585. Pro Coach Standards

If you are a coach and you have a coaching practice, or you’re a course creator or teacher, and you have some kind of a business where you serve people, help people, guide people, and you’re trying to take the steps you’ve been taught, you’re doing the things that you know to do, but it’s not getting you to that next level, at least not as quickly as you thought it would, you don’t feel like you’re progressing in the way that you wanted to, and you’re not sure what’s wrong, today’s episode is for you.

It may just be that you need some standards by which you operate ongoing that are actually easier to implement than some of the other stuff you’re doing, that will uplevel the way you show up in every area of your business. And that’s what we’re talking about today. I’m going to talk to you about the standards that make a coach professional versus amateur. Welcome to Better Than Happy. Let’s go.

Welcome to Better Than Happy, the podcast where we apply all the tools of psychology, human behavior, and mindfulness to live our best lives, navigate challenges, and achieve our goals. I’m Jody Moore and I’ll be your coach today. Let’s do it.

Hey there, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. A little bit of setup here. There is a book by Steven Pressfield called Turning Pro. And if you have not read it or listened to it, absolutely get it. It is phenomenal. Steven Pressfield is an author. He is a screenwriter and traditional book author. And so he’s talking about the creative process in general, but he’s actually talking about way more than that. He’s talking about any really goal that you set out to achieve or area where you want to grow.

And he talks about there being this amateur status and then professional status. And that at some point, we all begin as amateurs, but we have to move into the pro mindset, which then shows up and takes pro actions if we really want to succeed long-term. He relates it to writing, of course, as an author. He relates it to building a business. He relates it to even working on your health goals or any other area of your life: overcoming the resistance and turning pro.

It’s a great, quick read, and it has so many great points. You should absolutely check it out when you get a chance. But I like to talk about it and think about it in terms of growing a coaching business, as that is something that I have done and am constantly still working on, making sure my business looks how I want it to and is serving my clients in the way that I want it to. But I also have worked with many, many others doing the same thing. And this shift from amateur to pro is a game-changer. Not only does it get people the results they want in their business, but it makes it so that they enjoy doing it, they enjoy the process a lot more, and it’s something that they can sustain and then continue to go next-level and beyond.

And so that is why I’ve created what I call Pro Coach Camp to help you make this shift from amateur into pro. We go into a lot more detail in there about what that requires, what it even looks like, and it’s happening on October 19th, which is just before Halloween. So I don’t know about you, but whenever I go into the store and see all the Halloween candy and the Halloween decorations, I get super excited about fall and Halloween, and it’s just kind of a fun, cozy time of year, right? But nowadays, I get excited knowing that just before that, I get to hang out with all of you at Pro Coach Camp.

So we are opening the doors right now for Pro Coach Camp. You’ll go to procoachcamp.com to register if you want to join me. It’s a four-day live virtual event, meaning I will be live online interacting with you, teaching you, guiding you, coaching you, and helping you go from amateur to pro status in your coaching or course creation, teaching business. So go check that out.

But today, we’re going to talk about some standards, just the foundation that I recommend you operate from that will help you succeed in your business. Now, I want to be clear that I do not consider myself the expert on how all of y’all should be living your lives. In fact, quite the contrary. You are much more of an expert on how you should live your life than I am. So I want you to take all of these for what they’re worth, which is just my opinion, just what I have found for myself to be the standards that help me live the way I want to and succeed in the way I want to, especially in my business.

That said, I think many of you are going to benefit from sharing many of my same standards, but maybe not all of them. Maybe some of them you toss aside. Maybe you have different ones that I haven’t considered. And ultimately, you should be the creator of the standards by which you live your life, okay? That said, I’ve got six standards that I’m going to offer to you, and I want you to consider them.

We’re going to dive right in with the first standard, which is to plan your week. Okay, a pro coach plans her week, I have found. What do I mean by that? What I mean is each week, sometime at the beginning of the week—so maybe, I know some people like to do this on Friday at the end of the day, they look at what’s going to happen the following workweek. Some people like to sit down on Sunday night and think about what’s going to happen the following week. I like to sit down Monday morning and look at what’s going to happen for my week. So whatever is “the beginning of the week” to you, you get to decide when is the best time for you to do it, but we want to plan our week, not just let the week happen.

Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but if you don’t have a plan, the week is gone before you know it, and you wonder why you still haven’t gotten anything done. Now, I want to be very clear that I do not love planning. Some of you all love it. I’m so happy for you, so delighted if you love planning and you’re good at it, and you get excited about this part. Cool! But if you are not like that, if you are more like me, and you resist it, and you think, “I can’t have a plan because there’s going to be all these emergencies I don’t know about, and then what’s going to happen? My plan’s going to go to the wayside, and then I’m going to feel bad about it, and so I just can’t plan,” okay?

Or maybe you think, “Every time I try to create a plan, I end up not following it because I just don’t feel like it, and then it doesn’t get done, and then I feel bad about it, so I’m just not going to have a plan.” Or, “I’m just spontaneous. I just like to be in the moment and see what I feel inspired to do. How can I do that, Jody, with a plan?” I hear you, my friend. I’ve made all of these excuses myself and more, okay? And I’ve experimented with living both ways. My guess is you have, too. And when you have a plan, it goes better. I’m just saying.

The more you plan, the more intentional your life is. And do you know why that is? Because of the way the human brain works, okay? The now brain, meaning, “Huh, it’s, as of the time I’m recording this episode, it’s 3:41 on a Monday.” And my brain’s like, “You know what we should do right now is go take a little nap, or get a drink, or get a snack, or go ask the kids if they need anything, or maybe put away that laundry you’ve been needing to put away.” So many things that my brain is telling me I could and should and kind of want to do right now.

The last thing it’s telling me I want to do is record a podcast episode. Sorry, but that’s just the truth. I’ve been working all day. I’ve already recorded another episode today. It’s hot in my office. I had to turn the air off so that the sound would be better. And my brain’s just like, “Why do we want to do any of this? We don’t need to do this. We could just do it tomorrow, right?” But because I put it in my calendar and made a plan, I’m doing what needs to get done. Now, tomorrow me is going to be so grateful that I already did that podcast episode. And whenever this episode airs, I’m going to be so grateful that I sat down and recorded some content for you.

So without a plan, we do what we feel like doing in the moment. And what we feel like doing in the moment may or may not be the thing that is the most useful in the long term. Often, it is not, because the now brain prefers to avoid pain, seek pleasure, and save energy. The number one thing I want to do right now is just take a nap. Is it just me? Does anybody else need a nap and want a nap at 3:40 on a Monday afternoon? I don’t know.

So we don’t want the now brain making all of our decisions. It can make some of our decisions. After I get done recording this episode, I will be able to do whatever I feel like doing for a little bit until I need to make dinner. But if I live from that part of my brain all day, the day gets away from me, and I don’t get a lot done, okay?

So plan your week. I like to sit down every week and just map out what have I got going on this week. What do I have going on with my family and my kids? What’s going on with my church calling? What’s going on in my job that’s prescheduled, like meetings or coaching calls or other things that are planned on a specific day and time? And I start with that and my own self-care. Am I going to work out this week? If so, when? Do I have any other personal self-care needs that need to go in the calendar?

Then I take a look at what do I want to create or work on this week that isn’t preplanned on a set time or day. So that would include things like, “I’m teaching a lesson at church on Sunday, so I want to work in some time to think about and plan out that lesson. I’ve got a class coming up in my coaching program that I’m going to be teaching, so I need to prep for that.” The actual class is on a scheduled time and day, but the prep work is not, right? I’ve got a talk I’m going to be giving at the Faith Matters Restore conference, which, by the way, you should—actually, by the time you hear this, I think it will already be over, but you’ll be able to catch that online later, I’m sure.

