Ep #55: Loving Your Business with Krista St-Germain

You are listening to The Life Coach Business Podcast, episode number 55.

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 have a really special conversation to share with you today. In today’s show, I am sharing an interview that I did with one of my friends, one of my colleagues, Krista St-Germain. And or those of you who don’t know Krista, Krista is a master certified life coach who coaches widowed moms.

So, you’re going to get to learn more about Krista and her story and her business-building journey as she has grown her business over these last few years. So, I know this conversation is going to be full of value for you, so grab a paper, grab a pen, get ready to take some notes and we’ll see you on the other side.

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Amanda: Well, welcome to the show, Krista.

Krista: Thank you, Amanda, I am excited to be here.

Amanda: I’m super-excited for our conversation today. I want to start out by – I think a good place to start is why don’t you introduce yourself, tell us who you are, who you coach, that sort of thing. We’ll start there.

Krista: Yeah, so I’m Krista St-Germain and I’m a master certified coach and primarily, my focus is on widowed moms. And that’s what’s closest to my life experience, so it is my love and I just help widowed moms figure out how not to just get used to the new normal, which is what most of them think they need to do, but to actually love life again. Because that’s possible for all of us.

Amanda: This is going to be such a good conversation. So, tell us, Krista, let’s just go there, let’s start with your story. I’d love for you to share your story with my listeners and tell them how you got into coaching, why you decided to become a coach, and let’s start there.

Krista: Yeah, I got into coaching after having my own – I think it’s the common story – my own incredible transformation. And so, I had been listening to Brooke Castillo’s podcast for quite a while, it seemed. And I had never really done any life coaching with anyone. I had just been kind of a consumer of self-help and a consumer of the podcast and just interested in personal growth and development. But I’d never really worked with anyone on that.

And kind of unexpectedly, my husband died, so we had been coming back from a trip and I had a flat tire and he pulled up behind me to change it and while he was changing my tire, someone who we later found out had meth and alcohol in his system just didn’t stop and hit the back of my husband’s car and that trapped him in between his car and my car, and then less than a day later, he was gone.

So, I just had my own, you know, holy-cow life experience and, of course, therapy was what I needed immediately. So, I went back to my therapist and that’s kind of what helped me unfurl myself from the fetal position and get back to being able to function, getting back to work, to that place where all the people in my life were saying, “Oh, you’re so strong. You’re doing so well.”

And I was thinking, “If this is what strong feels like, this is not good.” And I think it was just an amazing – I don’t really even believe in coincidence, but it was amazing timing that right when I needed it, right when I was really ready and I as back to that place of functioning and I was ready to figure out what I wanted going forward, that’s when Brooke launched Self-Coaching Scholars.

And so, I went all in on that. And not that I don’t love my therapist, because I do, but there was something just incredibly, for me, powerful about life coaching. And the transformation was fast. What I accomplished in six months with a coach just blew my mind and I decided, I think this is what I want to do.

I wasn’t thinking about doing grief then though. Because, at that point, I hadn’t done enough of my own coaching. Even when I went to training. I wasn’t. I was just thinking life coaching is powerful and I could help people with it and it was going to be more meaningful than the corporate job that I had. But I still had enough of my own grief work left to do that I didn’t imagine myself doing grief work. I thought it would be sad.

Amanda: I just think you have such a – and thank you for sharing that, Krista. I just think your story is, you know, my heart goes out every time I hear you talk about it, of course. But also to see your growth. And Krista and I have known each other now the last probably three, almost four years. Goodness.

But to see your growth really through – today we’re going to talk about business, but really just through this process and how coaching has, of course, impacted your life. And I know you’ve got two children yourself and, you know, just all of the women that you’re impacting on a daily basis, I just think you’re such an example of inspiration in the work, in what coaching really can do. The power of it. You’re really an amazing example of that.

I want to just touch for a moment because I think this might be valuable to have this conversation and talk just for a moment about – because you’ve had the experience both with a therapist and with a coach. And I know, within our community, we’ve had some conversations recently, the difference between therapy and life coaching. But in your opinion, or in how you would define the difference between the two, how would you define that, the difference between coaching and therapy?

