you know lots of coaches. It feels like everyone around you is a coach. But here’s what I want to ask you. How many of them are what you would call professional coaches? Do you see a lot of pro coaches, or do you see a lot of what we might call amateur coaches? And would you like to become more professional or turn pro? If you consider yourself amateur, that’s what we’re going to be talking about in the Pro Coach Series. This is part one. Let’s do it.

Welcome to Better Than Happy, the podcast where we transform our lives by transforming ourselves. My name is Jody Moore. In the decade-plus I’ve been working with clients as a Master Certified Coach, I’ve helped tens of thousands of people to become empowered. And from empowered, the things that seemed hard become trivial, and the things that seemed impossible become available, and suddenly, a whole new world of desire and possibility open up to you. And what do you do with that?

Well, that’s the question… what will you do? Let’s find out.

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Hey there, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. I have put together a two-week free training that is unlike anything I’ve ever done before, and it’s just for coaches, and it’s called Pro Coach Camp. I’m going to help you go pro in your coaching. And again, the cost is free. So I will be telling you how to register for that throughout this episode, but I want to do a series here of pro coach episodes because I want you to think about whether or not you have some work to do here when it comes to being a pro coach.

So let’s start out by giving credit where credit is due. There is a book called Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield. If you have not read it, just go get it right now. Go download it onto your phone. I think it’s, I don’t know, if you listen on 1.5 speed like I do, I think it’s like a two-hour max audiobook or a short little read if you prefer to read a book. But it’s so good. Steven Pressfield is an author. He wrote the screenplay for the movie The Legend of Bagger Vance, and he’s written a bunch of other really great books. He’s really fun to listen to. He’s very kind of in your face and straightforward about things and very practical. And this particular book, Turning Pro, is one that I’ve read many times. I often will have people read it before we do a workshop together, especially with coaches.

Okay, so the general premise of the book is that we have amateurs and we have pros in any given industry in any field. And Steven Pressfield does a beautiful job of describing himself as a writer in his days as an amateur and when he realized he needed to turn pro. And he gives lots of examples of what it means, what an amateur does or how they show up or how they think versus a pro. And so it’s a really kind of fun, inspiring read. It’s a little bit of a kind of hits home, you might say with most of us because I know I still have lots of opportunity to turn more pro. But I find it to be really motivating because it feels like something you can implement in your life.

So I want to give you sort of my version of what I think is the difference between an amateur coach and a pro coach. And we want to begin by looking at overall results, right? So what are the results that you want to create through your coaching? And I’m going to go ahead and make some assumptions here that you have either one or both of these results. For most of you, it’s probably both of them, okay?

Number one, you want to help people. You want to make an impact in the world in some way. You want to leave people better than you found them. And the degree to which you want to do that is going to be different for everybody listening. Some of you want to make an impact locally and you want to have a handful of clients every month that you’re working with or on whatever frequency you choose, and you want to feel like you made a difference in someone’s life. Some of you want to make a much bigger, more global impact and feel like you changed something more significantly. Maybe you contributed to either a much larger group of people or even to a culture or population in general. Okay? But in some way, you want to help people and make an impact.

So I’m going to define somebody who is a pro, who’s a professional coach, as they are making the impact or making significant steady progress towards the impact that they want to be making through their work and through their business. Okay? The second thing is making revenue, making money. Whether you want to profit off your business and you want to make revenue and then have a profit or you want to have a nonprofit or maybe you’re working in someone else’s business, but you are probably generating income. And again, if you’re generating the type of revenue and income that you want to, or you are making significant steady progress towards that, then I would define that as a pro coach.

So an amateur, on the other hand, is not doing those things. An amateur has inconsistent results in both of those areas. An amateur is maybe making some impact, but not nearly the level that they want to, not reaching enough people, not having the type of impact that they want to in people’s lives. And second of all, not making the kind of revenue or profit that they want to through their business. Okay? So that’s a pretty simple definition, but you decide where are you on the continuum. And it is a continuum. It’s not all or nothing, and it might even kind of go up and down. You might have some success and then feel like you’re stagnating. But again, I love how Steven Pressfield puts it in this binary amateur versus pro.

