Ep #91: Integrity and The 100K Earner

You are listening to episode 91 of The Confident Coaches Podcast, the one with the tough love on integrity. All right coaches, 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 coach, how are you today? I’m doing so fabulous and lovely. And I hope that you are too. And holy cow is this year flying by, it’s August. It’s August my friends, the summer is already slowly fading. How is it even possible?

The year is flying by and I hope that you are were you want to be. And if you are not, I want to invite you that this episode that I’m getting ready to share with you right now, it could be a really important piece.

This is definitely a little tough love. Hard on the tough, even harder on the love. Because I’m getting ready to share with you many things that I know I have done, and I have evidence very recently of a lot of coaches doing it also, and we just need to talk about it. And this could be a big key for you.

Again, as usual, grab a notebook, lean in, get ready for a big old hug from your mentor Amy, that might sting. But it’s full of love. Right now are you like, “What the hell is she going to say to us?”

Okay, but before I do that, something I have not done in ages is read a review on the podcast. And I got this email from an Angie Peterson Green. So Angie, if you are listening, hello my love. I know it’s been like months since you sent this to me. But I found it in my inbox and I was like, “I have never read this before.”

So Angie reached out via email on my website to share this. She said, “Hi, Amy. I fucking love your podcast. I’ve been bingeing on your podcast while I drive. And I am like, wow. I feel like you’re talking to me on so many levels. I can’t tell you enough what your podcast has done for my own personal growth, as well as uncovering roadblocks and identifying my own sabotaging ways I didn’t even know I was doing. Keep up the good work. Thanks my friend.”

Angie, oh my goodness, thank you. So much love for you. And I had responded to her when I got the message. Thank you so much. And if you love this podcast, and you can’t wait to listen every week, I’m going to ask you don’t hold this, this is not like a secret little wooby only for you. Share this with your people. Please share this podcast with your coach friends.

If you listen on Spotify, you can actually share directly. You can share a link directly into your Instagram or your Instagram stories. You don’t even have to have that magical 10K figure. You see me do this almost every Tuesday in my Instagram stories.

You can screenshot it, you can pull clips from it, share it, tag me, write a review. I will share it in my stories. I will give you a shout out in my stories. I will give you a shout out here on a future episode if you do leave a review.

I think it’s important to remember there are literally thousands of coaches out there who are sitting around just waiting for confidence to come their way before they really start doing the business. And what we talk about here on Confident Coaches podcast is exactly what they need. So share the wealth, my friends.

Not only does it mean so much to me to hear from you, like I totally get choked up. And yes, I absolutely cry. It’s still one of those things where even though I know that there’s like a thousand of you listening every single week, I’m still like, “Oh my gosh, you mean there’s somebody out there listening to me?”

It’s like those two parts of your brain, right? In theory I get the numbers are there. But in actuality I’m like, “There’s really somebody out there listening right now? It’s not just my mom?” Hi mom.

So really, not only does it mean so much to me when you reach out, you’re really helping so many other coaches too, who discover this podcast. And maybe they listen to it and it’s not their jam. I mean, I’m not for everybody and that’s totally okay. But if I am for you, then this is the work that you have to do in the world so that you can put your awesomeness out into the world.

We’ve been talking about that God Rod, right? How many coaches out there, literally thousands of them, keeping their God Rods to themselves. We need to stop that. You can’t do that no more.

All right, so in last week’s episode I shared my path to 100K. If you haven’t listened to it, I would even say it’d be worth your time to pause this and go back. It’s a long one, but it is so packed with juicy goodness.

I literally break down step by step the five transformations I had the year I went from 18K to 103K. The rules I had to break, what it actually looked like when I implemented my confidence work. The breakdown of my timeline, how it took me 15 months to actually make 100K in 12 months.

Because I think it’s really important for all coaches to know that everybody’s path is going to be different. And yes, everybody loves an overnight sensation, but they really don’t happen that often. We see this in Hollywood all the time.

Some star comes out of nowhere and then we read one article on them and it turns out they’ve been hitting the ground and working the circuits for like 10 years, right? Like, “I was an overnight sensation.” Yeah, 10 years plus an overnight.

