Ep #89: Selling General Life Coaching

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, welcome to episode 89. Are you ready? We’re going to talk about how to sell general life coaching. So in episode 62, I talked about when to pick a niche. If you haven’t listened to that podcast, make sure you go back and listen to that one first.

I address when to specialize and when to not. And today, for those of you who are in a place where you’re not ready to specialize, I’m going to talk to you about how to sell general life coaching. Because many of you think it can’t be done, that it can’t be done well.

You have no idea how to do it, you feel confused as hell about it, and you’re pushing yourselves to specialize before you’re ready as a way to get out of this experience, instead of putting your energy into figuring out how to sell it.

So before we dive in, I want to give you some references of some great coaches that I know doing a great job of selling general life coaching. So Laura Swartzbaugh one of my 200K students is a life coach for life coaches. She helps you manage your shit so that you can manage other people’s shit. That’s not actually her slogan, but that’s what I just made up here the way that I imagine it.

So Lindsey Mango sells life coaching tools to people who want an above average life in all areas. She helps you apply her process to change so that you can change your life, so that you can then go create a business changing other people’s life in her program and her podcast, Anything but Average.

Jewel Hohman sells life coaching to anyone and everyone. She will be your coach for your life and don’t mistake her age for lack of experience because this girl gets the tools deeply. She is such an example of what is possible in my opinion for young people who want to be a coach.

The way that she explains her understanding of concepts when I’m talking to her, she’s also in 200K mastermind, it really shows me how deeply she has applied this work to herself. So if you’re a young coach who has thoughts about being young in the coaching industry, about not knowing how to get started, or if you just want a coach to call you on your shit, she’s your girl. And she even coaches guys. She just coaches anyone and everyone on anything and everything.

And Bev Aron is my personal life coach. She helps me – I can, I could do an entire podcast about my work with Bev over the last 12 months. She helps me on my thoughts about my business, my family drama, my relationship drama, basically when I’m being an asshole to Neil. Let’s be honest. He’s rarely an asshole to me, so she just helps me be less of an asshole to Neil.

She helps me on drama about the tiniest things that still – and you guys have this too, shit you ruminate on that is not worthy of ruminating on like buying six coats. A year later and I’m still working on that.

And she helps me set boundaries in my life and in my business. Literally everything. I just get to come to the call; I look forward to it every single week where I know Bev is going to hold the space for me and I get to let out all of my stuff. I get to talk about everything, not just my goal. I feel like I spend half the time talking about goals and the thoughts that I’m going to need to achieve them, and half the time just clearing out the cobwebs in my mind of all the stuff going on there. And there’s a lot. Trust me, a lot of stuff going on in there.

And you know what I love the most, I don’t even think Bev has social media. So you could be a general life coach and not have social media and have a full client roster and charge a lot of money and make hundreds of thousands of dollars. And I know this because I pay Bev all the money.

Now, she may actually have a niche, but this is what’s so important is I, as the customer, don’t know what that is and don’t care. It didn’t matter to me. I just know that every week I get to get on the phone and talk about those things, talk about what’s bothering me, talk about what I’m working on. And I know for me, it’s the best investment ever.

I didn’t need a website for her to explain that to me and for me to know that she was my person. I didn’t even think we did a consult. I heard from a referral she was taking clients and I’m like, hey, want to coach me? I need some coaching on all the things.

So a lot of possibility out in the world. You can have programs that sell general life coaching, Laura Swartzbaugh has a group coaching program for selling general life coaching. Jewel sells I think one-on-one life coaching, there are so many ways and so many offers that you could have selling some type of general life coaching.

When I say general life coaching, all I mean is just selling life coaching, having a life coach. That’s what you’re selling. You’re selling someone on having a life coach. So here’s what you need to know about selling someone on having a life coach, about selling general life coaching.

People want coaching. They want life coaching. I imagine it as therapeutic life coaching. Like a good mix of therapy and life coaching. So meaning, they want to sit for an hour and talk about themselves every week. That in itself is life-changing to just get it out.

People want other people in their corner. Focused on them, to give them perspective. That’s why I love having a life coach. I’m always going to have a business coach, always going to have a life coach. I love it. I love the feeling of having that person that I know I can take my stuff to every single week.

People want to change their lives. All of their lives. And the people who want to change any aspect of their life are the kind of people who want to change every aspect of their life. It’s a trend. Those of us who want to lose weight probably also want to manage their money better, have better relationships, have a more organized home, we just want a better life. It’s the tendency of those types of people who look for change in one area often will look for it in every area.

When you get stuck selling people on life coaching, it’s because you are stuck in your thoughts about – really, it’s about your business. You’re in what I could classify an industry/business facing problem, which has nothing to do with your client.

When you’re thinking about yourself as a business owner, when you’re thinking about the element of your business, oh, I need a niche, oh, I have to have one sentence, I have to have a website, I have to do this, this, and this, when you’re thinking about you as the business owner, you’re not thinking about your client and their experience.

