Ep #133: How to Build True Confidence in Your Coaching Business

You are listening to The Life Coach Business Podcast with Amanda Karlstad episode number 133.

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 hope you’re doing well. I am doing great. I just spent the weekend at my daughter’s dance competition. So for those of you who don’t know, she dances competitively. It was a pretty intense competition. It was a pretty intense weekend. For those of you that might not be familiar with the competitive dance world, like myself before she started dancing, I really wasn’t familiar with the competitive dance world. I have to say that it is definitely a whole new world. It is so much fun, but it’s also very intense.

I was telling some of my clients I feel like I actually danced all weekend, even though I did not. But it really was an amazing competition. She did amazing. I am so proud of her. She is doing so great this year and has worked so hard, and it’s really paying off now in competition season. Again, I’m just so proud of her.

We’re actually headed to a national competition that’s happening in June. So we’re really gearing up for that. We’re really excited, and we’re starting to prepare for that right now. It’s going to be so much fun to see her on that stage and for the team really to take things to a whole new level there. It’s going to be so amazing.

Part of me was thinking about her performances this weekend and just seeing her onstage in front of that huge audience at her age. I am really just blown away at how far she’s come, at her skill level that she’s really been able to develop, especially over these last couple of years. The level of confidence that she has as a result of that has been able to build in her art, in her performance. It got me thinking about confidence and really the path to confidence.

So that’s what I decided I wanted to talk to you all about today because no matter if you’re growing to your first 100k or your first million, and even beyond that, what I have found is that what we’re about to talk about, the teaching that I have for all of you today, is that it is universal. It is universal whether you’re building a business or whether you’re scaling a business, whether you’re playing sports competitively, whether you’re learning a new skill, or even establishing a new habit in your life. So I just think this is a really important conversation.

I’m really excited to talk to you all about this today. That I was actually having a similar conversation with my High Level Mastermind clients. So these are my clients who are in the process of scaling their businesses to multiple six figures, seven figures. Which, by the way, I’d highly recommend to you if you’re looking to take your business to the next level, whether that’s $250,000, $500,000, or even a million that you join us in the High Level Mastermind. This is where we are doing this every single day. We are taking things to the next level.

Also if you’re looking to take your business to your first $100,000. If you’ve had some success and you’re working with clients on a one-on-one basis, and you’ve made some money in your business. Then I also want to invite you to join us in the upcoming cohort of the mastermind, which is my six month business accelerator program which is designed to help you build your business foundation and really create real momentum and results in your business.

You can find the links to the applications for both of these programs in the show notes. You can also go to my website and fill out the application and set up a call. I’d love to show you what’s possible for you this year.

All right. So let’s talk about confidence y’all. This was a topic, like I said, that I recently spent some time on in one of my coaching calls with my High Level Mastermind clients. It’s a conversation that I think, again, is really important no matter where you are in the process of growing or even scaling your business. So I want to talk to you all today about confidence as it relates to growing your business.

There’s an important distinction that I want to make here. For most of the clients that I work with, and I know for many of you who listen to this show, that one thing that I know is that you have a lot of confidence when it comes to your coaching ability. When it comes to actually coaching and working with clients, the truth is that for my clients—and again, I know for most of you listening that you have a high level of self-confidence when it comes to your ability to coach, in your ability to hold space, in your ability to help your clients achieve their goals.

But the confidence that I really want to talk to you all about today is the confidence in your ability to grow your business. What I have found is that there is a difference with this. So I’ve talked about this before on the podcast, and I did an episode on this topic a while back. But as a coach, and as a coach who has made the decision to grow a business, the truth is that there are two very distinct roles that you own in the business.

Number one is that you are a coach. There is obviously the role of being a coach, which is the role that you are in when you’re working with your clients, when you are coaching your clients, when you are in your client sessions, during your client calls where you are in the act of coaching, right. Obviously, that’s a very, very important role.

