Ep #173: Avoid These Mistakes in Your Coaching Business

Hello, this is Lindsay Dotzlaf and you are listening to Mastering Coaching Skills episode 173. To really compete in the coaching industry, you have to be great at coaching. That’s why every week, I will be answering your questions, sharing my stories, and offering tips and advice so you can be the best at what you do. Let’s get to work.

Hey coach, I am so happy you’re here today, as always. And today I want to share something kind of special with you, a little different, a little behind the scenes of something I’m creating for my business. So I’m currently creating a new opt-in, a new like evergreen type opt-in that I will use on my website, in Facebook ads, just in lots of different places.

And what it is, is a video series where you’ll get an email each day with a new video breaking down all of the reasons I didn’t hit some of my goals last year, and some specifics around the goals I didn’t hit, and just really breaking down all the reasons that I think I didn’t hit them. And this episode today is going to be that very first video.

So if you decide that you want to hear all the reasons, go ahead and find the show notes, click the link, and you can sign up to get an email delivered to your inbox every day with a video and an audio option to listen to all the lessons.

And just to kind of know what to expect, you’ll get an email every day. Again, you can watch the video, you can listen to the audio, and it’ll be me breaking down kind of, here’s a reason that I didn’t hit my goals last year, and here’s what that means for you. So obviously it’s not just going to be about me, that would be pretty boring. I mean, maybe not, you might find some of it entertaining. But really, I want the takeaway for you to be, what can you learn from it?

So in every video, I ask you questions. I give you little exercises to do or to think about so that you can either avoid the same mistakes that I made, or maybe catch yourself when you’re kind of in the middle of doing the same thing, or just anything like that, right? Just any way that I can help you. Plus, it is truly in the spirit of being very transparent and very much an open book for you to really learn from the kind of deep behind the scenes of what goes on in an almost million dollar coaching practice. So I hope you enjoy. If you love it, again, go to the show notes or find my Instagram, we’ll have the link there too, so that you can be sure to get all of the goodness.

And even if you’re already on my email list and you receive my emails, we won’t be spamming my whole list and sending all of these to everyone. So even if you are already there, if you want to be sure to get all of the episodes and all of the lessons, still be sure to just go sign up.

All right. Oh, and actually, before we dive into this episode, I want to give one quick plug, just in case this feels like something you might be interested in. In a couple of weeks I will be in Miami hosting a live event. It is part of my advanced certification, but we actually kind of detached it from the certification so that it does kind of partner with it, but not everyone that’s in the advanced certification is coming to the live event.

So what that means is we have a couple extra spots and we are opening it up to my entire list. And now I’m going to mention it on my podcast, but only this once. So if you’re listening in real time and you would love to join me in Miami the first week of March, email me, lindsay@lindsaydotzlafcoaching.com, and I will get you all of the details. I don’t want to take up time sharing them here.

But if you think that sounds like something you want to do, it’ll be a week of focusing on visibility, really thinking about what that means for you in your coaching practice. Not just visibility of yourself, but for your ideas as a coach, the way you coach, your style of coaching, just you in general as a coach, as a practice and how you put all of that out into the world and how you can take care of yourself while doing it.

All right, so if that sounds like fun, and it’s going to be a lot of fun in a beautiful house in Miami with lots of surprises and lots of goodness. So if that sounds like fun and something that you just want to on a whim, last minute join us for, send me an email and I will answer any questions you have and send you all the info.

All right, with no further ado, here is the episode. Hello. Hey, coach. I am so happy you’re here. I am really grateful that you found me somehow, however you ended up here and that you have opted in to learn all the mistakes I made over the last year and how they can help you. So I am Lindsey Dotzlaf, it’s so nice to meet you.

If you’re new to my world, I am the founder of The Coach Lab and the creator of the Mastering Coaching Skills podcast. I help coaches create businesses, coaching practices that they love. Not necessarily on the business side, but from a coaching perspective. I help them develop practices they love and be incredible at what they do. I teach foundational coaching skills, and I also have an advanced certification where I’m teaching coaching mastery.

So, as you can hear, all I’m thinking about all day, every day is coaching. The art of coaching. And that’s going to come into play over some of these videos. But for now, I just want to let you know what’s about to happen. So however you landed here, I’m so glad you’re here. Over the next days, you’re going to be getting one lesson from me every day, where what I’ve done is I’ve spent about a month, honestly, analyzing my entire last year of my business.

