193 - Your 2024 Coaching Business Dreams and Your Future Self-Identity
Episode 193 of the Life Coach Business Building Podcast
In this week’s episode, we’ll talk about tapping into your future self to achieve your 2024 coaching business dreams.
If you're feeling overwhelmed in your business journey, unsure about the next steps, and seeking clarity, the good news is you already possess the answers—you just have to unlock them within!
Learn how to design your offers, refine marketing strategies, and attract ideal clients as if you're already successful.
Gain insights and tips on assessing your current business, reframing challenges positively, and adjusting goals to serve you.
You have ALL the answers. You know deep down what you want to do. Your future self is rooting and waiting for you. So, let's get to it!
👉 Create a profitable business that looks good and sets you up to be respected through the Fast Track Business Building Boutique Program
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Transcript:
Preview: You can decide today to have compassion. When you feel overwhelmed and you're just like, Oh my gosh, your future self can step in and say, Honey, it's all right. It's going to be okay. This too shall pass. Your future self can say, Yeah, learning this software is hard.Yes, it's awkward being on social media. But don't you worry. It's getting easier every day. Your future self would say, You've got this. You know how to do this. You were born to be a successful coach. What would your million dollar Debbie tell you to do?
Intro: Hello, I'm Debbie Shadid, the host of the Life Coach Business Building podcast. If you are ready to have more clients in your life coach business, then you're in the right spot. Each week I'm gonna teach you super simple strategies to grow your business without feeling overwhelmed and without spending money on paid ads. If that sounds interesting. Stick around and let's get started.
Are you lost on how to run your business? Are you wondering how you're going to get clarity and create some certainty about what to do next? I want to tell you, you actually have some answers and I want to talk to you about letting your future self run your business. In today's podcast, I first want to give credit to Dr. Benjamin Hardy, who is the author of many books, including Be Your Future Self Now. And to Brooke Castillo at the Life Coach School, who also taught me about the concept of being your future self.
What's interesting is, as you know, I've been consulting in business for over two decades and I didn't become a certified life coach until about three years ago. What I discovered once I was certified was the link between my coaching, the training that I was doing, the teaching, and it was already tied to the concept of being your future self. I had never heard about this and yet I was telling people to build their business as if they were already successful. That's what I'm going to talk to you about today.
I want you to design your business today as if you were already successful. I want you to design your offer from that same point of view. I want you to create a schedule to curate the type of business that you want today from that same future successful self. And I want you to market your business as if you were already successful. So, today as we think about tapping into your future self for clarity, for more certainty, and for answers of how to do things in your business.
We first have to start by assessing where you are today. So let's take an honest look. This honest look could actually cause you to redefine your goals for 2024. I hope that this will help you set yourself up to achieve your goals. Let's first look at your starting point. So where are you actually today? Our business mindset coach, Thais Glenn, actually had this exercise. She said, first, we got to get people to where they are today. And she's right. So where are you? What skills are you lacking? Do you even know how to have a successful business? Are you confident in your ability to manage clients? And there's so much more to managing a lot of clients than there is to dreaming about having a lot of clients. How confident are you with the technology that you need to use for your business?
What about marketing and social media? You guys know it. There's a lot that comes up with thinking about being on social media. There's pricing, there's your offers, There's your ability to sell coaching. How do you feel about all that? Are you ready and prepared? What I know for sure is that when I went fully online with my business in 2017 and I was no longer going and meeting people in person that I had done for the last 16 years, being in an online business was completely different.
I hired my first online business coach and she had me set some big goals and the truth is she should have asked me how prepared are you to have an online business and she didn't. So I set a big goal and it was a goal that I didn't reach until a couple of years ago and so what was wrong? Well I wasn't ready. Probably just like you are. Now, yes, I'd had tons of business experience and I'd done lots of consulting. So yes, I knew how to write marketing. I knew how to make offers. I knew how to sell, but not online to strangers that I had never met. So I really wasn't prepared. I wasn't prepared to be coaching people online versus talking to people at their business.
