Ep #54: Expanding Into Your Next Level

You are listening to The Life Coach Business Podcast, episode number 54.

Welcome to The Life Coach Business Podcast, a show for coaches who are ready to up-level their business and take their impact, leadership, and results to a whole new level. If you’re ready to start taking powerful action and become the leader your business needs in order to grow and thrive, this show is for you. I’m your host, Amanda Karlstad, certified life and business coach, and entrepreneurial leadership expert. Now, let’s get down to business.

Hello and welcome, everyone. I’m so glad to have you join me today. I hope you’re doing well. I am super excited to talk to you all today. I’m looking forward to the conversation we’re about to have.

But before we dive in, I want to give a huge shoutout to L. Cortez, who recently left a five-star review of the podcast. And here’s what she said. She said, “Amazing, brilliant, and genuine. I’ve been listening to other podcasts and nothing compares to this podcast. Amanda is brilliant, knowledgeable, but most of all, you hear the compassion in her voice, and you can tell she genuinely cares about her listeners’ success.”

Thank you so much, L. Cortez. What an amazing review. I appreciate that so much and I just want to say it’s such an honor to be able to bring this show to you and to listeners like you every week. So I so appreciate that, so thank you, thank you, thank you. It’s wonderful reviews like this that really do help the show to reach more people.

And so reviews like this help the show to do that and I truly appreciate that, L. Cortez. And my sincere biggest thank you for that. Alright, so let’s get into today’s topic. I want to talk to you all today about what it takes to expand into your next level.

And I’ve been thinking a lot about this over the last few days and I wanted to bring this conversation to you because I think it’s a really important one. And I will say that if you’re growing a business or if you are scaling a business, and if you’ve been in that process for any significant amount of time, I think what I’m about to talk about is really going to be your next evolution.

It’s really your next level that is going to allow you to continue to grow, that’s going to allow you to continue to expand your business, and ultimately make more money. And for my listeners, I know that that’s what you’re working towards. I know that that’s your goal.

And I know for many of you, that you have dreams, you have aspirations, you have goals of building and scaling a very large business. And for many of you, you have very big goals. And I want to tell you that if that’s you, you’re in the right place.

Because I really do believe that that is my zone of genius. Through my own process of building my business and also through my personal work, the deep personal work that I have done and that I continue to do on a daily basis, one of the things that I know I have been gifted is helping my clients to shift into their next levels and helping them in many cases shift immediately into those next levels internally so that you can start taking action, you can start executing on the external strategies that help you grow and scale your business.

And because of that, that’s why when clients generally start working with me in my programs, it really doesn’t matter where they’re at in terms of revenue and where their business is at. My goal is really to get them to their goal in the most accelerated way.

And that’s one of the things that I love seeing most in my clients is helping them to take those huge leaps forward, both on a personal level and also with their business. And it’s so much fun to be able to work with my clients and help them transform through that process and really witness that process, which when translates into massive growth in their business.

And so here’s what I want to tell you about this. The concepts that we are going to talk about today are a huge part of this. They’re a huge part of being able to take those huge leaps to make those quantum shifts that I talk so often about.

So I think it’s a really important conversation, no matter what type of business you have, no matter where you’re at in your business growth, it’s all going to be relevant to you. And I know many of you are coaches, or perhaps consultants, but I also know that I have several listeners who are creative business owners as well, and I want you all to know that the concepts that we’re about to talk about, it really doesn’t matter the type of business that you’re in.

The concepts are universal, regardless of your business, regardless of your business model. So let’s get to it. And I want to start by saying that one of the things that I believe makes the coaching industry, the personal development/coaching/consulting industry so unique is that it’s one of the simplest types of businesses to start.

It really has a simple business model when you look at it. Yet at the same time, I’ve found that it’s also one of the most confronting. And it’s because in the industry, in the coaching industry, growing a coaching business is a very personal thing.

It’s personal because as a business owner, as the coach who’s also the business owner, you are the brand in most cases. You are the face of your business. It’s you that is coaching your clients and working on a very deep level typically with your clients. And so it’s a very, very personal thing.

Now, I also believe that it’s one of the privileges that we have as coaches to be able to do the deep work, to be able to help others improve their lives in all of the ways that we are capable of doing that. I believe this really is a gift.