Which is kind of how I feel like my story is. I started coaching in 2013 through a direct sales program. Only earning commissions off of products. I wasn’t paid to coach people, I was paid commissions. And part of what they bought included me coaching them every week.

I didn’t make any money in 2014. And in 2015, my first year of just coaching, meaning people paid me money to coach them, I made a whopping $1200. 2018 was actually my first $100,000 year. I actually made $103,000 that year.

So, you see that that was my fifth year, technically, coaching that I finally hit 100K. And even now, three years later, I’m going to hit around half a million. So it’s not like I hit the 100K and now I’m already a multi-millionaire.

Everybody’s path is different. What I need to learn here might be very different than some of my peers. And what I want to offer you is that we’re still in the like top 1 to 5% of coaches, those of us who are making over $100,000 a year. There really aren’t that many.

Your circle might be filled with them. When you consider the hundreds of thousands of coaches that there are in the world, and how many of them are making good income. But their path to 100K all looks very different, and yours will too.

So, again, we love the overnight sensations. But I have to be honest, I really have a heart for those of you grinding and chugging away to try to figure this out. Those of you who aren’t quitting on yourself. Or even if you do have periods of quitting on yourself, you keep coming back and you keep starting over again and again.

Which is why, of course, I host this free podcast. You could just listen to this podcast and create great results. You can sign up for the freebie at the end of this episode. And when you do that, you’ll get a free training of mine and you’ll also end up on my email list. And then you find out even more free trainings that I offer, like live trainings, where you might be able to join me. I do those every once in a while.

And then when you are ready, invest in you and invest in your most important asset, which is your brain. You can apply and enroll in Confident Coaches Mastermind, which is the paid program that I have. And I did recently have a free training called the Mid Year Power Reboot. It was one of my live trainings where you could sign up and you could actually coach with me live over Facebook in a private Facebook group.

And something happened in that private Facebook group just last week, or actually by the time you listen to this I guess it would be about two, two and a half weeks. It is just too important not to share with literally every coach. This is a lesson in integrity. And integrity, if you remember from last week’s episode, was one of the five transformations that I had on my path to 100K. In my year between 18 and $103,000, integrity was an integral part of that.

So just a brief reminder of how I teach integrity. I talked about it a little bit in last week’s episode. Once you realize that there are no rules and there is no judgment, you can literally create whatever you want to create. And then you follow that up with saying what you really want to say. And integrity is following that up with the action you want to take.

Integrity is doing what you say you’re going to do. Integrity is showing up in the world the way you said you would, and the way that you expect others to. And, of course, the last component of integrity is learning to still love yourself and have your own back even when you don’t. Because it’s guaranteed, now all you perfectionists that are out there right now, it is guaranteed that you will sometimes not show up the way that you want to.

So in this live training, I had the private Facebook group open for a couple of weeks. And the training has actually been over for quite a few weeks now, but the group was still open at this time. And I posted a referral opportunity. A woman from back in the days when both of our kiddos were in preschool that I do know personally but not incredibly well. She’s looking for a life coach. And it’s just not the work that I do anymore.

And as you guys will learn, I don’t always have the best memory, meaning I’m always forgetting what I know. And I immediately was like, “I don’t know any general life coaches. I know no life coaches at all. I have no idea who to refer to you.” So I hit up the reboot group, I posted an opportunity, “Hey, who are my general life coaches?” And, of course, not 30 minutes later I remembered my favorite general life coaches.

Specifically one of my favorite clients, Leslie McHale, who is just like the perfect candidate for my friend. And so of course, I reached out to her. But that’s not the point to the rest of this episode, my terrible memory. The point is, I immediately started getting responses from the attendees in the Mid Year Power Reboot.

Now, I think it’s important to note that over 200 people registered for the reboot. And it was just under 200 people actually inside the Facebook group. Like you signed up through a lead page, and you got on the email list and you got everything emailed to you. But the actual coaching and conversation with me was inside the Facebook group.