So all of these things are things that I want to get done, but they aren’t at a scheduled time and date. So I’m not saying that you have to do all of them. I’m not saying that your calendar should be overloaded with things to do. It shouldn’t be. You should have plenty of gaps in your calendar where you say, “During this timeframe, I do whatever I feel like doing, or whatever I deem I want to get done, like the laundry or whatever else,” okay? But plan your week, or it will slip by. In fact, the months will slip by, and the years will slip by, and you’ll come to me and say, “I don’t know why I haven’t gotten that done yet.”

So plan your week. Now, if you want to plan your month, great. If you want to plan your quarter or your year, great. For me personally, I plan my week in the most detail. A little bit less detailed is the month or the quarter, and the least detailed is the year. So I still am putting some things on my calendar a year out or a quarter out or a month out, but they get really granular and detailed when I plan my week. So even if I don’t have my month or quarter or year mapped out very well, I’m planning my week because otherwise, I will not progress in the way that I want to. Just saying, plan your week.

I have a planner I use that really helps with this, my specific system, which I know a lot of you use that same planner as well and have been asking about it. We have the 2027 version coming out soon that’s a bonus. We actually don’t sell the planner; we give it away as a bonus when you try our Better Than Busy course. So stay tuned. That will be coming in the next little while.

Let’s go on and talk about the second pro coach standard that I adopt and recommend for you. Are you ready? I want you to get dressed with intention every day and make your bed, okay? I know I just crammed two standards into one, but I feel like we can handle it, right? You guys are advanced, okay? Get dressed with intention every day, and make your bed every day.

Now, make your bed. There’s a whole book called *Make Your Bed* by a retired US naval admiral named William McRaven. I have heard summaries of his book; I have not read his book. My daughter just read it actually in her fifth-grade classroom, which I thought was so awesome that her teacher picked that book. But my understanding is that the gist of it is that it’s a discipline thing and cleaning up your space type thing, and I’m sure there’s a lot more to it than that. But I happen to agree with the idea. I am not a person who has a perfectly clean house. I just don’t. I wish I did. I love a clean house. I keep it pretty tidy, relatively tidy, but it definitely gets chaotic and messy, and I don’t stress about that. I don’t feel bad about that. I even welcome guests coming over when it looks like that.

But I do make my bed. And even my own bedroom, right? It’s easy to think, “Well, the rest of the house is chaotic because of the kids and my husband and all these other people.” But my bedroom—granted, my husband participates in that mess, but let’s be honest, it’s mostly me in my bedroom. I’m the one with all the clothes and the shoes and just whatever I leave around, okay? It’s okay, but I make my bed every day. It actually makes the room look cleaner, which makes me feel calmer. And it just creates a sense of order, and more than that, a certain type of respect for my home and my property, and a bed that I get to climb into at night that isn’t all gross because the sheets have been bunched up all day.

So make your bed. Let’s talk about getting dressed, though. This is one that I haven’t been very vocal about, but I feel called to start speaking up about it more. I am a believer in getting dressed every day. This is not only more sanitary and hygienic than just wearing your grubby pajamas or sweatpants all day, it sends a message to your own self about the importance of your life and about the level of respect you have for yourself.

So I get dressed, including doing my hair, putting on makeup, intentionally choosing an outfit that I feel good in. Now, if it’s going to be a workday and I’m going to be on calls, I’m dressed up a little bit more. If I’m going to be running errands around town, then it might just be jeans and a T-shirt. But I make sure that everything’s clean, and that it’s a cute T-shirt, and maybe I have a belt with my jeans, and that my shoes are intentional. And I get dressed, all the way dressed, my friends, because my life matters.

Think about it. When you go to the grocery store and you’re in your grubby sweats, and your hair is all over the place, and you haven’t washed your face, and your makeup is everywhere, how do you feel? How do you feel? And how do you show up in the world from that feeling? You’re probably hiding. You’re probably hoping nobody sees you.

Now listen, this isn’t about judgment, and this isn’t about impressing anyone else. I don’t care at all if other people see me that way. I care that I’m telling myself that even running to the grocery store is a valuable use of my day, and I matter enough to get dressed and get ready for myself. I couldn’t care less what anyone else thinks. I’m just trying to impress my own self. She’s the hardest one, by the way, to impress.