But there’s also another role that you have. That role is the role of business owner. This is a very different role than when you’re in the role of a coach. So for most of my clients, and again, I know for most of you listening, you have a level of confidence when it comes to being a coach and working with your clients. Whether you’re coaching clients in a one-on-one session or possibly even in a group session, you have a fair amount of confidence in your ability as a coach in the tools that you utilize.

But what I found is that when it comes to building the business, when it comes to growing the business or scaling the business, this is where so often I see a lack of confidence come in. But here’s what I want to tell you about this. This is 100% normal. Based on what I’m about to teach you, this is actually what needs to happen. So let me explain.

Confidence, having the confidence in oneself, in one’s power, in one’s ability, which is the definition of confidence, comes from one place. It comes from the thoughts that you have about your ability to do the thing. So typically, when you’re starting out and when you are working to build your business in those initial phases, you have a heavy reliance on your coaching tools.

So for many of you, you’ve been through a certification program where you have learned the skill of coaching. You’ve practiced the skill of coaching. You have learned how to coach effectively. You’ve learned how to utilize different tools with your clients. Because you have this skill, you’ve developed this skill, you’ve learned how to coach, you’ve likely learned a variety of tools that you can use in your practice.

So there is a level of confidence that you have in the tools that you have. There’s a level of confidence that you have based on what you’ve learned, based on what you’ve practiced using, based on your experience working with clients. So for again, most of you, I know you feel a sense of confidence when it comes to your actual coaching. I want to tell you that this is amazing. It’s very needed.

But the other side to this is when it comes to growing your business and the skill set that’s required to grow and scale a business, this is what I want to talk to you about because one of the things that I see come up so frequently is that when you’re in the process of growing and scaling your business and when you’re taking things to the next level. For most coaches, this process, being in that space, there is a real lack of confidence that happens.

This might take the form of not being clear on what next steps they should take. It might be a lack of confidence in how to move from one-on-one coaching into group coaching or how to plan and how to launch effectively. There’s all different types of things that not only my clients, but I know so many of you experience as you’re in this process of taking your business from where you are to that next level.

So what I want to offer to you is that having a lack of confidence when you’re in this process, that it’s completely normal. I want to explain to you why it is normal. The truth is that as humans, we crave confidence. We want to have confidence. We want to feel confident. We value confidence. We understand what it’s like to have confidence in certain areas of our lives. We know what it’s like when we feel a sense of confidence about something. It feels amazing.

One of the key aspects of being human is that we either do or we don’t do things because of the perceived way that we think we’re going to feel. I want to point out that this is a really important distinction to understand. Because as humans, one of the things that sets us apart from other beings, other living beings on this planet, is that we have our human brain, which means we experience emotions. It also allows us the ability to create.

And along with that, we’re also hardwired to seek pleasure. We’re hardwired to essentially stay in our comfort zone, stay in the cave, so to speak, and not put ourselves in danger. That is in every one of us. It’s part of being a human. It’s part of the function of our human brain.

So why this is important is because when you go out and you put yourself in a position where you’re building a business or you’re taking your business to that next level. What happens is that subconscious part of your brain, the part that’s designed and hardwired to keep you safe, starts to interpret anything that it perceives as unknown or new as potential danger. That’s because it’s not currently known. There isn’t evidence that your brain has that it can go back to, that it can shuffle back through to see that you are in fact safe.

So what tends to happen when I see coaches in this process and when I coach my clients in this process is that the brain starts to look for evidence of that which it believes. In most cases, the evidence that it brings to the surface, the evidence that it finds that it is perceiving as proof is actually the opposite a lot of times of what you’re looking for. It’s opposite of what you want to be true.

So this can come in so many different forms. It can sound like you don’t have what it takes to build the business. The success that you want, it’s just not available to you. It’s not possible. Or it might be true for so and so, but it can’t possibly be true for you. There are so many variations of this. For each of you, you’re going to have your own version of this.

So it’s important to recognize this because what I see happen is that for so many coaches, they find themselves in the position where they’re not where they want to be in their business. Whether that’s at their first 100k or even at a million dollars plus per year. So they work on trying to feel confident. They go to work on doing different thought models and trying to find different thoughts that are going to give them confidence.

