3 Psychology Secrets of Highly Profitable Coaches

Do you want to grow a profitable Coaching business? Your psychology is key. 

The mindset is the one thing that can prevent you from taking action on all the tools. 

If we don’t have the right psychology going into our business, as coaches, we are going to sabotage where we’re going.

We’re going to self-sabotage, we’re going to reject and filter out opportunities.

We might not even see opportunities to help people, make money, find clients – if we don’t have the correct psychology in place.

There are three main problems that I see coaches come up against when it comes to building a profitable coaching business.

1. Trap of Comparison

The first thing that people struggle with when it comes to their mindset is the trap of comparison. Instead of going out there, and focusing on your vision and your mission, and staying in action, even if it’s imperfect action…

…we start looking left and right and end up getting caught in the scrolling and consuming, we can get stuck in the trap of comparison.

We can compare our beginning or our middle to someone’s end or someone who’s further ahead in the journey than us. 

We make excuses – thinking things like ‘It’s easy for them” or “they’ve been born into money” or “they’re naturally an extrovert”.

We can get stuck in blame and excuses and denial and all those things that are unhelpful because we’re comparing our journey to other people when actually, it doesn’t matter.

If you want to be a highly successful coach, you need to step up as a leader and leaders don’t look around and compare themselves to others. They are focused on their vision. 

If you’re a leader, you’re a big-picture thinker – you’re thinking about where you’re going, you’re not faffing about with all the details. And you’re certainly not spending the majority of your time consuming other people’s stuff and comparing yourself to others. 

2. The juggling trap

The second problem that I see coaches come up against when it comes to growing a profitable business is that they get stuck juggling too many things. They’re picking up dramas that aren’t theirs to carry, they get caught up in other people’s issues and problems. They’re trying to do too many things. 

I like to call them “building half-bridges.” When they start building a bridge here and it gets too hard, they’ll start building another bridge somewhere else.  For a lot of us, we’ve got lots of half-built bridges. 

You might have a half-finished course you haven’t finished or half-written book, or a half done marketing campaign. Whatever it is we’ve all got half-bridges. No one pays for half-bridges, people pay for a full bridge. 

Whatever you are doing right now, I want you to commit to one thing, finishing one thing and not getting stuck in the juggling trap where you’re doing too many things and you’re completely diluting it…

…because when you do too many things, you can’t do them all well. You can only do them all a little bit. You’ve diluted your energy and time instead of focusing on one thing and see it through to completion. 

If you’re not following through, you find yourself procrastinating and saying I just need motivation, or I’ll wait until next year, it’s because you haven’t set your focus on a target, on a clear vision, on your mission.

If you’ve got that, you will show up. You will do whatever it takes to get there because your mission is bigger than you. It’s serving other people instead of what you want for yourself. 

3. Fear of Rejection

The third problem I see people come up against when it comes to growing a profitable coaching business is a fear of rejection. 

They have a fear of selling to people, a fear of putting themselves out there authentically on social media, of creating a website, or going to networking events, or running a workshop or doing a webinar – all these things are lead generation strategies and we need to pick the right lead generation strategy and go for it. 

You’ve got to get super clear on your ideal client. That’s something that a lot of people avoid. But that’s actually part of being bold and brave, and taking that action towards the thing that you want. 

Business is all about facing rejection. You have to hear no – over and over again and the psychology of successful coaches is that they’re willing to be rejected and not take it personally. 

So now I’ll get into the three psychology secrets of highly profitable coaches.

Profitable Coaches approach business differently to unsuccessful coaches…

There are a lot of people wanting to be Coaches who want to do it for personal reasons. They go out basically telling everyone that they’re a Coach, but they haven’t actually got their own coach, and they aren’t working on themselves.

They aren’t working on their psychology and they are, going to crumble if they don’t work on themselves and really take the time to build their inner strength and learn the skills that they’re missing. 

Coaching is one skill, but coaching is one part of a coaching business. If you only know how to coach, but you’re not studying business, it’s going to fail.

A lot of coaches focus on improving the tools, getting better at coaching, doing another certification, getting caught up thinking I need to do more, I need to learn more, I need to learn more about coaching when actually you need to learn more of business in most cases. 

There are exceptions, but for most coaches that I see that are really good at coaching, really good at their modalities.

But they’re not so good at marketing themselves, as being confident in presenting themselves as being confident when they walk into a networking event, confident in their communication in their presence on social media.