I really didn't know what I didn't know. So have you done that too? Is that where you are today? And if that is where you are today, then maybe your goal needs to be adjusted to accommodate for that. So what do you need to know about building a profitable coaching business? Sometimes you're not even sure what that actually is. Sometimes people can't even ask me the right questions because they don't know what questions they should be asking. What marketing have you done to build your brand and business and your reputation right now? And look, it's not a few social media posts. It's not one email to tell your friends that you're a coach.
What really consistent heavy marketing have you done to build your business? How many paid clients have you worked with? Now, maybe you have worked with 10, 15, 20 paid clients or maybe none. But even if you've worked with 15 clients paid, there still needs to be more than that. And there becomes this question of, where else are the clients going to come from and how many more can I manage? And how do I manage those clients and also effectively market my business? How often are you telling people you're a coach? This is a serious question.
Just today, assess where you are. How often, when it comes up in conversation, are you saying, Oh yeah, I'm a coach. How often are you doing that? Probably not very often. And what do you honestly know about having a profitable online business? Now, yes, you probably watched lots of YouTubes and you probably have taken some courses and you probably have talked to your peers about it. But what do you actually really know about doing this for yourself? That is the honest assessment that you have to have to figure out where you are today. Because if you can do that, then we can set you up for success. Then you can look at your goal and say, all right, with all that in mind, I have a lot to learn. I have a lot of practicing to do. I have a lot of figuring it out along the way. So what should my goal be? And maybe this first year that you consider your business from this perspective, maybe the goal isn't huge. Maybe it's like, yeah, I need to get my first X amount of paid clients, or I need to make 30,000 instead of 100,000. Where is it that you actually want to be?
Now, I also want you to do something else that Thais talks about a lot and that I learned from Dr. Benjamin Hardy in a recent rapid transformation program that I was in. He talks about reframing. So you want to look at what you've done and every single week, reframe how that has been a positive experience for you. So often what we're doing is we're saying things like, Oh, well, I didn't do anything in my business last week, or I didn't get a client last week, or nobody commented on my post. How could you reframe that to make that a positive situation for you?
And this takes work, but when you reframe it to be positive, it actually inspires you to do more. So, I didn't get a client last week, could be, you know, I didn't get a client last week, but I did have a great conversation with somebody that really helped me have a new understanding. And I also continued to market my business, which was pretty cool. So, I know more people heard about me. You see how you begin to reframe what you think was a negative into a positive, because look, if you're still in the game week after week, there is something positive about that. I know you're making progress.
So, reframe where you are today. Reframe and say, you know, I know how to coach people. I've decided to take the leap into being in business for myself, which is more than a lot of people do. A lot of people just sit on the couch and say they're going to do it and you are doing it. Maybe you have practiced a lot on your coaching so you could say, I am fully prepared.
And I'm so grateful to my past self for all the work that I did to get me to this point. That knowledge is knowledge that could literally create thousands upon thousands and thousands of dollars, and it could be so impactful to the people that I work with. That is a positive reframing. When you make things positive, then you can begin to be proud of the business that you have even if you have no business. Your future self can be proud of you.
So if you imagine now you've reframed it and you've cleaned up your thoughts about your business and you go to that future self who could say, Hey, you're exactly where you should be. You're on your way to something magical. That's what we want to look at. You could ask your future self then, how do I want to show up in my business? Which is the work that we do in the business building boutique. We talk about personal brand identity as if you were already successful. So what does your future self do in your day to day? How does your day to day look? What are you doing? Who is supporting you and how are they supporting you? Even more than that, what decisions are you making in your day to day? What would be the marketing that your future self would do? This is important. Your future self has answers and I want you to go and ask that and then kind of assess where you are from that perspective.
I have this little thing I say to myself which is what would million dollar Debbie do? That is my future self. And that's just a phrase that I coined a couple of years ago. As I began growing my business faster and faster, it was like I had to ask myself, wait, what's the decision that Million Dollar Debbie would make? Would she be all hung up on getting this one thing right? No, I can tell you, your future self or Million Dollar Debbie would be having compassion and saying, wow, you've really made a lot of progress or wow, you know, you're on your way to something magical here, or maybe you would be kind to yourself and more patient and say, look, honey.
