Ep #60: Confident Celebration

You are listening to episode 60 of The Confident Coaches Podcast, the one where we celebrate ourselves and 2020… yeah, 2020. Let’s go.

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.

Hello, my Confident Coaches. How are you all doing out there? Is everybody having a good week? It’s the last week of the year. What? What? December 29, are you serious?

It’s the last podcast episode of 2020. That means I have put out 52 episodes this year. You’ve listened to 52 episodes of me this year. Guys, that’s some good stuff right there. We’ve covered some shit, haven’t we? I mean, we have covered some things this year.

I was actually in Grand Cayman Islands when the first episode of 2020 hit the airwaves at master coach training. Like, what? That feels like five years ago. Like, remember travel. Do you remember when we traveled, my friends? When we went to exotic islands and it was not a big deal to get there?

It’s been a year. We have covered a ton of topics. We have had a ton of life and circumstances. We have had COVID. We’ve talked about Black Lives Matter. We’ve talked about the election, all of that life, things happening, and how we think about that and interact with that and how we still keep moving forward in our business when all of these things are going on outside of us and how we incorporate all of that into our teaching.

It’s so fascinating to me that the same concepts and tools that we talk about here on the podcast – like, we talk about the tools here on the podcast but we actually activate them and integrate them in the mastermind. But these same tools that we talk about are the tools that you’re going to use when you’re nervous about doing a Facebook Live versus when you’re nervous about finally talking to your older mom or your older uncle about the racist things that he’s always saying.

These are the same tools to have these powerful conversations, to show up and stand for what you believe in, whether it’s in a social platform or whether it’s in your business or whether it’s just difficult conversations with your spouse. It’s all about truly believing that you have the right to show up and be who you are and say what you believe and you being able to do that in all corners and aspects of your life.

And this year, if anything, I will give praise to 2020 for that, that it has shown us how we aren’t just a daughter or a spouse or a business owner or a mom. We aren’t just these individual things. We are complex huma beings and I want to offer you that all of these concepts that you learn here on the podcast, you can use them everywhere. I want you to use them everywhere because you are not just, like, “I am a life coach today listening to this podcast.”

No, you’re a human being showing up in a world that is often very difficult and we are complex beings with lots of emotions and these tools will help us integrate and master all of that. And actually, it reminds me of – and we’re going to go right into my weekly shoutout. It really reminds me of my client Barbra.

She has been working with me since July and she is the perfect example of somebody who, in the past, has been pretty confident. But she had a year – she actually had a couple of years – of just some personal things that have come up, unexpected things, like outside of the worldwide aspect of things, but her own personal life. And seeing how she was able to use the tools and not just apply them to her personal life, but also to her business.

So, I’m going to share with you what she wrote about her experience in the Confident Coaches Mastermind. So, this is Barbara speaking here, “At the beginning of the year, my confidence was at a two because of personal things in my life and thinking that I should be able to figure this out. And I joined Confident Coaches Mastermind to get back to the basics. Now, Amy’s program layout is super-easy to consume and it goes so in depth, the weekly coaching, the Facebook group, all amazing, the coaches I’ve met are ridiculously amazing. And now, at the end of the year, my confidence is at a nine. I have doubled my income from last year just in the first five months of Confident Coaches Mastermind.”

She made $9000 the first half of the year and $50,000 the second half of the year, “And Amy is beautiful at reminding you of everything that you need is already in you and asking the questions you need asked in order to get down to the nitty-gritty.” And Barbara said, “If you are on the fence, why? Because it’s simply the best thing that you’ll ever do.”

And, Barbara, I just want to say thank you because a powerful example of somebody who can take these tools that we learn in Confident Coaches and apply them not just to her business, which of course that’s what we talk about, right? Confident Coaches feel more confident, sign more clients, but also live a better life.

And listen, my friends, right now when this is coming out on Tuesday December 29^th, I’m in the midst of a free training right now, a brand-new free workshop called the Confidence Solution and today is day-two. We have one more day tomorrow. And we’re also still enrolling in the January Confident Coaches Mastermind.

So what I’m talking about here, the results that I shared that were Barbara’s, the results that I share here every week, these are possible for you. This work is possible for you. None of us doing this work are special unicorns. These are simple tools that, when repeated and put to use week after week after week over the course of six months or a year or even longer, will move you from where you are now to where you want to be.