So if you’re not a person who likes makeup or cares about doing your hair, that’s fine. It’s not about that. But I’m saying, what is you at your best? What is the excellent version of you? Not your very, very best. If I were going to go to a wedding or something, make sure that my hair was extra clean, and maybe there’s times when I would take more time on my makeup or something, okay? I’m not talking that every day has to be your very best. I’m just saying, what is your minimum standard of getting ready that tells you that, “I love you. I respect you. I’m here for you. I take care of you. And even if no one else is going to see you today, I’m going to see you, and you’re worth impressing.” Get dressed. Get dressed. I recommend that you dress up maybe a little bit more than what you’re used to. Go a little bit over the top, like really impress yourself, really delight yourself.

Okay, let’s talk about number three. Number three pro coach standard that I recommend you consider adopting is that marketing is giving value ahead of time. Now, I did not make up this definition. I originally learned it from Brooke Castillo. I know she would probably give the credit to other people she learned from. There are lots of people teaching different versions of this, but I love thinking about marketing as giving value ahead of time. Ahead of what? What do we mean by that? Ahead of anyone paying you, anyone signing up to be your paying client. We want to give value to people before they ever pay us or officially sign up for anything. That’s what marketing is. That’s what this podcast is.

I do not charge you for this podcast. It’s free, right? Anybody who has access to the proper technology can download and listen to this podcast, and I hope they will. I hope they get tremendous value out of this podcast. I am producing content that I hope will be of value to people because that’s marketing.

Now, the good news is that a bunch of people will find it valuable enough that they’ll want to learn even more. They’ll want to get more in-depth help from me, and that will be very fun for me to get to actually coach them and interact with them and teach them on a more in-depth level. But the other very good news is that a whole bunch of people will never take those steps, will never pay me a dime, and their lives will be improved just because they listen to this podcast. Why is that good news for me? Because that’s how I want to live my life. That’s a win for me. Even if I never make a dime off that person, putting out goodwill in the world, putting out happiness, putting out joy, putting out positivity, yeah, sign me up for that. I do believe actually that comes back to me in all kinds of ways that I can’t even track. But if nothing else, I want to die knowing I spent my life doing that, okay?

So marketing is not this sleazy, tricky, gimmicky thing that you do because you need clients. If that’s what you think it is, you need to come to Pro Coach Camp so I can teach you what marketing actually is and how to do it in a way that’s very fulfilling and very rewarding. Marketing is just you giving value ahead of time.

All right, number four piggybacks off of this, number four standard, which is selling is serving. Okay, so those of you who are in The Lab: Coach Access know that we do a call every month called Selling Is Serving, where we work on our sales skills, and we talk through it, and we practice it, and we refine our messaging and all of that. And that’s because I do believe one of my standards as a pro coach, that I recommend for you, is that you start considering that selling is something you need to do because it serves others, not because you need clients, not because you want the money, not because you need to try to convince people to buy your stuff. You don’t need to. That is not what selling is.

Selling is not convincing people that what you have is good enough. It’s convincing people that they are worth investing in themselves for, and that if they choose to go all in and give this a try, they could be successful at it. You’re selling people on themselves. You’re not selling them on you. You’re not even selling them on your program. Selling is coaching in this way, right? I’ve said this before on this podcast, but I will say it again: I love sales. I love selling people. Selling is not convincing people. If anyone is not interested in what I have to offer, I have zero interest in convincing them that they should be.

It’s the people who are interested, but are filled with self-doubt, or maybe have questions, or think that they for some reason won’t be able to succeed, or that they’re not worth investing the time or the money or whatever. I will sell people on themselves all day long. I recommend you consider the same, all right? Now, there are strategies and tools that will teach you how to do this. Come to Pro Coach Camp if you want help learning my method of them, anyway. But you have to start thinking of selling as a service.

All right, number five pro coach standard is to underpromise and overdeliver, okay? Many businesses out there do the exact opposite. Have you noticed? They overpromise and underdeliver. I do not recommend that. That will not serve you or your business. Your clients and customers won’t like it, and you don’t need to do it. Instead, underpromise, overdeliver.

