Ep #45: Clarity Is a Decision

You are listening to episode 45 of The Confident Coaches Podcast, the one where you decide to be clear and not confused.

Welcome to The Confident Coaches Podcast, a place for creating the self-confidence you need to do your best work as a life coach. If you want to bring more boldness, more resilience, and more joy to your work, this is the place for you. I’m your host, Amy Latta. Let’s dive in.

Hey, my Confident Coaches. How’s everybody doing out there? I really hope everyone is doing fabulously. Now, I am recording this podcast during a pretty big storm. And Lou, the Chubby Chihuahua is kind of freaking out. So, we’re going to dive right in. No chitty-chat today. We’re going to get this thing done because the dog’s freaking out, there’s big storms.

But I want to make sure I get this out to you because I love today’s topic. I love this topic so much. It kind of blew my mind the first time I heard it and I’ve been sharing it with my clients and their brains are kind of exploding too. So, I hope yours explodes today also. Isn’t that why we do the podcast? What can I share today that would make the listener’s brains go…

So, let’s dive in. Today’s topic came out of some new content that I have created for the Confident Coaches Mastermind. Now, at this point, I have three masterminds running at any given time. Now, this is what I’ve been working up to all year.

So, I’m recording this the first week of September. I started, all of last year, I was doing one on one coaching, knowing that my demand was so high that it was time to start testing the waters to see if groups would work.

So, I started my first group back in January of this year, which of course is 2020. So, January of 2020 with the first week of September of 2020 feels like 20 years ago. But I promise you, it was only eight or nine months ago. So, I started the group just as proof of concept. Is this something that people want? Does it work? Does this material translate to a group? Can I do group coaching?

That’s why we recommend doing one on one coaching. There are many ways to skin this cat, my friends. You don’t have to do it any one way, but to understand the reason why it is strongly recommended that you start out in one on one coaching, because learning how to hold the space for an individual person is important so that you can then figure out how to hold the space for five people or 10 people or 15 people, that everybody’s getting value from the coaching that’s happening, even if they aren’t the person getting coached.

So, that is one reason why it’s a good practice to start out on one on one. So, I needed to figure that out. That was the whole point of my January group; does this translate? Will this work? Can I get my clients results in a group?

And, as you have already heard, April is a huge example of that. April Price. I’ve interviewed April, I’ve interviewed Denita, I’ve interviewed Jackie Skinner. All three of them were in my January group. So, yes, I had the proof of concept.

As I was coaching that January group, I created the Confident Coaches member site. Now, that was part of my master coach project. And that would end up being the backbone for every group moving forward. Here’s where you can find all of the tools, the concepts, all of my unique take on confidence coaching.

It’s literally the only kind of confidence coaching like this that you will find anywhere because I’ve taken the best of what I’ve learned from all of my mentors. I’ve mixed it with my own brain and my own experiences and I have created, quite frankly, the best damn confidence coaching materials you will find in the industry. I am so sure about this.

That, and with the creation of the member site and housing all of my intellectual property in one place, I launched that in April, then knowing I would start selling a new group in May, with the intention of starting a new group every other month.

And since May, I’ve started a July group. And now a September group started just this week. And the next group will be in November, and then in January, and then so on. And I love this format for so many stinking reasons. Like, really understand that the skills that you learn in the Confident Coaches Mastermind, the skills that I share here on The Confident Coaches Podcast you will carry with you to every single level of your business.

You will never not need the five steps to creating self-confidence, believing on purpose, embracing discomfort, being your own best mentor, having your own back, how to keep going. It’s the backbone of the member site and the member site is the backbone of the mastermind. And I want to make this mastermind so ridiculously accessible to every single life coach out there.

If you are hearing this, this is the mastermind that will help you feel more confident, sign more clients, and get you to that 8K a month business that all of those life coaches decided that we wanted when we got started. 8K a month, you do that 12 times, you’re a six-figure coach. You’re a six-figure business.

So, that means that I am running three masterminds at a time. And at a price that is of ridiculous value. Again, I want to make this so ridiculously accessible. So much overdelivering for what you get. It’s hands down the best value in the mastermind world right now for life coaches.

But I am running three masterminds at a time. So, in order to serve my clients more, not less, I spent all summer going into my brain to solve for how can I overdeliver to every single client that is in each of these masterminds at the same time so that each group that starts, they get better and faster results. And that I don’t have to give three times of myself at once for each and every life coach in my mastermind groups to get exactly what they signed up for. And more often than not, get more than what they signed up for, right?

Basically, asking myself, how can I serve more people better without overextending myself? This has been my own personal growth that I’ve been working on in my own brain. So, this group that just started in September, they got some pre-work videos that were part of that strategic thinking that I kept asking myself.

So, they’ve already gotten some pre-work videos that did not exist when the other two groups started. It’s one of the ways that I went to work to say, “Okay, how can I make sure I’m overdelivering? How can I make sure that every single person that signs up gets more than what they signed up for?”

