EP 286 - How To Actually Grow Your Coaching Business in 2026 (5 Big Lies That Keep Coaches Stuck)
If you want to grow your coaching business and wondering how to actually get coaching clients, this video is for you. I’m breaking down the truth about what it really takes to actually get coaching clients, and the 5 biggest lies that keep new coaches stuck, spinning their wheels, and doubting themselves.
Whether you want to work with more coaching clients or finally start making consistent income in your coaching business, it's time to learn what's actually working to grow your coaching business in 2026.
In this video, you'll learn:
The 5 biggest lies keeping new coaches from growing
Why “doing more” isn’t the answer (and what to focus on instead)
The truth about what actually leads to more paid coaching clients
How to stay consistent in your coaching business when things feel slow
... and so much more!
If you’ve been feeling discouraged or second-guessing yourself, this video will help you understand what’s really going on in your coaching business and how to actually grow your coaching business in 2026.
Register for our upcoming LIVE workshop here: https://coaching.debbieshadid.com/workshop
Free Resources for coaches:
Free Masterclass to Grow Your Coaching Business: https://coaching.debbieshadid.com/masterclass
Canva Workshop: https://coaching.debbieshadid.com/register
Private Podcast: https://coaching.debbieshadid.com/private
Growth Checklist: https://www.lifecoachbusinessbuildingschool.com/growth
Tools I recommend for coaches:
Flodesk (email marketing): https://flodesk.com/c/DEBBIESHADID
Descript (video editor): https://get.descript.com/cj4n2vzke4vu
Connect with Debbie:
Website: https://www.debbieshadid.com
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🎙️ Listen to the podcast: Life Coach Business Building School: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/life-coach-business-building-school-with-debbie-shadid/id1502118085
Don’t forget to subscribe for weekly episodes on coaching business strategy for women over 50, tech tools for coaches, and simple business growth strategies that really work: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz6RS8kQGMLJqJrK9uKdjtg
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Transcript
Have you just started your coaching business and you're already disappointed in the results that you're creating. You're wondering, what is wrong with me? Why can I not do what the other people online are doing? The truth is nothing is wrong with you. You've actually been told a lot of. Tall tales in some cases, almost flat out lies about what it really takes to succeed. In this episode, I'm gonna tell you what the truth is and actually what you have been told and help you see a clear path forward. I'm Debbie Shaddid I've helped thousands of coaches not only build, but grow profitable coaching businesses without paid ads, without fancy tech, and without living on social media. So today I'll break it all down for you. First, I'm gonna share the misinformation that you've been fed, and I actually think that's because the trainings that you are viewing are for coaches who are already established. There are very few coaches online who are talking to beginners, and I mean real beginners who still have questions about niche, about how to talk about their business, wondering whether offer is right, how to even find their people. you might be watching trainings that are skipping all of those details, and They're actually talking to coaches that are much further along than you. Start listening to all of these trainings in a new way and see if I'm right. Start listening with an ear that says, now wait a minute. Are they talking to a coach who's never had paying clients? Are they talking to a coach who's never launched a group program or who has zero people on their email list? I'm gonna bet you're gonna find out that they're not. So, before we dive in, I wanna make sure that you hit the bell and you subscribe so that you can hear more strategies and really more truths about what it takes to grow your coaching business. You guys ready? Let's dive in. I'm gonna start with technology. Tech is the answer.
Now, here's the deal. You do need technology and we actually teach technology. We show you how to do it. We answer all the questions. I believe that you need just a very simple tech stack. In fact, it costs you less than a hundred dollars a month. But what is being represented online in so many cases is that tech is the answer to your coaching business problems. No, it's not. When you're just starting out, you don't need the right funnel. You don't need any client management system. You don't need any automation tools. You literally just need to know how to talk to people, how to get on Zoom, get 'em on your calendar. You need to know how to use Canva and very few other tools.
