How I grew my coaching business to 10K?months

It’s been 3 years since I quit my job in tech — and I find it so magical that I get to celebrate my quitversary with 10K months! ????

Before we go any further though, I invite you to not get stuck on the timing. Just because it took me 3 years, it doesn’t mean that it has to take you the same amount of time, or even that once you reach your 3rd year in business, that a 10K month will be guaranteed. (In fact, if I didn’t hire my first business coach last year, it would’ve probably taken me much longer to do it on my own). 

To help those who want to reach their impossible goals, I’ve consolidated three key principles below that has helped me create 10K months. It’ll be a mix of strategy and tactics — because there’s no step by step checklist or set curriculum that you can follow to guarantee a 10K month. Everyone is different and there’s no *one* right way to do things. 

And at the end of the day, it’s actually not about what you do, but how you do it.

Your thoughts and beliefs are where your actions come from. Your thoughts determine what kind of actions you take, the quality of your actions, and whether you take the action or not. 

I want you to learn how to fish instead of just throw fish at you. 

?? And before we dive into it, here’s a quick aside: 

Note: 10K months are often known as as the golden grail of the coaching world. However, I do want to point out that reaching this goal doesn’t mean that you’ll always be happy, feel successful or never worry again. Trust me, I know.

Because no achievement can do that for you. It needs to come from the inside. So if you’re on this route to validate yourself or prove that you’re worthy or finally feel happy, this motivation will only hold you back. Because 10K months is a byproduct of already being there in your mind in terms of feeling successful and confident (this is also why mindset work is so important). In other words, 10K months is merely the delayed physical manifestation of the inner work that you’ve already done. 

3 Principles That Helped Me Create 10K Months in My Creative Business: 

1. I separated my self-worth from product worth. 

In the business world, you hear so much of: “Girl! Charge what you’re worth.” I followed that advice for years before realizing that it was doing more harm than good. 

Especially when you’re first starting out, this is especially detrimental because when you’re a beginner, you are trying so hard to believe that you’re worth a lot. So one of these two things happen: you either charge super high to seem experienced and competitive, or you charge super low because you’re actually equating the product value with how much you think you’re valued. 

Neither are helpful because: 

• When you charge high and don’t believe in it, you’re not confident in offering your services, which leads to zero clients. 
• When you charge low and you know it, you’re consciously downplaying your value and keeping yourself in barely breaking-it-even months. 

There’s so much more freedom when you separate your innate value with your product value. One of my current philosophies is: Undercharge and overdeliver. 

What that means is: I know my services are worth so much more than the amount I’m currently charging. And I’m always aiming for clients to 2x, 4x their investment (in fact, one of my clients is about to replace her old corporate income and we’re only two months in our coaching relationship! Text exchange shared with her permission below) 

The overdelivering philosophy is the exact same approach I teach my clients, and it has a 3 pronged benefit: 

• It helps you create new clients consistently.
• It helps you make an offer to help people with confidence, and none of that “is this worth it / is my price too high” mind-drama.
• It builds up your reputation and referral system for a thriving business. 

 Action tip: Stop doing market research. Just choose. Charge a number that feels good to you - that you feel confident in so that it’s not a no brainer, and make sure it’s not paying you peanuts so that you’re resentful about it. Now go make more offers and create more consistent clients :) 

2. I evaluated my performance and and practiced being in discomfort, every. single. day. 

I make evaluating my consult calls a priority when I looked at my calendar from last year, and realized that I went through hundreds of calls that were No’s and still had no idea what worked and what didn’t. 

That’s hundreds of thousands of dollars. A multiple 6 figure business right there. And hundreds of lives went unchanged.

So I set up to evaluate my calls, get feedback and incorporate it into the next one. This is also known as deliberate practice, a specific type of practice that’s both purposeful and systematic. 

For example, you can think of two people practicing tennis for 10 hours. 

• Player A uses a ball machine and practices hitting forehands for five hours and backhands for five hours. They also keep track of how many balls they get out of the line, how many they get in, and notes on what helped them.
• Player B practices hitting the tennis balls by themselves, uses random combinations of forehands & backhands and takes breaks after moving from one side of the court to the other or when they feel down about hitting so many balls that are out. Due to this, their total practice time is cut in half. 

 → Who do you think is better at tennis after ten hours?

When I applied deliberate practice to coaching and building my business, I saw a 10X in my growth. Not going to lie... at first it was really uncomfortable. My default action was to bury my head in a pillow as my inner voice criticized me on all the things I did wrong, how it was a failed call and it was better to sweep it under the rug and forget about it. 

But there are so many golden nuggets of wisdom in these calls.

So I started evaluating them in a dedicated notebook like a curious observer and took my ego out of the question. I practiced selling from an unattached place, also known as clean selling. And I noticed when I was caught up in having thoughts about myself (i.e. I really need to sign this client to have a successful month) and instead, reoriented to about them (i.e. What would serve them the most right now?)

