Ep #187: Top 20 Mistakes Coaches Make and How to Avoid Them with Olivia Vizachero

Welcome to the Make Money as a Life Coach® podcast where sales expert and master coach Stacey Boehman teaches you how to make your first 2K, 20K, and 200K using her proven formula.

Hey coaches, so today I have a very special podcast episode planned for you. I have been following along in several of my coaches journeys in the 200K Mastermind and the Two Million Dollar Group. And some of them have very inspiring work that they have done on themselves, gaps that they have bridged to get to where they are, things that they have worked through that I think are highly valuable for you to hear from them. So, they didn’t reach out and say, “Hey, I want to teach on the podcast.”

They weren’t doing this work for anything other than themselves. But I wanted to feature their work because I felt like it would be so useful for you. So, over the next couple of months, I am going to play some of these episodes that they have recorded for you. You’re going to get to hear them throughout the next three or four months here and there. And I encourage you to take these episodes as seriously as you would take hearing from me. They are so inspiring, I’ve been following their work in my pages and it’s just in the Facebook pages and our calls.

And it’s really stood out for me so it will be extraordinarily valuable for you. It’s one of my favorite things about masterminds is you get to learn from other people’s ideas and their work. It might not be your work at the time, but it will be your work either in the future or it is your work, and you didn’t know it was your work. They’re going to present ideas to you and how they have worked through things in a way that will be so applicable to you and your own growth in your journey.

So, I hope you enjoy this as much as I have enjoyed hearing these and watching their journey, and learning from them myself in my own self-coaching, learning how they show up in the world has been deeply impactful for me. So, without further ado please enjoy one of our guest podcasts from one of my star 200K Mastermind or Two Million Dollar Group students.

                                                                                                                  

Hey, you guys, how are you? I am so excited to talk to you today. For those of you who don’t already know me, allow me to introduce myself. I’m Olivia Vizachero. And I’m a former attorney turned life coach for lawyers. And I’m the founder of The Less Stressed Lawyer. I help attorneys who are over the overwhelm live lives with less stress and far more fulfilment by teaching them to make themselves and their wellbeing their top priority.

I got certified as a coach through The Life Coach School in 2018 but I really didn’t start going all in on my coaching practice until January of 2020. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that later. Since starting my coaching practice I’ve worked with clients one-on-one. And as I’ve built my practice and it’s become more and more full, I typically work with about 28 clients at a time, that’s what I consider full for me. I now have the honor of having a pretty long waitlist of potential clients who are interested in working with me.

And I’m also in the process of transitioning to group coaching from one-on-one. So, I just launched my first group program, that launch was very successful. My program begins next month with an in person event. And then it’ll be a mastermind, sort of like Stacey does 200K. And I can’t wait to coach in that format, to coach in a group setting. I know how beneficial it’s going to be for them to watch their peers in the mastermind get coached and to be able to learn from them just like Stacey’s students get to do in 2K, 200K and the Two Million Dollar Group so I’m super excited for that.

Since this podcast is all about making money as a life coach I also want to give you some insight into the amount of money I’ve made applying Stacey’s teachings. So, I made my first dollars as a life coach in my own business in April of 2020 and since then I’ve gone on to make $461,000. In the last 12 months I have made $306,000. And year to date as I’m recording this, I’ve made $192,000 which is incredible. I have made more money in the first five months of this year than I used to make all year when I was working in big law.

So, lots to celebrate and tons of evidence that everything Stacey teaches us works like a charm. Now, in addition to running my own coaching practice I am also a senior client support coach within 2K for 2K which means I oversee Ask a Coach, managing our team of brilliant coaches and I also coach within Ask a Coach myself. And what’s so great about that, it’s like that insurance commercial. I’ve seen a thing or two about a thing or two.

So, I’ve seen so many questions about all of the different aspects of what Stacey teaches, and I have thousands of hours of experience coaching on these topics. In fact, at the time that I’m recording this episode in Ask a Coach we’ve answered over 22,000 questions. Isn’t that incredible? It’s really amazing to watch people come in, get coached, work through their mind drama through Ask a Coach and start creating results in their coaching businesses. It’s absolutely incredible, it’s so rewarding to see.

Now, given the fact that I have so much experience coaching coaches on all the different problems they encounter as they start to grow, and scale their businesses, I thought the way that I’d be able to give the greatest amount of value in this episode would be to talk about the most common mistakes I see coaches make and explain how you can avoid them. There have definitely been some themes that have arisen over the course of those 22,000 questions we’ve seen in Ask a Coach.

So, I’m going to highlight the ones that I think are most common and I’m going to help you avoid making them yourself. Are you ready? Let’s go.

Alright, mistake number one is not practicing constraint when it comes to platforms, offers, how you show up and provide value, the coaches you listen to, the programs you’re in, just practicing constraint all across the board. Constraint is so key as you start, build, and grow your business. Practicing it is how you get further faster. So, I want you to think about where could you be practicing more constraint in your business. What platforms are you on?

Don’t try and be in all of the places. Stacey teaches that if you’re trying to be everywhere you’ll end up being nowhere. Also don’t try and do all the things all at the same time. You want to practice constraint. Build a presence in one or two places then go from there if you want to expand later. But in the beginning, practice constraint. Also start with one thing in your business, one way that you add value and then only add another when the first thing feels solid.