They tend to hide behind very safe, comfortable blog posts, but not actually moving the needle forward in their business by doing the things that are hard or are avoiding because they don’t want to get rejected. 

They want to avoid the things that are actually going to make them money. For me, the thing that I was avoiding was sales. I just didn’t want to improve sales, I didn’t want to think about sales, I didn’t want to think of myself as a salesperson.

I went to a course where this guy was speaking on sales. And he said “Sales is a skill that you don’t want to learn, but you have to learn if you want to stay in business”.

It really stayed with me and I’ve found it to be so true. There’s no way that you can have the financial freedom that you want and be that entrepreneur that you want, unless you embrace it because on the other side of the sale is your freedom.

If you don’t want to go back to a job, then you have to get better at sales because that’s the thing that gets you over the line and gets you money in the bank. Otherwise, you just have a hobby.

So here are three psychology secrets of highly profitable coaches:

1. Face what you’ve been avoiding

The first psychology secret is all about what are you avoiding. Successful profitable coaches do things that other people avoid. 

There are some things that you’ve potentially been avoiding and you’ve been getting caught up in j multitasking and building half-bridges because you don’t want to face it.

For some of my clients, it is willing to go to networking events, and talk to people and find out what their problems are and actually show up and serve and give. They think they’ve got to go out there and promote themselves, you don’t. 

If you help enough people get what they want, then you will get what you want. It’s the famous Zig Ziglar Quote-  “If you want to be successful, help as many people as you can be successful and you will be successful.”

Successful coaches and profitable coaches, they get this. They show up, they serve, they be of service and to give value to people to find out what their needs are, and what their problems are.  They don’t show up to hand out heaps of business cards. They do the thing they’ve been avoiding. 

For me, it was presenting. I avoided it. I got stuck in the one-to-one model for way too long because I was scared of public speaking. I was doing one to one for about eight years before I realized I need to actually employ the one-to-many model. 

I was scared of it. I didn’t want to be in front of groups of people. It just freaked me out. I didn’t like the attention. I didn’t want people to think that I wanted attention, I just wanted to deflect, and that actually really cost me in business.

I realized as I was sitting in a convention, I was watching the speaker and he was talking about how the one to one model is very slow. You can only serve and help a certain amount of people in your life if you stay one-on-one because it’s you and one other person.

Whereas for example, on this Facebook Live, there’s a number of you on here, and every time I do a workshop It’s not just me. There are 20 people, 40 people. If I’m doing a webinar it can be hundreds of people. 

When you’re willing to do the things that you’ve been avoiding, whether it’s sales calls, whether it’s doing a Facebook Live, whether it’s doing a webinar, whatever it is that you’ve been avoiding, when you face it, that’s how you become a highly profitable coach. 

Highly profitable coaches do things that other people avoid, and they do the things that they have been avoiding. They face them head-on because that thing’s not going to go away. It’s just going to keep coming back, because the longer you leave it, the harder it gets.

2. Change your identity from follower to leader

The second one is you need to change your identity from follower to leader. You’ve got to think what does a follower do? and what does a leader do?

I remember watching this film called Divergent. I remember the main character, a really badass chick who has to choose a faction because society is divided into these factions. She chooses the black faction, who were these rebels doing these crazy students and they came to this black hole. I remember the leader of the faction asked who’s going first? 

I remember thinking, Oh my gosh, I would back away because it’s a black hole, you couldn’t see what was at the bottom. She said I’ll go first and jumps into this unknown black hole, not knowing where it would go. And it really stuck out to me. 

I still remember it because I remember thinking that’s what you do when you’re brave. That’s what leaders do. They go first. They put their hand up first, they take action fast, they say yes, I’m doing that. 

They get more opportunities because they think of themselves as a leader. Followers, on the other hand, are always consuming. Whether It’s consuming other people’s stuff or watching TV or scrolling instead of creating. It’s from follower to leader, from consumer to creator, from living at the effect side of the equation where they say I can’t do it because of this reason.

It’s basically taking that mentality of I’m not responsible, to taking full 100% responsibility for your life and not getting stuck in lame excuses and denial. Saying, no, I’m the leader, that means I take full responsibility. That means I show up to serve and to give and not to take,

Our job is to hold space for people and to reflect back to people their best version. If we’re not focusing on our best version, we’re going to really struggle as coaches. 