So tech is not what you need right now. You do not need a client management system. The second thing I wanna talk about is that success happens fast. This is a story, a tall tale that's being told everywhere. It starts with certification companies, and I'm not saying that they intentionally mislead you. But they like to showcase the best case scenario, like build your own business, have the life of freedom that you desire, and all of that is true, but it doesn't happen fast. It's not a magic bullet to get certified and then automatically have clients. Just because you post on social media doesn't mean that you're gonna be fully booked in weeks. In fact, when you think that, do you know what happens? Most of the time you start out doubting yourself. You've posted a few times, it did not work for you, and you're thinking, okay, maybe it's my niche. You start thinking something's wrong with the way you're posting. Maybe you'll even go looking for an Instagram course so that you can find out about the algorithm, which has nothing to do with where you are in your business. Now, the algorithm is important, but what is more important is that as a beginner coach, you consistently post. please hear me on this.
Success does not happen overnight. Could we find some isolated stories where it did? Of course we could. But for most of you, it's gonna take some time. And here's the deal. What if it took you a year of consistently working on your business? I don't know of any other business in the US that can build a business too profitable in a year. being in an online business, you do have an incredible, magical opportunity, but it doesn't happen overnight. All right. The third thing I wanna talk about. Is that you could manifest anything instantly. Now let me be clear. I love manifestation. I am all about opening yourself up to more possibilities. I love the power of positive thinking. I love vision boards, affirmations, all of those things. But if you are thinking that you can change your mindset and that you can just attract clients. I have to tell you, you're wrong. People have to know you exist. You still have to have a presence online. People still need to understand what your offer is, and I know this makes sense to you now that I'm talking about it, but you have to talk about your business for people to know that they should be talking to you, for you to manifest anything you have to take action. I like to say that manifestation. Starts with an idea and then an action, and then the result you manifest. you must have action in order to manifest. the fourth idea that I wanna talk to you about is that everybody will buy high ticket coaching right away. And look, that's not the truth either.
In fact, I always tell our clients. Start with a price that you feel comfortable with. You might've been told to sell high ticket like five or $10,000, but I always ask our coaches, do you really feel good about selling like that? Can you deliver a $10,000 result? And of course you could say, well, yeah, of course I can. but when it really gets down to it. Let's really be honest about it. Do you feel confident? Most of the time you don't because you haven't actually coached for money yet. So instead of starting with a high ticket offer that you have a really hard time selling and that you don't make very often because you are so uncomfortable with the idea of selling this high ticket offer. I recommend that you start with something small. Many of the coaches who have high ticket offers, they feel like failures because they're not able to sell 'em from the beginning, or they freeze up as they're trying to make the offer. And sometimes they change their mind right in the middle of making the offer and they sell it at a lower price. So I recommend that you start at a lower level, build your confidence, build your proof, and your price will naturally increase. The fifth interesting idea that I wanna talk about is that ads are the answer, the promise that if you just turn on Facebook ads or Instagram ads, your calendar will fill up. That is just not true. You have got to know, first of all, how to even get an ad approved. You've got to know what to do to set up the technology, to get the calendar. You have to know what your offer is, how to sell, how to price. You have to have some place online for the person who's gonna schedule the call to go check you out.
Gone are the days when people just book and buy. There needs to be an opportunity for no, and trust built. So getting clients instantly, you guys, it just doesn't typically happen. if you are getting dms where somebody is promising you that they're gonna fill your calendar, it is not true. It's not true. Somebody else cannot fill your calendar with ideal clients because at this point you don't know who your ideal clients are. And even more than that, my dear one, you're not ready for a calendar of clients. You have to start with one client, then two, then three, then four. You have to get good at doing that first, and there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, that is exactly how it should be. I love to talk about a baby that learns how to crawl and then walk, They can't just start running. Same way with your business. new coaches, they often lose thousands of dollars on ads because they don't know what they're doing. They don't have clear messaging, proof of results, or even the foundation to have that. I will tell you honestly. I worked with a coach in the beginning, and I don't say this to brag, but I spent $57,000 on ads and I was not ready for ads. So I speak from experience with this. It is not time for you to run ads until you are experienced at selling, until you have the proper things set up. Here's the sixth lie that I wanna tell you about. Beware.