I want you to imagine – I have a bonus in 2K called interrupt your mindset, and it’s really an entire training on the fundamental changes you have to make as a new coach in your own brain and then in interacting with clients in the world and building your business.

So I talk about building your self-belief, building your self-love, your self-integrity, really foundational work to changing your life. And here is one of the examples I give in that training. I talk about I want you to imagine that you have the best cupcakes in town and everyone starts coming to you for cupcakes.

And you’re selling them out of your house. They don’t care that you don’t have a business name or branding or colors. They care about how good your cupcakes are. And if you sell enough out of your house, you will have money and experience to expand into a storefront.

And even once you have a storefront, the way that you bring people in is by the smell of your cupcakes. Not by the way your cupcake shop looks. Have you ever been in Walmart’s bakery department when they make cookies? You don’t care what the packaging looks like. You’re like, where do I get the cookies you’re baking right now? They smell amazing.

So here’s another thing to think about. When you’re thinking about your client and how they experience coaching, the way they think about coaching, the way they interact with coaching in their mind, with the way they think about buying coaching, people new to coaching often have so much work to do in each area, they are so overwhelmed in everything that needs to be changed and they have so much desire to have all the results, all at the same time, that having to actually choose one area can actually be very difficult and it could be a barrier to entry in the coaching world.

So we need general life coaches in the way that we need again, general surgeons. I talked about that in episode 62. Now, here’s something else that I want you to consider. General life coaching is not less valuable, harder to sell, and it does not require less skill.

I actually think it hones your skill. When you have no idea what your client is going to bring to the call that day, when they are constantly bringing new things, different things, you have to rely more heavily on the foundational tools of life coaching, on your foundational knowledge. You have to bring more of an open mind. You can’t even prepare yourself for that type of call.

It’s not like you can prepare for exactly – you can’t run them through a program or a system and feel comfortable relying on things you’re going to teach them. You have to spend the entire time being open and coaching them. And you get to develop these foundational ideas.

So for example, especially for those of you who feel like I don’t have enough tools to teach my clients, the simple idea of fear, choosing fear over love, what serves you towards your goal versus what doesn’t, when you have a client that comes with marriage issues, work issues, weight issues, time management issues, you could show them where they are coming from either fear of lack or resistance in their mind and explore with them what it would feel like when it would be more like love and open and more sufficient in all of those areas.

And if they learn how to apply the concept to anything, they will then be able to apply it to everything. This is where your clients will start to see major changes in a lot of areas and they’ll want to keep paying you all the money. So you can stay with a client on just that concept for months.

Another simple concept, just story versus fact. Learning how to tell the difference as a coach between an actual factual circumstance versus a client’s story that they’re presenting like the news. That will make you sharp as a coach. And helping your client gain awareness by knowing the difference between their thoughts and their feelings or their thoughts and facts.

Teaching them how to just allow emotions that they feel, teaching them to create feelings on purpose, to generate them in their body, to use emotions to navigate whether they are believing things that serve them or things that don’t. Like I love when Byron Katie says that when you’re believing lies, you’ll always feel bad.

Teaching your students these foundational concepts and tools and how to apply it everywhere is everything. It’s extremely valuable. It’s extremely valuable for you to coach anyone on anything and it’s extremely valuable for your client to learn how to apply basic foundational coaching tools to their life in any aspect of their life.

And teaching yourself to lean on basic coaching principles that you know and have used to change your life will keep you out of giving advice and trying to do the work for your client and to solve their problems for them. I actually think every single coach should sell general life coaching for at least a year for this reason.

However, if you are not selling general life coaching and you haven’t for a year, don’t use that against yourself. If you knew immediately that you wanted to specialize in something like weight or marriage, that is not a problem, so don’t make it one. I’m just here selling those of you who don’t know where you want to specialize on how it’s not a problem, on how to sell it to yourself, and then how to sell it to other people.

So many of you are in the boat of needing to sell general life coaching, that being your next best step, and you’re being confused about it. And if you’re listening to this, I’m literally imagining the things that you’re freaking out about in your mind right now as you’re listening. If you’re like, I don’t know the tools of story versus fact, I don’t know, I’ve never heard anything about fear versus love, which I’m being a little bit exaggerating now, but if you are someone that’s like I don’t know enough tools, you have to start with changing your life.

You have to look at what are the things that you know to be true that you could teach someone else that have allowed you to feel the emotions that you have, to generate new feelings, to change your life in any way. You have to be able to break down how you came to coaching and how you’ve let coaching impact you and then how that’s impacted your results.

If you can just break that down, you can teach that to somebody else. And you can also join 2K and take the interrupt training and use that to change your life, use that to develop a way to explain it to other people. You can also hire a life coach. Change your life and then go help other people change it.

You can go to a coach training. There are a lot of options. You don’t need to be confused about that either. I want to talk about this being confused for a second because a lot of you use this to hold yourselves back, especially when it comes to niches and I think you do it whether you’re specializing or you’re selling general life coaching.

