I Am An Awful Coach And All My Clients Hate Me - The Irrational Belief
Running a business blurs the lines between what’s rational and what’s not, at least that’s the case for me.
You see, I live in constant awareness of two beliefs.
I am an awful coach and all my clients hate me.
This business is about to fail tomorrow.
When I really think about it. When I try and fail to gather evidence. When I say them out loud to someone. I realise they’re irrational.
But in the everyday, they provide an undercurrent to what I do which feels entirely rational. And recently I’ve been trying to unpick that.
Let me break that first statement down a little more.
I am an awful coach and all my clients hate me.
Have I ever had a client tell me they’ve had a bad experience? No.
Do past and current clients provide evidence to imply that they’ve benefited from my coaching? Yes.
Yet before every coaching call, I have this odd feeling in my gut. It’s not fear. Or dread. I love my coaching work a huge amount. But it’s something I can’t quite put a language to. The feeling that I’m about to have to prove myself. The awareness that there is no set plan to what's about to happen and that the outcome, whilst entirely unknown, is something I’m responsible for.
And you know what, I don’t think I’m the odd one out for feeling that. And I don’t want that feeling to go away. It drives me. It reminds me of the expectations people have of me. It keeps me looking for ways to level up.
Because problem doesn’t lie in the origin of that belief. The problem lies in the way I translate that.
You see, the irrational belief that I’m an awful coach and all my clients hate me is entirely unproductive. For many people, beliefs like this stop them from starting, whereas for me, it begins to cause problems once I’m actually doing the thing.
Let me explain that a bit more. As a coach, I’m technically selling my brain (weird right?). And as a service based business, I’m often lacking in immediate concrete evidence of my work. So when those truths are paired with a belief that I’m rubbish at what I do, I begin looking for ways I can find evidence which is within my control. The problem is, the evidence I look for isn’t important.
Evidence like how fast I reply to their messages, how my Skype video looks and sounds, what my onboarding process feels like. Now sure, all of those things are important, and they do play a role in the value people get from my work. But they shouldn’t be my focus.
My focus should be on the core reason people work with me. And that core reason is the least tangible thing - my ability to hold space for them, dig into the behind the scenes of what they’re doing and inject relevant expertise which lines up with their long term.
The moment I lose focus from that is the moment I do both myself and my clients a disservice. My lack of an ability to control and measure the impact of my work is something I need to learn to sit with, not counteract.
So I’m changing my language.
The belief of I am a rubbish coach and all my clients hate me is irrational.
The belief of as a coach my work is often immeasurable and I’m at my best when I’m bringing the core value of my work, despite that discomfort, is rational.
And that’s where I’ve got to so far.
As for the second belief, my business is about to fail, that one needs a whole coaching session of its own. So look forward to that one.
In the meantime, what do you think to this topic? Resonate with it? Surprised by it? Hit reply, I’d love to hear from you.