112: Fall Back In Love With Your Coaching Business

This episode is a surprise package. It was to me and hopefully it will be to you too. Find the full transcript at prosperouscoach.com/112.The longer I’m in business for myself — and it’s been a couple of decades now — the more I realize that once you have the strategy in place, success at your coaching business is largely an inner game.And that’s mostly true about all aspects of life.In a few minutes I’m going to share something radical that could help you to fall bacj in love with your coaching business and your life. But first let me take you back 14 years to an inspiring moment in time.In 2006, when I first launched Prosperous Coach, it was a membership program with a year’s worth of curriculum for new coaches. One of my members made a huge impression on me. And I realized that while I was teaching other coaches how to launch, one of my Prosperous Coach members became my teacher.This isn’t unusual in coaching by the way. Our clients have a lot to teach us.This woman, I’ll call her Reena, was incredible! Smart, funny and wise. She was warm and encouraging to everyone. She accepted everyone as they were and filled the Prosperous Coach community with love.She also had amazing successes early on that were so inspiring and possibly a bit intimidating to other coaches. Clients were flocking to Reena. She was getting $10,000 coaching contracts.And before you start imagining a statuesque woman in an expensive suit … Reena was, I think, 5 feet tall, boyish, wore no makeup and could care less about clothes. She was not memorable by her looks but by her presence.She’d always say that Prosperous Coach made her prosperous. She was a walking billboard for me. And it made me blush because ultimately I knew that I deserved little credit for her coaching business success.I say this not to be self-deprecating but because over time we became long distance friends. Beyond her graduating from my program she’d touch in from time to time saying how much I and Prosperous Coach meant to her. And, I learned that she had many businesses before her coaching business, ranging from farms to corporate think tanks and other diverse things — each one of them wildly successful.She’d start a business, bring in a team, nurture that team with love, respect and encouragement then turn over responsibility and move on to her next adventure. She was a consummate coach helping other people’s stars rise. And she was beloved among her colleagues.She never talked about money but I knew she was wealthy in every respect of the word. And she was the most FREE person I’d ever met.She shared stories about enrolling a new coaching client while sitting next to someone on an airplane. Those clients would champion her, promoting her far and wide. She never marketed ever. Companies scrambled to hire her for keynote speaking gigs and she wasn’t even trying for that.Years into our friendship I asked Reena how she made so much happen so effortlessly and she told me a harrowing and deeply personal story, which is why I’m not sharing her real name. She was abducted at the side of a road, dragged into a forest, beat and abused and left for dead.She survived by crawling 15 miles out of the forest. And she started a new life unafraid and accepting life the way it came to her. She didn’t tell me this story as a victim. She told it as the moment of her life transformation. And what I learned from her is this … I make my success by the way I think, by how well I accept myself, my circumstances and other people.Read about the "radical" concept here.