But because this episode is about selling general life coaching, I’m going to frame it in this subject. A lot of you think that when you talk about different results, that it’s confusing and not focused. That’s the thing that you’ll tell me is like, instead of saying you’re confused, you’ll say, well, I think it’ll just confuse my people.

That is just a thought. The way that I thought about my general specialty – first of all, the way that I thought about general life coaching is that general life coaching is a specialty. But the way that I thought about that is I am an expert on change, on the human experience. I help my clients understand their human mind and their human emotions.

I am a human behavior expert. I am a human relationship expert. That is the energy I presented myself with in the world as a life coach to other people. This was the energy of my meeting people, of shaking their hand, metaphorically or in real life. This was the energy of my copy, with my posts, and then eventually a year into it, my emails.

So the energy of your thinking will determine how you sell life coaching. Not having a niche or not. That’s just the circumstance. A 2K client recently posted that she gets confused on this concept of if you’re talking to everyone, you’re talking to no one. First, you don’t have to be talking to everyone about everything with general life coaching as a specialty. That is what you all just think. That is just you being confused about how to sell general coaching.

That is you wanting to stay confused, rather than getting out there and figuring it out. So you have to practice taking to someone about something within general life coaching before you get the hang of it. You can only learn this by being willing to do it wrong and evaluating along the way.

Many people have managed to have a general life coaching practice and fill it. So what are they talking about? Who are they talking to? Here’s what they actually did. They decided what to talk about. They decided who to talk about it with.

So for example, I’m talking to millennials. They want to change their life. They don’t know how. These are the things I will teach them to change anything and everything. I will teach them dot, dot, dot. You have to fill in the blanks.

But notice how you’re approaching selling general life coaching. So many of you, it’s from confusion. You will never unwind the confusion from I’m confused. You have to stop telling yourself that. You think if you have something specific to sell people, that you will stop feeling confused and that it’ll be easier, but it won’t be. You won’t be not confused.

You might just say it about different things. If you’re not confused on your niche and how to talk to people, it will present somewhere else if you have a confused mind. Or you’ll be confused even about selling a specialty. Confusion in our mind always creates confusion in our actions and our experience.

So you have to go to work to meet actual humans, to tell actual humans that you’re a life coach and practice telling them what that is and why it’s valuable. And I think it’s better to do it on a general level. That is how you will build your belief in life coaching itself. When you start thinking about why life coaching is important for anyone and everyone, why anyone could benefit, what results having a life coach creates, what impact those results have on their life and everyone around them.

And when you can start talking passionately about this, without being confused, which sucks all of your passion, then you will start selling general life coaching. People want it. People need it. People are looking for it right now. They want a coach who helps them through life. If you believe that, you will start selling that. And people will start buying that.

Okay, I wanted to end sharing this post with you, and if you’re not following us on IG, @staceyboehman, you better run and get to it because we share a lot of really great inspirational posts that I find from my students that they post on their normal page, their regular pages. And if I see it online and it’s amazing, we will get permission and we will post it on our IG.

And so one of the things we’ve been doing a lot of this year is sharing other people’s work that are in this industry to inspire and to educate our followers. So make sure you’re following us. Again, @staceyboehman. But I wanted to share this post.

So this actually is from my client Sade Curry, who actually does have a niche, but what she wrote about I think applies so much to helping you understand the value of just having a life coach. That’s all the post is about, is the value of having a life coach and I think it’s brilliant so I want to end sharing her message with you.

She starts the post with this. “Paying for a life coach is the same is paying someone to be your friend. I heard this interesting take on my profession last week. I replied that it was possible they were the same thing is you had a friend who had an established process for helping you get results, was trauma informed, was an expert in their area of coaching, understood your experience 100%, was willing to show up once a week to work with you on solutions to your issue, guaranteed that you would get results from your sessions together, could cut the time it would take you to achieve a goal in half, provided a non-judgmental space with no distractions or interruptions to work with you, was focused 100% on you, had the skill to see your blind spots objectively and help you shift them forever, had a library of techniques to help you overcome anxiety, procrastination, self-doubt, overwhelm, and imposter syndrome, knew how to motivate you to do things that you thought were impossible, kept you accountable to massive action, continually showed you were you were growing and improving, provided confidentiality, told you the truth without holding back, could help you transform your emotions, marriage, money, career, relationships, and health, spent his or her time looking for even better ways to help you get results. Yeah, if you had a friend like that who was willing to show up for you for free every week to do the deep work of helping you grow, then it would be the same thing. If you don’t have a friend like that, you might need a coach.”

I love that so much. So I wanted to share that with you because that’s the work you need to be doing to sell life coaching to anyone for anything. You need to understand the value of a life coach at that level and then learn how to go communicate that to other people.

And the way you learn to communicate that with other people is by practicing communicating it with other people in person or online. Doesn’t matter. It’s all you have to do. And you will sell life coaching. Any kind, to anyone. Alright my friends, I will see you next week.

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.