Ep #181: The One Attribute All Coaches Need

You’re listening to episode 181 of The Confident Coaches Podcast, the one where you understand the one thing you need to understand. 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 Amy Latta, let’s dive in.

Hello, my coaches. Always excited to have you here. Listening every single week on confident coaches.

This one is I think you know how it is when I say this one’s going to be on and then I go off on tangents. This is going to be one that you’re going to want to save. This is going to be one you’re going to want to flag for when you’re just not feeling it, when you’re thinking about quitting, when you’re thinking this is too hard. Everybody else is ahead of you. You’re behind. You don’t know what you’re doing. This is never going to work. Nothing you ever do, ever works. It doesn’t really matter.

Whatever your version of, you know, those repeat thoughts that keep coming back up that you’ve coached around a million times. And some of these you just believe them. Some days you just believe them. And this is the episode I want you to tag for when you’re having one of those days and you need a little foot of the ass. You need a little kick in the butt. You need a little pounding of fist delivered lovingly from a person who’s been there, from a person who gets it, and also You can’t not to do this thing.

And I was really thinking about, you know, how many coaches sign up for Free to Paid coach and they’re all in for the first six to eight weeks. And when the results don’t come immediately, how many people just kind of fall off. And I’ve seen this in multiple programs that I’ve, myself, have been in those times. And even people who do have success right out of the gate, but then it comes to maintaining that success. They also can fall into this same thing also because I really want you to know. Like, it really isn’t the results that solve all of your problems. It will not make the doubt go away because the bar for success is being continually raised higher as you get farther along in your coaching business. Multimillion dollar coaches, their bar for success is now just much higher and their mind will still tell them that nothing they do works because now they’re only averaging you know, in a month, what they couldn’t even imagine they could make any year once upon a time. Right? And there’s so many that do give up and I understand why.

Let’s be really honest. This is why I’ve been talking so much and doing so many podcasts around kind that shady business stuff. I can’t remember what number it was, but I mentioned it in a podcast a couple weeks ago about, like, you know, coaches who parade out only their, like, top one percent of their clients these are their results that’s possible. And I get it. We want to be inspiring to people.

We want people to be inspired because those results are possible and we know that they’re possible because somebody’s done it and so, which can be, on one hand, really inspiring and on another hand, really crippling. And this is something that I see in the life coaching world of, you know, if your thoughts create all of your things, never indulge in the thought that you can’t do it too. Don’t accept the average results.

But also, if you are a coach who is not in the 1% of success stories, you’re thinking, you’re the only one. When actually, you’re in the 90-95% of how business tends to go. It’s this fine line that we have as life coaches have inspired to achieve that 1% of 1% while also really celebrating the results of a coach who builds something from nothing and how phenomenal that is.

And so when you have coaching programs and business coaches in particular who their success is in the 1%, and I’m even going to go the 5 or 10%. Like, let’s give them leeway. And the only results you hear are the top results. Then there’s the words that you’re hearing. And there’s not a lot of conversation around the other results that are possible, the other results that aren’t just numbers and clients that are so valuable. You know, and I think a lot about and I can’t remember if I told the story in the last shady business one. So I’m going to share it here.

I still remember that the year I got certified as a coach, there was one person from my class who hit a hundred thousand dollars in, like, eleven months and twenty-eight days. Like, it was literally three days to spare kind of thing. And the person who runs my coaching school, this was the first time anybody had ever done that, and it was really fascinating to watch the messaging become … if one person can do it, everyone can do it. And this shouldn’t be a negative message. Right? Like, it stands to reason if one person can do it, why can’t everybody else do it? Like, why not strive for that? And all so 99% of people won’t do that, and that doesn’t have to be a problem. And yet when we say if one person can do it, we all can.

It makes sense that so many coaches and so many of you right now are going, you know, I know all these people from my coaching class that are making money and I’m not or I just saw somebody post how they made two thousand dollars in their first year as a coach. And I haven’t made two thousand dollars in three years. So I must be doing something wrong. Right? I must be doing it wrong. Something’s wrong with me. It’s not meant for me and that’s what all of those that negative talk is.