So if that’s true, then how do we turn pro? Well, again, I’m going to be teaching you. We’re all going to be turning pro in Coach Camp, but I just want to share before I get into some of the things I want to share with you today. I’ve been in this industry now professionally for 12 years. And so I have seen a lot of people come and go as coaches. I’ve seen people go through coach training and never do anything with it who were frustrated because they really wanted to do something with it. I’ve seen people never do anything with it by conscious choice because they made other decisions who are not frustrated about it and feel good about their decisions. And then I’ve seen people have businesses that do okay but flounder and don’t have the consistency that the coach wishes they had.

And then I have some friends and colleagues and people I know very well who have had tremendous success at helping to change people’s lives, have made a tremendous impact, have left an impression on a lot of people, and have made a really good profitable business and a good living doing so. And so I’ve seen people all up and down this continuum, and I’ve been on all ends of the continuum myself. And so I want to describe to you some of the commonalities I see in the amateur versus the pro. Okay? So let’s just dive right in.

Number one. The amateur is going to try it out and see how it goes, but the pro is committed. Now, I want you to pay attention to your language and not just what you say out loud, but what you are thinking in your mind when you are planning and preparing whatever it is you’re going to do next in your business. Do you find yourself thinking, I’m just going to try this out and see how it goes? I’m going to try this and see if it works. Now, there’s a caveat. I’m going to try this and see how it works can be a useful mindset, as long as you realize that it doesn’t just work or not work, you will make it work or not work.

So I’m going to try this out and see how it goes, has to be followed up with, then I will decide if I’m going to keep going and try something different if it doesn’t go how I wanted, or I’m going to decide to walk away from this strategy or this program or even this business, whatever you’re going to do. Okay? Because I feel like a lot of people, and this happens of course, especially when we’re new in our businesses, right? I hear a lot of coaches say this like, I don’t know, I just decided I would go for it and see how it goes. You never know. I might be really successful. And I feel like they’re crossing their fingers and opening up door number two to see what’s behind it. And guess what, you guys? The pro doesn’t do that because there’s nothing behind door number two except what you create. You’re not just crossing your fingers to see if you have good luck.

All of the professional coaches that I know did not just have good luck. They didn’t just happen to pick the right niche. They didn’t just get into it at the right timing. And people think that. People say this to me all the time. Well, you’ve had a lot of success because you got into it at the right time or because you picked the right niche, lucky for you, or whatever other number of things they want to give my success to. And I can assure you that those things are not the reason. The reason I’ve had success in any way that I’ve had success, and that’s not to say I don’t have a lot of work to do because I do, and there’s a lot of growth possible for me and my business. But any little bit of success that we’ve had has not been because I tried something and, oh, lucky me, it worked. It’s because I was committed to being consistent and continuing to try things until I was able to create the result I wanted to create for my clients and for myself.

Okay? So the pro says things like, I’m going to create this result. Let’s go. That is very different than I’m going to try this out and see how it goes. Sometimes I will ask you guys when I’m coaching you coaches, I say things like, okay, you’re going to do this program or you’re going to pick this price point or you’re going to name this thing or you’re going to try this social media strategy or whatever it is. Is that going to create what you want? And what I’m looking for is where’s your heads at? Because if you say something like, I don’t know, I hope so, then we got a little work to do. You’re in an amateur mindset. I want you to say, yeah, it is. And if it doesn’t, then I’ll do the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, and I will keep tweaking it until it creates what I want. That is how the pro thinks about her business. I promise you, every successful coach I know is saying those words.

All right. Number two. The amateur takes everything literally because she doesn’t believe she’s capable. And what I mean by this is when you’re learning, and I’m a big fan of you continuing to learn. I am constantly still learning. I have a lot to learn about how to be an entrepreneur, about how to be a better coach, about how to run my business, about how to manage my team, about marketing, about sales, about all the things I’m trying to do. There’s so much to learn. But the amateur takes what she learns very literally because she doubts her own abilities. Now, I believe we all start here, right? We all start out as amateurs at everything that we do.

