Ep #203: A Simple Exercise to Align Your Coaching and Marketing Energy

Hey, this is Lindsay Dotzlaf, and you’re listening to Mastering Coaching Skills, Episode 203.

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 are here as always. And today I am going to give you a really, really tangible, quick exercise that you can do to do a little check-in on how you are feeling about your coaching and how you are feeling about your business and how those two things can play together and how you can use one to enhance the other, okay?

This is something actually that came up on a Coach Lab call. Someone came to the call and asked this question and I thought I have to share this coaching on the podcast because it is very simple and it can be really powerful if you let it be, all right? So for those of you that are coaches and entrepreneurs, I know some of you are coaches, maybe you coach for someone, you work for someone, but even if that is you, if you are thinking of being an entrepreneur, you are thinking about selling your own coaching, this will be really helpful for you.

So here is what I want you, before I even tell you what I am going to talk about, I want you to answer these questions. I want you to think about when you are coaching your clients. If you are a brand new coach, maybe it is like if you are doing some free coaching, if you are doing some self-coaching, if you are thinking about coaching, even if you do not have clients, use whatever you have reference to. Or maybe you have a lot of clients, you love coaching your clients. I want you to think about this. I want you to answer these questions.

When you are coaching or when you are about to coach, when you are hopping into a coaching session, how are you feeling in that moment? How do you feel when you are coaching? And maybe what are your main thoughts about showing up for coaching? Whether it is before a coaching session or in the middle of a coaching session, what are you feeling? What are you thinking? You can answer either or both of those, right?

So if you can easily answer one, do not overthink it, just go with that for now. And then I want you to think about when you are marketing and selling your coaching on the entrepreneur side of your business, what do you feel when you are going to do that? When you are like sitting down to maybe write a social media post or write an email to your list or figure out that sales page or do a sales call, how do you feel about doing those activities or when you are getting ready to do them? And what are maybe your main thoughts? So I know I just gave a bunch of examples, but just pick one, right? Like if you write emails regularly to your list, something that is very specifically marketing, let us say to your list, how do you feel in that moment and what are your main thoughts about it?

So you can pause for a second if you need and just think about those for a second, but just go with whatever comes to you immediately. And the main thing I want you to notice is are they the same or are they different? Hopefully they are similar, at least, well, hopefully they are similar if you love your answers, right, if you are like feeling good doing all of them, amazing, even if that is true, this is still going to be useful for you.

But what I really want you to notice is that there is a big difference between those two things. So someone came to The Coach Lab call recently, shout out to Heather, you are amazing, thank you for bringing this for coaching, was so powerful. We spent a few minutes talking through it and she said she took some time off of her business for a little bit, I forget why, she had some personal things happening and she is coming back, she is getting into coaching and kind of restarting her business or picking up where she left off. I do not remember all the exact details, but what she brought for coaching was, I feel so excited to coach.

I feel so great about my coaching. I feel, you know, just so ready to dig in and so open and ready to coach when I think about coaching my clients. But then, when I think about marketing my business and marketing my coaching and selling my coaching, I feel confused and shut down, maybe these were not her exact words, but it was something similar to this, right? They were just very different. It was like, I do not know what I am doing, I do not know who I am talking to, and I just feel so different. So I was like, okay, cool, let us dig into this.

First of all, let us think about when you are getting ready to hop into a coaching session, what are the main thoughts that you are having? And I did take some notes during our call so that I could say some of these things back to her, and then I just thought, oh, this will be really useful to tell you some of them, but your thoughts might be completely different and that is okay. But her thoughts were very simple. This is going to be so much fun. I am completely in service or I am ready to be totally in service to this client.

We are just going to explore. I am just exploring. I am just going to help them see, right? Which what she meant by that was like, I am just going to help them create awareness. I am going to help them see things that they do not see now. I am going to help them create new awareness.

Those were her main thoughts. And so then I asked her, okay, when you are thinking those things and you are headed into those coaching sessions, how are you feeling? And I did not take notes on that, but I do remember it being some form of, you know, I am like feeling curious and open and just kind of excited, like ready to go and just ready to show up and deliver. And these are all incredible, right? Like those are ways that you want your coach to feel when they are getting on a session with you to do some coaching, especially like my favorite feelings for coaches to have when they are in a session is to be pretty like open, curious. Those create a lot of just open space for you to receive whatever the client brings.

Those are not like super charged or high emotions. Those are like fairly calm, but just open, ready. Then I said, okay, tell me what is different when you think about marketing your business. I do not remember specifically if she even told me really how she was marketing or specifically what she was thinking about, but we will just use the email, for example. Email example I used a minute ago. So when I said like, you know, how do you feel when you sit down to do that task, to like work in your business, not to coach, but to like sell your coaching, to market your coaching?

