Hey, this is Lindsay Dotzlaf, and you are listening to Mastering Coaching Skills episode 277.

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, and today I have a little treat for you. Today I’m going to build a little bit on what I talked about last week, but I’m also going to tell you about something happening behind the scenes in my business that I think you might find interesting. Just give you a peek into something that’s quite ironic considering what I taught you last week and what I’m teaching you this week.

So, first I want you to think about last week’s episode. If you haven’t listened yet, that’s okay. You can listen to this first and then go listen to that if you want, or you can pause this, go listen, and then come back. But you will still understand the context even if you don’t pause and listen now. So last week I told you all about the business archetypes and about how the best way to build your business is to build with activities and marketing activities that align with who you are and that help you connect to the way that you are just wired as a human.

And then I shared a link with you for the archetypes, and I invited you to a training that I was hosting, and that was part of a launch for The Complete Coach, my new membership. And I have to tell you what happened after that because the irony here is not lost on me. And it’s actually a perfect setup for what I’m going to talk about today.

So, I hosted that training about the archetypes. First, people loved it. The training itself went really well, and then it led into a launch for The Complete Coach. And the launch didn’t go as I had hoped, right? So I just didn’t hit my launch goals. No big deal. Of course, I did sign some new clients into the membership, which is amazing. And if that’s you, I’m so glad you’re there. Welcome. I’m so thrilled that you decided to join us.

But what happened was, I didn’t meet my launch goals. And right away, when I thought about what am I going to do next, my very first instinct, before I even thought about it, was obviously just going to turn right around and do another launch, another training, another workshop, something exactly like I did last time, and I need to do that right away in order to bring in the money that is required to run my business.

And the fascinating part about that is I immediately felt so much dread in my body. It was very heavy. It lasted a couple of days. I just kept thinking, I don’t have the energy to do this again right now. So here’s the irony. So here I am, one week after telling you to find the strategies that fit you and stop forcing what doesn’t work. And I also shared how when I was selling The Coach Lab that there was a year where I continued to do webinars and workshops every month. Right? That was part of the whole episode.

And my brain’s first move, without even thinking twice about it, is to force myself to do the exact same thing over again because money, right? To just turn it around, do the same thing, just keep going, don’t even think about it, because that felt like the clear option and kind of the responsible thing to do. So for a couple of days, I sat in that dread, kind of trying to think about what would I teach in this workshop and what is it going to be about, and how many, you know, I started going down the strategy of how is it all going to work.

And then I woke up a couple of days later and I had a pause, and I saw it so clearly. I must have seen this in my dream or something. It was literally like I woke up with like a, wait, I see it. I was doing exactly what I coached my clients on all the time. I wasn’t even considering that there were other options. My brain just went to, here’s the way we do this, and so let’s just go and put your head down and just keep working and make it happen.

And I absolutely could have done that. I could have not caught this at all. I could have not seen like, wait a minute, this is exactly what you teach your clients. And I would have been fine. I would have done another workshop. I would have planned another launch, and I would have probably exhausted myself and not really enjoyed a lot of it.

Now, I always enjoy the part where I’m client-facing. It’s not about that. It’s about the whole launch experience, right? The writing of all the emails, the planning the workshop, the writing of the sales emails, the planning of the social media content. And not that any of that is wrong. What is wrong about it is the way I was feeling and that I wasn’t pausing to question any of it.

And so when I woke up with that realization, I just decided that morning, I’m not doing it again. I’m going to find a way, a completely different way to launch this membership. I’m not just going to go back to the same pattern that I used to sell The Coach Lab that exhausted me for that year.

I’m going to find something that feels more fun for me and in turn, more fun for everyone that’s participating. I don’t even know exactly what it looks like yet. I’m sharing it before I’ve even gotten to that point. It just actually felt important to share it right now in this moment.

And actually, as I’m recording this, the extra irony is that we are in the middle of Archetype Week inside of the membership, and it is going so amazing. The coaching sessions have been incredible. People are bringing the most amazing questions, and we’re having realization after realization.

