Ep #207: The One Question That Can Unlock Your Business Results Today

You are listening to The Life Coach Business Podcast with Amanda Karlstad episode number 207.

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. So glad to have you here. I hope you’re doing well. It is officially fall here and the trees are turning, and it is beautiful. We have so many great things happening. We are prepping for our in person High Level Mastermind retreat that is happening in just a couple of weeks. I’m so excited for clients to be coming in and for all of the work that we’re about to do. So many celebrations happening, so many client wins, so much growth, so much capacity that is being built. It really does blow me away.

So today, I have something really special for all of you. Today, I wanted to offer to all of you something that I have found to be extremely useful in my journey of growing and scaling my business. It’s really one question that I think if you really sit with it and you truly consider it for yourself, I believe that it can really change the game for you.

I will tell you all, it’s something that I have personally sat with. I, about a year ago, asked myself this question. It’s something that I have sat with that I truly considered for myself and really allowed myself to go there and go to the place that this question really took me to, my answer to this question really took me to.

I have found it to be a very powerful question for me and a very powerful frame that I still go back to, to this day that is a bit of a different frame that I think a lot of times we are used to in this industry. I think it’s different from, for example, questions that you may have asked yourself around your future self, for example.

Which I do want to say I do believe future self exercises are extremely powerful and extremely powerful frames and something that I use as well and something that I have used many times with clients.

But what I’ve also found is that sometimes using the question that I’m about to give to you, it’s a bit more nuanced. I believe that it might open up an even more powerful response for you. What I really appreciate about this question, and I want to really talk through it here in a minute.

But I have found that it really is a way for you to bring things more into the present for yourself. To look at where you are right now presently and address and reframe your current experience that I believe is just as important as thinking in terms of some of these longer timeframes, which often we do with exercises like future self.

One of the reasons this is so powerful is because I like to use this in terms of the present for what I might be experiencing in the moment, whether that be a strong emotion, or maybe it’s something that cognitively just keeps coming up.

I really appreciate this question because I believe our response to whether it be the emotions that we experience on a daily basis, or whether it’s certain thoughts that we might be having, whether it’s the certain results that we might have created in our lives or in our businesses, our responses in those moments are what make up and compound over time. That then create the experiences that we have, that create then what we feel in each moment, that create what we choose to think and what we choose to believe.

So whether that’s towards a certain circumstance or a belief system that we hold, all of these things make up what we experience again in our life and in our business. It also influences who we are and who we’re becoming, which is why this is so important.

I will tell you it’s a question that when I first asked myself this question and really sat with it, like I said, for weeks, it was something that I spent some time journaling on. I do have to say I find myself going back to this question time and time again and reminding myself whether it’s doubting certain things or feeling uncertainty in a certain area, or even experiencing fear.

This could be around certain decisions, for example, that need to be made in the business. Or I’ve also found when I am in the process of going through an uplevel myself, or when I’m in a period of rapid growth or scale, this has been a really useful question.

So the question is who would I be in the absence of my concerns? I’ll repeat that again. Who would I be in the absence of my concerns? I want to challenge you to really think about this. Because what I’ve learned after years of doing this work, both directly with clients and being a student of this work, doing this work with myself and as a master coach is that our lives, the experiences that we have, the experience we have in our businesses, the challenges that we face.

What I’ve learned is that they’re actually gifts that we receive that reveal where we are limited. They reveal where we are limiting ourselves, where we are imposing what I call our own glass ceilings on ourselves.

Being that my work, the core, the foundation of what I do is to help and to facilitate my clients into stepping into their greatness, into stepping more fully into their own capacities of what is truly possible for them through the vehicle of entrepreneurship, and specifically coaching and growing and scaling their coaching businesses and doing so in a very profitable and effective, and in a way that makes them a lot of money.

What also happens is that I have a front row seat every day where I observe clients so often that are always presenting challenges and presenting thoughts or emotions or experiences that they’re having that are actually fights with their past. Where more often than not, what happens is, is subconsciously we are being driven or being influenced by something or someone or some belief or some identity that we may have held in the past.

So even though we can consciously see it, even though we know that it doesn’t serve us, we know that it’s not, for example, what’s going to get us to the next level, and it’s very obvious. At the same time, it’s so, so important to understand that the way that we are each wired, our brains are literally wired from a place of prediction and protection. What this means is that we are always battling with ourselves, and so often without even recognizing it, where we’re trying to predict something.

From that prediction, what happens is then we go into automatic protection of self. I see this happen so often with business owners, especially in the first couple of years of business where the evidence is especially strong, where maybe the results aren’t there yet, or maybe the results haven’t reached a level of consistency where the business owner is convinced that it isn’t just a fluke.

So often what happens is that specifically for coaches, I see a lot of times where we tend to impose the past onto the future. The problem with this is that then perpetuates the history of that which has yet to be reconciled into the present. This is why this question is so important because what it does is it takes you out of that automatic pattern of prediction and protection.

Instead, it’s an invitation to look at what becomes available to you once you step out of the constraints of your subconscious, which I believe speaks to your inherent being, that speaks to the unlimited you, the abundant you. It’s a call for your true nature to step forward, to help you transcend any constraint, whether it was self-imposed, or the product of your environment. It opens you up instead to what is also true for you, to a version of yourself that is more closely aligned with who you truly are.

So I want to leave you all with this question. Who would I be in the absence of my concerns? I invite you to consider this question over the next several days, write down your answers, open yourself up to what is already available to you right now in this moment. All right, my friends. Have a beautiful week. I’ll talk to you all again 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 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.