Part 4: Why Having a Professional Business Coach or Mentor is So Important: Letting Go Of The Stories in Your Head
Hey there! I’ve been really enjoying the comments I’ve been receiving about this series of articles on the world of business coaching. I’m so glad it’s been helpful and clarifying to you!
In case you missed the first 3 parts — you can grab them here:
- Part 1: What is a Professional Business Coach? An Explanation of a Business Coach’s Role
- Part 2: How Do You Pick a Professional Good Business Coach? The Six Questions You Must Ask
- Part 3: The Top Five Qualities that Have Made My Clients Successful
So I’ve been in the coaching world for 14+ years now. And I’ve been on both sides of the fence. I’ve had a business coach every year (plus other coaches) and I’ve coached thousands of clients.
And here’s the main reason why having a professional business coach or mentor is so important:
Because as women entrepreneurs we live and work in isolation.
Even if you have a team.
Even if you have vendors or freelancers.
You’re still making most of the decisions in your head — and primarily alone.
And here’s what happens in Isolation:
We Make Up Stories!
See whenever anything happens in your business, the way your brain responds is to try to figure out why that thing happened — it’s trying to connect point A with point B — so it makes up a story. And we often make up that story without any degree of evidence, statistics or information.
According to Brene Brown’s book, Rising Strong, a story without any proof or evidence is a conspiracy theory! I love this interpretation — because it’s so true! All day long we go about making up conspiracy theories about why things are happening to us that are simply not true.
And more often than not, we are the villain in our stories.
That’s why it’s so important to have a business coach or mentor in your life — to provide you with the REAL statistics, stories, examples and evidence. Someone who is experienced with trends, statistics and wisdom and can give you real-time advice. And to make sure that you don’t end up quitting for no reason! Or making yourself wrong — when you really just need to make some changes and try again.
Let me give you some examples:
Example 1: The Webinar Show-Up Conundrum
The Situation: You set up a webinar and spend weeks of time sending out emails and creating content for the webinar. You show up to do the webinar and only 6 people come to the live webinar.
The Story You Tell Yourself: “I’m not good enough to do webinars. I hate technology. No one likes me. This will never work.”
Your Response: You mope for a few days, feel a bit hopeless and then try to avoid technology in the future.
The Real Story With Evidence/Wisdom: There were only 20 people registered for the webinar. 30% of them showed up live for the webinar. That’s actually AWESOME numbers — as industry average is somewhere between 10-30%. You don’t need to feel bad. You should celebrate that you got great show up. Then work on building your list, and the relationship with your list, so that you can get more people to register and show up for your next webinar.
Example 2: Team Leadership Issues
The Situation: You’re working with a new virtual assistant. You notice that when you tell her to get things done you aren’t sure whether they are actually getting done. Also, she seems to be missing deadlines. So you try harder to tell her things more often, but it doesn’t seem to be working.
The Story You Tell Yourself: Maybe it’s me. I’m not communicating clearly enough, or I’m not telling her the right deadlines. Or maybe it’s that I can’t really work with team members and they aren’t doing the right things for me.
Your Response: You continue to try to tell your assistant to do things. Eventually you start taking on more yourself and feeling more pressure and stress. You wonder how this business thing is ever going to get any easier.
The Real Story With Evidence/Wisdom: No one is born a good manager/leader. We all learn it over time. And there are few key points to making sure you are managing successfully. One is team meetings — you need to be having between 2-5 team meetings a week with your assistants. Where you can get together and chat about status, goals and debriefs. Two, you really need to write down all tasks that you do together. This writing could be as simple as taking notes in a google document that you can both look at and add to together. Or using a project management system like Asana or Teamwork PM.
Whatever system you use — all tasks must have 4 parts written down clearly:
- What the task is.
- How it is to be completed (show me ideas, do it without me, do it with me, do this part and then show me the rest, etc…).
- A deadline and what part is due by that deadline.
- When it will be discussed again (at the next team meeting, at a special meeting time etc).
Now here’s the point — all of this information is WISDOM, gaining wisdom from a business coach is an important component to eliminating the stories that we tell ourselves.
The truth is that no coach is going to prevent you from making mistakes or having learning experiences or disappointment. That’s impossible.
But it’s so important that you have someone walking with you to help you from making up the stories that take you out of the game.
To stop you from creating conspiracy theories based on evidence that just isn’t true.
For me personally, this has been lifesaver. I grew up with a highly critical mom. So the voice in my head literally has a field day with what I’m doing wrong and how I’m not doing enough.
And this is why having a coach or mentor has been so important; by having a business coach in my corner I’ve been able to focus on solving problems externally, and not just beating myself up. It’s allowed me to get off the couch and start working towards changes in my business much, much faster.
And it’s one of the key components to me building and sustaining a seven-figure coaching company for the last 5 years.
When I see women entrepreneurs who are trying to play this game alone — it saddens me. Because I see the pain in their eyes, the fatigue in their bodies and I hear the stories they are telling themselves.
Stories about how they aren’t good enough.
Stories about how this will always be hard.
Stories about survival and somehow making it through.
So here’s your challenge: take stock and ask yourself: “what conspiracy stories am I making up in my head right now? What elements of my business have I quit on? What have I decided that I can’t do?”
And then find a great professional business coach or mentor to give you some solid strategic wisdom to help move you forward fast — and let go of the old stories. Because we all deserve to get support. And we all deserve the truth.
We all need support and encouragement. A great place to find it is our Facebook group; join now!