Look, you're exactly where you should be. Yes, this is hard and you're making progress and I want you to know how proud I am of you. Can you see? Million dollar Debbie would be saying that to me. Million dollar Debbie says, wow, look at you. You're doing something incredible and your future is going to be amazing because you're setting yourself up for success. So from that point of view, as if you were already successful, let me ask you a few more questions. Who do you want to work with? You know, today, oftentimes as you build your business, you're just taking anyone.
But what if you said, this is who I know I want to work with. You know, I say I want to work with women who want to take action, who want to get their business built, who don't sit around passively and come to coaching not to learn and do. The women I work with are action takers. That's my future self and that is my current self.
Do you want to work with the cream of the crop or with go getters? Yes, the cream of the crop. I want the very best to work with me. This can transform how you market. In a workshop I did today with my clients, I was talking about their offer, designing an offer that speaks to or that serves the cream of the crop, like the very best of the best. And then you can ask yourself, If I had a program like that, what type of support would I want to deliver? Who do I want to support me as I deliver that support? So when you think about that and you think about somebody marketing their business from their future successful self, which means they've sold a lot of coaching, they've earned a lot of money.
Can you see how powerfully they would show up when they talk about their business? You would be talking and selling from the point of view that you already know for sure what you have to offer is epic and they'd be crazy not to take you up on it. I also want to ask you this. When you think about your offer, Is it serving you?
Now, maybe it's great for your clients, but does it allow you to work the hours that you ultimately really want to work? Some of you tell me that you want to have, you know, 26 private clients or something, and it's like, do you really want 26 private clients, your future self? 26 private clients is a lot of hours of work and you still have to market your business.
You still have to have a lot of consultation calls. Do you really want to have 26 clients? Would your future self say, yeah, that's what I'm going to be doing forever is having 26 clients. I don't know what the answer is for you, but it's important to look at that and say, how many hours do you want to work? We're all working towards freedom here. So how many hours would you work and have the freedom that you want? Then you begin to make offers and create a business that supports that.
So today, thinking about that, where do you need to make adjustments? How many more free trainings would you be watching? Or would you just say, all right, I'm going to hire Debbie. I hope that's what you say. I'm going to hire Debbie and I'm just going to get this thing figured out. I'm tired of messing around. your future self would say like, look, if you're going to do this, get with it. Stop all of the, what we call business buffering, which is just watching all the things, looking to see what everybody else is doing.
Your future self would say, hey, you have the answers. You know deep down what you want to do and let's get to it. So when you do that honest assessment and you reset your expectations and your goals, then, as I mentioned, your future self is like, all right, honey, let's go. Then you can spend time thinking about that future successful coaching business. And really deciding what your day to day really does look like.
You can decide to intentionally approach your day that way. You can decide today to have compassion. When you feel overwhelmed and you're just like, Oh my gosh, your future self can step in and say, honey, it's all right. It's going to be okay. This too shall pass. Your future self can say, Yeah, learning this software is hard. Yes, it's awkward being on social media. But don't you worry. It's getting easier every day. Your future self would say, You've got this. You know how to do this. You were born to be a successful coach. What would your million dollar Debbie tell you to do?
That's it guys. I'm going to leave it with that. You create your own statement. You're welcome to take mine and put in your own name there. But what would you be doing in your business? And what would your business look like? What would your future self identity do to help you grow your coaching business and to achieve your goals in 2024?
All right, guys, have an amazing week. I do hope that we can talk about your business. We are helping so many amazing women right now in the business building boutique. If you are interested, Let's talk, you guys. Seriously, let's get your business built and have your future self say congratulations and bravo. You are on your way. All right, until next time, take care of yourself and I'll see you soon.
Outro: Okay, ladies, that is it for today. Before we go, I want to invite you to head over to debbieshadid.com. I have this incredible Canva training, specifically designed for life coaches where I'm gonna teach you how to use Canva to create beautiful graphics to market your life coaching. All right. Have an amazing week. I'll talk to you very soon. Bye bye.