Ep #121: Discomfort of Asking for Money

You are listening to episode 121 of The Confident Coaches Podcast, the one where you stop running from all those feels of asking people for money. All right, 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.

Well, hello there coach. How are you doing today? Guess what? Holy shamoley, it is March. It’s March. It’s the month that spring begins, the month where birds start chirping, and bunnies start nesting, and the trees start blooming, and there’s new hope, and there’s new life. I love March. I love March so much because it means that the frigidness of January and February have come to the end and it is going to be warm soon.

But more important than all of that, way more important than that, March is the month that Free To Paid Coach launches. That’s right. As I told you last week, I am launching Free To Paid Coach. A lifetime access group course and coaching program that’s going to teach you everything you need to know to become a confident paid coach. It is the program that has been missing in the coaching industry.

Sure, there are programs that teach you how to sell, teach you how to market, there’s masterminds like mine that teach you the path to 100K. But Free To Paid Coach is everything you need to become a confident paid coach. If you’ve not already listened to last week’s episode, I strongly recommend that you listen because it is loaded with a bunch of details about the program launch. And it goes over the first step of the five step process that is Free To Paid coach.

Now the steps are super simple, believe you’re a paid coach. Learn to handle the discomfort of asking for money. Rely on yourself instead of others. Stop beating yourself up when you fail. And keep going until you’re a confident paid coach. And we’re going over each of those five steps over the course of five weeks. And this is the second episode, this is the second week that we’re talking about it. So today is all about learning to handle the discomfort of asking for money.

I just had to create this program because it’s exactly what I wish I had when I first decided to become a life coach. It’s the exact program that I needed. And quite frankly, it’s the program that every single life coach in the industry needs because there simply is no amount of money in the bank and there are no amount of clients on your calendar that will make you feel confident.

You can be making 400,000, 8,00,000, you can be making $5 million and still not feel confident. You can still be chasing higher and higher numbers and hoping of feeling safe and secure. Because that is not what creates safety and security, your mind is what creates safety and security.

And that comes by learning to feel confident in yourself. And Free To Paid Coach is going to teach you exactly how to do that so you will never have to be chasing clients, never have to be chasing dollars. Instead, learn how to get them to come to you because the confidence is coming from inside of you, not out there.

And you’ve heard me say it once and you’re going to hear me say it a million more times, confidence is the foundation of your business. Confidence is the inevitability of whatever you want to create. Confidence equals money. When you learn how to create confidence for yourself, there’s literally nothing you can’t create. From confidence comes every single thing that you want.

Free To Paid Coach is going to teach you exactly how to do it. And the best thing ever, the best stinking thing ever is it is $1,000. It’s $1,000 for a lifetime program with weekly coaching from me. It includes my member site, weekly group coaching calls.

Now yes, obviously some weeks I will have guest instructors that are Confident Coaches, alumni, people who’ve already gone through the program. It’s not every single week that I will be in there, but it is my program and I will be in there most weeks. And it’s absolutely a freaking no brainer.

I have even had former clients of mine tell me, “Amy, you need to be charging way more. You are way undervaluing your coaching.” To which I’m like, “I’m not undervaluing my coaching.” I understand that this is a five figure program that I am giving you. I’m offering it for only $1,000 because I want every single coach in the industry to have these tools. Because I know no one else teaches these tools.

No one else teaches confidence like I do and you simply can’t get these tools anywhere else. And I’m a really fabulous coach. So you should totally be joining us when we launch in just three weeks.

So last week we talked about the first step in the process, which is believing you are a paid coach. And today is all about feeling the discomfort of asking people for money. One of the things stopping you from being a confident paid coach is because you hate the feeling that you experience when it comes to saying, “And now will you pay me money, please?”

It just always cracks me up how everybody wants to know the super secret thing that you’re supposed to say so that it doesn’t feel uncomfortable asking people for money. And I’m like, “Um, that’s not how this works.” Because there will likely never come a time where you don’t feel weird asking for money.

The goal of Free To Paid Coach is to not eliminate the discomfort of asking for money, it is to teach you how to not let the discomfort stop you from asking for money. And you’ll see that really important difference, because if you wait until you feel nothing but fabulous when it comes to conversations around money, you’re going to be waiting a really, really long time.