So, I’m going to give you examples of how I do this in my business. When it comes to platforms I don’t try and be everywhere. I’m on LinkedIn and Instagram, that’s it. Now, when I started my business I only started with social media posts. I aimed to post four days a week, that pace felt doable to me and then after several months of doing that consistently and that feeling easy, I decided to add a monthly webinar. And I didn’t add anything else for about a year, just the four posts a week and the webinar.

Then once that felt really dialed in like clockwork I added a weekly email. And that was clunky at first. I missed a couple weeks here and there and then I finally got that dialed in. And only once I had that dialed in did I make an intentional decision to add a podcast. And right now, I’m in the process of getting that all ironed out, so it feels really seamless. Now, I won’t add anything else value wise to my business until that’s dialed in. So, constrain and just add one thing at a time.

If you try and do too much you’ll overwhelm yourself and you won’t follow through. Then you’ll use that to feel badly, and you’ll feel really unmotivated and discouraged. So don’t do that, practice constraint.

Alright, mistake number two that I see coaches make is that they believe they should be further along than they are. And most oftentimes this expectation is based on nothing other than they want to be further along than they are. Now, if this is a thought that you have thought yourself, if you think you should be further along I want you to ask yourself and be very specific here, where exactly do you think you should be? What results do you think you should have right now that you don’t have? Again, be as specific as possible.

Write that down and then from there I want you to ask yourself, what would you have needed to do to create those results and get to that place? Again, be very, very specific. If you’re thinking about this in terms of the model, I want you to identify the result that you think you should have and then work backwards. What are all of the actions that you would have needed to take in order to produce that result?

So, if you wanted to be fully booked you would need to meet people, tell them what you do, make offers to help them, add value ahead of time, book consults, do the consults, overcome objections, sign clients one after the other on repeat in order to get to the place where you’re fully booked. Now, you might flesh that out even further, how will you meet people? How will you tell them what you do? How will you add value? Get really specific, turn that whole A line into a very big paragraph.

Those are all the things that you would need to do in order to create the result that you want. Now that you’ve got that fleshed out, I want you to ask yourself, what have you been doing? Be as specific as possible, again go through all the things you’ve done and all the things you haven’t done if you’ve been indulging in some inaction. All the actions you’ve been taking that have produced the current results that you have. Now, once you have both of these action lines fleshed out fully I want you to compare them. Do they match?

And the answer is likely going to be no, of course they don’t match. If they matched you would have your desired results. So, I want you to be kind to yourself here but also call yourself out on the BS. You should be exactly where you are right now, and you should have the exact results that you have based on the action that you’ve been taking or the action that you haven’t been taking. You should be exactly where you are. So, the thought that you keep thinking that you should be further along is just a thought error. It’s not true.

You should be right where you are and have the exact results that you have. Now, two caveats here. Number one, if you have been taking all of the actions that would produce your desired results and you’re not getting the results that you want you may have a belief problem. So, you have to take a look at the thoughts that you’ve been thinking while you’ve been taking that action. And it might be following you like bad perfume.

Your negative thinking and lack of belief may be contaminating all of the action that you’re taking. So, you’re going to want to examine that and correct that issue if it’s there. Another thing that you want to make note of is that if your action lines do match you may just be mistaken about what it takes to create your desired results. You may need to go back to the drawing board and tweak a few things. You may need to add some things, maybe subtract, try it differently. That’s why we evaluate.

Which takes me to mistake number three, people not evaluating the action that they’re taking in their business. Stacy teaches the simplest evaluation process imaginable. What worked? What didn’t? What would you do differently? You want to make sure you’re doing that. Do it with your consults but also do it with other aspects of your business as well. You can evaluate each week or each month, if you host a webinar you can evaluate how you promoted it, how it went when you did it, what happened afterwards.

You can evaluate so much, so don’t sleep on that process. It is how you improve, and you will get so much further faster if you’re doing that, if you’re constantly engaged in that curious process, learning from the mistakes you make, making tweaks and improving. I always explain this to people as the act, audit, adapt cycle. You want to take action, then you want to audit it with an evaluation, learn from it and then adapt. Come up with a different hypothesis, test it out, see if that works better.

If you’re not doing evaluations in your business I want you to ask yourself why. I get it. I used to be resistant to doing them too. I thought that they were too tedious, they took too long. Who has time for that? There is all these other things that I should be doing instead. I also didn’t like looking at the ugly parts, the things that I didn’t do so well. So, it was easier for me to just avoid that process. But when I started evaluating my business, the action I was taking, the consults that I did, all of it, that’s when things really started to shift. So, I highly encourage you, do these evaluations.

Alright, mistake number four, this might be my favorite one, I probably should have started with it but it’s number four and that is avoiding discomfort and engaging in what I call comfort entitlement. And what this looks like is you have those actions that you’re supposed to be taking, the ones we just talked about a minute ago, that you would need to take in order to produce your desired results. And instead of taking them you run for cover and hide and don’t take action.

This is where you find yourself saying, “I know what I need to do, I’m just not doing it.” And the reason why you are not doing it is because of the feeling, the negative emotion that you’ll be forced to feel when you take that action. And instead of allowing yourself to feel that negative feeling and taking action in spite of and despite it you resist and avoid it by not doing that activity.

So, for example, if you’re struggling with picking an offer there’s a negative emotion that you associate with just deciding and moving forward. And instead of feeling that feeling on purpose you avoid making the decision to avoid feeling that feeling. If you’re not meeting people telling then what you do or making offers it’s because you associate taking those actions with feeling negative feelings that you’re currently unwilling to feel.