So while I’m recording these, it’s actually the very beginning of February 2024, so the year I’m talking about is 2023. But if you’re listening to this or finding this in the future, they are all going to be very relevant moving forward. They’re not date specific.

So I just broke it all down and I removed all of my shame about not hitting my goals, all of my disappointment. I removed all of that, set it aside, set my ego aside and said, okay, now what am I going to learn from this? And I came up with a handful of lessons that I want to share with you. It’s going to be a little bit like I’m just giving you my journal, you just get to read through it, or more like maybe the notes section of my phone. I don’t really keep a journal. But you just get to read through it.

But then imagine getting to do that, but then me sitting there with you and saying, and here’s what you can learn from this. Please don’t make this mistake. Or because we all make mistakes because we are human, more like, please let me help you when you notice that you’re doing this, or let me help you move through it faster or avoid it where possible.

So that’s what we’re going to do. And to be really specific, because I’m going to be specific, I’m going to give numbers, I’m going to give all the things in these videos. It’s going to be like an open book. To be very specific, when I say the goals that I didn’t hit in 2023, I want to be clear. When I talk about setting goals, I talk about setting holistic or multifaceted goals.

So for example, in my coaching practice, I might have I want to make X amount of money in my business this year. That’s just one goal. Attached to that goal I also have, and I want to do that not working weekends, right? I want to spend weekends and vacations with my family. I want to do that, not working before 10 AM. That’s really specific, but just something that I love to practice in my business.

I want to do it knowing that every client or as many clients as possible are creating the results that they hire me for and feel fully supported along the way. This is one of the most important goals to me, always. This has always been a goal attached to, you know, anytime I’m setting a money goal. This goal always gets to come along because I don’t want to sacrifice the client experience to make more money. That’s just not why I’m here. It’s not what I’m in it for. And you’ll hear more about that as I continue to talk through these.

So when I think about the goals, one goal that I also didn’t mention is that I want to have an effect on the coaching industry. I want to make some shifts in the industry. That one feels huge to me. It’s kind of one that’s always over the last couple of years, as I’ve created The Coach Lab and the spaces that I’m running currently, it’s one that just is always kind of hovering around, right?

That’s like overall, here’s one of the most broad goals, is to have an impact on the coaching industry. To teach coaches that your client’s results are really important because that’s why they hire you. To teach coaches to care more about their clients than how much money they make. Not that money is not important because you have to have money to run a business. This is something I’ve had to learn and I’ve worked on over the years, so you’ll hear me talk about that too.

So just for specifics, last year my money goal was a million dollars. And I made about almost exactly half of that. Not a problem, right? That’s still a lot of money. Now, I also want to be very clear that when it comes to a money goal, there are reasons you set one. There are great reasons to set one. And one of the great reasons is knowing how much it costs to run your business and knowing that you probably want to make at least that amount or more, right?

So to be very transparent with you, I have been a coach since 2015. I have grown a very successful business. I have made more over the last couple of years than I did this year. And so when I think about the money that I spent in my business, the money that I spend hiring support coaches and people to help me in my programs. The money I spend having a full-time business manager who is like the love of my life, I couldn’t run my business without her.

What I spend paying myself, right? Because it’s not a charity, I don’t work for free. Hopefully you feel that way too. Unless of course you are coaching as a charity, which is a different situation. Taking into account all the software and just everything that it takes to run my business in the way I want to run it and all the things that it takes to fully support my clients. So, obviously, I didn’t hit the money.

Another part of my goal is to help as many coaches as I can work on their foundational coaching skills to know that they have a really solid base for their coaching. To know that every single client session that they go to, they feel supported, they have a place to come talk about what worked, what didn’t work. How can I be better in the next session?

They have a place to unpack all the just human things that happen in coaching sessions, which if you’ve ever coached even a handful of clients, you know sometimes stuff comes up that you are like, okay, I did not see that coming or that’s never happened before. Or I don’t know how to navigate this situation.

I help coaches with every single piece of that. I also help them be really solid in their actual coaching skills, right? Like how to create awareness, how to help clients set goals, how to help clients make decisions and others that I won’t go deep into right now. But that was also a piece attached to my money goal, is wanting to help as many coaches do this work that I have the capacity for.