And it’s also one of the biggest personal journeys I believe that one can ever go through is building a business. And so again, it doesn’t matter what type of business you own. If you’re an entrepreneur, entrepreneurship is a complete personal journey. And I also believe it’s a very spiritual one, especially if you’re in the personal development world.

So I think one of the things that is important to understand and that is most unique about all of this is that it really does require a level of your own personal growth. It requires a level of your own personal evolution in order to grow your business to a substantial level.

And in fact, one of the things that I talk a lot about and really base the whole concept of my podcast is that in order to grow a business, you have to first grow the leader of that business. And that, I’m guessing for all of you, is you.

And one of the reasons for that is because when you look at, again, the coaching industry for example, when you look at what it is you’re really selling, it’s very different from selling, let’s just say a widget. It’s not like you’re selling a product, something you could buy in a store. You’re selling transformation and you’re selling you.

And so because you’re selling your ideas and your approach and your content, which again, is very different than selling, let’s say a mop or a set of knives, or some sort of household product that you might see in a store, it’s a very, very different ballgame.

And because of this, you also open yourself up to a lot of different personalities, a lot of different people, which also leads to different opinions and in some cases, perhaps criticism, or naysayers, whatever that might be. And because it does open you up and because it’s such a personal journey that you go through, it requires a certain level of emotional maturity to develop.

It requires that your emotional maturity is at a certain point. It requires that you are emotionally resilient. And the truth of this is as your business gets bigger and bigger, as you’re working with more and more clients, as your audience grows, the learning curve that’s required to build a large business, especially if you’ve never done it before, it’s huge.

And in that process, there’s so many things that you’ve never been confronted with. There’s so many things you haven’t done before. And so because of that, it can be a very confronting situation. And how you choose to respond to those situations is what will make the difference.

It’s having that emotional maturity and that emotional resiliency to be able to choose how to best respond in those situations. And in so many cases, it really can be the difference between keeping your momentum in your business, or the difference of stopping you in your tracks.

And I will tell you, if the latter happens, that is a very dangerous place to be. And the truth is that I see this happen a lot, especially with newer entrepreneurs. But what I want to offer to you today, and what I have learned is that the faster you can respond, the faster you can move through whatever it is that’s coming at you with a level of emotional maturity, the sooner you’ll be able to gain your footing, the sooner you can start gaining traction, and the sooner you’ll start creating momentum.

This is really, really important. And the next thing I think is important to understand is that the more your business grows, the more vulnerable in many ways it might start to feel. And the reason for this is because of the fact that you are opening yourself up to more and more people, and because there’s so many more new channels and layers and opinions.

And again, in some cases, criticism. Again, it’s opening up you to so many new levels of vulnerability that you may not have experienced before, that may not have been open before. So having that emotional maturity, your ability to handle what it is that comes at you is really important.

So managing your emotions and your ability to navigate the things that are coming up for you is huge. Because your ability to be able to move through whatever that is is going to make all the difference.

The next piece that goes right along with all of this is your ability to be uncomfortable. And what I mean by this is your ability to be able to move through any type of discomfort. It’s having an ability to keep putting one step in front of the other, even if you’re feeling different levels of discomfort.

So let’s say for example that for whatever reason, you might not just be feeling at the top of your game. Maybe you had some personal things happening, or something was happening in your corporate job that kind of threw you off, or you had some doubts coming up in your business. It doesn’t really matter.

But the point is that you’ve got things happening, we all do. And they all do have the ability to affect how we feel. And so for most new entrepreneurs and most new coaches that I work with, in so many cases, hitting that first $100,000 might feel impossible.

From wherever you’re sitting right here in the moment, it might seem so far off. And it might be – maybe you’ve developed a new program and you haven’t sold it before. And so thinking about putting it out into the world and selling it and doing all of the marketing and selling it out, all of those things might seem impossible to you right now.

And the reason it does is because we don’t have evidence of that yet. We don’t have evidence that people want to buy it. We don’t have evidence that we can create our business to that level.

And so I even see this with strategy a lot of times when newer coaches come to me and it’s the first time, they’ve put together any type of sophisticated marketing strategy. It gets overwhelming very, very quickly. And the reason for that is again, because it’s all new skills in many cases that we’re learning.

But we also don’t have the evidence. We don’t have that evidence that it’s going to work, and so it’s very, very easy for that self-doubt to start creeping in, for that voice in our minds, that record that’s playing that tells us what if this doesn’t work. This worked for so-and-so, but maybe this isn’t going to work for me.