Krista: Yeah, I can only speak from my perspective. But for me, therapy was about getting myself back up to that kind of minimum baseline of wellness. It was about being able to tell the story of what had happened in a raw and unfiltered way, just for the purpose of processing. It was coming to terms with what had happened. And I think there’s very much a place for that.

But what I also see is that I could have stayed in that story for a long, long time and that would have kept me really stuck. And so, at a certain point, when I was done telling it, I needed somebody to help me go back and tell it in a way that was powerful and strengthening, help me tell it in a way that would be in service of the future that I wanted to create, instead of in a way that kept me stuck recycling a past that I really didn’t.

So, that was the difference. It was, here’s what I needed to do to be able to function again in the world, and then life coaching is what helped me create something in the future that I wanted.

Amanda: It’s so good. I think that’s a great way to define the two and separate it. and I feel very much the same. And I know that you talk a lot about a concept I’ve heard you talk a lot about, and I’m sure you do within your community, about post-traumatic growth. Could you talk to us about that and share with us what your definition is of that. What does that mean to you? What does that mean to the women that you coach? I’m interested I hearing more about that.

Krista: Yeah, I remember the first time I heard post-traumatic growth, just the term. It was like that moment where the record scratches, like, “Wait, what? Post-traumatic growth?” Because I think so many of us are familiar with post-traumatic stress, but yet we’ve never heard of this idea of post-traumatic growth.

So, it used to be that the thought was, after trauma, the best you could hope for was just a recovery to the baseline of how you were doing before the trauma. And post-traumatic growth was a phrase coined in the mid-90s by Tedeschi and Calhoun. And basically, what it says is that that’s just not the way of it. It doesn’t have to be that way. Yes, we can absolutely get back to the way we were functioning before a trauma. But we can also use that trauma as the basis, as leverage for growth, that we can actually grow with it because of it if we choose to.

And trauma, of course, being highly subjective – so it’s not that some events are traumatic and some events are not traumatic. Trauma is really in the eye of the beholder. So, what’s traumatic to one person might not be traumatic to another. We don’t need to have experienced post-traumatic stress disorder to grow from trauma.

And the truth is that most of us are going to have trauma in life. We’re going to have something happen to us that we perceive is traumatic. And we get to be the boss of what we want to do with that life experience and how we want to grow from it, what we want to learn from it. And so, it’s kind of exciting when you’re used to thinking of trauma as something that you have to be the victim of to realize that trauma is actually something that you can use, if you want to, to evolve to the next version of yourself, to become more of who you want to be instead of less.

Amanda: Yes, oh my gosh, I love that so, so much. An again, you’re such an example of how you’ve built your business, how you’ve really taken arguably one of the most traumatic events that any of us could experience what you’ve experienced. And really, like you said, how do you grow with that and really turn that into the next level within your life, that next chapter, I think is just – again, you’re just an amazing example of that.

So, when you think about your audience and the women that have experienced, I’m assuming, similar traumas. I know, yes, it’s subjective. You know, what do you see in terms of examples of post-traumatic growth that they’re experiencing or that they choose to experience through your coaching, through that process? What does that look like?

Krista: Yeah, so it’s different for every person and it’s really what we want to make of it. But often, it is a decision of what is important to me, right? It’s, “Am I living my life aligned with the things I truly value? And if not, I’m going to figure that out.” It’s deeper, more meaningful connections with the people who are important to us or with our spirituality. It is a sense of resilience that perhaps we didn’t have before, like realizing, this is what I’m really made of. This is what I’m really capable of. And maybe I don’t have the limits on my potential that I thought I did. And so, that’s what’s so great about it is that it really is whatever you want to make it. But more, meaning more purpose, more fire, right?

Amanda: Yeah, absolutely. So, now, do you work with women in a – if you could talk to us a little bit, I know you were doing one on one coaching for a time. And I know you’ve transitioned into some group coaching. Can you speak to us about how you coach women? What does that look like for you right now?

Krista: Yeah, primarily I do a six-month group coaching program. So, it’s all widows, all moms. They’re all different ages, different stages. But they’re all widows, they’re all moms. And I bring them into a group and it’s kind of a revolving door. So, I add a new small cohort every month. And during that six months, they all get to experience the same tools and the same outcomes.