Like, if you get this much confidence mojo having me in your ear every week, imagine what having me in your brain every week will do. And that’s what you will get in Confident Coaches Mastermind. So, absolutely, the mastermind, like I said, we are enrolling right now. You go to amylatta.com/mastermind and you can apply for the mastermind there.

And if you just want to know when the next mastermind is coming up or when the next free training is coming up, then make sure that you sign up for the freebie that’s at the end of this podcast. Because when you do that, you’ll get emails from me and you will always know what I have going on when, when doors are open, when the next free training is taking place. Because these results are not just for me, not just for Barbra. They’re for all of us.

And speaking of results, we’re talking about that today. What we’re talking about today is celebrating wins. Now, here’s the interesting thing. If you have not created the results that you wanted to create this year, your brain’s going to try to tell you that you don’t have any wins to celebrate. And I’m going to call bullshit on that right now. We are not tolerating that right now.

Okay, so make sure that you have your pen and paper because we’re actually going to do an activity together here on the podcast. And you’re going to use the hell out of the work that we do in this episode to kick your 2021 off. This is a little bit of the work we’re doing in the workshop, but we’re taking it a little bit deeper too.

So, if you do get a chance to join us in that, make sure that you look me up on social media and find the registration link. You’ll also get it if you get the podcast freebie at the end of the show today. It will get you onto my email list and you’ll get the next email going out about the training too.

So, this is the work that we’re doing this week. I started this last week with my mastermind students and we’re doing it in the workshop this week. And this is just a little bit of a snipped and a little touch, a little taste of the kind of work that we’re going to do to help you have the best 2021 ever. And it’s really important for me to share with you that celebrating wins even when you aren’t getting the results that you really want to be getting.

In fact, you’re going to learn to celebrate wins every single week. It’s a big part of our evaluation process. Why? Why do I put so much focus on celebrating wins? Why do I put so much focus on confident celebration in the Confident Coaches Mastermind?

Mostly because this shit is hard. Your brain is wired to focus on the hard, on the difficulty, on the discomfort, on the fear, on the not knowing, on the uncertainty. Your brain will stay focused on the hard.

Listen, if this was super-easy, everybody would be doing it. If this wasn’t uncomfortable, if it didn’t come with a heaping side plate of fear and worry and doubt and anxiety, literally anybody would do it. they’d be like, “This is not a big deal.” It is a big deal. It is something that a lot of people aren’t willing to do because it does require you to feel of emotions that most of us have not been trained how to feel.

And your brain is wired to focus on that. You have to direct it otherwise. Your brain is wired to keep you safe. It’s wired to immediately go to everything that’s sucking, everything that’s not working, all the reasons why you should not take one more step outside of that cave. We have to actively direct it toward the positive. It will always go to the negative without our purposeful direction.

And so many people don’t celebrate wins because until they’re hitting a very specific goal, they don’t think they have anything worth celebrating. Like, “This isn’t big enough. It’s not special enough. I set the same goal as I did last month and I still didn’t hit it. I don’t have anything to celebrate.” That’s bullshit in a handbasket right there, my friends. When your brain is constantly pulling you towards the everything sucks, you have to purposely pull it to, “Actually, that’s not true. Let’s go look at all of this not sucking over here.”

This is like a gratitude practice. Your brain is wired to focus on what sucked in your day and your job is to focus on what didn’t suck, on what was awesome. Like, even if it’s just, “I got out of bed and I put clothes on and I didn’t yell at my kid like I normally would have,” this practice of gratitude, I’ve done a podcast episode on this before. It’s actually something that I will send out every once in a while, my gratitude practice. I send it out a couple times a year via email.

It will actually rewire your brain and make your life better when you focus on the positive in your life, and nothing even has to change. This isn’t just like positive thinking, positive affirmations, let’s take something that really, we think is shitty and put a happy face on it. It’s like, no, what are you celebrating today? Even if that is a month of no consults, a month of no new clients, but I kept posting every day, or I posted four times, which is one time more than I did last time, or I’m still getting up, I’m still working on my business every day, I’m still doing something.

Even if you have to go really basic, “I got up. I showed up to my…” I’ve done this in the mastermind before. I’m like, it’s a win if you are looking at your business and you can’t find anything working but you still show up to the weekly calls and raise your hand and ask for coaching, or you just show up and you listen and you integrate the coaching that you hear and that is taking place. That might be a win right there.

