BEWARE OF EXPECTATIONS WHEN IT COMES TO LAUNCHING AND GROWING A DREAM COACHING BUSINESS. 

So many coaches go through coach training with the expectation that once they’re finished, they’ll have a steady stream of clients.

I was one of those coaches.

I thought that if I built it, they would come.  (That’s code for I had an expectation that clients would suddenly appear on my doorstep, just like that!)

But that’s the problem with expectations; they’re usually not based in reality.

The other problem with expectations is that they eventually lead to frustration, then resentment.

You end up waking up each morning feeling overwhelmed before you even start the day.

It makes a coach want to fall down and cry on the bathroom floor.

There’s just one thing…

THERE’S NO CRYING IN COACHING!  

(I’m conjuring up Tom Hanks in the movie, A League Of Their Own.)

Let me be clear: there’s crying, and then there’s crying.

One is productive (releasing pent up energy) and the other is not. Unproductive crying is not at all good for us. It keeps us stuck in a state of, “I can’t do this.”

Productive crying leaves us feeling spent, so that we can then take a moment to asses what’s going on, what needs to change, and how we plan to move forward.

Productive crying is healing. Cathartic. It toughens our resilience muscle.

Unproductive crying is what happens when we sign up for courses expecting they will work.

We hire coaches whom we expect will make things work for us.

But courses don’t work for us. People don’t make things work for us.

Expectations don’t get us anywhere unless we have a right to expect something will happen, based on hard evidence that if we do X, then Y will happen. 

Starting a coaching business is an experiment like everything else in life. You can’t have (realistic) expectations until you turn each expectation into a testable hypothesis that is proven to actually work. If it doesn’t work, you’ve learned something. Time to get back to the drawing board.

Scientists don’t cry when their experiments don’t work!

Coaches who approach their businesses like scientists have the greatest chance of success because they don’t have expectations until they prove something actually works. If it doesn’t work, they move on. They keep going. 

Expectations will often cause us pain unless we turn them into experiments.

Dream coaching businesses are ones that are created by coaches with the willingness to keep on experimenting until they prove the hypothesis (the expectation).

Resilient coaches are successful coaches.

You see… there’s no exact formula for what it will take or how long it will take. It ALL depends on the coach (and the woman that drives her), and whether she expects things to happen or whether she hangs in there and makes things happen.

In love and guts,

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