And a couple things at play. First of all, even that one person from my coaching group would come back and say, that that person had a lot of things in place that allowed them to reinvest every single dollar that they had well into the multiple six figures. And not everybody has that. We’ve talked about this on the podcast before too. Privilege, advantages. It’s not a negative thing. If you have those, it’s not a negative thing you don’t have those, but it’s worth acknowledging that some people need to be able to pay themselves before they’re making four or five hundred thousand dollars in a year. They need that income. They need to be able to pull money out of their business to help put food on their table. And they shouldn’t like, that’s not a success story. Right?

As you were sitting here wondering if you should just quit this all. Number one, be aware if you are looking at the 1 to t10% and completely forgetting about the other 90 to 99% that you are a part of. And here is the thing. The only reason you haven’t figured out how to become a profitable coach is because you do have one foot out or maybe a toe out.

You are still making quitting an option and what I’m inviting you to do is to stop making quitting an option. Are you willing to take quitting off the table? If you stop comparing yourself to the 1% and realize there’s a whole other 90 plus percentage of life coaches who the exact same place as you are, and maybe you are even farther ahead than they are.

If you really honor that you are not the only one and that success can happen in an instant and it can take a lot of time and it can be everything in between. Are you willing to take quitting off the table? Because if there’s one thing that I know is that some people have a lot of advantages in their place that others don’t and that’s okay. Some people do fall into success, but most of the people, they’re tenacious. And I was thinking about this.

So there’s this activity that we do in Path to 100k where we’re really talking about homing in on the definition of our ideal client. We really dig deep into the specifics of what their life looks like, the specificity goes way up into the person that we’re talking to.

You know, when you’re just trying to become a paid coach, you’re learning how to become more specific. You’re learning about language. Like, you’re new. You still have to throw out a lot of things before you can really home in on it by the time, you’re in Path to 100k and we’re working on becoming a profitable coach in Path to 100k, we want to start getting super specific.

And one of the activities we do are what are the characteristics of your ideal clients and even boiling them down into three succinct words. How you we would describe these people, characteristics, qualities, that’s the word I’m looking for—qualities.

In Path to 100k, the qualities of my ideal Path to 100k, client they’re determined and they’re resilient and they are resourceful. When I’m thinking about the person I’m writing to in my emails and my copy. I have those words. I’m talking to that person that’s determined, that’s resilient, that’s resourceful.

What about my Free to Paid Coach client? What does it take to become a paid coach? And it’s like, well, they’re also determined, and they’re committed and it’s really funny because my third word, I’ve probably replaced a bunch of times –they are fierce, they’re unrelenting.

And it was only recently where I realized tenacious. That the quality of a Free to Paid Coach client, that’s the quality of a new coach who’s going to become successful.

Yes, it’s determination. Yes, it’s commitment. And actually tenacity almost takes care of determined and committed. It’s tenacity with a ton of curiosity and a ton of willingness and openness to explore. But tenacious. So look it up tenacious in the dictionary, which I did for this episode.

We’re talking about persisting in existence, not easily dispelled. Not readily relinquishing a position, a principle, or a course of action. It’s very determined. Right?

Persistent. Very determined. And I love this not readily relinquishing a course of action, for example: not willing to quit. Some other some other definitions that came up: tenacious is an adjective that describes something or someone that does not easily stop or get pulled apart or separated from something else. It means persistent, stubborn, relentless in maintaining and hearing to and seeking something of value and desired. So we’re talking about some relentlessness, some stubbornness. You’re so stubborn about becoming a paid coach and making this work.

Examples of tenacious could be a company that dominates the market. An advocate of civil rights, a person who survives a terminal disease, a detective who solves a difficult case. I thought this one was really weird—a ladybug that catches its prey. I was like, that’s such a specific example.

Quitting, like, what’s the quality that we see there? Quitting is not an option when you’re tenacious. It is a relentlessness. This is going to happen, and I don’t even know how it’s going to happen and there’s so much going against me, or it feels like there’s so much against me and I have to be willing to look past that in order to achieve.

And here’s the thing, when I say tenacious, I know some people go to the tenacity of a pit bull, the tenacity of a rabid animal. And by the way, a side note to the animal lovers: I think pit bulls get a lot of negative press. I know so many amazing and loving pit bulls, but there’s that connotation in that association. Right?