And it’s important to focus on those things because your brain is totally wired to just say nothing is working, so the need to actively go look for what is working is so important to you. I also want you to think of it in this term right here. What I just shared with you there, we get that conceptually. But now, I want to give it to you in a more practical explanation. I want you to think about what kind of boss do you want to be?

I’ve had at least two jobs where my bosses, or maybe not direct bosses but the people who oversaw my work, they kind of sucked. And what I mean by that is I’ve been in jobs where I was constantly being asked to do more with less, meet this bar, now meet this bar. And every time I would hit a goal that ha previously seemed impossible, there was no celebration. The bar was just raised.

I was in so many jobs where the bar was just constantly being raised and there was no reward. I wasn’t getting pay raises. I still remember the job that I had, I was a photoshoot producer, and I was constantly being asked to cut the budget.

So, I would find places to cut the budget, and my negotiation skills, begging, borrowing, stealing. How can we make this fancy photoshoot look fancy even though I’m on a fraction of the budget as the other fashion magazines were doing? This was back in the days when we still shopped by catalogue. It was the early 2000s.

And so, I would come in. I would actually come in under budget. I would do the thing that they asked me to do. And then, do you know what they would do? They would curate the next year’s budget based on the lower numbers that had created this year.

So, every year that I worked there, my budgets actually got smaller and smaller because o kept coming under budget, as I was asked to do. It was like, where’s the reward in this? Where is the reward of constantly struggling and negotiating and solving these difficult problems only to be told, “Okay, you did it. Now, do it even better next time.”

I wasn’t getting that money back. I actually got laid off. In fact, I got no extra money for this. I got no accolades. And I remember thinking after a while, this sucks. Why do I keep working for you people? You’re constantly setting the bar higher, I constantly meet that bar, and yet I’m asked to just keep doing it.

That is what you are doing to yourself when you’re constantly asking yourself to stretch and to grow and to do the uncomfortable things and then you get a small win and you’re like, “Nope, not good enough to celebrate. Let’s keep going. Let’s keep pushing.”

Stop for a moment because you’re being the worst boss ever to yourself and you don’t have to be. Eventually your brain will tell you to take this job and shove it. Like, “I’m so underappreciated. No one around here recognizes the hard work I’m putting in.” Don’t be that boss. Be the boss that celebrates the awesome and elevates your workers – by the way, that’s you – to push the limits of what’s possible and to see what you’re capable of and to celebrate every single step along the way. Because that’s what’s going to keep moving you forward.

Like, what kind of office do you want to work in? The one where they’re constantly raising the bar higher and higher and higher and saying, “That’s great. What more can you do? What more can you do? What more can you do?” And never taking the time to recognize you. Or do you want to work for a boss that’s like, “Come on? I know this is a lot. I know it’s uncomfortable, but I really believe in you and when you get there, man, we’re going to throw the biggest office party and then we’re going to turn around and we’re going to do it again. But every single time, we’re going to celebrate the hell out of the work that you’re doing.”

Who do you want to work for? Which one sounds more fun? Right, there we go, right there. do you want to throw yourself a big office party every week? Or do you want to be like, “Could be better. What have you done for me lately?”

Another reason that I find that people hesitate to celebrate is because it’s the opposite problem. They’re afraid that celebration means that they’re an asshole or that they’re going to be arrogant. Listen, only people who aren’t assholes worry about being assholes. The real jerks of the world are not actually worried about being jerks. So, if you’re worried about that, you’re probably not one of those people. Right there, notice that.

Celebration is not arrogance. Not the way we do it around here, my friends. I could do an entire podcast episode – I might have for all I know. I know I’ve talked about it before – the difference between confidence and arrogance. Arrogance is in relation to other people, “I need other people to be below me so that I can elevate myself.”

Confidence has nothing to do with anyone else. It’s only about me and how I feel about me. Arrogance is, “I need to be better than somebody else. I need to be up on a pedestal.” Confidence is, “I am really proud of what I’m doing. And in fact, my pride in what I’m doing is an invitation for you to come up with me.” It’s a huge difference and it feels so different in your body, when you’re celebrating from a place of confidence, assuredness, and truly appreciating what you’ve done, versus arrogance, like, “Yeah, take that, suckers.” It just feels entirely different.