And instead of feeling them on purpose which is what you’re going to need to do in order to produce the results you want, you run for cover, and you avoid feeling them with your inaction. The same thing goes for posting on social media, if you find yourself not doing that, not doing webinars, not talking about money with clients, not coaching on objections, not seeking the truth, going beyond on a no, saying the hard thing, and not doing evaluations. We just talked about that.

All of these activities, if you’re not doing them it’s because of how you think you’ll be forced to feel if you take that action. Now, avoiding discomfort and engaging in comfort entitlement is a sure fire way to not make money. I get it. Doing these actions, especially in the beginning is super uncomfortable. That’s your brain just protecting you, trying to get you to maintain the status quo. It’s normal that it’s uncomfortable because it’s new, that doesn’t mean anything’s gone wrong. Also, the discomfort is not a good enough reason not to take the action.

In a perfect world you’d get to do both things. You’d get to make money and avoid feeling all of this discomfort that comes from taking this action that we just talked about. But I have not found that to be the case that that’s possible. We can put unfortunately in parenthesis here, but I have found that in your business especially when you’re doing things for the first time or it’s relatively new, you’re going to have to pick and choose between avoiding discomfort on one hand and making money on the other.

Ultimately there is discomfort both ways. There’s discomfort and taking uncomfortable action and there is discomfort and not getting the results that you want in your business. I highly encourage you to pick the discomfort that comes with the money. And the phrase that I teach all of my clients that I’m going to offer you today, I get that the discomfort that you’re encountering as you take these actions makes you want to vom, makes you nauseous, a little queasy.

My recommendation to you is that you don’t make that a problem, just gag and go through the discomfort.

Okay, mistake number five is that you’re overconsuming. You’re spending all of your time listening to podcast episodes, rewatching the 2K modules, going through all of the bonus content, over-self-coaching, doing the worksheets, going to Ask a Coach. All of that is amazing in moderation, when you start to buffer with it and you’re not doing the activities that are client facing that make you money, that is a problem.

So, we overconsume as a way to avoid the discomfort that comes with taking all of those client creating actions and you want to be onto yourself if you find yourself doing this. This is a great area to practice constraint, decide ahead of time how much time you’re going to allocate to being in consumption mode and how much time you’re going to allocate to client creating activities, meeting people, telling them what you do, adding value, making offers, all of that stuff.

As a rule of thumb at least let the split be 50/50, 50% consumption, 50% creation mode. I highly recommend you spend way more time creating than you do consuming. But if you find yourself to be a chronic consumer, at least start with a 50/50 split.

Speaking of how you spend time in your business this brings me to mistake number six which is where I see people not decide ahead of time, how much time they have each week to spend on their businesses. And then from there they also don’t spend that full amount of time on their businesses. So, let’s say you have 40 hours a week to devote to your business and ultimately you’d like to work that much in your business between working with clients, and the marketing, and backend stuff that you do.

And in the beginning instead of spending 40 hours a week working in and on your business, you spend five hours a week. Maybe your number isn’t 40, maybe you only want or have 10 hours a week to spend in your business. You’d only work with a handful of clients because that’s how you want your schedule to be or that’s what works for you right now as you work a full-time job, or you have care obligations for loved ones, something like that.

And instead of spending the 10 hours a week that you would like to be spending on your business once you have clients, in the beginning before you have clients you only spend an hour or two a week doing client creating activities. This is a huge mistake and I see people make it all the time. They waste a lot of their time by not deciding ahead of time how much they have and then not being disciplined enough to actually spend that time doing those client creating activities.

And I think part of this comes from just a misunderstanding, or a false assumption of what it takes to create a full coaching practice because no one tells you this. I had to figure this out for myself, but I didn’t realize at the very beginning of my business before I had any clients that that would look like me spending eight hours a day most days meeting people, telling them what I do, adding value and making offers.

I spent hours, and hours, and hours each day on LinkedIn, creating my own content, engaging with other people’s posts, doing virtual coffees one-on-one with people that I met from LinkedIn. Going to online networking events, I spent a full eight hours every day doing those client creating activities. And I think I thought that the very beginning of my business was going to look sort of like the middle of my business where I had a couple of clients. I’d do some social media each day and that’s what a coaching practice looks like when it’s getting started.

That’s not really accurate. When you’re getting started you have zero clients, and you have to figure out what to do with that time. I suggest that if you want to be spending x number of hours coaching clients you spend at least that in the beginning doing those client creating activities. So, if you want to be working in your business 40 hours a week, spend 40 hours a week doing those client creating activities. If you want to spend 20 hours a week, make sure you’re spending 20 hours a week.

If you build it they will come and as clients start to come in you can shift from 20 hours just marketing to 19 and one, 18 and two, 17 marketing, three hours coaching clients until you get to a place where you’re spending most of your time each day or each week in sessions with your clients and some time continuing to market, to continue to build demand.

Alright, mistake number seven is when coaches conflate meeting people with creating content. These are separate things. Now, people can meet you through finding your content. But if we’re talking about social media here you want to think through the trail, or the path and journey people have to take in order to interact with you and find you. They may be able to find a piece of your content through hashtags, or if you’re on LinkedIn through second degree connections, things like that.

But otherwise, they’re not seeing your content if they’re not already connected with you. So how are you getting people’s eyeballs on your content? You have to meet them and that’s a separate task. So, there is lots of different ways to meet people on social media. You want to formulate a plan that works for you, ask yourself, who are your people? What platforms are they on? How can you find them? And then engage with them. Go to their profiles. Talk to them. Don’t slide into anyone’s DMs, that’s not what I’m saying.