So it was just under 200 people inside that Facebook group. And still to this day, I’ve not actually done, and yes, on the back end of mine to be able to analyze that free training to get the actual numbers, is still something that I need to do. As of this recording I have not done it yet. So these numbers I’m about to share with you are ballparks and estimates.

But I would say anywhere from 30 to 50 active people in that training. You know, there were those 10 that showed up all of the time. And then maybe another 10 to 25 that I saw a lot over the course of the total of three weeks. And then maybe another 20 to 25 that I saw maybe once or twice. Names that popped up a couple of times but then I never heard from again.

And again, I don’t really know how accurate those numbers are. But from my brain I’m very comfortable saying that about a quarter of the people in the Facebook group I was aware of or familiar with during the training. So what I mean by that is I went live every day for the first five days and I saw their names.

When I asked questions during the lives, they would respond in the comments. When I offered, “Who needs to be coached on this?” They would post a coaching question, they would comment in the comments even later on.

So even if they weren’t live, I always invite people to type in the word replay to let me know that you’re here. And they would do that so that I would know who was watching even if it wasn’t live. When I would ask questions inside the Facebook group, they would reply. When I asked for celebrations and transformations, they shared what they got out of the program.

And again, not everybody did every single one of those things. If you’ve ever done a free training, you know how it goes. There’s those people that do everything. And then those people that maybe show up for about a third to two thirds of the work.

And I have absolutely no judgment whatsoever for those 150, 175 people who didn’t show up. And to be really clear, I can’t even really know who watched the lives and did the worksheets, and literally just made no comment whatsoever on Facebook. I mean, maybe there was one person, maybe there were another 50. I really don’t have an idea of those numbers.

But I also know what it’s like to sign up for a free training and then not show up. I’ve done it. I’ve done it a lot. I know what it’s like to sign up for a free training and not show up. To sign up for a program that I paid for like a 29, or a 49, or a 199. Heck, I’ve even bought programs upwards of multiple hundreds of thousand dollars and then not done the work at all.

I have been there. I have empathy and love for those people who do that because I have done that myself. This is also not what this story is necessarily about. Because what the story is really about is when I posted the referral link, the names of the people people that I saw, at least a good half of them, I had not seen before.

So in this group of 200 people with 30 to 50 active people in there, I post, “Hey, who’s a general life coach?” And on a list of people, a good half of them, first time I’ve ever seen those names. They were not one of those people that were in the 30 to 50.

And again, maybe they showed up and just never commented. But I also know what it’s like to not do the work, to not show up in a group, to not do the free training, et cetera. And then when someone’s throwing out free referrals, there I am raising my hand.

Because I did this when I first graduated from the Life Coach School. I was really just– I have to be honest with you, I graduated from the Life Coach School in 2016. So again, in 2015, I made 1$200. In 2016 I made $6,000. And so it was in that year, I remember, I was really just painting by numbers, my friend.

The mindset work that they had given me to do, wasn’t doing it. I wasn’t self-coaching. I did not have a coach of my own. I wasn’t reaching out and asking for coaching. I got my certification and I just went to work on my business.

Now, my coaching school today has a lot more coaching opportunities built in now than they did back in 2016. Because I think they saw so many of us do that, graduate, certify, and then flounder because we weren’t continuing to be coached on our most important asset, which is our brain.

And for me, there just was no mindset work for me anywhere. And then I don’t know if this is still part of their program, but at the time, they would give out referrals all have the time. And we were like ducks in a pond when someone’s throwing out bread. Just like maniacs piled on top of each other to get these free referrals.

So I totally know what that’s like. Because when you’re not showing up and doing the difficult mindset work and the mental growth work because you really don’t believe you can do it on your own, of course you’re going to raise your hand when people are giving away free referrals. Because that might be the only way you get a client. Because you don’t really believe that you can create them on your own. You don’t really believe that you have what it takes for a client to see you and want to work with you.

And this is where that integrity piece fits in and why it is so important. And I’m going to share with you what I specifically shared. So, I did reflect on this for a couple of days. And of course, we went out of town for a baseball tournament and I wasn’t working at all. And I did share a long, tough love post in the Facebook group.