And so I think this is just important to really be on to yourself in these moments and be on to your brain and understand that your brain is literally doing its job. And so for some of you, you might have had some level of success and you might be in the scaling process of your business, and maybe you even have some level of audience to a degree.

And so in some cases, it might feel like your stakes are even bigger because there are more people and now there’s bigger feelings that there’s more to lose.

So it really doesn’t matter what stage you might be in in this moment. What’s important to understand is that the process in and of itself of starting to play a bigger game will present new challenges. It will bring out self-doubt. It will be uncomfortable. It will require you to grow and develop many new skills as you’re putting yourself out there in a bigger way.

And because you’ve never done this before, your brain, what it will do, and this is inevitable, it will work to keep you in your comfort zone. It will work to continually point out and seek out evidence of whatever that core belief is.

So let’s say for example, if you have a core belief that you don’t think you can have the level of success that you really want, or you don’t think that a certain strategy is going to work for you, your brain, the primitive part of your brain, until that core belief changes, will continually seek out evidence of this all around you.

And it will feel completely uncomfortable. And it will cause you to continue to question things. And you will feel fear and you will feel self-doubt, and you might even feel insecure. And so these types of feelings of discomfort, these emotions, I want you to know are all part of it.

And your ability to handle these types of levels of discomfort, these types of emotions is absolutely one of the secrets to growing your business. And the sooner you can embrace the discomfort, the sooner you can understand that it’s actually where your next level of growth will come from is so, so valuable.

And so when you decide to go in on your business, and when I say in on your business, I mean all in. So when you decide that you’re going to take big steps forward, whether it’s investing in a certain program or putting a certain marketing strategy together, or starting to run some paid advertising, there are a number of ways that you can go all in in your business, and that’s going to look a little bit different for all of you.

But for some of you, it might even be letting go of your nine to five job and going all in on your business. And whatever that looks like, when you make that decision, when you decide to go all in and you start to realize that you’re moving into a place where it does feel uncomfortable, where you probably don’t have full confidence, where you certainly don’t have evidence that what you’re trying to achieve will even happen, when you are willing to bet on yourself, that, my friends, is when I think the real training starts.

That is when we tend to learn our biggest and most valuable lessons. That is when you’ll likely be confronted with even more levels of ambiguity and discomfort, and ultimately, what you’re doing is you’re risking failure. But yet, having the willingness to go there, the willingness to bet on yourself to the degree that it might feel like you’re risking it all, what I want to tell you is this; that is where the best lessons will happen.

That is where the best lessons, as far as where you need to grow, as far as what your next level is, that is when that really starts. And these are the situations where we can learn and where we have the opportunity to grow the most.

So I want to encourage you to not resist this. I want to encourage you to welcome this. I encourage you to recognize that you’re putting yourself in the game, as I like to say. And yes, there will be complexity, yes, there will be discomfort, yes, you will fail.

And yes, you’re feeling likely that you’re risking something big by doing this. But what I want to offer is that this is actually what will move you closer to your goal. Because to use a sports analogy, it’s when we keep ourselves on the sidelines, it’s when we hold ourselves back from playing full out, that is when personally, I think we risk so much more.

We risk not stepping into our true potential. We risk not getting our message out in the way that we could. We risk not helping the people we could really be helping. This is why growing your capacity and leaning into the discomfort is so important.

This is why growing your capacity to lean into the failures and lean into the risk is what we want to be doing. Because unless we do that, we risk staying where we’re at. We risk never playing full out. We risk not making the impact we could really be making.

So I want to encourage you to lean in, dig in. Dig into feeling the discomfort. Dig into the complexity. Dig into the failure. Dig into the risk. Bet on yourself. That, my friends, is where you’re going to start to reach new levels, both personally and in your business. That is where you’ll learn your most valuable lessons. That is where true transformation, true growth will occur.

Alright my friends, have an amazing week. I’ll talk to you all again very soon. Take care. Bye-bye.

Hey, if you’re ready for a real breakthrough in your business and want to grow and scale your business to at least six figures or more in annual revenue, I invite you to apply for my exclusive program The Mastermind atamandakarlstadcoaching.com/the-mastermind. I look forward to seeing you there.

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Life Coach Business Podcast. If you want to learn more about how to build, grow and scale your business and accelerate your results, visit amandakarlstadcoaching.com.