It’s a nice environment because I’ve always got some people in there who have gotten their Bambi legs and they know what’s going on, some women who are about to complete the program, and then some brand new and trying to figure things out. So, it’s a nice balance. But group coaching, support between calls, that sort of thing.

Amanda: So, let’s talk a little bit about the business, since this is obviously my listeners are building coaching businesses, many of them. And some are what I would consider creative entrepreneurs as well. But let’s talk for a minute about just kind of your business building journey. Because that, in and of itself, I can attest to is a journey, very much a journey. And so, I’d love for you to just kind of walk us through that what journey was like for you up until today. So, in 2017, I know you were certified as a life coach through the Life Coach School. So, kind of just fill in the blanks for us on that.

Krista: Yeah, so I certified in the December of 2017. I actually had an opportunity to go and do a 90-day trial at the Life Coach School for a fulltime position there. And so, that was the impetus to have me quit my corporate job. And thank goodness for that because I think it would have taken me forever to exit stage left.

So, I quit my job in January. Went to work for the school on the trial. The trial did not work out. I think I spent about six weeks in that trial. But after it didn’t work out, I left on good terms. Thankfully it opened a lot of doors for me. But I just decided, okay, I’m already here, I’ve already left my job. Let’s just make this work.

And so, I didn’t go back to my fulltime job. I just threw myself into the coaching business. I had no clients and no anything really. Just an idea and some coaching skills. And so, in the beginning, I took clients that weren’t related to my niche and that was fine. And I spent probably a couple of months working on things that in hindsight I realize just weren’t that valuable.

So, I spent a lot of time working on my website, all those things that perfectionists tend to hide behind. That was me. So, I was working on the website and business cards and surely those things are required in order for us to take money… Not true.

So yeah, that first little bit, I didn’t make all that much money. I think a couple hundred dollars here and there, couple thousand dollars, you know I think, the first quarter I did maybe, I’m looking at it now, $3600 my first full quarter.

And then, I kind of started getting fired up in the summer, that summer. And I decided to apply to be in Brooke’s 100K mastermind group. And so, in order to do that, we had to have proof of concept before we got there. so, I started selling pretty well in August, September. And that experience started in October of that year.

So, from April to September, I had made $35,000. And then, in October – and I was advertising on Facebook just a little bit but not really knowing what I was doing. It was more for list-building purposes at that time. But definitely, I had niched down. I was starting to speak the language of my niche. I was, at that point, starting to get more niche clients, struggling through a lot of mini sessions with no-shows and mini sessions that weren’t great fits and all the pricing drama.

I really didn’t get in probably a good rhythm until November of that year maybe. And then, I went on to just start to develop a pretty good clip there. I was selling a 12-week package and I kept it really just to that one offer, started figuring out my Facebook ads and started figuring out my funnel and staying true to the funnel, staying true to tweaking the same funnel, not trying to reinvent the wheel with different offers, different funnels, but really testing.

Amanda: Yeah, that is super-super-important. And I want to take pause for a minute on that because I see this happen a lot. I love that this is coming through because one of the things that I teach in my program, as you know, Krista, is I do teach Facebook ads, I teach funnels. You know, a lot of the technical stuff that goes into building the business along with the mindset and all of the inner stuff. So, it’s really a combination of that.

And one of the things that is really, really important and that I’ve learned is that exactly to your point, that it’s super-super-important to stay focused on one program, one offer, have one funnel, one set of ads. Or maybe you’re testing a few different things within those, but really working to optimize that before we start building and adding more in.

And so, I’d love for you to just share, I guess, how long that process took for you to kind of find your clip, as you say. I love how you say that. Because it does. I find that it does take time. It’s typically not an overnight thing.

Now, how long that takes is going to depend on the coach. It’s going to depend on the business owner, who the audience is, how strong the messaging is. There’s lots of things that go into that. But I’d love for you to share your own experience with that because I think that might be helpful.

Krista: Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more as far as constrain and stay the course, and be testing all the time. But don’t constantly be reinventing the wheel all the time. You know, test one variable at a time.