So I want you to imagine that you’re going to go try something brand new you’ve never done before. Maybe it’s a sport, maybe it’s a musical instrument, something you’ve never done that you have no knowledge of. And somebody tells you exactly what to do. Let’s just take something really basic like tying your shoes. Okay? I want you to think about teaching a kid to tie their shoes. So there’s more than one way to tie shoes, right? There’s the bunny ears method, there’s the run around the rabbit hole method. Maybe there’s other methods that I don’t even know about that are even better. But there’s many different ways to teach someone to tie their shoes. So when I’ve taught my kids to tie their shoes, I’ve taught them the method that I thought would be easiest for them to learn, or sometimes I teach them methods that for me are the easiest way to do it, right?

But eventually, after they do that literally, because they’re amateurs at tying their shoes. So they literally do what I’ve told them to do until they master it. But eventually, they start realizing there are other ways to tie shoes, and they start taking on their own nuances in it and figure out what is the way that they prefer to tie shoes. And this is what the pro does, right? The pro has intentionality and nuances her way to success.

So it’s okay to start out by literally trying out what you have been taught. That’s sometimes the best way to start out. But eventually, you have to give yourself permission to change it up, to nuance it. I can tell when people are in an amateur mindset because they will say things like, well, I tried that and it didn’t work. And I will say, okay, we’ll try again because it works. It’s like my kid saying, I tried tying my shoes the way you showed me, mom, and it didn’t work. Like, well, try again because you missed something because that does work. Right? There’s a way to work. You just didn’t work it. And eventually, you might find a way that you like better. I’m all for that. But to start out, you got to start somewhere, right?

So I want you to think about this. Do you have an area where maybe you’ve been trying it a long time and it’s not creating the result you want or you just don’t enjoy it. It’s not something you want to do long term in your business or it’s not serving your clients. And you’re resisting it telling yourself, no, this is the right way. This is the way it should be because this is what everybody says, and you’re trying to force something that maybe you need to start nuancing, and you need to listen to your own instincts about the best way to run your business or serve your clients, et cetera. And that way, ultimately, is going to be the best way for you. The way that is easiest and most fun for you is likely the best way for you. But we start out as amateurs taking things literally, no problem there. Just eventually, you’ve got to turn pro. You’ve got to nuance it.

The other example that’s coming to mind for me is with our health, right? Like, in the beginning, if I decide I need to lose some weight, I might talk to a nutritionist who tells me eat these things, and I might need to follow it very literally and exactly because I don’t have anything else to draw from. But eventually, I should ultimately start listening to my body and paying attention to the results that I’m getting. Am I having the kind of energy I want to have? Am I sleeping enough? How is my mood? How is my stress? And am I losing weight or gaining whatever health gains I want to gain? And it might be that I need to change up what they’ve told me a little bit. I need to add food somewhere or I need to change the time that I eat it or the order in which I eat it, or I need to be eat less in some way. So those nuances are what ultimately create you being a healthy person, not just you having a temporary change in result.

This is what I want for you as a coach. Okay? I am also going to teach you when you come to Pro Coach Camp a bunch of strategies that I think work really well. I’m going to offer you strategies. But I am not here to say that my way is the only way. There are many ways to tie your shoes and there are many ways to build your coaching practice to make the impact and the revenue that you want to. So I want you ultimately to be empowered to nuance it and change it up and figure out what works for you.

All right. Number three. The amateur delegates authority to outside sources. The pro sees herself as the one most qualified to make the final decision. So this really piggybacks off what we were talking about in number two. And I’ll tell you this is one that I constantly have to remind myself of though, because there are people who I look up to who are ahead of me in accomplishing the kinds of goals that I want to accomplish in my life. And I don’t tend to do this to like everybody, like the masses I kind of block out. I’m like, I don’t know if that’s going to work for me. I’m very skeptical of like mass popular opinions. But there are usually a couple of people, people who I really respect, people who I really admire. Again, usually people who have achieved far beyond what I’m trying to achieve and who I trust, right? And who are good people and who have similar values to mine.