We’re afraid we’re going to be annoying. We’re afraid we’re going to be one of those people that never shuts up about the thing that they’re doing. All they ever talk about is that thing. Right? They’re kind of that person in your life. It’s like, oh, here they come again with that thing that they always talk about.

But someone who is tenacious is less worried about what people’s perceptions are of them than they are about figuring out what they want. Do you hear me on that one? You have to be somebody who is less worried about what people think of you than you are about figuring out what it is you want, figuring out how to achieve what you want. Like, I’m thinking about, like, imagine that example or set an advocate for civil rights.

There are people who for sure think that this isn’t as big of a problem anymore. This isn’t a conversation. Like, we solved all that back in the late sixties. Definitely, people were like, oh, you’re bringing that up again. Why are we still talking about that? And there are even people in this day and age in the year of 2023 who actively advocate against civil rights like we’ve already did that already.

The pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. I live in Missouri, ask me how I know. A lot of the state legislation that’s coming out has me going, what is happening? Right? But can you imagine if those people fighting for the civil rights of all people were like this is just too hard. And there’s too much new legislation coming out. And you know what, I gave it my that good old college try and, yeah, I’m just going to stop now. No. No.

That’s not what tenacity looks like. Your values, your belief in you, your belief in the power of coaching, your belief in your understanding of what coaching has done for you and when is possible for other people, when they do it also. Your desire to be an entrepreneur and a business owner in a business that matters to you, that’s important to you, that has more value to you than what other people think of you. And that’s it. Right? This is why.

There’s an entire section in Free to Paid Coach on stop beating yourself up, which is all about having your own back. It’s a fundamental teaching in Free to Paid Coach. It gets its own section of modules, on how to have your own back, how to believe in you even when other people think something else of you. How to believe in you even when you aren’t creating the results that you want? That’s a fundamental part of Free to Paid Coach because it’s a fundamental part of achieving your goal and achieving your dream.

That’s part of the tenacity that’s required you have to believe more in yourself than the opinions of other people. This is all so why feminist coaching is embedded in all of my coaching because you will have to be standing up against what you believe in, sometimes it will feel like it’s in the face of cultural and social norms.

Are you allowed to dream this big? Who do you think you are? Do you have the right to talk about your business with people? Do you have the right to ask people to pay you money to coach them? There will be a lot of messaging that you have received possibly that says that if you’re helping people, you shouldn’t be charging for it. Or that as a woman, you don’t have the right to charge what you are worth because your worth is really in the care and nurturing of others and kind of giving of yourself freely and openly way past what you should have to do.

So if you want to become a paid coach. If you want to become a profitable coach, tenacity is the one skill you are absolutely going to need to hone and foster.

And here’s what I want to offer you …

Number one, is understanding that when you’re comparing yourself to others, make sure you’re comparing yourself to the whole of life coaching, not just the top 1%. Understand that tenacity is the relentless pursuit of what you were wanting to achieve anything fabulous in this world, 99% of the people had to rely on their tenacity to achieve it.

And that tenacious does not have to be a negative thing. And knowing that you have make ensuring that you have the resources that you need to dispel those myths that your mind is giving you as to why this is a problem, why tenacity is a negative attribute, and learning that is a positive attribute.

I think most importantly, however, as understanding where you have already been tenacious in life. You guys forget how fierce you are in your life. How much super tough shit you’ve already solved because quitting wasn’t an option. And yet, you try to convince yourself that your business is somehow different and it’s not. You’ve just secretly decided that if this whole life coaching business thing doesn’t work out, it’s okay. You’ve been tenacious in other areas of your life. Bring that tenacity into your coaching business.

Yeah, I know it doesn’t necessarily come easy. I know things aren’t always going in your favor. I know you will have to overcome things that you thought would be simple and they turn out not to be. I know that you’ll try to look at somebody else and replicate with worked for them and it won’t work for you. I know you’re going to have to problem solve and it’s going to feel like rocket science and brain science, and you can still do it because you absolutely have in other areas of your life. You were already a badass at this in so many areas of your life. You just need to decide that quitting isn’t an option. Remember what a fierce human being that you are and take your next best step right now.