So, I started Facebook advertising in May of that year, but that was somebody else was doing it for me. And so, I really wasn’t learning anything about it. Versus in September, October, when I actually took in on myself and decided to learn the process and then really decided to actually pick one funnel and just tweak within that funnel. I think I actually saw results pretty quickly. But I was really on top of my numbers.

Every Monday, I had my own little business session with myself where I reviewed all of my numbers. I had a spreadsheet that I tracked everything on I could have told you anything about my Facebook ads and what was working and what wasn’t.

So, I would just make small tweaks at a time. So, never anything major. Just little small tweaks. And by, yeah, really November, December, I was having over $10,000 months and then all of 2019, my lowest month was a $15,000 month, at my lowest.

Amanda: So, that’s the power. Just the power in that. And I love – there’s a couple of things I want to take a minute and talk about that you said are really, I think, really, really important. So, you talked about at first how you had outsourced your Facebook ads. And someone else was doing them. And I want to talk about that for a minute because one of the things that I’m really passionate about in teaching my clients is the importance of learning this process yourself, is the importance of learning how to run your ads, how to read the data, how to understand, on a very kind of intricate deep level what the numbers mean.

So, I think in some cases, it seems like the easier route is just to have someone else take it off our plate. But the unintended consequence with that, that I find, is that you don’t know what’s happening if you never are responsible for that within your business. You don’t know whether or not whoever is doing it is actually optimizing it to the level that it could be optimized or seeing everything that needs to be seen. And I think one of the most valuable things you can do in your business, especially this type of business, is really understand your numbers.

And I want to point out that – I love what you said about every Monday, you had your own business meeting with yourself. And that’s something I absolutely teach my clients as well. You’ve got to be on top of your numbers always. There should never be a point in time where we’re like, “I don’t know what my numbers are.” We need to track it. Because in order to grow it, we need to be able to track it first.

So, a couple of really important things that I wanted to highlight there that I think are critical and well help, like, the more you can really dig into the numbers and to understanding how all of these things work together, it pays off so much in the long-term, would you not agree?

Krista: 100%. I don’t do my own Facebook ads now, but I am so glad that I took the time and I went through the pain to learn how to do that process myself. Because I wouldn’t be able to speak the language. I fully trust the woman who’s doing them, but yeah, I would just be missing out on so much. I would just be taking her word for it. And so, it was painful. But it’s worthwhile, I think.

Amanda: Did you find like, at some point, it got to be a little bit fun, once you knew what you were doing, once you had a sense of how things worked? Did you ever have fun with it?

Krista: Yeah, actually I did. And it feels like – it’s like when I started my corporate job. I knew nothing about aviation, and there’s just a learning curve there when you don’t speak the language. Everybody’s talking in acronyms. And Facebook ads are the same way. It’s just a bunch of acronyms. And when you learn them, it all makes sense and the puzzle pieces fit together, and it actually is kind of fun.

Amanda: Yeah, so, so good. Let’s talk for a minute – I know we got off track there for a bit. But let’s talk about – so, you started out with one on one coaching, started out just kind of coaching whoever you could, which when you’re starting, I think that’s totally okay. I think that there’s a lot of value in doing that. As you did the work yourself, got clearer and clearer on your own niche, on who were our people, who was your audience, when did you find it was time to transition then into groups and really start to scale your business?

Krista: I took so long, Amanda, to make that decision. I had so much drama in my brain about switching to groups and so, by the time I actually did it – I started selling groups in October of 2019. And I launched my first group in November of 2019. So, I would say there were several months where the idea was there and I was struggling to just pull the trigger. It took a while.

I had also worked for another coach in her group, Kara Loewentheil, I worked inside of her program, which was a group program, for quite a while, a year and a half maybe. And so, that helped too, to be able to see behind the scenes of another successful coach’s business. But them of course, my brain drama was, “Well, she’s a special unicorn and Harvard, Yale, all the things…”

But yeah, I got to the place where I was full doing one on one. And also, the other big thing for me is that I started really seeing the benefit of group coaching for my clients.

Amanda: Share with us what some of those benefits were that you saw.