And so if that’s you, if you’re in the membership, I want you to have a little laugh with me as you hear me record this because I have been coaching you all on this all week, and I am actually in the middle of it myself right now. The good news is, I caught it, I stopped myself, and I will be course correcting, and I’m very excited to figure out what that looks like. And just notice how even my energy shifts from the heavy, exhausted feeling of like, I have to do this again to I can’t wait to figure out how to solve this.

So then I had a thought, if this is happening to me, 10 years into running my business, I know that it’s happening everywhere. And I also know it’s happening everywhere because I’m coaching clients on it all the time. So many coaches are treating enjoyment of their business as something that they will earn after they hit certain goals. Maybe it’s a number of clients or a revenue number. And the assumption is that you work hard, you grind, grind, grind, you hustle, and then whenever you get there, you get to enjoy your business.

But what I keep seeing at every level, every form of business, inside the membership with newer coaches, inside Reimagine with my more established coaches, this is the backwards pattern. It does not work like this. The enjoyment is actually what creates the momentum and creates the results that you’re looking for.

So let’s talk about all of the ways that not enjoying your business, like all the ways that that shows up. The first one is forcing strategies that just don’t fit for you. That’s what I talked a lot about in last week’s episode. Maybe trying someone else’s playbook because it works for them and for all these other coaches that you’re watching, but every time you try, you dread it, you hate that strategy, you just can’t figure out why it’s not working for you, but you just keep going and almost like punishing yourself with it.

Another way it shows up is overworking until you hit a certain number. So treating a revenue milestone as the permission slip to finally give yourself some rest or to take a break. Right? Like, I’ll take Fridays off when I’m making X amount of money. Or, you know, thinking about, well, I heard that some coaches only work three days a week, and okay, that’s like a thing I’m going to work towards, and once I hit this huge milestone, then I’ll figure out how to do that.

Or I will stop hosting these workshops or trainings that I don’t love when I’m finally fully booked. And the number just becomes a moving target. Right? Consider that.

Whatever that goalpost is that you’ve decided on, the revenue, the number of clients, for most coaches, you do continue to grow. So that goalpost just keeps moving. So what happens is that the enjoyment of your business never arrives for more than a day because you’re just on to the next thing.

The other way it shows up is just being super rigid about what working looks like. Right? So like sitting at a desk for hours or following a strict schedule or structuring your day the way you think a real business owner would, even when it doesn’t match how you actually do your best work.

Now, all of these things I just said, they can be good for the right person. But if they are making you miserable, that is just something to pay attention to. Right? It’s fine to have a strict schedule if you love that. It’s not fine to have a strict schedule if you’re fighting against it the entire time and it just never gets better. That creates misery.

And the other way I see it show up is coaches recreating their corporate life or creating what they think a corporate life would look like. And this is a sneaky one because some coaches left a job specifically to do things on their own terms. And at first, they start to.

And then they slowly start to rebuild the exact same process, the exact same structure, and pressure and rules inside their own business without realizing it until one day they’re like, wait, why am I doing any of it this way? If you have done any of these things, this episode is definitely for you. Maybe save it, come back, and listen later.

Here’s why this is so important. As you build your business, the goalpost will move. It always does. First, it’s I’ll enjoy this when I sign my first client. Then it’s when I’m finally fully booked, and then it’s when I hit six figures. Then when I have consistent income or when I build my membership or fill in the blank.

There will always be a next benchmark. So if you don’t learn to enjoy along the way, you will spend the majority of your time running a business that you are just always waiting to enjoy. And that’s not what you built this for, at least I hope it isn’t.

Enjoyment is not ever a luxury that you earn. It’s not the reward for hitting your goals. It’s actually a business strategy. Not in a toxic positivity way, not in a just love what you do and the money just flows kind of way. But in a when you enjoy what you’re doing, it shows everywhere. People can feel that. It actually energizes you instead of draining you.