But on their public posts, or just shoot them a connection request, build your audience, meet people that way. Engage with their stuff, add value but don’t conflate meeting people with creating content, they’re not the same thing. Now, mistake number eight goes along these lines too. It’s where people keep selling to the same people. They’re not focused at all on growing their audience. Now, I am the first person to say, you can make a lot of money with a small audience.

And small is a thought, I want to throw that caveat out there too. But you don’t need a huge audience to make a lot of money. That being said, I can always tell when coaches post and ghost on social media because their audience never increases, they’re conflating meeting people with creating content. They don’t spend any time on a platform engaging with other people’s posts, engaging with their ideal audience, their ideal clients. They just post their stuff, expect engagement, show up with a little entitlement to it and then get off the platform or just keep scrolling but they don’t engage with anyone else.

Now, when you’re selling to the same people you are missing an opportunity to get some easy sales when you add new people to your audience. You just keep slipping into convincing energy, trying to get the people who are already following you to buy. You want to make sure you’re doing both things, not convincing. But you want to make sure you’re speaking to the people that have been following you for a while, figuring out exactly what they need to hear from you in order to move forward with working with you.

But don’t sleep on continuing to grow your audience, you want to make sure you’re doing both things. Numbers do matter a little bit, they aren’t everything, but they are something. So, make sure you have a strategic plan for how to grow your audience and have some goals for where you’d like to be and how you plan to get there.

Alright, mistake number nine is one of my favorites to talk about. It’s that you think that there’s an X factor that you need to have in order to be successful as a coach. Spoiler alert, there’s not, there is no X factor. I think that’s such a convenient thought error that our brain loves to serve up to us because it’s like, if there’s an X factor and I clearly don’t have it, well, then might as well throw in the towel and pack my bags, and head home because what am I going to do about it.

You need an X factor, and I don’t have it, so this is basically a lost cause. How convenient is that? What a great way for your brain to ensure that you avoid discomfort, conserve energy, and go seek immediate pleasure by grabbing a box of Oreos and binging the latest Netflix show. It’s such a convenient thought, it just so is not true. There is no X factor. This isn’t a smarts competition, this isn’t a charisma competition. There are going to be people who aren’t as smart as you that make more money.

There are going to be people who don’t have half the personality you have, and they make more money than you are right now. Why is that? It’s not about smarts. It’s not about charisma. It’s not that they just have the secret sauce that you don’t have. The only difference between people making money and you if you’re not making money is that the people that are making money are willing to feel feelings that right now you are unwilling to feel.

I learned this the hard way. I took forever to start taking action in my business. And finally, it dawned on me that this wasn’t a smarts thing, and it wasn’t a charisma thing. There was no X factor. The people who were making money and really starting to take off were simply willing to do things that I at that time was unwilling to do, like post on social media and tell people I was a life coach, especially publicly in front of my former colleagues.

And one day it hit me, that’s what it would take. The people that were making money were willing to feel embarrassed and exposed and I wasn’t. All I needed to do was feel embarrassed and exposed on purpose or at least be willing to feel those feelings in the event that they come and take action in spite of them. Same thing with doing webinars, I felt dread about doing webinars. I felt nervous, and unprepared, and inadequate, and uncertain, and exposed, all of those negative emotions.

And I thought, maybe other people who do webinars have also felt those feelings. Maybe my negative emotions aren’t a good enough reason to not do them. So, I decided, if other people making more money than me do those things I’m just going to follow suit, gag and go, and feel those feelings, and take that action. So, I promise you, there is no X factor. Once I started taking action and feeling my negative feelings, and moving forward in spite of them, I started to make money.

So again, no X factor here, that’s a convenient theory your brain wants to serve up to you. It’s not true. The only difference between people who are making money and people who aren’t is the people who are making money are willing to feel feelings that the people who aren’t making money are currently unwilling to feel. If you want to make money just feel those feelings on purpose and get moving.

Alright, mistake number 10 is when coaches indulge in compare and despair instead of getting curious. I just walked you through an awesome example of what it looks like to get curious. So, I could have indulged in compare and despair, why are these other coaches making so much more money than me? Why are people that I got certified with at the exact same time, so much further ahead? And used that to feel discouraged, or indulged in a state of despair but I didn’t choose to do that.

Instead, I got curious, and I asked myself there must be a reason why they have those results, and I don’t. £hat is it? And I started coming up with my own hypothesis and testing experiments. I got curious and formed my own theories of the case and then tested them to see if it was true. So again, I figured, maybe other people just post on social media, and show up, and meet people, tell them what they do and make offers. And here I am not doing it, maybe that’s all it is. Turns out I was right.

Same thing with one of the coaches in the 2K community, Serena Hicks, she had a 100K month in December of 2020. Instead of indulging in compare and despair, I got curious, and I asked myself, how did she do that? How is that possible? There’s math behind that, I want to solve for the math. So, I asked myself, how did that break down? She had posted somewhere that she got 10 clients. I figured that her price was $10,000 for six months of coaching.

And then I started to build my belief that if she could do it, I could do it too. So instead of just using her results against myself, I got curious, I figured it out, how to reverse engineer them and then I started working towards doing that myself. I encourage you do that instead of indulging in compare and despair.

Alright, mistake number 11 is listening to people who haven’t done what you’re doing or working on doing. We love to take advice from people around us. It just usually doesn’t serve us, especially if they haven’t walked in our shoes, especially if they haven’t had experience doing what we’re working to accomplish, they just don’t know. They’re not going to understand. They’re not going to have the same context. So, you want to put other people’s opinions on mute if they haven’t done what you’re trying to do.