And those people, if they give me advice, often they’re my coaches or teachers or mentors like that. If they give me advice, then I want to trust it. And that’s not wrong, unless I’m forgetting that I’m ultimately the one who knows best for me and my business what to do. I’m ultimately the one, right? Just like you’re ultimately the one. And so I have to be the one to make the final decision and so do you for your business.

Okay, number four. I love this one so much. The amateur is playing to not lose, whereas the pro is playing to win. Everybody listen up because this one is a game changer, and this will apply in so many areas of your life. I hear this all the time in my clients and in myself. Are you playing to not lose or are you playing to win? Now, I want to be clear. I’m not suggesting that you put things on the line that are going to create real problems for you and your family. For example, maybe you’re going to invest some money in marketing. Okay? I highly encourage you to invest some money in marketing. I think it’s the best place you can invest money in your business. I invest a lot of money in running ads on social media, Facebook, and Instagram.

Now, if I go into an ad campaign thinking, oh no, what if this doesn’t work? What if this doesn’t create whatever result I’m trying to create? Usually I’m trying to generate leads or maybe get people into some kind of a free or really inexpensive offer, okay? What if it doesn’t work? What if I put all this money into ads and then I don’t get the leads or the clients that I’m trying to get? That is playing to not lose. A lot of people will not invest the money because they’re afraid of “losing” the money. So when I say don’t invest more than you can afford to, don’t put yourself in a terribly tragic situation, what I’m saying is I don’t want you to go take out credit cards and invest a bunch of ads in credit cards believing that you’re going to be able to pay that back as soon as you convert those leads, or to second mortgage your house or to take out money that you don’t have.

So when I invest money in ads, it’s money that I can afford to lose. Like, if it converts at zero, my family’s not going to suffer, my credit’s not going to suffer, I’m not in debt over it. It’s money that I’ve already earned in my business, and now I’m reinvesting it back in my business. Okay? But this is the important part. Remember, the amateur is playing to not lose. The pro is playing to win. I’m willing to spend money in order to figure this out, in order to create what I’m trying to, which is to reach more people, to impact more lives, and to have a more significant impact in those lives and grow my business in the process. I’m willing to pay money to make that happen. And I’m not playing a short game, I’m playing a long game.

So if I spend a whole bunch of money on ads and it doesn’t bring in any leads, I’m still closer to getting leads than if I had never spent that money on the ads. You know why? I did a bunch of things that didn’t work. So either I learned something about ads, I learned something about whatever I was running the ad to. I learned a bunch of things about what doesn’t work. Not to mention, I probably learned some technology. I probably learned some things that are going to be useful that I’m going to repeat down the road. I probably created something that’s useful. If nothing else, I got some practice teaching, creating content, or creating graphics or creating videos or editing videos. Like there’s definitely some skills that are wins that I’m going to take with me and then a bunch of lessons. So I spent money because that’s sometimes required to win, whether I got the immediate return or not.

So I don’t want you playing to not lose. I want you playing to win. There’s a difference. It’s a mindset difference, but it’s everything. Winners are focused on winning. They’re not just focusing on not losing. You see it? All right.

Fifth and final thing we’re going to talk about in this part of the Pro Coach series is that the amateur indulges in indecision. The pro knows that decisions unlock power. Okay? Indecision is probably the heaviest thing in the backpack that I sometimes wear. What I mean is it slows me down, it bogs me down, not just when I’m sitting at my desk ready to work, but in between when I wake up in the morning, when I’m in the shower, when I can’t sleep in the middle of the night, when I’m doing something totally unrelated, I’m with my kids, I’m at church, I’m on a walk, whatever I’m doing, it’s hanging over my head. Oh, I have to decide that thing. I have to decide what we’re going to call it, how much we’re going to charge, when we’re going to do it, how it’s going to work, what we’re going to offer, whether or not we’re going to keep doing this thing, what to say to that client, what the podcast topic should be for the week.

Like, there are so many decisions that your business is going to ask you to make. I get it. I know it’s exhausting, but you know what’s more exhausting than making decisions? Indulging in indecision. It’s so tempting to do because we think there’s a right decision or a best decision.