And for so many of you listening right now to me, for so many of you who hear my words and my voice in this exact moment, the reason you aren’t paid at the level that you want to be getting paid as a coach right now, is because you want it to be more comfortable. And this is a terrible goal to try to hit. It’s a much smarter goal to learn how to not let the discomfort stop you because the discomfort doesn’t have to be a problem.

You’re going to learn emotional strength training right out of the gate. You’re going to learn how to practice feeling nervousness, jitters, maybe a little doubt, maybe even a little nauseousness. You’re going to learn how to feel the full range of human emotions because when you feel the full range of human emotion, you learn that there’s actually no emotion that you can’t handle.

So much of becoming a confident paid coach is really a feelings practice. So while y’all are out there trying to eliminate the discomfort, I’m in here teaching my students to practice the discomfort. And I really first learned to understand the importance of this when I was actually trying to become a keynote speaker.

I love you guys, I love you so much. But this isn’t originally what my goal was. I actually didn’t want to coach a lot of people when I first started. I was coaching a handful of people here and there. I was actually charging $400 for six months of coaching with me because what I really wanted to do was be a speaker, like a TED Talk speaker. I wanted to be on stage all the time, that’s where I wanted to make my dollars and cents.

I wanted to be a keynote speaker that made like five figures. And I remember the very first time I got asked to speak at a speaking event, which I did not get paid. I was literally just so super excited to even be invited to speak on stage. It was a conference that had a mixture of experienced speakers and new speakers.

So I was in the new speaker crowd and it was like a mixture, like every other speaker, it was like a mixture. You know, like they weren’t just saving all of the best people for last. It was a really great event for somebody like me who was a brand new speaker to be kind of couched in between people who did this for a living.

And what was wild was the entire car ride there, the entire day and a half leading up to my presentation, I was practically in a catatonic state. You know, other people were engaged at the welcome reception, all that kind of stuff. They’re conversing and enjoying one another. We did like an outing, it was in Tulsa at the time and we did like this outing in Tulsa. And they were all like laughing and being jovial and I was like a spaced out alien.

I was so nervous about talking. So I was like the second or third speaker and I had to go on right after a professional speaker, like this is what he did for a living. And he was dynamic, and he was exciting, and he was so at ease, and he didn’t need any of his notes. And then I had to go on stage right after him. I literally thought I was going to puke.

Don’t worry, this story is going to come full circle, you’re totally going to see how it relates to the discomfort of asking for money, we are getting there. So I 100% thought I was going to puke the entire walk up onto the stage. I was in this fugue state even when I started talking, I was fidgety, and nervous, and I totally needed to look at my notes.

But within 30 seconds to a minute and a half, I kind of started to find a rhythm and I started to find myself and my natural humor and my natural fabulousness. You know me, you know the Amy that you all know here and love on the podcast. And I did end up delivering, really, a great talk even though I did have to keep using my notes to help keep me on track.

And it was super fun because by the end of it, all of these people had seen this Amy in a fugue state person for a day and a half that they were pretty blown away by the presentation that I had. And to this day, I remember this experience so much about what it meant to feel discomfort, and anxious, and anxiety.

First of all, it was the first time I learned that that feeling, that feeling of wanting to vomit, that feeling of extreme anxiety as I walked up on stage did not actually kill me. And this is a really important lesson because your brain is going to tell you that we are going to die. Like you know empirically outside of the room that asking somebody for money on a consult call  is not going to kill you. But your Helga brain will actually try to convince you in the moment that you are in actual danger.

So it’s really important to learn that you don’t actually die when you feel that high of a level of anxiety and that high of a level of nervousness. And realize that at the time, I had not discovered life coaching yet. I was still what I call A line coaching, I was just coaching people on things to do in order to lose weight.

I hadn’t yet learned about the kind of coaching that I do here on this podcast and about the kind of coaching that I do with my clients. So a couple of speakers later I’m in the bathroom, and I ran into another one of the professional speakers. And she was kind of pacing around and running through some steps like on her hands and in her head.

I remember asking her if she was okay because I knew that she was one of the professional speaking people. And I was the newbie that was super nervous. So like was she okay? And she told me what was quite possibly one of the most important things that I have ever understood about feeling the discomfort of doing something really important. She told me that she gets nervous every time she goes on stage.