What I want to teach you here is that confidence is a byproduct. Confidence is a byproduct of all of this. So this is something I learned from Dan Sullivan. This has been so true for myself and my own journey. It’s also been so true for my clients. That is that confidence is actually a byproduct.

When you set out to do anything significant in your life or in your business, the truth is that there are distinct phases that you will go through. These phases, these levels that no matter what it is that you’re trying to do in your life or in your business. It’s true that in any case, whether you are building a business or you’re doing something new, something like even establishing a new workout routine, for example.

That there are distinct phases that every human that when you’re on the path to achievement, when you’re on the path to achieve something new that you will go through. I want to emphasize this because it’s really important to understand because for most coaches you all want to skip the first two levels that I’m about to teach you.

So let’s talk about what those four levels are. So the four levels are this. The first level, the first phase that every human will go through when learning something new, when creating something new, is commitment. It’s making a commitment to the thing. It’s making a commitment to build the new habit. It’s making the commitment to building the business, for example. So the first step in any new endeavor is going to be commitment.

So this is why I talk all the time about the importance of commitment in the business building journey. The second step, the second phase that you’ll go through is courage. So what this means is having the courage to go after that commitment. It’s demonstrating courage to go out and to do the things that need to be done in order to create the business, in order to create the new habit, in order to achieve whatever it is that you want to achieve.

Once you’ve moved through that phase, and by the way, this phase can take a long time. It takes however long it needs to take. But it isn’t until we thoroughly move through that courage phase that we can then move into this third step, into this third phase, which is the phase that we so often want to jump to immediately which is confidence. But in order to arrive at this level of confidence, we have to pass through the first two levels of commitment first and then courage. It’s only then that we can arrive at that level of confidence, which is, again, the destination that so many of you want.

So after we’ve reached that level of confidence, that fourth phase, that fourth step is capability. So it’s arriving at a place of capability with whatever it is that you’ve set out to achieve or to create. It’s having a sense of capability about whatever it is that you’ve gone out and done. So it could be arriving at that first 100k or arriving at that first 500k or million, whatever that amount is for you. It’s feeling a sense of confidence and having built a level of capability to have built a business to that level.

So here’s why this is all really important for you to understand. So often when we start out in this process, we want to jump to that third level. We want to jump immediately to that third level of confidence. So very often I see a lot of coaches that say they’re working on their confidence. This might look like doing all different types of mental work, trying to cultivate a sense of confidence within themselves. I will say in some cases, the mental work of this can be very useful.

But when it comes to creating actual results in your business, the only way to build true confidence is by first going through the first two levels thoroughly. So that means fully committing to your goal, to your goal of building a successful business. Once you’ve made that full commitment, then it’s about operating and demonstrating courage in the business, courage in the day to day.

I will say that I see for so many coaches, this is where they get stuck. The reason they get stuck is because courage—When you consider what courage really is in the context of building a business, being courageous, acting courageously, demonstrating courage in your business, it doesn’t feel good.

So back to what I talked about earlier. Because it doesn’t feel good we try to avoid it. We try to out model feeling the feeling of courage because it feels uncomfortable, and in some cases it feels terrible. But what I want to offer to you is that this is also part of the curriculum. This is also the path to your dreams. It must first start with a true commitment.

Only then once that true commitment is made, then we have to move into courage. We have to demonstrate courage and step forward and put ourselves in places that feel uncomfortable on a daily basis, even when it feels terrible. But once that courage has been demonstrated, once that courage has been lived, that is when real confidence will come in. That is when true confidence, confidence that you truly feel, confidence that truly fuels you, confidence that is known, it’s also earned. That is the type of confidence I want to encourage you to go out and create.

But you have to first be willing to make the commitment, and then be willing to operate from a place of courage so that you can arrive at that true place of confidence in yourself and in your business. That is the type of confidence I want for all of you. Have an amazing week, my friends, 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 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.