This approach completely changed my mindset around coaching, selling and now I’m LOVING IT ??.

Imagine loving all parts of your business. YES, it is possible!

Falling in love with all aspects of my business was a huge factor in helping me double my monthly income and exponentially grow my business. In fact before this, my highest month was a 6K month. I never even had a 10K month…before having my first 5 figure month at 12K. 

All because I learned to love feedback. Because I learned to love the discomfort that comes with growing. Because I learned to love my business. 

And who says success needs to be linear? ;)

Action tip: After each consult call, go back and evaluate: What went well? What didn’t go well? What will I do differently next time?

3. I focused on my mind, healed past trauma and all the things you can’t see. 

This is probably what made the most difference in helping me create 10K months — and what most people will skip over in this article.

I too, used to look down on things that I couldn't see, and only focused on the physical world. But some of the most powerful things in the world are the ones we can’t see: the chemistry we feel when we first meet someone who makes our heart flutter, the connection we feel with a stranger across the globe that feel like long-lost best friends, and the energy we feel with a coach that inspires us to become their client. (I’ve legitly chose to hire a coach because I wanted to have his calm energy…more on that later). 

To play a bigger game, you need to move beyond the physical and go upstream — to your mind. 

Tactics create linear results. Mindset creates exponential results. 

These days, I devote my entire mornings to working on my brain. And it’s not because I already have 10K months that I can afford to do this — but that this is what creates high income months. Managing your brain is much more important than checking off “more productive” to-do list items. 

Here’s a glimpse into how my mornings may look like: listening to an 10 minute Abraham Hicks video, meditating, taking a walk in the sun, planning out my day, gratitude journaling, thinking about and sending resources to clients, writing, studying a coaching video, doing thought-work, etc. 

Thought work looks a lot like writing all the thoughts that I have, especially negative thoughts like: “No one wants to coach with me” and investigating how true it is. Because thoughts creates feelings, which creates actions, which creates results. 

So if I have the thought that no one wants to coach with me, it makes me feel really sad, small, unwanted and unworthy. When I feel this way, I don’t do anything: I don’t offer my services nor coach courageously on consult calls. And this leads to the result that — no one wants to coach with me. Therefore reaffirming my original thought. See how our thoughts create our results?

So when I realize that a thought isn’t serving me, I consciously choose a better on and decide to not take on my brain’s thoughts that are driven by fear. 

By understanding my thoughts and patterns, I was also able to heal past traumas that were subconsciously holding me back. Here are a couple of things I got healing on, thanks to working with my calming and very zen life coach: 

• I couldn’t fully embrace my present because I was so hung up in the past and deep down, I despised myself for not being the best version I could’ve been in SF. There were a lot of things I wished I could forget, undo and felt shame around. After working with my coach, I learned to forgive my past and recognize that the younger version of Yunzhe was doing the best she could. And that the past is actually perfection. There’s nothing to correct or fix. However long it took me to get here, was however long it was meant to be. There was so much release in this insight and I finally was able to start loving myself, and all of myself — both the past me and present me. As a byproduct, this helped me let go of so much baggage and allowed me to hold an unconditionally loving space for existing and potential clients. 
• I had so much angst around my relationship with my parents. Through doing IFS therapy and somatic work, I was able to process all the feelings, let it move (learning that emotions are just energy in motion) and explore the ways I was showing up. I realized why I felt needed to play small (because making noise meant potentially catching someone’s attention and getting scolded) and my resistance towards being angry (because anger meant someone was going to get hurt). When I understood where I was coming from, and recognized that these are stories, I was able to do whatever was needed for myself, whether it was letting go of people pleasing or integrating the different parts of me. This has helped me so much in loving challenge my clients and coach bolder, therefore creating better results and more clients. 

THIS is the type of deep inner work I mentioned at the beginning of the article. 

And it’s made such a significant impact in my life that I’ve incorporated this holistic aspect into my own coaching with clients as well. 

Working on what can’t be seen is what separates exceptional entrepreneurs from average entrepreneurs, because most people are all about taking action no matter how uphill it feels, instead of figuring out why it feels hard and what’s actually running their life. 

Action tip: Investigate your brain daily by writing out your thought, feeling it creates, action you take when you feel that way, and the results it creates. 

There you have it — the three principles that has helped me the most in creating 10K months!

I hope you’ll go out there and apply these principles to your own unique situation. 

?? If you’d like more help in creating five figure months in your business and get personalized coaching, I’m currently taking on 2 final clients for the year. It doesn’t matter where you are in your business — the only requirements are that you have bold dreams for yourself, you want to make a positive impact in the world and you’re ready to blow your own mind on what’s possible. So if that sounds like you, DM me. 

Questions about this article? Feel free to comment below — I’d love to hear from you!