And actually, going into your own brain and strategically think, that’s a concept that I also teach inside the Confident Coaches Mastermind, how to find your own answers. That’s that third step of self-confidence, how to become your own best mentor and how to actually access your brain. I have a couple of different tactics to do that, to find the answers that you’re looking for.

See, I use these steps over and over again myself. I told you, I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times – 100 times. Probably not a million – that these five steps, I myself use them at every level of my business and you will too.

So, when I went into my own brain to really access that strategic thinking, one of the concepts that I shared in the pre-work videos that I recorded for them this very first week that they are starting was on clarity.

Now, I have done podcasts before on clarity and confusion. I know for sure I did it on my old podcast, which was called Business Women Losing Weight, which I’m adding to the member site. It’s kind of out there in the ether. You won’t find it on iTunes, but I decided to resurrect it and add that to the member site for a bonuses section.

And I think I’ve talked about clarity and confusion, maybe not as a specific topic. But I know for sure it has come up in this podcast here also. But one thing that became so clear to me as I was working on these pre-work videos for this new group on how I can set every student of mine in CCM for a level of success that blows their mind. And that is, everything we think we know about clarity is kind of bullshit.

I’m just going to call it right here. Everything you know. I know, at this point in the game you’re like, “Oh, I’m getting to the meat.” Everything you know about clarity, it’s crap. Because clarity, clarity is a decision.

So many of us seek clarity as if it were a thing, a circumstance, a thing that we can attain and hold in our hands. And that is not possible at all. Tell me one thing that we can ever be in 100% clarity about or over.

Well, I guess actually there is one thing that we can be 100% clear on, and that is we’re all going to die. Not to be morbid here. Not to be the bringer of bad, terrible news. But clarity, as we life coaches like to think about, is not some state where we know. There’s never the state of absolute knowing, where we are sure of the outcome. Because in this world, that’s not actually a thing.

And if 2020 taught us anything, it has pulled back the curtains on so-called clarity that we thought we had before. Like, we have so many instances we thought we knew for sure about how life was supposed to be lived and how humans would interact with each other and how business was going to function this year, and all of that was thrown out the window.

That’s why this year is so stinking uncomfortable, because there’s so many things that we’ve made presumptions about and we’ve considered that clarity, only to find out, “Oh, that’s not the way the world works.” That’s not how this works at all.

Actually, technically there’s a second thing that we can actually have 100% clarity on. That we can’t be sure of anything. We can be 100% clear that we can never be 100% clear. But we will run models over and over again and we will ask for coaching and we will self-coach ourselves to try to create clarity in the model on what we will decide that we will do next.

We’ll put clarity in the F-line or we’ll try to put it in the T-line, like, “I have clarity on this.” Or we’ll try to put it in the A-line, we’ll try to solve for clarity through some sort of actions. And what we’re missing is that clarity is not something that we can attain or achieve. It’s something that we simply decide. We decide that we are clear.

Now, I introduced this concept not only to my September group last week through the pre-work videos, but also to my other two coaching groups. And I coached them on this idea of clarity being a decision that you simply make. And here’s the interesting thing. We think we want clarity in business. But if you all haven’t realized, every single one of you has decided that you’re going to be an entrepreneur.

If you are a life coach not working for someone else, you are an entrepreneur. You are a business owner. You are the CEO of your business. And anybody who has ever been an entrepreneur knows that nothing is guaranteed. Clarity is a decision in a field where it’s inherently lacking clarity.

All of the systems that have ever been created ever, they are all just best guesses. A lot of heads exploded in the coaching sessions this week. There were many brains that were unhappy. And that’s because we think we can’t have clarity if we don’t have all the answers. That’s what your brain will tell you, that the only way to be clear is to be sure of the obvious path ahead of us.

And what I want to offer you is that you can absolutely be clear. You can decide to have clarity, even when you don’t have the answers. What? Even my brain, I can hear little Helga in the background going, “That’s crazy. That can’t even be true. What are you talking about?” I can hear her in my head right now and she’s like…

Because anyone who tells you that they have all the answers, they’re lying, either to themselves or to you. Now, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have good ideas. But the bottom line is, there’s just too many variables in life and in business to ever be able to say that I am sure that this is what is going to happen when we do this thing.

We can guess. We can take educated guesses. We can run probabilities and trajectories and spreadsheets. We can take past evidence and extrapolate from that what we think will happen next based on industry standards or what we’ve seen other successful coaches do.

We can create a roadmap based on past experiences and presume that we will get something similar. We can take someone else’s roadmap and hope that it works for us because it worked for them. But understand that in the business world, as an entrepreneur, the most successful entrepreneurs in the world had to decide that they had clarity without actually having it.

Do you think Bill Gates knew for sure he was going to create Microsoft the way that it is now? Or Steve Jobs? They just decided to be clear on what they were creating and then set out to do it. at any given time, shit could have gone off the rails.

There’s a lot of hard work and a whole lot of luck and a whole lot of decision that this is the path we’re going on, even when it is unclear and you need a machete to cut your way through it, right? Clarity is not having a clear path. Clarity is standing at the start of what potentially looks like a path with a couple of machetes in your hand and stepping forward and cutting the shit out of the way.