She was like, oh my gosh, so opposite, right? I feel like closed off. I feel confused. I feel like I do not know what I am doing. I feel, you know, just pressure. I feel like I am in a hurry could not have been more opposite than the way she described how she feels when she is coaching or when she is about to coach.

And so we just spent some time exploring those two things, right? And it was like, how can we get you to feel and really kind of think similar things when you are thinking about marketing your coaching as you do when you are thinking about coaching your clients? What would that be like, right? She was like, what? That would be amazing, yes. And then we did explore, you know, here are some ways you can get into that.

But for you, for the person listening, I really want you to think about that. If you have a similar experience, I know I work with a lot of coaches who have very similar experiences, and yours might even be the opposite. You might feel some of those more positive feelings about your marketing and your selling. Maybe you have a background in marketing or you just have more experience in that area. But then when it comes to the actual coaching, you get nervous or you feel that pressure. So it does not really matter.

You can use this exercise either way. But when you compare the two, pick the one that feels good. If there is a difference, pick the one that feels good. And then ask yourself, how can I apply these feelings? So I will just use her example. How can I apply these feelings to my marketing, to my selling?

What do I think I would be doing? What actions would I be taking? How would it be different? If when I thought about my marketing, I was feeling open, curious, excited, ready to go, ready to show up, right? Like that would be so different than feeling the opposite of that, right? Then feeling like confused, shut down, you know, not knowing what you are doing. So that is it for today. That is the message. I want you to do this exercise for yourself and to compare those two things. Now, inside The Coach Lab, obviously a lot of what we focus on is coaching skills and is the coaching side, the coaching aspect of coaching, right? Which I love. And I think it is so important, I have been talking about this a lot lately, to really think about the overlap of those two things.

If you are an entrepreneur, if you run your own business, the overlap of how your marketing and selling affect your coaching and how your coaching affect your marketing and selling. But if you can lean into one of them that you love, right, like pick the one you love, pick the one that feels great when you are doing it, and then ask yourself, how do I take all my thoughts and beliefs about this thing and apply it also to the rest, right, apply it to the other side? How could that be possible? Like what thoughts would I have to believe about marketing and selling to feel open and to feel curious. One of my favorite thoughts that she said, which is something I use all of the time when I am showing up for a coaching session with my clients is I will think I am just ready to coach, just ready to be completely in service.

I cannot wait to see what my clients bring today. You can take those similar thoughts and translate them into your marketing, into your selling. I cannot wait to just show up in service right now, right? And then you just explore what actions would I be taking if that is the thought I was having? Because usually if you are feeling closed off or confused or shut down or pressure, your thoughts are very different, right? They are not like, I am just here to be in service.

I cannot wait to see what we talk about today. I cannot wait to see what comes out of this. They are probably more like, I need to get a sale, I need to make money, I have not hit my goals, what do I need to say to get this client to sign up with me for coaching? I do not know what I am doing, my niche is not clear. All those things that I hear on repeat from a lot of coaches, especially newer coaches or coaches that have been really working at that beginning phase of their business for a while, but this also translates into, of course, more experienced realm of coaching where maybe you are selling a new offer that you have never sold before or you are doing something like a webinar or running ads or writing a different kind of copy for something that you have never done before, I invite you, no matter where you are, no matter what level, I do not know if that is the right word, but you know what I mean, what level of business you are in, I invite you to compare those two things. How do you feel in your coaching?

What are your thoughts about it? How do you feel around your marketing and selling? What are your thoughts about that? Take the one that feels good and ask yourself, how do I apply this to the other side? It is going to show you some really powerful examples of how you could be showing up for one or the other. And again, this is the way I tend to think too, what my client brought.

I trend towards always loving the coaching and sometimes feeling iffy, more iffy about the selling and marketing, although that has definitely changed over the years, but it is mostly changed because I do spend so much time focusing on the coaching, focusing on thinking about my clients and on coaching my clients that I am easily, much more easily than I ever have been able to before, I am able to translate that into all the other areas of my business. And again, it can go either way.

So if you love the selling and marketing aspect, but you are terrified every time you have to get on a coaching session, or maybe you are doing something new for the first time in coaching, right? Maybe you are coaching a group, or you are coaching someone, talking to someone you have never met before, or coaching on a topic you have never coached on before, right, you are just like something different is happening on that side, but you love marketing and you love selling, take whatever your thoughts are, right? Maybe it is like, I just love telling everyone about how important coaching is. How can you translate that into coaching with your client?

How do you feel when you tell yourself those things? How can you create that feeling in your coaching sessions? I hope this was helpful. This was short and sweet today because this feels like a very simple but very powerful way to create a quick shift for you in your coaching and hopefully in your business as well. I will talk to you again next week. Thanks for being here.

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. See you next week.