Krista: Well, I’m sure this is similar in every niche. But for sure in mine, widowed moms tend to not have other women in their environment who can relate to what they’re going through. And it’s a very isolating experience. And so, often, they think they are by themselves, they don’t have other people to talk to about what they’re dealing with. And also, they tend to blame themselves for any problems they encounter. They make it their own fault.

And so, in a group, what I find is we can just normalize so much of the experience straight out of the gate and then, because the experience is, “Oh, it’s not just me,” then we can make progress even faster. And you hear the same stories over and over and over in a one on one and you’re just like, “Man, if I could just get these people together, they could see that there’s nothing wrong with them. This is just grief. This is just the way of it.” Stop beating yourself up.

Amanda: Yeah, I agree, I think there is such power in bringing a group of likeminded women or clients, whatever that looks like, whatever problem we’re facing, whatever challenge we’re coaching them to. I see the same in my groups too. There really is something about, like you said, normalizing the experience of it that allows you, I think in many ways, to understand and really see that, “Okay, I guess I’m not the outlier here.”

Krista: The other thing that I think is so powerful about groups is that I notice, especially when I’m being coached, and I see this with my clients too, the brain just tends to be a little bit resistant when it’s your life. And when it’s someone else’s life, and your brain isn’t resistant, it’s so easy to look at what’s happening in their life and the coaching that they’re getting and you can so clearly see the problem because your brain’s not resistant because it’s not your life. And then you can apply that to your own life.

Sometimes, I’ll stop my clients and I’m coaching one person in front of a group and I will check in with the other group members to see, can they see it? And they can always see it. And then that helps the light bulb go on for them because they see it, “Okay, maybe she’s doing that in this area of life. But that’s what I’m doing in this other area of life over here.” And so, they can accept coaching in such a different space than when it’s their own life.

Amanda: I agree with that 100%. I’ve had that experience myself. And I think yeah, just from a pure teaching standpoint, because I do think a lot of what I do, teaching whether it’s Facebook ads or some of the more technical things I am really teaching, more of a kind of teacher role with some of that. And I do think that you’re absolutely right, being able to see that, someone else, that experience of watching or having someone else be coached and then applying that to a completely different situation.

And I know for me, even coaching programs that I’ve been in as well, the same thing, being able to observe that and then apply that to your own life can be sometimes were the biggest transformation happens. I love that. That’s so, so good.

Alright, let’s talk for a minute, Krista about what do you think are some of the biggest lessons that you’ve learned over the last couple of years as you’ve been growing and scaling your business? What would you say are the top two to three lessons that you’ve learned?

Krista: Yeah, the pursuit of failure. So, yeah, when I let myself just try things, knowing that I could fail and be willing to fail and I look back, those are the times when I’ve grown the most. And I don’t just mean grown the most in terms of my own development. I mean, those are the time when the numbers have moved the most, when I’ve made the most money.

And I tend to struggle with perfectionist thinking. I really like to plan things out very thoughtfully. I want to have examined all the risks and really have great plans before implementation. And that just holds me back every time.

So, if I can just catch myself and get into the ready, aim, fire, ready, aim, fire iteration, then I can adapt. I can get more data and I can adapt and I can make a different decision and I can keep going. And that just goes against everything that my perfectionist tendencies want to do. So yeah, that’s been a big one.

Amanda: So, would you be open to sharing, like, in a moment like that? Because I think this is really relevant to my listeners especially because many of them are, in some cases, putting themselves out for the very first time, maybe leaving a corporate job. Or maybe some of them are still in a corporate job that are trying to grow their business alongside of that. Or maybe it’s a new program. Maybe it’s a new niche that we’re coaching. But can you talk for a minute about some of the methods or some of the things – what are the beliefs? What’s the T-line when you’re in that situation when you’re faced with, “Okay, I feel the resistance. This does not feel good. However, I know logically I need to make the move, I need to do this.” What goes on in your brain in that moment or in those moments?

Krista: So I’m kind of like coaching myself through those moments, “the worst thing that can happen is a feeling. And I’m going to create that feeling with my thoughts. Am I willing to feel the discomfort of it?” And that really has gotten me out of so many situations. And when I realize I’m already uncomfortable, I’m already feeling the discomfort. And the discomfort on the other side of whatever it is that I think is going to kill me isn’t really that much worse. I don’t even know if it’s any worse.