So, understand that there’s never a guarantee that something’s going to work. That’s just thinking. A guarantee is not really a thing. All a guarantee is, is you’re thinking that you’re pretty sure that this is going to work. We’re pretty sure, we know that this is going to work. We just don’t know how many detours are ahead of us.

Clarity, our brain will tell us that clarity has to come with no detours, but that’s not what clarity is. Clarity is, like this is the path we’re forging. There’s going to be a lot of detours. But we’re going to figure them out along the way.

All clarity is, is just thinking that it I as good as done, that it is inevitable, but the path between here and inevitability is filled with who knows what. Your Helga brain will tell you that you need the answers to all of that who knows what, and that’s just not conceivable. It’s just not possible. That’s not the way entrepreneurship and life coaching works.

Your brain wants you to believe that clarity can only come with knowing all the answers. But that’s a lie. Clarity doesn’t come with knowing all the answers. Clarity is a decision to trust yourself to choose an answer for the one thing that’s in front of you right now. Clarity is knowing all of the steps. Clarity is a decision to trust yourself to take the next best step.

And even deeper than that, clarity is a decision not to be confused. Because not only do we think clarity must mean we have all the answers. Our brain also tells us that clarity means never having doubts. That always just makes me laugh out loud right there.

Because how can we have clarity when we have all of these doubt-creating thoughts? I must not be clear. I thought I knew what I was doing. But now all of these thoughts are swimming in my head and now I feel full of doubt. I must be confused.

No, you’re not confused. You’re clear, remember. You made the decision to be clear and to have clarity. Clarity doesn’t mean you don’t have doubts because clarity will never mean that you are not operating with a normal human brain.

Remember, doubt is normal. Doubt is not a sign that anything is going wrong. Doubt is a sign that your Helga brain is working. Remember, Helga is that cavewoman that lives in the back of your skull and she’s designed to keep you safe.

If she’s doing her job, she’s filling you with doubt to keep you in the cave and keep you safe, or so she thinks that she’s keeping you safe. You’ll take these doubts to mean that maybe you don’t have as much clarity as you thought and that you must be confused because you had had clarity and you made some decisions. But now your head’s filled with all this doubt, so actually I think I’m confused. I’m so confused I’m not sure what I’m doing. But that’s just not true. That’s just Helga talking.

And you will play with that confusion like a cat plays with all the catnip. You’ll toss it and play with it and roll around on the floor with it, like pure indulgence. In this case, it’s such a necessary indulgence that keeps you from taking any action and moving forward. Playing with that ball of confusion catnip will just keep you stuck.

You don’t have to be confused. You can decide that you aren’t confused. You can decide that you have clarity. You’re just a human whose Helga brain is talking. And in that moment, you’re choosing to believe her. And you don’t have to.

In CCM, I give my clients specific tools to learn how to un-believe all of the thoughts that that Helga brain offers up to you, how to identify your fault obsessions and stop believing them, how to drop your hula-hoop thoughts that you love to spin around and around, “It must be this, no it’s this, no it’s this, no it’s this,” and around and around and around that you brain will go, saying that it’s confused when all you have to do is just drop the hula-hoop.

I teach you exactly how to do that, how to feel the discomfort of calling out your Helga brain and choosing not to believe her when you’ve spent decades of your life believing her. This is a new skill and it feels very uncomfortable to learn new skills. So, you get to decide. You get to decide that you are not confused. You get to decide that you are clear. You get to decide that you have clarity.

Another skill that I teach my CCM members is how to keep going, that fifth step of self-confidence, how to evaluate for confidence and identify how their thinking is creating their results, what’s working, what’s not working, and then to decide what small tweaks they’re going to make this next week.

And doing these evaluations from the thinking that I am clear and I have clarity, that in and of itself is such a clarity boost for you. And what if it is just that simple, to just decide that you have clarity, even if you don’t have all the answers, even when you don’t know all the steps?

Understand that clarity is a decision because you are operating in a world where it has to be a decision that you make because it can never be an achievable, attainable thing that you hold in your hands. Entrepreneurship is inherently unclear. So, it requires you to decide that you are clear, that you don’t have to know all of the answers, that you don’t have to know all the steps. You just have to take the next best step.

And, with that step, you will either create the result that you want, or you won’t, and you’ll evaluate why and learn so much that you will keep moving forward with. That’s the work, my friends. It’s so simple. Much simpler than your Helga brain is making it out to be.

Clarity is a decision; a decision not to be confused, and to believe, “I can take the next best step.” There’s your thought right there. Clarity is as simple as believing, “I don’t have to know all the steps. I just have to take the next best step. And that will move me closer to feeling more confident and signing more clients.”

Alright, my life coach friends. We made it through without too many thunder rumbles and no dogs completely freaking out. Yes. I love you guys. And until next week, let’s go do epic stuff.

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Thanks so much for listening to The Confident Coaches Podcast. I invite you to learn more. Come visit me at amylatta.com and until next week, let’s go do epic stuff.