And, honestly, I don’t remember what my exact number was of, you know, maybe like new clients that I wanted to enroll into The Coach Lab, but I do know I didn’t hit it. I think I hit about three fourths of the number, or half to three fourths. Maybe I’ll look it up and say it in one of the future videos. I didn’t mean to leave it out, I just forgot to look up the number.

And so those are the two goals that when I look at like all the other things, I was great with my scheduling. I didn’t overwork, which I can have a tendency to sometimes. I feel super aligned with my values. Like all the other things, great. But those two things are the places where I fell short.

And I’ve heard a lot of people talking recently about, oh, coaches need to be more transparent or coaches don’t talk about fails. I’m like, wait, what? Coaches are failing all of the time. I don’t care if it’s coaches making millions and millions of dollars, having huge businesses. I would actually argue that those coaches are probably failing more than coaches that don’t have businesses like that.

And so in the spirit of full transparency, I had this idea too, you know, as I was really digging into what are all the things that affected me not hitting my goals. At first I was like, this information is so useful, thinking of it for myself. And then I realized or, again, in the spirit of full transparency, what if I shared all of it with you? So that’s what I’m doing.

So that’s kind of an intro. That’s who I am. That’s kind of what we’re doing here. And since this is the first video, now I’m just going to tell you the very first thing. I would say the number one reason that I did not hit those goals last year –

Oh, and before I tell you what it is, I also want to add a little caveat that I only examined things that I have control over. So what you won’t hear in these videos is, you know, because of a recession or because of just anything like that, that’s outside of my control.

Not that those things don’t affect our businesses, because of course. If you’re an entrepreneur, if you have a business of your own, anything that’s happening in the world affects our businesses, right? But what I’m here to kind of teach you is the things that we can control, because I think that’s the thing that gives us the power to fix what we’re trying to fix, right?

So the number one reason that I did not hit my goals last year is because at some point during the year, I wasn’t connected to my vision, to my mission. I forgot the mission. And it became a little more about as I was failing over and over and over. And even when you hear the amount of money that I made, you’re probably like, yeah, but that’s still a lot of money. Yes, and it takes a lot of money to run a business, right?

At least a business of my size, it takes a lot of money. I have hundreds of clients and I want to make sure they’re all taken care of. That costs money. So when I lost connection to my mission, it started becoming about, oh no, we didn’t make enough money this month. How do we solve that quickly? What’s just the next thing? What’s the next thing? What’s the next thing?

I know so many of you have been in this situation, even if you’re a brand new coach and you’ve never made any money, right? It’s easy to get in that cycle. Or maybe you’ve made a little bit of money or you’ve not made enough money to sustain yourself as a coach. Or maybe it’s not money, but maybe it’s another piece of your goal; the number of clients you want to work with, the impact you want to have.

When you look at it and you’re like, oh, I’m not doing it over and over and over, it can kind of become easy to forget to connect back to your mission, right? And forget to really ground yourself in this is why I’m here. This is what I’m doing. I must keep going, but I have to remain connected to the reason I’m here, to the reason I’m doing this at all. Because the reason I’m doing this is to not hit goals.

I want you to consider that. Hear it again if you need to. The reason you are running a coaching business is not to hit your goals. That is not the purpose of your business. It is not the mission of your business to hit goals, right? My mission as a coach is to make big shifts in the coaching industry. It’s to help coaching be an industry that’s taken really seriously as part of someone’s maybe mental health journey and healing and holding the space and just helping our clients fulfill their human capacity, right?

In holding that space for them and letting clients be able to set big goals or even set small goals or say things out loud for the very first time. And to be the person who gets to hold that for them and who gets to help facilitate change in every client. And I think when, as coaches, when we lose sight of that vision, it can become a little more about the business, right?

And what’s really interesting is that I talk about this all the time and I teach this all the time, how it is, you know, when I think about growing my business, I’m not usually setting goals with just the money in mind or whatever. But when you’re not hitting your goals and when you find yourself in this hamster wheel of like, oh, here we go again, I didn’t hit the goal again. I didn’t hit the goal again. It interestingly becomes all about the money.

Not in the way that like, you know, for sure there are coaches, just like there are people in every industry where it’s like, I’m just here for the money, right? I heard that this was an easy business to be in. And that’s not what I’m talking about.