So, do I want to feel discomfort and stay stuck? Or do I want to pursue discomfort knowing that it’s the path, that the business I want is on the other side of it? And so, I just got to earlier this year, you know, a project that I was working on for master coach training was failing every day. Picking something that seemed like it was impossible or some sort of fail, and doing it on purpose and getting in the habit of it and just kind of reframing failure for my own sake and just going, “What would be amazing but probably isn’t going to work out? What if I just tried that?”

Amanda: That is so good. I love that.

Krista: Lo and behold, a lot of the things that I thought were amazing but wouldn’t work out did.

Amanda: Amazing. Can you give us an example of that?

Krista: Yeah, so several big podcasts that I thought other coaches that if I went to and said, “Hey, can I be on your super-successful podcast,” they would say, “Oh, you’re so cute. No. We love you. No.” But I got all these yesses, right?

You know, a couple of guests for my podcast, some that haven’t come on yet but are in the works that were just, like, dream people, you know, I would have never actually allowed myself to ask them if I hadn’t really thought, “It’s okay, Krista. You’re just going to fail and you’re just going to count this towards your fails and it’s fine.” But that was the impetus to get me to make the request. And so often, the requests that I made were actually accepted. It just blows your mind.

And all of a sudden, you’re like, “What planet am I on? What if I could get all of my original group members to re-up and do my master’s program. That would be amazing. That will never happen.” Sure enough…

Amanda: Wow, there you go. I hope everyone is taking notes on this one. So, so valuable. Thank you so much for sharing. So, what would you say are, when you’re looking at – because you’ve been there – what’s some of the best advice you could give to maybe a newer coach or someone that is starting their business, maybe working towards that first six figures? They’re kind of in the hustle mode of it, trying to figure it out. What would you tell them?

Krista: Well, two things that really worked for me. One was to have a really clear picture of the person I was trying to serve with my work. Because that’s’ what allowed me to get out of my own head. And time and time again, when I just didn’t want to – I was afraid of what other people would think when I wrote the blog or made the social media post or did the live or put the Facebook ad out there and I was just worried about myself.

Then, because I was very connected to my why and the person, and I had her name and I had a picture of her. And of course, she was all made up. But clearly, I knew her story well because I was serving someone who had a similar story to mine. And so, if you can get out of your own brain and remember that this really is not about you, it really isn’t. And there is a person out there right now and that person needs you and they need you to make an offer to them. They need you to get over your own crap so that you can serve the because they don’t know the tools that you know.

You take for granted what you know because it’s like your core genius. But so many people, they need you, they need to pay you, they need to be your client. And so, that was huge for me. And it still is, sometimes. And then the other one was just this idea that if you can believe that your success is inevitable, if you can believe that you have all the pieces, it’s the puzzle box that you bought from the store, it’s still got the wrapper on it, you know all 1000 pieces are inside the jigsaw puzzle box. It’s just a matter of being willing to keep experimenting. But keep the knowledge that you have all the pieces. Other people have done this. You can do this.

That helped me too and I watched all the coaches that I know, you know, that are ahead of me. And my constant mantra was, “If she can do it, I can do it.” It’s just a matter of time.

Amanda: so good. Thank you so much, this was such a great conversation. Is there anything else that you thin is important or maybe relevant to someone that’s building a coaching business, or any other type of creative business, online entrepreneur industry?

Krista: Well, the other thing that I also did that I guess that I would add is I always visualized the success that I wanted. And maybe not every day. But you know, I had something that I would always go back to and I would write it down or I would visualize it, about me getting the 100K award, which was my first goal, right? Within our coaching school, that’s an award that’s given out.

And I had a Post-It note on my desk for where that award would go and I imagined what it was going to be like when I got that award and how I was going to feel and what it was going to be like to be on the stage. And I don’t think you have to have a stage or an award or any of it to make it possible. But I do think that no matter what it is that you want next, you want to go to the place in your mind where it’s done. And feel that and see it and be there as much as you can.