If you’re like me, it’s sometimes hard to have confidence in your own decision. Like if somebody comes along and tells you name your program this, and it’s somebody that you trust and respect that you think knows what they’re talking about, it’s easy to go, yeah, that’s a good name. But if you come up with the name, are you like me and you’re like, I don’t know, is that a good name? Does it send the wrong message? Is it cheesy? Is it dumb? Will people like it? Will it convert? Is it too confusing? Is it too obvious and literal? That’s what I like to do around names. I like to do this with a lot of things in my business, which is indecision. That’s what’s draining. That’s what’s exhausting.

Okay? So the pro knows that decisions are where our power lie. Why is that? Because decisions then give you the option to move forward. We cannot move forward when we’re in indecision. We stay stuck and spinning. And I hear you guys tell me this on our coaching calls. You say, I’m going to do this thing, I just haven’t decided yet, or I want to move in this direction, but I just haven’t decided. I just need to decide, right? Again, I’m right there with you, my friends. But when you just go, okay, we’re deciding right now, and you put some pressure on your brain. A little bit of pressure can be good for you. Can be good for me.

This is one of the benefits of having a team. I have a small team, we meet every week, and we talk about what’s coming up and where we’re at with projects and things. And that team is constantly looking to me to make decisions. I’m the founder. I’m in charge of the marketing and the content delivery and the coaching. And so that’s where a lot of the decisions lie. Now there are some decisions in other departments that I have those people make, but a lot of these decisions I have to make. And so they’ll ask me things like, well, what day is it going to open? How much is it going to cost? What’s going to be the policy about ABC thing? What do we do if we get this question? And having a team look at me and knowing that they need answers in order to do their jobs has forced me to move into decision-making a lot faster than I used to when it was just me.

So I want to encourage you, even if you don’t have a team, to act as though you do, to have a meeting with yourself every week and to make plans for the week, to be accountable to yourself from the previous week, and to make decisions knowing that if you don’t decide, you can’t move forward and it will just slow you down. So you got to be willing to make bad decisions. You got to be able to make wrong decisions. You’re going to then make new decisions as you get down the road and learn something new. But you have to make decisions.

I’m going to give you an analogy to kind of wrap this up. You know when before the days of reserved seating at the movies, if you’re old enough to remember that, if you got to the movies late and the previews or the movie had already started, then you’re standing out in the hallway where all the lights are on, and you need to go into the movie theater where it’s dark and you need to find a seat, but it takes a minute or so for your eyes to adjust, for your pupils to adjust to the darkness. So when you first walk in, you can’t see anything. And you might accidentally sit on someone’s lap if you walk in and it’s dark, you don’t wait for your eyes to adjust, right?

But when we’re in indecision, what we’re doing is we’re standing out in the hallway going, I can’t see inside there, and I need to know where to sit. I don’t want to sit on somebody. And we’re standing out in the hallway trying to figure out where to sit. Well, that’s never going to work. You know how you’re going to figure it out? You got to go into the theater, you got to walk around for a minute, and you got to let your pupils dilate. And then suddenly, or wait till the screen flashes something bright, right? Suddenly you’re able to see, oh, there’s a bunch of empty seats. I can go sit right there. But you got to walk into that theater. And walking into that theater, my friends, is the equivalent of making decisions. The more decisions you make and the faster you make decisions, the faster you will get to success in your business.

And I will just add on, remember, make decisions with confidence. Remember that you know best. You are the pro in your business. You already are. You don’t have to achieve some certain level of success to label yourself a pro coach. You have to get there in your mind first. That is how you will get to the external result.

So come and join me at Pro Coach Camp. You go to ProCoachCamp.com to register. I should have said that earlier, I guess. But ProCoachCamp.com. And it’s totally free, and it starts on February 16th. Don’t miss it. I’ll see you there. Take care.

Oh wow, look at that. You made it to the end. Your time and attention is valuable, and I don’t take it lightly that you made it this far. In fact, it tells me you might be like me; insatiably curious about people and life and potential and connection. Maybe you have big dreams but a small budget and no time. You’re tired, but bored. You’re content, but dissatisfied. Sound familiar? Come to a free coaching call and see for yourself what’s possible: JodyMoore.com/freecoaching to register. That’s JodyMoore.com/freecoaching.