And I want to be very clear, I’m not saying that we don’t do hard things because building a business is challenging. There are so many challenges. And you’re going to have to do things that stretch you, that feel uncomfortable, that require growth. That’s part of it, and that is not at all what I’m talking about.

There’s a difference between a challenge that energizes you, the kind where you still feel maybe tired, it still feels hard, but you’re still fully engaged and you’re in it, and you can’t wait to figure it out. And then there’s a challenge that you just dread no matter what, over and over and over, even though you keep trying to change your thoughts about it.

There’s one that pulls you forward even when it feels uncomfortable, and then there’s the other one that you have to drag yourself through every single time. And you keep waiting for it to get easier or to be more enjoyable, and it just honestly doesn’t.

My year of webinars, yes, I learned a lot. I did have a lot of growth, and I’m not saying I shouldn’t have done that at all, but I should have paused and examined it at some point. Because the dread that showed up never got easier. If anything, I had to work through it more and more each time because it never really got more fun.

I just kept recovering from one and then bracing for the next. But then there have been other things that I have done in my business that have been a big uphill challenge to learn because it was new and it was uncomfortable, but it energized me and I was excited to keep experimenting.

So this isn’t about avoiding the discomfort. It’s about being honest with yourself about which kind of hard you’re in. When you enjoy what you’re doing, you show up differently, your energy shifts, your content sounds different, your consults feel different.

People can truly feel the difference between someone who’s forcing themselves to do something and someone who’s genuinely lit up by their work. When you’re lit up, you can sustain that effort for so much longer. You can show up more consistently, and you will attract the people who resonate with the real you instead of the performing version of you.

So let’s bring it back to me realizing that I do not want to just turn around and run the same launch again. Right? That instant dread I felt in my body. This is not my first time doing this, right? I’ve done this many times. I’ve done lots of webinars, lots of workshops, lots of training. So that instant dread isn’t growth to get on the other side of. It’s data. And the dread isn’t laziness or lack of discipline because I was fully prepared to go forward with the dread. It was my brain telling me this is not the path.

And so when I chose, when I paused and chose differently, I didn’t abandon my goal. The goal is still there. I just decided that the way to get there is different and I’m willing to find it. So here’s what I want you to sit with. What’s one thing in your business right now that you’re tolerating because you think you’re supposed to? What would you do differently if you gave yourself permission to lead with enjoyment right now, not after you get to some magic number.

And here’s a really powerful question that I actually asked today in my Reimagine mastermind. I asked them to rate their business on a scale of one to 10, how much are they enjoying it? One being, hate it, it’s the worst. 10 being, it’s the dream, right? It’s everything I want it to be.

And then I asked them, okay, whatever number you chose, what would it take for that number to just move up one to two numbers? What would you have to do differently? What would need to shift? There can be a lot of good information there if you answer that.

Okay, so to wrap this up, I need you to know you don’t have to overhaul everything. It’s just those small noticings of where are you postponing enjoyment? Where are you kind of punishing yourself because you’re not where you think you should be? And when you’re doing that, is it actually helping you get where you want to go? Or could it be the very thing that’s slowing you down?

Okay, so if you haven’t taken the business archetype quiz from last week, I’ll link it again for you in the show notes. A lot of people have been taking it. I’ve been getting a lot of feedback that you’re loving it. So, that’s so fun. I love that. I’ll link it in the show notes so you can go take it. You can find your archetype. It’s a great starting point for figuring out what you actually enjoy and what type of strategies might actually fit your archetype and your wiring a little better.

And if you want to go deeper, this is exactly the kind of work we do inside The Complete Coach. Not just finding the right strategy, but building a business that really feels good to run. I’ll drop the link for both in the show notes. The Complete Coach, if you’re listening in real time, is not open right now, but the link will take you directly to the waitlist so that you will be the first to know when it’s open again.

I’m so glad you’re here, and I’ll see you again next week. Goodbye.

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.