And this is a piece of what I shared. Let me read this to you. Day four of this training was integrity. Do you say what you’re going to do? Do you show up in the world the way you expect others to do? Because we want our clients to say yes to the work. We want them to show up to the free trainings, experience the transformation that’s available to us. Did you do that here?

We want them to raise their hand share the transformation that they’ve had? Did you do that work here? We want them to commit, not just to us, but to ourselves. Even when it’s scary, even when they’re unsure. Did you do that here?

If you didn’t, don’t forget the second part I taught about integrity. Which is having your own back even when you don’t show up like you said you would and as you want others to. That is confidence.

Did you show up to this training and do what you said you were going to do? Did you watch the five live videos? Did you do the worksheets I offered? Did you comment and post and ask for the coaching that you need? If you didn’t, do the uncomfortable and ask yourself why? Because your reasons are the same reasons your potential clients have.

That last part right there, right? The reasons you don’t show up and do the work are the same reasons your clients, your potential clients have. It’s same reason that people follow you, and they love you, and they don’t reach out for coaching. Whatever your reasons are, they have the same once.

And then I did remind them of all of the amazing results that the people who did show up got. People signed clients for the first time in five months. People made their first dollars ever in this free training. It was so good and so powerful.

And that the training was actually still there for them, that I hadn’t actually shut the group down yet, they could still all do the work. And you had the emails where all of the trainings were still there. It wasn’t really going away, just the Facebook group was going away.

And how a month from now, when the rush has worn off and the free group isn’t there, and the doubt, and the rules, and the judgment creeps back in, we’ll still be doing this work. Making offers and signing clients every week in Confident Coaches Mastermind.

So, hell yeah, y’all are all invited to come along with us because we expect other people to show up in the world a certain way. And then we get out of integrity when we don’t even try to show up the same way too.

And this is such a confidence killer. And it’s kind of a silent confidence killer. Because we spend so much time projecting our doubt and our frustration and our expectation onto other people, that we aren’t looking at our own doubt and not living up to our own expectation.

And there’s that part of our Helga brain that knows we are not showing up the way we want other people to. So who are we to be able to help anyone else when we can’t even help ourselves? Does that sound familiar?

I mean, I literally got coached by my own one on one coach on this very subject. It was about a different circumstance. But the, how can I possibly help anyone else when I can’t even help myself? We had that coaching just a couple of weeks ago.

Now, of course, that last part of integrity, can we please talk about the third most important part? Which is how not to beat yourself up when you don’t show up in the world the way that you wish that you would? Now, one of the reasons it’s so easy for me to talk to you guys about this is again, what did I just say? I myself just got coached on this.

That’s me showing up in the world the way that I expect my clients to. That isn’t me expecting perfection from my clients. But if I expect them to get coached, if I expect them to address their integrity, you bet your bippy–   Oh my God, I just said bippy. You bet your bippy that I am out there getting that coaching myself.

And the only way you can achieve true integrity with yourself is by putting love, or grace, or compassion on the feeling line when your circumstance looks like something you wish it didn’t look like. When you’ve done something that you wish you hadn’t done, or you didn’t do what you wish you had done.

When that is the circumstance, what would it look like to feel love or grace or compassion? What would that look like to you? To have what we perceive as a negative thing in the circumstance line and a positive feeling on the F line? What? Yeah.

A brand new client of mine, actually one of the new July clients, just brought this up in one of our bonus calls. All of the calls we had in July were all bonus calls, and August– Actually, is it today? Yeah, actually, today, the day you are listening to this episode is actually our first kickoff call of the new group.

And we were talking about the biggest fear that she has about going into the six months together is that she’s going to let herself down again. That she always jumps into things and then she gets distracted, she gets busy. This coaching business just becomes not as important as other parts of her life.

And as we dove into that her brain was only giving her two options, she either goes all in all of the time and never gets distracted and never gets busy. Or she lets herself down. Like there was no other in between. And I’m like, “No, no.” I’m pounding my fist on the table, or I would accept my microphone keeps falling. So I’m going to have to stop pounding.