When it comes down to this, I know that this is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. If it were easy, the panel of success would include a hundred people out of a room of fifteen hundred. It would include fifteen hundred people. Literally everybody would be up on that stage, not just a fraction of the people in the room would be up on that stage.

I know that this can be hard. I know there are days when you want to quit. I know there are moments where you’re like, oh my god. I would love this would be easier. I know that the more success you achieve, your mind just keeps raising the bar of what your bare minimum is supposed to be. I know that you look at others and you think that they got it easier than you do, and sometimes they do have things in their favor that you don’t, and sometimes that’s not the case.

I know that life isn’t always fair. How many courses do you have to buy before you finally figure it out? I get all of that and also where is your tenacity to figure it out anyway? Why can you not do this? Why is this something that you not just kind of want to maybe do, but like this is what I really want to do, this is why it’s important to me.

I shared this with my Free to Paid Coach group in a live pep talk, and I’m going to share it with you. This episode is going to come out sometime in April, so I want you to think about it.

Sitting here in mid to late April, what do you want to see in your coaching business by the end of this year? In the six to nine months? Imagine yourself coming into your office at the end of a week and you’re sitting there and you’re wrapping up your week and you’re looking at your calendar and you’re looking at your what’s on your desk? You’re looking at everything. What do you want to have achieved by then? How many clients are you working with? How many dollars are in your bank? What projects have you launched? What programs have you put out there? You don’t have to have all of those things, but what things do you want to have into existence that don’t exist right now?

And then I want you to answer these three questions. Number one, why is that important? Because you don’t have to do that. You can go get another job. You don’t have to be a life coach. You don’t have to be an entrepreneur. You don’t have to be a business owner. But something in you says, yeah, I kind of do. Why is it important?

Number two, what’s the impact that business that you see in your mind that you want you see possible for you by the end of this year? What’s the impact of that on your life, on your family, your finances, your future? What would that mean to you? What’s the impact, the positive impact that it’s going to have on your life and the people in your life?

And then the third question, my favorite question is what that will mean about you to be the woman who creates that business that allows for the answers you came up with in number one and number two. What does it mean about you to be the woman who creates a business that allows you to have that impact on your life and that impact in the world.

Those answers feed your tenacity. Let those answers feed your relentless, I’m not giving up and I’m going to figure this out.

Yes, you’re still going to have negative thoughts come through your mind. The goal is not to eliminate those. The goal is to not let them stop you anymore. Just because the thought is there doesn’t mean you need to believe it. Your job becomes allowing it to sit in the car with you without you allowing it to grab the wheel and drive the car. The negative thoughts aren’t going anywhere Your work is to stop believing them.

If you do not know how to do this, if this is not something you’re very adept at doing, this is what we do all damn day in Free to Paid Coach. These are the skills you learn in my very basic, open to everybody who wants to be a paid coach program.

Free to Paid Coach is $1,000. I’ll take four payments of $250 if that’s the payment option that will help you. And you learn exactly how to not believe everything just because it’s in your mind. If you’re ready to become a paid coach, that’s the program for you.

If you’re ready to become a profitable coach, Path to 100k is where we’re going to take all of that work and we’re going to home in on and get super specific about all of it. And we’re going to focus on creating the business that looks like yours and like nobody else’s and that elevates your life right now.

So what are your answers to those three questions and let that fuel your tenacity?

All right, my friends? I cannot wait to hear what you’re creating. I’m so excited to see what you create in this world. And I’ll talk to you next week.

Coach, it’s time to sign your first free client, your first paid client, your next client, and to learn how to do it consistently and having a hell of a lot of fun along the way. This is exactly what you’re going to do in Free to Paid Coach. It’s the only program giving you step-by-step what to do to become a paid coach and step-by-step how to handle the roller coaster emotions that come with doing what you need to do to become a paid coach.

If you know you can’t not do this life coaching thing, but believing that you can do it, handling rejection and remembering how to do all of those things shuts you down, the Free to Paid Coach Community is waiting for you. Find everything that you’re looking for inside. It’s only $1,000. Payments are available, and then you’re in forever.

Visit www.amylatta.com/ftpc to join us right now. See you inside. Let’s get paid, coach.

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.