There is no passive income. Nothing is passive. You've heard like launch your course, put it online, wake up with sales. No, it doesn't happen that way. You don't wake up with sales unless you market your business. And marketing is not passive. Building a community and a relationship and a brand and a reputation, none of that is passive. What is passive? That is true. Is recording the content, but what you have to do then is be the engine that brings the people in. In fact, do you know how many people you might need to bring in to buy one course? It could be hundreds of people. And I'm not saying that to discourage you, and I know there's exceptions to every rule, but I would rather tell you that nothing is passive. You have to work your business for your business to work. So many coaches. They spend months getting ready for their business. They get some fancy software. They get their modules recorded, which takes a lot of work, a lot of time. They edit it all, they put it up and they never sell anything, and then they blame it on the economy and on the coaching market being oversaturated. That's not true either. In fact, I think there's massive opportunity for us no matter what the economy and no matter how many coaches there are because. There are very few people that have ever hired a coach. You happen to know who they are because you're in the coaching space. But start asking your neighbors. You'll find out none of them have worked. You will find out that none of them have worked with coaches. So in reality, you should spend your months building your email list, you're following your reputation building that know, like, and trust. Working with private clients. Working through creating your own methodology and then someday you can have a course. no passive anything when it comes to business. If you are nodding your head right now and you're like, okay, Debbie is right, I have been told some white lies or some big fat lies, I wanna pause right now. I wanna invite you to hit the subscribe button and then comment the word Canva if you're listening on YouTube, or send me a DM on Instagram, the word Canva. And I'm actually gonna show you how to uplevel your brand by sharing my Canva training. While I'm gonna teach you one of the things that will change things for you, it's to elevate your online presence by having a beautiful, professional brand. I'm actually going to teach you how to use Canva Plus I'm gonna give you 30 social media graphics in 38 minutes. No kidding. Not only will you know how to create a brand, a logo, select your colors, you'll understand how to elevate your online brand presence. All right, let's talk about the truth. I've walked through the tech. Please keep your tech simple. You will get stuck. You'll honestly get stuck, and there's nothing wrong with you getting stuck because the truth is. I know you're smart enough to use a computer, and you know how I know that because you use an iPhone every day or whatever your phone is.
Chances are you've worked on a computer at your office. But the truth is, every bit of software, there's a learning curve. So you're not terrible at tech, you just don't know how to use this stuff yet. And you should start with the basics like learning Canva, learning how to use Zoom in the proper way, setting up your scheduler. So start there with the tech that you need to support your business, and then don't get any other tech, no fancy tech until you are so fully booked. And I'm talking about 20, 30 clients before you ever consider anything else for your business, when you add technology. You just complicate your business. So even if you're thinking about sending out emails and notifications to new clients, you can do that manually. You can copy and paste in seconds and save yourself a really big learning curve, and honestly, a lot of money. the second thing that we talked about was that building a coaching business takes time. I think you understand now we have clients that build their business in six months. Sometimes they get clients at month four, month five. We have some people who get clients in month two, but for the most part, to consistently have clients coming in, you need to be at about the 12 month mark of marketing your business. so can you get paid coaching clients? In the beginning, yes. And probably month three to month six is a good time to think about getting your first few clients. And then you have to learn how to manage the clients and the marketing at the same time, and then get to a place where you're consistently marketing and you're consistently making revenue. That's gonna be about a year.
The third point we talked about was manifestation. Please know I love manifestation. In fact, I work with a manifestation coach. Kathleen Cameron, if you don't know who she is, go look her up. She's amazing. But Kathleen says the same thing that I say, and she's very wise. She's been very successful. You have to take action. Yes, you need to be in belief, but you gotta take action. So go listen to her podcast, go watch her on YouTube. She really shares some incredible stories about envisioning and believing and elevating what you think is possible for you, and also taking action. belief is powerful belief. With the conversations, with consistent marketing, with you, talking to people, all those things, that's actually what manifests an incredible business for you. Number four, I talked about high ticket pricing. Please know you're gonna get to that point. What will happen for you is that it will organically happen. You will start working with a lot of clients and you will say, now, wait a minute. I am giving them so much value, the next person is gonna pay more than the last person. Or you'll say, I've got so many people now on my calendar, my time is more valuable, and so I'm gonna charge the next person higher. your pricing will automatically step up and you'll get to high ticket at the right time. The fifth idea I talked about was ads. Now ads can work and I run ads. I do, I run ads. But hear me on this. I am at a completely different place in my business than you are. I work with women who are just starting their businesses, and the strategies that I am talking to you about are geared for women who are just getting started. So if you've been thinking ads are the answer, they're the answer. If you've sold a few hundred thousand dollars. Yeah, they're the answer.