Now, I knew I was nervous. Even though I didn’t understand thoughts and feelings and all of those things, I was thinking, of course I’m new. Of course I’ve never done this before. Of course I’m afraid of what people are going to think of me. I just thought those were facts, I didn’t realize that those were thoughts at the time, right? But I understand that now.

And what she taught me in that moment is that you can be really great at something, like she was, and she could be doing something really important. And you can have lots of experience, and you can be having necessary conversations, and you can still feel nervous. And it’s not a problem. I understand it on a deeper level now that I am a practiced mastered coach, but even then I understood that she was teaching me a monumental shift about feeling nervous.

She was literally demonstrating for me what it was like to experience anxiety and nerves before doing something really important. And it wasn’t a problem for her. Can you imagine if she thought she had to eliminate the discomfort and the anxiety in order for her to think she was a good speaker? In order for her to continue to do that as a living?

No, she knew she was a really good speaker. She knew this was how she made her living. And also, oh here, of course, comes the nerves that happen every time before I step on stage. Now it would be years before I understood that my thoughts create my feelings, it’d be years before I understood emotional strength training, how to experience the full range of human emotion.

But to this day, before I step on stage I feel a little twinge in my tummy. Before I hit live on a live video, I can feel my tummy do a little flip. Even before I start a coaching call, even though I’m at the point where I’ve been coaching for almost 10 years, I can still feel a little flutter. I just now understand that the presence of discomfort is not a problem and I can handle the feeling.

And you can too and it’s what I’m going to teach you exactly how to do inside Free To Paid Coach. Now, my Confident Coached Masterminders, those students I have worked with over the course of the past few years, they know this is my specialty. My feelings work is where I shine.

I love coming at the coaching model from the feelings line. I love teaching you the full range of human emotions. I love teaching you how to fully experience the sensations of any emotion and lean into them and fully experience them. Rather than them stopping you, or this fear that they’re going to swallow you, or you’re going to drown in the emotions, or they’re going to hold you back.

I actually teach you how the moment you release that and you do the process I teach you inside Free To Paid Coach, you will instantly feel better, and become better, and that feeling will not have to stop you anymore when you’re having a powerful coaching conversation and it’s time to ask that person to give them your money.

I actually have another really quick anxiety story that I heard from a really famous comedian. So if you’ve ever watched SNL, if you ever watched Saturday Night Live, you might be familiar with one of their former cast members, Bill Hader. He’s Stefon, was one of my favorite characters ever. This party has everything. If you know, Stefon from SNL.

Okay, so Bill Hader has since gone on to share in interviews that he actually has really bad anxiety, like diagnosed anxiety. And he’s joked that live comedy is probably not the best field for somebody who has crippling anxiety to go into.

And the way that he got through his anxiety and the way he got through his discomfort was visualizing his anxiety as like this little fluffy stuffed animated ball that would pop up on his shoulder. And just like how I have learned that the nerves are going to show up right before it’s time to do something important, his little fluffy anxiety ball always shows up and hops right on his shoulder right before he would go out on stage and do live comedy on Saturday Night Live.

And he just saw it as like here’s this anxiety that is with me, but it’s not on me and it’s not who I am. It’s just this thing that comes along with me, like it’s going to tag along. And it can be in the room with me and it doesn’t have to stop me anymore.

I’m going to teach you exactly how to do that. It’s one of the best damn tools you’re ever going to learn ever anywhere in your life, period. And this is how you’re going to learn to feel the discomfort of asking people for money. It’s that powerful, you’re going to use it literally everywhere.

Now, we’re also going to do some money mindset work inside Free To Paid Coach because that’s the other part of this feeling of asking for money, is that we’ve been taught that we’re not supposed to talk about money, that money is a really taboo subject. I actually just coached a client literally this afternoon, just an hour or so ago on money mindset because it is one of my favorite things to teach.

And I just find it so weird, everything in our life revolves around money and yet we’re not supposed to talk about money? So Free To Paid Coach is definitely going to be a room where we’re not going to be afraid to talk about money. Making money, desiring money, being okay, being ambitious to make a lot of money. Not needing reasons to want to be a paid coach. Not needing excuses for asking for money. Not needing to justify our money goals.