This can be hard when your friends and family members have lots of opinions, especially if you have a habit of seeking out their advice or their counsel and you’ve done that frequently in the past. I want to encourage you to hesitate if you feel the desire to do that. It’s really unhelpful because they’re going to give you a lot of their own limiting beliefs, a lot of untested advice and theories that may not be accurate and they may really hinder you.

So, talk to people who have done what you want to do. You have an amazing community here, you’ve got the podcast. If you’re in 2K for 2K or 200K, lean on the people in those rooms, in those programs, people who have done what you’re trying to do. Those are the best people to go to for guidance.

Now, mistake number 12 is one that’s near and dear to my heart. It’s when people put too much pressure on their businesses. People do this all the time in the beginning and Stacey always talks about don’t put pressure on your business, you want to treat it like it’s a newborn baby. So, for me when I was getting my business started, actually slightly before I really went all in on marketing my business, I got a contract position working for Stacey in 2K for 2K as an Ask a Coach. And it was a part-time position. It was on average 10 hours a week.

And at the time she posted that position and I applied for it, I was really, really broke. I had left my last job after a long while of not getting paid by my boss. And I had no savings, and I was in desperate need of some income. And I was fortunate enough to apply to that position and receive it and it was just enough to cover my overhead, keep a roof over my head, pay my utilities and make sure that my cats and I were able to eat each day. It was just enough to cover what I needed to cover.

I also was willing to get scrappy. I sold my jewelry. I got as resourceful as I possibly could to make sure I was able to cover my overhead and focus on my business without adding undue pressure. So, if you’re starting your business and you are coming from a place of feeling really scarce when it comes to money, and you think that you need your business to start producing for you, you need to be making money, otherwise all of these bad things are going to happen.

I want to encourage you to not do that, it’s going to put you in really desperate graspy energy, and you don’t want that. It’s going to have a negative impact on all of the action you take and the results you work towards producing. So instead, if you are dependent and in need of income in the interim, find it, get resourceful, come up with the money somewhere else. Don’t put that pressure on your business. It’s not fair to your business. It won’t serve you. It will only slow you down, I promise.

Take the pressure off, find some contract work. If you can find it working as a coach, amazing. But don’t make that a requirement either. Do whatever you can to give your business some breathing room to grow and get off the ground.

Alright, mistake number 13 is super simple, it’s that you’re not using Ask a Coach. And if you’re not I want you to ask yourself, why not, it is such an incredible resource. We have answered over 22,000 questions. We have seen it all. So, you want to make sure that you’re using that resource to your advantage. Take any questions you have there about the 2K process, anything that comes up for you. If you don’t know where to start, I’m going to give you a prompt. Just do three thought downloads about meeting people, telling them what you do and making offers and just start there.

Write down all your thoughts about each one of those three things, and next to each thought put in parenthesis the one word emotion that comes up for you when you think the thought. Bring those three thought downloads to Ask a Coach and we’ll help you take it from there. If that doesn’t resonate for you, pick one action you know you should be taking in your business that you’re not taking because it’s uncomfortable. And bring that to Ask a Coach and we’ll help you with that. Those are two great places to start.

But make sure you utilize that. It is incredible to watch people come in really struggling and over the course of some weeks, coming back day after day, they work through all their mind drama and really start to create the results that they want to create in their business.

Mistake number 14 is a little similar but not quite. It’s when coaches don’t use what’s in the programs because they’ve overwhelmed with everything that’s there. I don’t want you to do this. I want you to decide ahead of time that you’re only going to come and take what you need out of each program they are in, whether it’s 2K or 200K. You don’t have to get through everything all at once, there’s plenty of time to get there. But only take what you need and make sure that you’re spending the rest of your time doing those client creating activities.

So, my suggestion for anyone in 2K, make sure you go on through the 2K process modules. It’s the best place to start and use Ask a Coach. If those are the only two things you do, it’s a great place to start. You can get to everything else in the meantime, but don’t not use what’s there. And don’t not do those two things because you’re overwhelmed by everything. That’s your perfectionism talking, put a pin in it. And show up and do the 2K process modules. Do Ask a Coach.

And come to the live calls. I always think those are so, so helpful too, to watch other people get coached on issues that you struggle with and for you to raise your hand and get coached yourself live.

Okay, mistake number 15 is when coaches say things on consults without understanding why they’re saying them. So, Stacey does such a great job of walking you through so many different examples, of things that can arise on a consult, as she teaches you the five step close that you learn in 2K for 2K. And people will parrot what she says in the module videos, but they won’t understand why they should be saying those things. They don’t understand why they’re strategic, where you’re supposed to go once you’ve said that statement, or asked that question.

People are unclear of how it all fits together in the context of doing a consult, finding someone’s objection, and working to overcome it. So, you want to make sure that you walk through your consult process. You can do this when you do your evaluations of consults. Ask yourself if an area felt clunky, do you understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, why you’re saying that thing, why you’re asking that question. And understand where you need to go from there based on what the potential client says to you.

So, I see this with the magic lamp example all the time. If you had a magic lamp and you could just get the results you want, would you spend the money? Or if you could just buy the results off the shelf, would you spend the money? People will say these questions on consults, but they don’t understand how it relates to the belief triad and uncovering the potential client’s underlying objection versus their surface level objection. So, you want to understand how this all fits together.

