What You Think About Your Coaching Business Matters More than What You Do

You can have an amazing business model and an impeccable strategy to go with it — if your mind is not in the right place, it will always sabotage your efforts to build and grow your coaching business.

When I started as a coach I knew how important my mindset was, but I didn’t anticipate just how big a role it would play in the success of my business.

Everything that I have achieved so far is due to believing that it was possible: I only published in HBR once I believed in the possibility of being a contributor; I imagined myself delivering workshops for The Association for Coaching and other coaching training providers way before it actually happened; I quit my job to focus on my business full time because I believed it was possible to make a living from coaching.

In this article, I highlight the power your mindset can have on the success of your coaching business.

What is mindset?

Cambridge Dictionary?defines mindset as “a person’s way of thinking and their opinions”, but it’s more than that. The collection of a person’s thoughts and beliefs creates a mental attitude that influences the way they act, leading to particular results in their lives and in their businesses.

A good mindset is one that doesn’t stand in the way of reaching the goals you’ve set for yourself.

Mindset and coaching prices

The results you see in your coaching business will be heavily influenced by your beliefs about coaching as an industry, as an unregulated profession, about how much coaching as a service is worth, whether it’s a luxury or a necessity, how much your clients are willing or can afford to pay, etc.

The latter is something that often comes up in my discussions with coaches. If you’re also concerned about it, here’s some food for thought: Affordability is not something you should judge, because you are not the one buying your services. It is your client who pays, so let them decide what is affordable and what is not.

I have worked with coaches who believed that their clients couldn’t afford their services even before they knew how much they were going to charge. That is the perfect example of a mindset issue. I addressed this and other mistakes coaches make when setting their prices in?this article.

Money beliefs and their influence

Thoughts similar to the one above can become paralysing and quite damaging for your coaching business. What’s dangerous is that sometimes we’re not even aware of them or we think they are common sense.

For example, many coaches say to me that they are not in it for the money — money is not the goal, they just want to help people. I’m not arguing that money should be the goal, but when you see it as unimportant, you are likely to act as if it doesn’t matter and end up treating your business like you would a hobby. I talk more about this belief and other similar ones here.

Improving your mindset

Are you a lifelong learner? You’ll need to become one if you want to improve your mindset.

Every time you raise your prices, change your business model, do a pivot in your business or simply reach a new financial threshold, the gremlins will come swinging. “Who am I to charge this much? Does this change of direction make me less true to myself and my values? Am I betraying pure coaching by adding mentoring and consulting to my services? Have I turned into a greedy person?”

Left unaddressed, these thoughts could turn into beliefs that might sabotage the efforts you’re putting into growing your coaching business.

When it comes to mindset work you will never be exonerated, you’ll never “arrive”. Instead, each time you reach a new level in your business, ask yourself: What thoughts and beliefs require my attention so that I can confidently embrace where I am now?

This video can help. In it, I share 9 mindset shifts every coach needs to make to get more clients and grow their coaching business.

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A version of this article was originally published on?Medium.com.

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