But what I am talking about is, a lot of you probably really resonate with this, where you’re like, I know I’m not in it for the money. I’m in it for this bigger vision, this draw to help people. This draw to be the person in my client’s life who just stands with them and helps them move forward. But for some reason I find myself thinking about money all the time, which of course you are, right? You’re trying to keep your business afloat or to build your business.

So when I bring myself back to what is the mission of my business? To shift the coaching industry. To help coaches take this profession really seriously without taking themselves so seriously, right? To help coaches create coaching practices in their style, using their style of coaching, creating all of it in a way that feels great to them so they can be in love with their practices and show up every day for their clients, all while living their life, right? While having a life outside of coaching.

That is my mission. All of that feels so important to me. And every time I forget it, I don’t hit my goals because like, let’s really unpack that and think about why that is because this is not just true for me, it’s true for you too. No matter what your mission is, your mission does not have to be the same as mine. It’s probably not. But I want you to take a second and really connect to your mission. What is it?

And if you don’t know, maybe after this video or after you’re finished listening here, spend a minute to think about it. Why did you get here? Why are you a coach? What is the pull you feel to help your clients? What change in the world will your work make? Really meditate on those. Let them sink in. Find your answers. You might have to dig a little bit if you’ve never really deeply considered this.

I am so clear about what my mission is and when I become detached from it, I start showing up differently. I start forgetting that coaching is my favorite part of my business, which is a future video. I feel irritated that I have to get up in the morning and do the work, right? When I’m making it more about me, am I failing? Am I not hitting the goals? Am I in panic over I need to make money this month because I have this business to run? When I make it more about that than my mission, everything about the way I show up changes.

I want you to consider, like here’s your takeaway. So at the end of all of these videos, I’m just going to give you some questions to consider, some exercises to do, or just some things to think about. And for each video, probably some of them will resonate more with you than others. You know, if one of the videos is like, oh, I don’t know, I don’t really know if I connect with this, then don’t do that one. Do the other exercises. But to me, this one should hopefully land for all of you.

If you are not connected to your mission, building your business is going to be so much harder. So consider those questions I already asked you, right? What is your mission? Why are you here? How did you get here? What drew you in? And then I want you to think about your last year, your last month, your last however long, or just specifically a time recently that you didn’t hit a goal.

And just ask yourself, how were you not connected to your work in the world? How were you not connected to the mission that you have of being a coach? Where did that break down? At what point did you stop becoming connected to it? And maybe why? Why do you think that is?

And then when you think about your mission, can you feel it in your body, the connection to the work you’re doing? Can you find that place in your body? For me, it is like a solid knowing down the center of my person, center of my body. If you’re on the video, I’m showing you. But if you’re just listening to audio, like literally my neck, like just below my chin, my neck all the way down to like where I’m sitting on my chair. Just a very rooted feeling.

When I am connected to that mission, I feel so solid. I don’t feel the anxiety of, oh no, what am I going to do next? That thing didn’t work, now what’s next, right? When I say that, if you’ve been there recently, can you even just feel how it shifts in your body? How you go from that feeling of being rooted to your mission to in your head, oh no, we have to figure this out.

So I want you to explore this a little bit. And then I also want you to see if you can play with that. If you can shift it. If you can feel in your body, and it might feel differently for you, so figure out whatever that feeling is, that deeply rooted feeling to your mission. And then can you shift it? Can you take your mind to like, okay, but what’s the next step? And how does that feel, right? How does that shift what’s happening?

And can you control it? Can you even like move those back and forth? Like from feeling rooted – And maybe you’re feeling very rooted in your coaching right now, so maybe use a different example. You can also use all of this with your clients, right? Everything that I always teach is focused on you as the coach and also things that you can immediately take and apply with your clients. You have my full permission to use all of these questions, all of these exercises with your clients and any goal that they have.

All right, that’s where we’re going to end for today. Stay tuned, there’s a lot more to come. Hopefully this was really useful for you. I would love to hear any feedback you have. If you want to email me or get back with me, let me know, either tell me what your mission is or how this really shifted something for you or what it brought up for you. I would love to hear it and I will be back with more. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Mastering Coaching Skills. If you want to learn more about my work, come visit me at lindsaydotzlafcoaching.com. That’s Lindsay with an A, D-O-T-Z-L-A-F.com. See you next week.