Now, does that mean we can control what other people might think of us, that other people might think that we’re arrogant for celebrating? Maybe. The bottom line is, most likely, we’re never going to know what other people are thinking of us. And what other people think of us is not even a reflection of us, remember. Don’t ever lose sight of the fact that whatever anybody else is thinking about us is always a reflection of them and their worries and their doubts and their fears. It’s never a reflection of us.

And I want to offer you this. Maybe, just maybe, when we’re celebrating from a place of confidence, we are again inviting people to see the awesome and the cool in themselves. We are inviting them to celebrate themselves. Like, come with me. Here’s what’s awesome in my life. What’s awesome in your life?

Arrogant people would never do that. They would never want to invite other people to the party. And that’s what we’re doing here. And that’s what we’re going to lean into right now. So, let’s talk about some wins. Let’s do some celebrating.

I really want you to consider this, that celebrating wins is about intentionally sitting in what we have created, and in this episode, what we have created this year, in 2020. And that we’re going to be marinating in these good feels of the results that we created. No matter how large, no matter how small, no matter where you need to go in your life to find those wins worth celebrating.

Okay, now this is where you’re going to need your pen and paper. If you just want to listen first, because I’m going to give you a bunch of prompts. I’m going to give you a bunch of areas to consider what you’ve accomplished. Now, some of these things you’re going to have, and some of them aren’t. The goal here is not to have a list of everything I’ve created if it doesn’t pertain to you. If you don’t have anything to list in that category, don’t worry about it. Just use these as prompts.

So, if you want to listen first and then come back, it’s totally up to you. So this is what I want you to consider. We’re going to start making a list of the accomplishments that you’ve had this year. And here’s the kinds of things I want you to be looking for.

Let’s talk about your business. How many clients did you work with this year? I actually wrote out a list of every single person that paid me money that I coached this year. I’m super-proud to say 80 freaking people; 22 one on ones and the rest were in groups. What?

So, how many clients did you work with? One? Five? 80? How much income did you generate? Count every dollar. $5, $10, $500, $50,000? What programs did you create? How many social media posts did you make? This you can guesstimate. This, I guesstimated mine. How many emails did you send?

I actually went into my email server and I pulled up all the emails that I had sent. There were so many per page. There were 13 pages. It came out to like 275-ish. About how many posts? About how many emails? You can totally guesstimate these numbers. On average, you post X number of times a week in X number of weeks.

How many people do you know are following you, are responding to you? Here’s the interesting thing about this number. When we first get started, we really don’t have much grasp of how many people are paying attention to us. But I have found fairly consistently – this is not scientific data, but fairly consistently – that for every one person that I know of that’s paying attention to me, there are 10 more.

So, when you think about, like, on average I get maybe two likes and maybe three comments or something like that, multiply that number by 10 and that’s probably how many people were paying attention to you.

How many people are on your email list? How many people – if you have these things, if you have a Facebook, if you have an Instagram, how many people are there? How many people regularly interact with your stuff, multiply that number by 10. Where there’s one, there’s absolutely 10, okay.

Now, what about stuff you created? Ideas? What kind of ideas did you create? In my coaching circle, we call this your intellectual property. I’ve introduced a lot of new concepts on this podcast, like emotional currency as a concept, the belief meter and belief discomfort is a concept that I’ve created, right? Any new concepts that you’ve created.

What about projects or videos or workbooks? Do you have a podcast? How many episodes? How many downloads did you have? What kind of trainings did you run? Did you run any free trainings? Did you run any free workshops? Did you do any webinars? Have you done any live coaching on Facebook? Did you speak anywhere? Probably not in person in 2020. Maybe you did. But did you do any online networking, were you guests of anything like that?

What about investments you’ve made in yourself? Did you complete any programs? Did you complete any certifications? What about technical aspects, like you got your email set up? What about a website or lead pages or Facebook ads? What technological things did you sort out or figure out this year?

If you do actively have clients, what kind of results have they created? What’s the ripple effect of your work? What kind of results are your clients creating? How much money are they making? How much weight did they lose? How many marriages have improved?

And then start thinking about your life. What are you proud of in your personal life? What about your relationships? What about your health? What about your hobbies? What help have you sought out and improved in?