I love to overdeliver to my clients. I love to be generous. I love to give them extras that they hadn’t even planned on. And when I’m talking to someone, if they have doubt about whether or not my program is for them, I have no hesitation about saying, “I don’t think you should take a step until you feel pretty confident this is what you’re looking for.” Not because I don’t think my program could help them, but because if they don’t believe it could help them, they’re less likely to get the result. And I don’t want people spending time and money with me who don’t believe they could get the result that they desire, okay? So I’m going to underpromise and overdeliver. It’s the most fun way to run a business, and I highly recommend it.

Okay, this brings us to the sixth and final pro coach standard you might want to consider, which is to make decisions from abundance, not from scarcity. Now, this one you’re going to have to be really intentional about doing, because your brain is going to tell you, “Oh no, what if we lose their business? What if our clients don’t like this and they get mad? What if somebody else steals my stuff? What if there’s too much competition? What if, what if, what if?” Those are all scarcity thoughts, right?

So listen, you’re a human brain, you’re going to have scarcity thoughts. They’re going to come up at times. Your brain thinks it’s looking out for you. It’s not insane, either. These are real, possible things that could happen. So you can hear that part of your brain out. Don’t even get mad at it. Don’t try to swat it away. There’s nothing wrong with having those thoughts. You can have a little conversation with yourself and answer those questions: “What if this did happen?” But don’t make decisions about your business and your future from those scarcity thoughts. Make them from abundance.

Here’s what it sounds like: When your brain says, “What if it doesn’t work?” then you stop and you answer it. “Well, what if?” The true answer to what if it doesn’t work is that we’ll be right back in the same position we’re in right now. Maybe we will have spent some time, maybe we will even have spent some money and some effort, but other than that, we’re no worse off than if we never try. And if we never try, it for sure doesn’t work. We for sure don’t create the progress we want to, right? So you have that conversation. Then you go to abundance: What if it does work?

And you make a decision from abundance: “If I knew that I could make this work—maybe it won’t work the first time, but eventually I’m going to get it working, and the only way to get it working is to dive in and try to make it work—then what would we do?” Then we would go for it. So make decisions from abundance.

Same thing if you’re like, “Hey, somebody just took that thing I taught.” Somebody could take my podcast episode, go rerecord it with their own face and their own voice and their own words and put it onto YouTube. You could do that, right? I probably would actually be really flattered if you did that. I’d think, “Wow, somebody thought what I said was good enough to recreate it.” But if I had any scarcity thoughts about, “Oh no, this person is going to steal my ideas, or they’re going to steal my business in some way, or steal my clients or my revenue,” those are all scarcity thoughts. So again, I would have a little conversation with my brain, like, “Okay, is that okay? Is this really a problem?” But ultimately, I would make a decision from abundance.

If we knew there’s plenty of success for everyone, and there’s plenty of clients for everyone, and that no one’s ever going to be better at being Jody Moore than I am, and the fact that they even want to try is kind of flattering if you think about it, then I would make a decision from abundance. And I don’t know what that decision would be for you. I’m not saying that you wouldn’t want to send someone a cease and desist, or whatever you decide is the right thing to do, but do it from abundance. It’s fine. I get to control my success. I get to create my destiny. No one else is in charge of that. That’s making decisions from abundance.

Okay, so one more quick review of your pro coach standards, and then again, feel free to modify these. Feel free to throw any out that you don’t like. Feel free to add others that you do like. I’d love to hear about it, by the way, if you do. But consider these:

Number one: Plan your week.

Number two: Get dressed and make your bed every day.

Number three: Marketing is giving value ahead of time.

Number four: Selling is serving.

Number five: Underpromise and overdeliver.

And number six: Make decisions from abundance, not scarcity.

All right, I can’t wait to see you at Pro Coach Camp. Head to procoachcamp.com if you want to join me. Otherwise, I’ll see you next week for another episode. Take care.

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