You’re asking that question in order to uncover where  the client lacks belief and to gain understanding and to show the client how that lack of belief is causing them to hesitate and preventing them from moving forward with working with you. So, you want to make sure that you’re really clear on all of the parts of the consult process that Stacey teaches you, you understand why you’re doing it that way.

You understand why you’re asking the questions that you’re asking or saying the things that you’ve been taught to say, be very clear on the why. Otherwise, it’s going to come off salesy. If you don’t understand the purpose behind each of these statements that you make or each of the questions that you ask, it’s going to sound pushy because you’re doing it to sell and convince. You’re not doing it to relate it back to the framework of belief to really show the client their mind and get them to a place where they know and like their reasons for making whatever decision that they make.

So that’s a mistake, don’t make it. Another mistake I see people make on consults is that they believe clients’ money stories without having enough information. When I went through learning how to do consults in the beginning, I stumbled on the idea, I don’t know if Stacey recommended it somewhere or if I just got the idea to do it myself. I think it was the latter. But I decided to do a consult on myself. I figured  that would be effective. Stacey says, “Don’t practice consults on your peers, that it’s not effective.”

But I wanted to walk through and just get a little bit more comfortable with doing consults and working through the five step close process. So, I did a consult on myself. I sat down with a big sheet of paper, and I went through where I was now versus where I wanted to be. I bridged my own gap. I painted my own vision. And then I picked a price for one-on-one coaching that felt like a massive stretch to me at the time. And then I found my own objections, the surface level objections that would normally come up for potential clients in the consults that we do.

And very quickly I ascertained that my surface level objection was price, that I couldn’t afford it. But then from there I went and did the overcoming objections portion of the consult and I started to identify all of the questions that a coach would need to ask me to find out if it was true that I didn’t have the money to afford the coaching. You know your money stuff. You know what’s true and what’s not true. So, I made a list of all of the questions someone would have to ask me to find out whether or not I could actually afford the cost of the coaching at the price point that I had picked.

And they were really invasive questions, questions like how much money do you have in your bank account? How much money do you make? Do you have available credit? Can you get a loan? What’s your credit score? Do you have any money in savings? Can you borrow it from someone? What can you sell? Are there any other ways that you can get money? Really specific invasive questions. And what this taught me was that we never have enough information because we’re not asking those questions likely on consults.

And I’m not suggesting that you do ask all of those questions. What I am offering you is that you never have enough information to believe someone’s money story on a consult. If you’re not willing to ask them all of those questions and have them give you their answers you just don’t have enough information to jump in the pool and agree with the potential client that they can’t afford it. So, what I want you to do instead is stay curious. Don’t believe their money story.

Operate from curiosity and ask some questions. One of the best ways that I love to do this, I ask questions and I also offer my potential clients this. They’ll say, “Oh, that’s a lot of money. I don’t have the money.” Or they’ll say my favorite thing, “I have to check my finances.” I promise you, no one ever needs to check their finances. They know on the call whether or not they can afford it. They know if they have access to the money. They know if they have it available right now. They know how they might get it.

Or they know if they absolutely no way on the face of the Earth can afford it. So, I just tell people that. I have decided to be as transparent as I possibly can be on my consults. I simply tell people, when they tell me that they can’t afford it or they need to check their finances, I tell them, “I hear that all the time.” But here’s what I tend to find to be the case, either one of two things is true. Either right in this moment you know you absolutely do not have the money, which candidly for the people that I talk to tends to be pretty rare.

Or what’s much more common is that you have the money available to you right now sitting in an account somewhere or you have access to the money, maybe via credit cards, or you could get a loan, or in a 401(k), something along those lines. But you have it or you have access to it and you’re hesitant to spend it. And if the second bucket feels more relatable to you, here are some reasons why you’re hesitant to spend it. You lack belief in me because we have never worked together before. Totally fair.

You lack belief in coaching because you’ve never tried it before. Again, totally fair. You lack belief in yourself because you’ve tried some things on your own and haven’t followed through and gotten yourself results. So, you’re not quite sure if you can do it this time. Again, that’s fair. Or investing in yourself in this way just feels really irresponsible and a little selfish. And then I just ask them, “Tell me if any of that resonates with you.” And lo and behold they get so honest with you. When you are transparent with them they will be transparent with you.

And typically, you’ll find that they have the money or have access to it and they’re simply hesitant to spend it and they will tell you why that is out of the list of the four things you just offered them. So, try that. Don’t believe their money story. Stay curious. Ask them questions. Write out questions that you may ask them ahead of time. I think that’s a great way to practice getting better at consults. Pick one or two questions each time that you’re going to be willing to ask, gag and go through the discomfort of asking them. You’ll survive all of the feelings, I promise.

But test that out and see what happens instead, don’t buy into the money story when you don’t have enough information to back it up.

Okay, mistake 17 is when coaches fight the process. They join 2K, or 200K, or I assume even Two Million Dollar Group and instead of just immersing themselves and being super coachable and keeping an open mind, they fight what Stacey teaches. They don’t humble themselves. They think they know better. They think the teachings are stupid. They resist them. They don’t test it. They don’t apply it. They just decide ahead of time it’s not going to work, and they don’t follow through.

And the reason that I wanted to talk about this particularly with you is because I did this myself. I joined 2K for 2K in March 2019 and I didn’t apply it for almost a year. I watched part of the module videos, and then I just stopped, didn’t apply anything. I watched a bunch of coaches I knew start making a lot of money in a short period of time while I made zero dollars. And I judged the program. And I thought it couldn’t be that simple. And I didn’t start taking action.

