• “When you are trying to be the advice-giver, the answer-getter, and the be-all-end-all to your clients you are robbing them of breakthroughs.”
• “Keeping your clients small is not the path to success.”
• “If you’re constantly in your communities being mr. or mrs. know-it-all, being the fix it person, and being the question answerer, how are you going to scale?”
• “When you’re going into your communities and coaching your clients, you want to recognize what things are facts and what things are the stories that they are building on top of it. When you can make that distinction, both for yourself as a coach and for your clients, that’s when you can really unlock the next level of transformation.”

If you are someone who is building a coaching business in the online space, then this one’s for you. We are talking about why giving advice is actually setting your clients up for failure.

Whaaat? What are you talking about, Jen?!

We’re going to dive into three key reasons why this is the least effective, in fact, the worst way to be showing up as a coach.

When we look at the coaching world, one of the things that a lot of people are doing is giving advice. In fact, a lot of reasons why so many brilliant people are not stepping forward as coaches is because they believe they have to know EVERYTHING before they start and they believe that their entire business is going to be built around everything they are going to be teaching. 

When we say to ourselves that we need to know everything before we start so that we can just pour into our clients, that’s coming from – maybe at first – a seemingly abundant place. We are giving our clients the answers to everything, they are inboxing you all hours of the night, and you’re getting all sorts of questions flying in all different directions (in your Facebook groups, in your inbox, in your text messages…).

For a lot of coaches that I speak to, they are getting to the point where they are actually starting to feel burnt out and resent not only their business, but their clients because they have no boundaries with their clients. 

Why is this happening?

Because they put themselves in a place where they wanted to be the person who answers everything, and on some level, it was coming from a place of fear and lack.

“I have to help them be successful, so I’m going to give them all the answers, and if they’re not successful then that means (and this is where we build a story) I’m not a good coach,” which is absolute garbaaage.

If you’re a health coach, you’re not going to go to somebody’s house, follow them around, and smack donuts out of their hands. If you’re a business coach, you’re not going to knock on someone’s door and say, “Hey, did you do your live video today? Did you make the offer for your sales program?” No, that’s not how it works and that’s not what coaching is about.

When you’re trying to get all the answers for people, micromanage their success, and spoon feed things to them, it’s the equivalent of when you see people who have rich kids. What is the generalization around rich kids? That they’re spoiled. They’re spoiled and they’re entitled because they assume that they’re going to snap their fingers and things are going to just happen around them. It’s like some moms’ kids who don’t know how to do laundry because they just think, “Oh, the laundry fairy does it. It was on my floor one minute ago and now it’s gone! Cool!” They’re not seeing the behind-the-scenes of how that actually happened and then they become adults and cannot fend for themselves. You guys know the saying “you can give a man a fish and he can eat for a day, or you can teach him to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” It’s the same thing. 

When you are trying to be the advice-giver, the answer-getter, and the be-all-end-all to your clients you are robbing them of breakthroughs.

They’re not learning how to fish or fend for themselves. What you end up doing is creating a really weird cycle of codependency. They always kind of need you and they’re not ever really confident enough to step out on their own. Some people might say, “Well, that’s a brilliant business model because then you’ll always have clients.” If you’re in the game of transformation and you’re here to actually help people, then I think you would recognize that the faster you get people results, the more likely they are to send you to friends and the larger your reach and impact can actually be.

Keeping your clients small is not the path to success.

And I don’t think that’s really what you’re about. But if you’re giving them all the answers and you’re being the advice-giver, you are keeping them small because you’re not giving them a chance to learn and grow on their own. So that’s kind of this first piece. 

The second piece is, “I need to know everything before I start. I’ve got to be the Encyclopedia of my topic. What if somebody asks me a question and I don’t know the answer?”

This is one of the biggest reasons why people don’t take action in their coaching businesses. What I have to say to that is: if you don’t have all the answers, that’s actually a great thing because then you won’t fall into the very common trap of trying to spoon feed people information and you’ll actually be able to look beyond the question that they’re asking because you don’t even know the direct answer.

Let me give you an example.

In my coaching business, people will ask things like, “Where’s the best place to go live? Should I go live on my business page or in my Facebook group or on my Instagram page?” Well those are really not the question that they’re really asking. It’s like the question beneath the question and then the belief that’s actually influencing that question. It gets it gets a little heady sometimes, but that’s the truth.

If you’re answering the surface question, you’re missing what they actually want and need and then they’re just going to go off and implement a strategy. We all know that strategies alone are not what build a business. There’s thousands of people using webinars. Thousands of people doing five day challenges. Hundreds of thousands of people doing network marketing and all of these different tactics, and yet some people are really successful and others are flat broke. So clearly, it’s not the strategies alone that are making or breaking a business.  

That’s why I want to give you that permission right now to step back and say, “Okay, I don’t need to know absolutely everything in my topic in order to help people create a transformation.”

Here’s the other caveat. When we are very learned in our area of expertise, we can sometimes get into that place where we want to be a know-it-all or we get a high off of being mr. or mrs. fix it.

I actually had a conversation with someone who’s in my community about how she was getting a secondary gain, so what is the real benefit that she was getting? She was able to answer all of these questions doing so many live videos for her community inside all of these different programs, like answering questions within MINUTES. In the moment, she was really enjoying it. She was like, “People are loving it. I’m getting all the testimonials. People are telling me I am the most amazing coach they’ve ever had. I literally couldn’t be happier.”