That is not it. It is not 100% or 0%. Because, coaches, of course you’re going to get distracted. Of course you’re going to let other things take priority. Of course you’re going to have times when you don’t believe, and you don’t show up, and you don’t do the work. And someone throws you a bone and you clamor for it, even though you’d be totally pissed if the situation was turning that was your clients doing that.

Of course, you’re going to do those things because you are human. And you have a whole host of thoughts, something like 60,000 a day, right? Most of which are going to be on that uncomfortable side. Most of which are going to be Helga thoughts driving what you do and don’t do every day.

It takes a lot of mental work to override your desire for efficiency and comfort and safety. But efficiency and comfort and safety do not create a confident coach. They will not create a $100,000 business if you’ve never created one before.

So of course, you’re going to say, “I’m doing this.” And then not show up all the time like you said you were going to. Of course you’re going to have a high expectation of others and then fail to meet them yourself. Acknowledge that, allow for that. And be willing to explore the reasons why so that you can be aware of them when it does happen again. Because it will happen again.

You’re never going to reach this heightened place of enlightenment where you never mess up. Where you just always show up perfectly in the world all of the time. That’s just not even an attainable goal. But when you ask yourself why you aren’t showing up the way that you want to from a place of love, grace, or compassion, the answers that you come up with will be like the answers your clients have too.

When you face the integrity issue, you become such a better coach for your people. Because you can model to them what it looks like to fuck up, to not show up how you want to, and still love yourself. This is what I did for my client just this past week in the July group.

The way she’s going to not let herself down again, is to not never get distracted, but to get distracted and still be okay with herself when it happens so she can come back and keep going. And to start practicing now what that would feel like and start creating the thoughts now of what would produce that. So she can actually start believing them.

It’s written into our whole society that we really don’t like people who mess up, right? We really put a high expectation on people to not fuck up, don’t be late, don’t ruin the big project, don’t act like a jerk. And the whole thing just denies that we are humans.

And then we think that we either have to apologize profusely and feel terrible and feel shame. Or we blow it off and act like it’s no big deal. The two options are not I either feel like a total shit bag or I tell people they shouldn’t really be that upset with me. Those aren’t the only two options here. It’s acknowledging, “Yeah, I did this thing, wasn’t my best.”

Apologize when needed, especially if it’s to yourself from that place of love. So that you can take the next best step forward because integrity is not about perfection. Integrity is about holding yourself up to a high standard, and loving yourself even when you don’t meet it. If you ever expect to do that for others, you have to be willing to do it for yourself.

So, my friends, the questions that I dropped a little bit earlier, I want you to really consider them again. If you do not have a business that you want right now, ask yourself why. If you want to make 100K and you haven’t yet or you have no idea how it’s going to happen, be willing to explore why you haven’t already created that.

We want our clients to raise their hand and share their transformations that they’ve had. Have you done that work? We want them to commit, not just to us but to themselves, even when it’s scary, even when it’s unsure. Have you committed to yourself?

And then with so much love and compassion, be willing to get uncomfortable and ask yourself why. Because they answered you come up with will give you all the avenues to explore where you need coaching. And when you explore those avenues for coaching for yourself, you’ll be able to coach your clients so much more powerfully and so much more compassionately. Because you yourself have done the work.

And this is 100% the work that we do in Confident Coaches Mastermind. Now, we’ve already started the July CCM group, but our next CCM group is October. And I already have clients reserving a spot. I already have clients putting down payments on their spot.

So if you do this exercise and you find those areas you want to coach on, and even though that work kind of scares the shit out of you, makes you incredibly uncomfortable. Of course it would, discomfort is not the problem part here. Because you know on the other side of that integrity truly is part of your path to 100K, then let’s get you applied for the next round. It’ll be here before you know it. All right, coaches? All right. Until next week,
let’s go fuck some shit up.

Thanks so much for listening to The Confident Coach’s podcast. I invite you to learn more come visit me at amylatta.com. And until next week, let’s go do epic stuff.