And then I got hired as an Ask a Coach and I had to go through the entire program and very candidly, hopefully Stacey is busy on maternity leave, that she doesn’t hear this. But I still had a lot of negative thoughts about the 2K process, specially the consults part. I thought certain things were cheesy. I didn’t like how they were said. They didn’t feel natural to me. It just felt clunky and awkward. So, I was really resistant to do it. But I had started to master the 2K process at least in theory and intellectually because I had mastered it to be able to coach other people on it.

And I started to do that every day in my role as an Ask a Coach. And lo and behold after a couple months I started watching all of these coaches that were coming to Ask a Coach start transforming themselves, their businesses, go from all this mind drama and struggling in all the ways that I have struggled and that I was struggling at that time in my own business. And they started to make their first dollars and then they got better at consults. And then they were getting close to fully booked.

And then they were asking questions about waitlists. And I was like, holy sham Oley, maybe Stacey’s onto something .Maybe this process works. And I finally humbled myself to apply it. I don’t love admitting when I don’t know how to do something, that’s a personal weakness of mine. So, it took a lot for me to admit that I had no idea how to market myself and that I had no idea how to sell coaching and that someone else might know more than me.

And that might sound crazy because I had already paid Stacey to be in her program. So, you’d think that I would have gotten over that already, but I hadn’t. I still had to work through that mind drama. And it took me watching a ton of other people getting results that I wasn’t getting in order for me to get out of my own way and to stop fighting the process. So, I made myself a promise that I would just do everything Stacey teaches. I’d drop my resistance. I would try it her way and that I was willing to do it for as long as it took to get good at it.

I said, “I’ll do this badly until I master what she teaches.” And sure enough, once I went all in and started applying her process, meeting people, telling them what I do and making offers, and showing up really consistently to add value, make those value bank deposits. I started getting consults and then I applied everything she taught in the consult process. I evaluated, I did them very badly at first and then I got better, and better, and better, and better. And I started signing clients.

So, I want to offer you if you’re fighting the process, stop it, stop making this harder on yourself. Let it be easy. Someone has gone through and figured out exactly what you need to do to make your first dollars and then make lots more of them. Don’t fight her. This process works, just work the process. I really believe that everyone has their own journey to making their first dollars. For me it took from getting certified in 2018, towards the end of 2018 to April 2020 before I made money as a coach in my own business.

That could have been weeks or months instead of over a year if I would have just followed the process, dropped my resistance very early on, embraced the discomfort, done the gag and go process and engaged in doing what Stacey teaches. It’s fine that it took me as long as it did, but I could have skipped the more than a year long period where I didn’t make any money if I would have just dove in and started taking massive action immediately. So, if you want to shore up the time between when you get started, and when you start making your first dollars, I suggest you do the same.

Mistake 18 is indulging in I don’t know when you encounter a problem in your business. Instead of tapping into your resourcefulness you just throw your hands up in the air and say, “I don’t know what could be causing that problem.” And you don’t look at the data, you don’t focus on the variables at play. You just indulge in I don’t know. Instead of doing that you want to get curious, and you want to conduct what I call controlled experiments. So, if you want more people to register for a webinar, assess what you’re doing right now.

How many emails are you sending? How many social media posts are you doing? How big is your audience? Have you added to it? Look at the data then make an educated guess of what you might need to do to make an improvement and then test that theory. If you want to create a certain number of consults rather than indulging in I don’t know, like, I don’t know how to get more. I don’t know what creates them. Get curious, come up with a hypothesis and then test that theory.

Don’t change a bunch of stuff at once though because it makes your data unreliable. You want to isolate a variable, come up with your hypothesis, and test it to find out if changing that one variable makes a difference. Maybe you do the same webinar every month and your attendance keeps going down. Well, decide to change the webinar topic each month and see if that makes a difference. Don’t change the webinar topic, and time, or day. Those are too many variables that you’re changing all at the same time.

And you won’t be able to figure out and isolate which one actually had an effect if you see a change in your results. So don’t indulge in I don’t know. Put on your thinking cap, problem solve, be resourceful, come up with your theory and then conduct a controlled experiment where you only change one thing at a time to figure out whether or not you’ve solved the problem and you understand what it is. And you can figure out what needs to change.

Alright, mistake number 19 is one of the most common mistakes, I see coaches who are doing consults make time and time again. The client gives you an objection on the consult, it’s a surface level objection, time, money, or status meaning what other people think. And the coach thinks that that objection goes in at the T line of the client’s model. So, the circumstance is commit to coaching, that’s the circumstance that your potential client is thinking about. And then they have a thought that causes them to feel a feeling that drives an action.

And their action is that they say to you, insert whatever their objection is. Coaches often want to put their objection in the T line, the thought line of that model. That’s not where it goes. I think the best video in all of 2K is the client coach model’s video in the overcoming objections module section of the 2K process. If you need a refresher and you’re in 2K for 2K which it’s a no brainer. If you’re not in the program go join. It will give you everything you need to make money, I promise you.

I made over $170,000 just from using what I learned in 2K. And in that module or video, what you will see is that the clients thinking about committing to coaching and then they give you an objection, that goes in the A line and your work as the coach is to figure out how they’re feeling about this decision, the emotions that are coming up for them. And then to figure out what they’re thinking about committing to coaching that’s making them feel that feeling.