If you don't have time to do this beautiful organic, one-to-one connecting, which will actually convert to clients much faster than ads will, so just know, get to a hundred thousand dollars. And then consider ads. But what if I told you could even go further than that without ads? So focus on getting your free marketing really nailed. The sixth item that I talked about is maybe the thing that is most frustrating to me. Is the passive thing. I love courses and we even sell courses, and one thing that I wanna talk to you about is creating education. And I'm a huge fan of education. No matter what your coaching niche is, I think that we all need to understand coaching concepts, and you can do that for your clients.
Even your private clients can have quicker success if they understand the concepts, if they understand the things you're teaching them. You can do that by creating videos that you turn into, like a course that runs in the background for your private clients. you're serving individual videos to your private clients to help them get through their coaching in a more efficient way. That's actually how creating content works. We do that with our clients. I always say look. I am not selling you a bunch of videos to watch. I'm selling you answers and coaching with me, but the videos are the support tool and that's actually what we teach our clients as well. if you've been wondering why it feels harder than you expected, now you know it's not you. It's the misleading information that you've been given. And please hear me on this. When you are watching videos or listening to podcasts, ask yourself, is this person that I'm listening to, actually talking to somebody at my level of business, does it make sense that I need a client management system? Should I use my time listening to that? Or is that just gonna confuse things? And in most cases, it causes you to think I'm not doing good enough. Or something's wrong with me. And I also know from firsthand experience, I subscribed to software and paid for software in the beginning that I did not need because I kept thinking, oh, if I have this one thing, it's gonna help me with my business. The only thing that helps you with your business is talking about your business to people. I know it's the one thing that's the hardest to do. It feels very useful to learn more, to buy software, to get signed up for more things. In reality, my friend, what you have to do is get clear on your niche, learn how to talk about your business, start making offers, start having conversations, and doing it poorly until you do it. Good.
At the Life Coach school, we used to talk about B minus work. You have to start that way. You're not gonna start with perfect. Start learning how to talk about your business. Start giving yourself that grace of getting on social media and not being great at it. Don't worry about the algorithm. Someday you will be at a place where that stuff matters. So the truth is, once you learn a few simple steps and you commit to consistent action, you decide on a niche and you keep the niche. You can build a beautiful business that you can be so proud of. You can have time freedom. You can work the schedule that you want to. Once you get your business built, all of that is available to you. You can make more money than maybe you made in your current career. That is available to you, but not tomorrow. So don't forget to subscribe. I really would love for you to watch our free Canva training where you really get more insights to what it takes to build that professional business. So comment the word Canva. I want you to stand out from everybody else.
Be seen as a successful coach from day one. That's what I'm talking about in the Canva training. Comment the word below, Canva, or DM me on Instagram, the word Canva. And I will send you that training And I'll also gift you 30 days of social media graphics, and I'm gonna teach you how to update those. I hope you enjoyed this episode. In closing, I just wanna tell you, you've got this. The people who win at this don't quit. this is the day that you get to start over. This is the day you get to say, okay. I heard what she said. I'm not gonna look for shortcuts. I know what it takes. I'm gonna pick my niche.
I'm gonna start talking to people. I'm gonna be consistent on social media. I'm not gonna buy software or watch advanced trainings that have nothing to do with where I am. I'm gonna do the basics, tell people I'm a coach, offer to help 'em, and then have conversations with them, Have those consultations. I call 'em comfortable conversations. All right, my dear one. So much love. You got this. It's gonna get incredible when you get there, and I know you're going to have a beautiful day. We'll talk to you very soon. Bye-bye.