We need to go from the basic stresses of life where we’re still stuck in our wounds, we’re getting triggered all the time, we’re blaming things like I’m tired or I’m just stressed to raising our standard, raising our bar to be excellent, to be outstanding, to stand out and not just be part of the pack. 

Be the leader, be an eagle. An eagle that flys around are often by themselves. I’m not saying spend more time by yourself, we need community.

I spent way too many years trying to do business by myself and it doesn’t really work, it’s lonely. You don’t grow, you isolate yourself, you actually need support.

You need mentoring, you need peer group around you, especially people that are above you in terms of their level, their income, their self-image, the way they view themselves, we need to be hanging around with those people that are at that next level. 

Let’s say you want to go from here to here. And here, you’ve got no clients. Here, you’ve got 10 clients, that gap is the psychology that you need to work on. It starts here with your psychology to get to that next level. 

One of the fastest ways to do it is by modelling other successful people. If you think about the people that you hang around with, the 5 closest people to you, are they at your level? Are they below your level? Or are they above your level?…

…how many clients they’ve got? what’s their psychology? what’s their bank account? what’s their mindset like? What’s their level of responsibility they’re taking in their life? What are their habits likes? Are they healthy?…

…Do they have a high standard in the way they operate? Because otherwise, you will end up with your peer group at that level.

If you want to be a strong leader, a highly profitable coach, ask yourself how many highly profitable coaches are you hanging out with? Do you have a coach? Do you pay for a coach? If you’ve got that in congruence with you want coaching clients but you aren’t paying for coaching, then that can be a mismatch which can actually really affect your self-image. 

3. Give your brain evidence of successful Coaches

Number three is you’ve got to give your brain evidence. That’s what successful coaches do, they give their brain evidence that they are a high-value coach. You’ve got to give you evidence that you’re a high-value person.

 How do we do that you might ask? high-value people, prove to their brain all the time. They’re constantly giving their brain evidence that they’re high value by setting great goals outside of their comfort zone and meeting them.

Having a vision and a mission that you’re going towards, because once you’ve got a vision, your a mission and your target that you’re going towards. You’re showing your brain, if I’m going here, I need to be doing high-value activities….

….I need to be doing activities that actually move the needle forward in my business. not get caught up doing things that are not going to grow your business. 

It’s the things that you’ve been avoiding. If you’ve been avoiding doing a video, you need to show your brain that you are a high-value person because you do the things that are hard. 

I do the things that I’m scared of. I show up and give.

For example, I spend a lot of my time in rooms where I’m supporting a high-value leader, because I want my brain to go, that’s where I’m going to be, I’m hanging around with those people I’m serving them, I’m going to their events because I’m giving my brain evidence that I can be a great follower because great followers are great leaders.

I set bold moves and then I do them. For example, if you are doing the actions that are valuable, that are hard, that are scary, then your brain actually has proof that you are a high-value person. 

It goes I can’t argue with that, because last week you did a webinar, today you did a Facebook Live, tomorrow you’re going to a social networking event. The evidence is undeniable.

When you’re stuck in fear, anxiety, worry, you are often focusing on the worst-case scenario. And your brain goes between fear of the future to thinking back to the past where you stuffed it up.

Being present is where the magic happens. being present is where you get the creativity and the problem solving and the downloads and uploads coming through. 

On a practical level, what can you actually do? Firstly, you can write down all the things you’ve been avoiding, and start facing them and doing them and proving to your brain that you did them and nothing bad happened. So, therefore, you can do them again. 

I’ve given my brain proof over 100 times that I’ve done workshops and I was fine no one died. So don’t get that fear and anxiety anymore. You still will sometimes get nerves if something’s a little bit different, or there are more people or there are people that have never met before.

Things like that don’t mean the nerves ever go away because it’s just expansion. I just reframe it as expansion but they have given my brain evidence that I’m fine.

I do those hard things and I’m fine. So make a list of the things you’ve been avoiding, whether it’s sales calls, whether it’s networking videos, webinars, workshops, whatever it is, is your next level.

Write down the thoughts that are preventing you from going to the next level. Start attacking them, work on them with a coach and do self-coaching.

Do those hard things, turn up and be the leader. Have that frame of reference every time you go into any situation, I’m the leader. It doesn’t mean, you boss people around. It’s not that kind of leadership. It’s leadership where you take responsibility.

I will do what it takes, I’ll push the needle forward or do the hard things. That’s what highly profitable coaches do.