Amanda: I 100% agree. And that’s something that I talk about all the time, both on this podcast, in my coaching programs, when I’m working with clients is the power of really living into that, leaning into that every day. I know that’s a practice that I have myself every single day is, you know – and what’s so interesting, and maybe you’ve had this experience too, but every day, as you move closer and closer to that goal, it’s like you get even deeper and deeper, it’s like the layers get deeper of, like, what that experience is like. And I guess, when I think about even programs and just where the business is going, it’s almost like it gets better and better as I go.

Krista: Yeah, it’s kind of like it’s always this shift of I start to see the potential of something that it could happen, and then I let my brain entertain the idea that it could happen. And then, eventually, I shift into this place where it is happening. And then, I kind of shift into the identity of the person, I am the person who makes it happen. Yeah, it’s interesting because I think the same process is relevant, no matter the goal. I keep using it.

Amanda: 100%, it doesn’t matter what you’re trying to achieve, what you’re trying to make a reality. It’s, if we have to first hold it in our mind, we have to believe it and then become that person, become that person that can then bring that into our reality.

Krista: And the reality is not perfect when you get there, P.S. All your problems don’t melt away when you reach your goals. So, I didn’t do myself any favors, sometimes, by over-glamorizing the accomplishment of a goal. Because the truth is that your brain’s just going to be ready for the next one and you’re still human when you get there. It’s fine. Just have fun along the way.

Amanda: I agree. That’s been a message lately from me to my clients too. Let’s just really enjoy the process. Because even though it feels like, “Oh I wish I was further along here,” you’re never going to be exactly where you are right now.

Krista: Yeah, and why not just have fun now, because if we don’t have fun now, why are we even doing this?

Amanda: Exactly. I mean, one of the things I love talking about too is this whole idea, when you really look at this – I think for many of us, when we look at our business and we look at just the overall of our life – you and I are moms. We have children, both in relationships. We have our business. There are different layers to us. Like, we’re not just business owners. There’s different layers to us all. We all have our own layers to that.

And I think what’s really important to keep in mind is that to create a business that is, I don’t know, put a high dollar amount. I don’t know if it’s a million. Whatever that amount is. But to create a business to a high revenue generating level, it does require a certain amount of effort and focus.

And I mean, the whole foundation of it is really the mindset and keeping yourself really in the game, as I call it. But I think what’s really important to remember is that because it requires what it requires, it’s important to understand that you’re, in some ways, trading – for me, I think about my kids. I have a three-year-old and a seven-year-old. My kids are still fairly young. This is my work in the world.

What I’m trying to say is I don’t ever want to be a stay at home mom is kind of what I’m saying here. I know that that’s not for me. I’ve always known that, I’ve had the opportunity to experience that to a degree and I know that, for me, I guess my purpose is my work and being a mom, right, both. Not just one or the other.

But the fact is, like, there’s a lot of time, a lot of energy that needs to be put into building a successful business. And it’s almost like you really have to be ready for that level of commitment. And I think it’s important to also enjoy the process of it because you’re trading so much of your life in so many ways, so much of your time versus, yeah, we could go sit in a corporate office somewhere. That would be fine. And that’s okay.

But this is, I think a journey that challenges you in so many ways. And it’s really the best professional development, I think, personal, professional development that you can ever go through. And I think it’s important to just really honor the process of it and honor the journey of it and not be too much in a rush to get to where we think all of the problems will go away.

Krista: Yes, that describes my first year in business; hustle. And in hindsight, I’m glad that I took my career seriously because I do know that there are people who really struggle to keep their own office hours or to not watch TV during work time. And that was never me. But also – I do think there’s value in the commitment, the dedication, the hustle. But also, there really is no greener grass. And so, can we just maybe relax and enjoy the process of being committed and dedicated.

Amanda: Yes, and really get that it is about who you become in this process.

Krista: Yeah, so good.

Amanda: Yes, so amazing. Well, thank you so, so much, Krista. This was so much fun. Thank you for sharing everything that you shared. I think you have such a valuable a valuable insight and experience as it relates to the business that you’ve built and the work that you do in the world and I just think you’re a wonderful example of what is possible. So, thank you.

Krista: My complete pleasure.

Amanda: I appreciate it. Alright, we’ll talk to you soon.

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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 at amandakarlstadcoaching.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.