But what’s the long game?

How is that scalable?

What does your life look like?

For all of you – you want to ask that question.

Maybe you are trying to have kids, maybe you’re getting married, maybe you just want to go and travel the world, maybe you want to write a book next year, or maybe you want to host live events and become a speaker.

If you’re constantly in your communities being mr. or mrs. know-it-all, being the fix it person, and being the question answerer, how are you going to scale?

A coaching business can’t be built on just your expertise. There’s more to coaching than just giving advice! What we were able to help her recognize was that her need to be in her communities 24/7 answering questions and her need to be the “superstar coach” was actually coming from a place of ego. It was based in ego, but it was kindness clothed in fear and clothed in lack. 

It was kindness and helpfulness and “I’m a great coach!” clothed in, “Oh my God. What if I’m not enough? What if people don’t think this course is valuable? What if they go and follow someone else?” And all these other stories that were being created…

Yes, in some instances a negative or lack thought can generate something that has a positive where people are getting great results, but we need to step back and ask ourselves what it will look like in five years. You don’t want to be in your communities all day long. You don’t want to be sitting with your spouse at dinner at date night and be looking at your phone having anxiety about somebody asking a question and feeling like you have to answer it in two seconds.

That’s actually not serving people at the highest level.

& it’s not serving you at the highest level.

& if you’re not operating at your highest level, then you can’t help other people.

You can’t pour from an empty cup.

Especially if you are coaching coaches or if you’re a network marketing, your clients and team members are going to model your behavior. So if you are showing up in that way, they subconsciously or consciously are going to model that OR they’re going to resist it because they don’t want to have a business like that.

When people are asking questions in your communities, it’s really easy to just give them the rah-rah, give them a little pump up, and give them encouragement.

But the truth is, it doesn’t impact real change if you just give someone a little quick pat on the back.

People sometimes need a little cheerleading and then they can go about their business, but other times when people ask questions oftentimes there’s a lot of layers to that. When someone asks a question, are they giving you the facts or are they creating and building a story around their circumstances, and the story is just a made up belief?

Someone in my community was saying that she was feeling discouraged. She didn’t get a lot of interest in something that she put out there. Interesting that she said she didn’t get a lot of interest because then she followed that with, “And the people that DID subscribe,” so she did have interest, but she was creating an interpretation around a belief that she held.

So she said, “People are not opening up my videos and watching and it’s so disheartening. I was scared to do this and now that I’ve stepped out, I’m afraid I’m going to fail. Can someone please remind me that it does take time to keep going? That eventually people will come to me. I just really need encouragement. Thanks, all.”

A lot of my people in my community are amazing, lovely, wonderful, and they want to support everybody and they do SO dang well. So everyone was like, “You’re going to be great! It takes time. No worries.” 

But I wrote back and I said, “You don’t need encouragement. Encouragement is temporary. Let’s get to the actual cause of you feeling discouraged and disheartened. It is nothing to do with the number of people who signed up or opted in. The feeling is simply in response to a belief that you hold around how many people should be opting in in order for you to deem it a success.”

I was able to identify her facts versus her story. Instead of giving her an answer or giving her a strategy of like, “Instead try this next time and do this thing,” I said, “That’s not the actual question and that’s not the actual problem.”

Do you see that? 

So I said, “You’re measuring your success on external circumstances. If X number of people opt in, then I’m successful.” She maybe had 50 people opt in, well that wasn’t successful, but if she had 100 hundred people that would have been a success.

We create these stories and sometimes we’re not even consciously aware of these rules that we create around what deems something a success.

I went on to coach her a little bit more around this and gave her some additional feedback around how she could reframe that to identify what success would even look like. What if you just decided that you were successful not because of a specific number of people opting in? Because that’s outside of you. That’s something that you have literally no control over.

“I’m only successful if one hundred people jump on my videos.” …You have no control over who’s on your live videos. Sure, you can do certain strategies and promote it, but at the end of the day, that is measuring your success based on how other people show up.

“I can only be happy when my kids get A’s.” Nonsense.

“I can only be happy when my spouse takes out the garbage.”

“I can only be happy when I finally have a six figure launch.”

“I can only be happy when I lose 20 pounds, until then I’m going to be miserable and pissed off.”

It sounds silly to say it in that way, but the reality is that is how the majority of people are operating. So instead of saying, “I’m only successful when X Y and Z happens,” what if we reframe that? Let’s take one step forward and let’s shift that so that you are feeling successful based on rules that you are in control of.

So I continued, “Well what if you decided that you were successful simply because you put something out there? Maybe it was a course, a freemium, or a live video. You put it out there. That’s a win. Why don’t you celebrate that? Or what if you celebrated the fact that you felt really good about it? Or what if you celebrated the fact that you broke an old pattern of waiting to put something out there?”

We can take that power back and say, “I’m successful based on things that I’ve decided for myself.” What if we went a step further and said, “I feel successful because I’m me, just for being me.”

What if we just DECIDED that?

All of these are beliefs. Every single one of them is your own creation. If all of these are beliefs, then you can change these beliefs and make new decisions about how you want to feel so that you can feel happier more of the time and sad, pissed off, lonely, discouraged, and powerless less of the time. You guys will see this in your clients no matter what niche you’re in.