Here’s another one. My client Sarah phrased it this way. I thought it was perfect. What bullshit did you overcome? What have you let go of? What emotions did you used to indulge in that you don’t so much anymore? What are you more aware of mindset-wise and emotions-wise that’s kind of a big deal for you? What mindset shifts have you created?

So, don’t be afraid to, like, go look for those unknown areas. What has changed in your life this year? What have you accomplished this year? Again, you may not have something for everything that I mentioned here. These are just prompts. But they give you an idea, to look in all the nooks and crannies of your life and find what’s working for you.

What did you accomplish? What are you proud of? What did you let go of? What have you brought into your life?

Again, if you need to pause and go back and actually spend some time with that, absolutely. I went online. I went into my Vimeo to see how many trainings and videos I had done. I went into my Libsyn podcast to see how many episodes have I done, what kind of downloads do I have? I did take the time to gather the numbers and be specific where I could and then come back and kind of guesstimate some of my other numbers.

I took a look at my clients and I thought about what kind of results they had created, how many of my clients have doubled their confidence, how many of them tripled their confidence and even one or two of them that quadrupled their confidence this year.

I think about this. with confidence coaching, you know, I’m not a business coach. I’m not a business strategy coach. It’s incorporated into the confidence coaching that I do. But so many of my clients come to me in different stages of their business and I love it because I have clients who weren’t even on social media six months ago and now, they are on there every single day posting Facebook Lives. What a huge shift.

I have clients who made $500 the first half of this year and have made $15,000 the second half of this year. I’ve got clients like Barbara who made $9000 the first half and really would have described her personal life as in turmoil and is now like, she made $50,000 the second half of the year. And even though the personal life is still her personal life, she’s just feeling so much better and thriving.

Every single client comes to me a little bit different, so think about what kind of things your clients have accomplished this year and the influence you have had in helping them create that.

Now that you have that, I want you to think about this. what do you think about the person who has accomplished everything that you just compiled and put together? What do you think about her?

How about this question. If that was your best friend and she sat down to tell you all of this stuff, what would you think of her? That’s a kicker question right there, right? We might temper our thoughts about ourselves who did that, but think about if that was one of your coach friends or if that was your best friend and they said, “Look at all this stuff that I accomplished.” What would you think about her?

Now, I’m assuming you know where we’re going with this. So, I want to offer you this, to each and every single one of you listening right now. What you think about the person who accomplished all of that, no matter what all of that is, everybody’s all of that is going to look very different who’s listening to this podcast right now, whatever you think about her – because that is you. You accomplished that. Whatever you think about you as the person who accomplished that, you can continue to think about yourself as the person who’s going to achieve that big 2021 BHAG, is the person that’s going to create that January goal.

This episode is coming out on December 29^th. You can choose to continue to think that about the person who still has a December 31^st goal they’re going after. There’s literally no reason not to think whatever you think about that person that created all of those accomplishments, there’s absolutely no reason not to continue to think that about anything else moving forward.

If you can create that in 2020, what are you going to create this week? What are you going to create next month? What are you going to create in the next six months, in the next year? Because whatever you think about yourself as the person who created that in the past 12 months, all of that still stands.

Look what you’ve created. What do you think about the person who’s created that? That is you. There’s literally no reason not to fully believe that about you as you think about where you’re going in the future. Alright, my friends. This is your work. This is your work all of the time.

I am so proud of what all of you have accomplished. I don’t care if you’re ending the year with zero clients signed and zero dollars in the bank. You cannot possibly tell me that if you are listening to this podcast right now that you have nothing to celebrate and you have nothing to accomplish. That’s bullshit. I don’t believe an ounce of it. I know that you do.

Use these prompts to find what you are sure of, what you are proud of, what you did accomplish, what you think about the person who accomplished that, because that person is you and it’s completely open to you to continue to believe that, to own that, to feel that in your bones. I want you to marinate in that. I want you to go all the way back to the beginning where I talk about how to actually sit in belief. I want you to marinate in the emotions of that belief that you have about yourself as the person who accomplished that. I want you to sit in it. Celebrate it.

And now, use that to look forward. Let’s create an amazing rest of this year and an amazing 2021. I want to be by your side for all of it, my friends, truly. When I say I can’t wait to see what you create, I cannot wait to see what you create. Alright, my Confident Coaches, and remember, until next week, let’s go do epic stuff. Happy New Year, my friends. Love you.

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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.