And here is an even deeper reason that we need to be having this conversation, now Free To Paid Coach is open to literally every single coach. Man woman, him, she, they. It is not a female only group program. This is going to be a very diverse room where literally every human being is welcome.

But I can tell you right now that for literally millennia, money has been kept out of the hands of women and we are going to be talking about that in this room. How money has been kept in the hands of the very few. And I think about this so much, how I was born in 1974. And that means my mom would not have been allowed to establish her own credit without a male signature at that time. I’m going to be 48 years old and she couldn’t do that.

A female’s money has been passed down through their male lineage. Women were married off with dowries bestowed upon them by their fathers. We have traditionally been kept out of the rooms where money is talked about and it ends here.

Free To Paid Coach is going to be a room where women openly talk about money. Where our BIPOC brothers and sisters talk about money. We’re going to talk about the discomfort we have about talking about money so that it becomes more comfortable. The way to become comfortable with money is to not shove the discomfort in a box, but to allow the discomfort to be in the room with us, to create a safe space with us, and to begin having those conversations.

We’re going to get the patriarchy out of your head when it comes to talking about money. If this sounds like the kind of conversations you want to be a part of, you need to make sure that you enroll in Free To Paid Coach when we go live on March 21st.

So if you haven’t signed clients for money at all, or you just want to hit that first solid 5K. If you avoid anything that feels uncomfortable, like asking people, “Do you want to work with me? And will you pay me money?” If you’re not really sure that you can do this because your belief is a little shaky, because how can you believe in something you’ve never seen before?

If you try to copy what other people are doing because you think they have more authority than you, like they must know something more than you do. If you really desire other people to always be telling you that you’re doing a great job so that you can believe that you’re doing a great job. If you’re constantly looking for validation outside of you. Beating yourself up for every failure, fall, every face plant because you make each one of those things mean that you probably can’t do this and this probably isn’t going to happen.

If you worry about wasted time and wasted money and feel terrible about the time and the money that you’ve already spent on other coaching programs. If you’re justifying letting life and friends and family distract you from your business. And even if you are getting paid, if you are quick to downplay it and you see it as not enough, Free To Paid coach is going to coach you through all of that.

This is what you need. This is what you need to get your first free clients when you’re a brand new stinking coach. This is what you need to get your first paid clients when you’ve got free clients under your belt. This is what you need to get to your first $5,000 in less than six months. This is what you need to be the perfect candidate for The Path to 100K Confident Coaches Mastermind. And this is what you need at every single level of your business.

Remember, not needing validation outside of yourself in order to feel confident is the foundation of your business. And no amount of money in the bank, no clients on your roster can create it for you. Free To Paid Coach is an evergreen program with continuous enrollment. There’s no start and stop date, you just jump right in where you are.

It’s lifetime access. And you get the Free To Paid Coach process, the modules, the workbook, any bonus content. You get any free future updates, you get the Facebook community, and weekly coaching with me. And even though it could easily be five figures of value, like it’s a no brainer at $1,000.

So if you are in, put your plans in place to be with us on go day, which is March 21st. So if you’re a brand new coach who has never worked with clients, if you’ve never been paid, if you want to get consistently paid as a coach, this is the program you need.

And I said it last week and I’m going to say it every single week, I am taking 100 coaches with me to $5,000 in the next six months. By next September, are you ready? 100 coaches will have 5,000 more dollars in the bank than they do now. And I want you to be one of them. Let’s make it happen.

Be one of the 100, mark your calendars for March 21st to sign up when we go live. And look for this post on Instagram and on my business page for Facebook and shout out, “I am one of the 100.” Let me know that you are in.

I can tell you that it’s been just a couple of hours since last week’s episode went live at the time that I’m recording this, and on Instagram I already have so many clients shouting out, “I am one of the 100.” It’s just been a couple of hours.

So shout out to Pamela, Karen, Simone, Abby, Doreen, Ann, Leondra. Yes, they are one of the 100, I hope you are one of the 100 too. I’m looking forward to shouting out more names over the course of the next couple of weeks. And, of course, bring on all of the questions, I will make sure that they are all answered by March 21st.

I love you guys so much. And until next week, remember let’s go fuck some shit up.

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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.