And it’s going to be where their underlying objections are, where they lack belief in you, in coaching, or in themselves, or maybe they think it’s irresponsible or selfish for them to make that type of investment. That’s going to be what’s in their thought line, not the surface level objection. So, if you’re making this mistake, go reference that resource, give yourself a refresher and start to run these models after you do consults with people so you can start to learn.

Your job is just to show the client their mind, why they’re making whatever decision they’re making or why they’re hesitating. You want to make sure they really understand the true reason that’s happening before you get off a call with them. That’s your work as the coach.

Alright, last but not least mistake number 20. I see this happen all the time and it always breaks my heart when I see it. It’s when coaches contemplate quitting. One of the biggest things that I’ve learned in my time as a coach is that failure is always a thought. It always goes in the T line of the model. And people are so afraid of doing it but it’s not something you can do. It’s just something that you think so you always get the option to think that you’ve failed, or you can choose to think that that’s not something that’s possible for you.

But failure is only a thought that becomes available to you when you contemplate quitting because failure requires an end point from which you measure. If you take quitting off the table entirely you cannot fail. You’re always simply winning or learning, constantly improving, constantly working towards the pursuit of that goal. So, you make your success inevitable if you make the decision to take quitting off the table and promise to keep at it, evaluating, act on it, adapt until you solve for whatever’s not working and you get where you want to go.

But when I see coaches entertain quitting, when they keep that as an available option they’re sort of half pregnant between their business and whatever else they’re envisioning that they would do if they weren’t doing their business. And I think that split focus is so harmful for you creating the results you want to be creating in your coaching practice. I learned this from Stacey in my early days of Ask a Coach and it really shifted everything for me.

There was a really difficult question that came in and it was when I was still pretty new in that role, and I asked her for some guidance on how to respond to a 2Ker. And the person was really in a state of despair, having a very hard time, not understanding what needed to change, what she should do differently, just in a really dark place and was really entertaining the idea of quitting. And Stacey offered some incredible coaching, and they did an intake and just stayed really curious and asked and answered a bunch of questions.

And then she ended the coaching with one final question and even though it wasn’t my issue, her answer changed my life. She simply asked the 2Ker, “How would you approach your business, what would you do if you couldn’t quit it?” And that line for whatever reason really struck me. I started a lot of businesses in my 20s and I always had all the excitement and enthusiasm in the beginning. And then when I wouldn’t get the results that I thought I should have really quickly, I’d get discouraged and feel defeated, and feel embarrassed, and feel frustrated.

And finally, all that negative emotion became too hard to tolerate and I jumped to something else that felt more exciting, that would distract me from the discomfort. So, I knew that that was a habit of mine. And when I saw Stacey offer this coaching and I read it for myself it hit me. How would you approach your business if you couldn’t quit it? And the answer that came up for me was I’d approach it with so much less mind drama. I’d just put my head down and get to work. I’d drop my resistance. I wouldn’t fight the process.

I wouldn’t avoid the discomfort. I wouldn’t dread doing things that create clients, create money. I would just show up and do them. I wouldn’t have meltdowns. And if I did have meltdowns about taking action I wouldn’t make them a problem or a good enough reason not to show up. I would just take action in spite of and despite them and I’d show up every day doing that until I got where I wanted to go. So, I highly encourage you ask yourself that question too. How would you approach your business differently if you could not quit it?

And then once you answer that question make a promise to yourself right now that you won’t quit. I promise you if you take quitting off the table it will change everything.

Alright, that’s my list of the top 20 mistakes I see coaches make and how you can avoid making them. I know that was lengthy. I appreciate you sticking with me. I really wanted to make sure I covered all the bases. I have one word of caution before I leave you today. If you’re prone to overwhelm and I just went through that list of 20 mistakes and you’re making a lot of them and you’re like, “Oh my God, I don’t know where to start.” And you want to use my list against yourself, don’t.

First and foremost, you don’t have my permission to use my list against yourself. Also, that’s just super unproductive. So instead of slipping into a state of despair and indulging in overwhelm, here’s what I want you to do. Out of all the mistakes that I listed I want you to make a list of the ones that are issues for you. The order doesn’t matter. I want you to just pick one, focus on that, practice constraint and implement changing and remedying that mistake.

Once you’ve done that you can move on to another one. Do not attempt to fix all of these all at the same time. You will overwhelm yourself and then you will just shut down. Don’t do that. Just pick one, make the change, implement it, solve that problem then move on to another one. You’ll eventually get to all of them. You’ll address each and every one. I promise you the order doesn’t matter. Don’t indulge in perfectionism there and think that you need to pick the right order in which to address these. There is no right order.

Just pick one, implement, move on to the next one. Pick one, implement, move on to the next one over, and over, and over again until you hit them all.

Alright my friends. That’s what I’ve got for you today. I hope you found my list of mistakes and ways to avoid them, helpful. And if you’d like to connect with me you can find me on LinkedIn, just under my name, Olivia Vizachero, or on Instagram my handle is @lessstressedlawyer. Or if podcasts are more your thing because you’re tuned into this one, you can go listen to mine, it’s called The Less Stressed Lawyer.

In the meantime, take what I’ve taught you here, implement it, even if it means you have to gag and go to do it, that’s fine, just gag and go so you can go and make all of the money you want to.

                                                                                                                  

Hey, if you are ready to make money as a life coach, I want to invite you to join my 2K for 2K program where you’re going to make your first $2000, the hardest part, and then $200,000 using my proven formula. It’s risk-free. You either make your 2K or I give you your 2K back. Just head over to www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.