5 Lessons I Learned Taking My Coaching Business To The Next Level

*This is a post I orignally wrote in early 2016 as I was on my way to Sydney to run a day event….I had 3 women sign on to the Sydney Mastermind*

Deciding to step away from the Honourable Martial Arts Entrepreneur brand I’d lovingly created (and felt immense pride in) in favour of launching myself into the unchartered waters of launching a high-end mastermind in the female entrepreneur (My $25K Live Mastermind) was a huge leap of faith but every cell in my body screamed “you have to do this”….and so I did.

What lay before me was definitely something I’d dreamed of (and my gut told me was possible) but as most of us are, I’m a highly optimistic entrepreneur and in my lifetime had set MANY epic goals that didn’t quite come to fruition the way I’d planned; at gut level I “believed” but there was also a huge element of SHOW ME THE MONEY. The proof of success in business is not in the pudding but in bringing in the big bucks….I was on the cusp and dying to see if I could pull this off and make it happen.

As I begin this post I’m sitting on the airstrip at Melbourne Airport waiting to fly to Sydney to launch my mastermind in Sydney.

I’m excited but I’d be lying if I said I was fearless in the face of this launch, you just never know what you’re going to get until you try so on the eve of my launch I’m confident, my gut is happy and I feel good about this next step in my business.

However…..I have a Plan B, C D and, well as many plans as I need to make this thing a success (whatever that turns out to be in this instance).

From the outside looking in the success of others always looks easy but we’re both smart enough to know that this is simply the highlight reel and that behind the shine a battle of epic proportions has been fought and won.

(At this point I’m checked into my suite at the Sangri-La (DIVINE) and I’m now sitting at The Waterfront tapping away with the Opera House and Harbour Bridge as my backdrop, the sky is blue and the sun is out in full force – perfection!!).

As I sit here soaking up the view and feeling more alive than I’ve felt in weeks (a whole other blog) I feel this is the perfect time to revisit some of the lessons I learned doing EXACTLY what I’m doing now.

Taking a risk.

Testing the untested.

Once again attempting to take my business to the next level.

LESSON 1 – There is no “I’ve made it” moment.

Ok so I may have had a split second moment of “I’ve made it” when I shot THIS video on the day I kicked off my first mastermind in Melbourne 14 months ago but that was pretty short lived.

That particular program had some teething problems I hadn’t anticipated but even with having to work through all of that I was off and racing towards the next target within weeks.

In my experience the attainment of every desired outcome simply becomes a stepping stone for the next level because as ambitious women we’re always striving, we always want more, there is ALWAYS a next level.

Rather than find myself excited by the prospect of having secured a 6 figure income for the following 12 on months straight out of the gate I got to thinking..wow, ok, if I can do that what else can I do???

The “I’ve made it” moment was nice while it lasted and I treasure the memory but I’m also ok with knowing “the comfort zone” and I are never going to be best mates and I’m built to strive….for the next thing…always.

LESSON 2 – The mental crap you deal with is the same.

I’d love to be able to tell you your mind is transformed when you reach that sought after “next level” but I’d be telling a big fat porky.

It’s the same crap.

I launched my first mastermind with a bang, the 2nd one was 100 times better and I’d found my groove so you’d think that when I decided to launch in Sydney it would be a no brainer right?

WRONG…so very wrong!!

I upper-limited like a mad woman (If you haven’t read The Big Leap by Bay Hendricks go and do it NOW!) and eff’d it up before I’d even started, I postponed dates, gave money back and essentially had a nice little meltdown around the whole idea of “Sydney”.

A-Total-Nightmare and I just couldn’t get over the fact I thought I was past all the fear and self-doubt crap given how far I’d come.

I was wrong….yep, so very wrong.

It look a lot of metaphorical repeated slapping myself around the head before I came to my senses, sucked it up and DECIDED I WAS going to launch Sydney, no if’s, but’s or maybe’s.

Day 1 is sold out and Day 2 is ok, not sold out as I’d hoped but I’m sitting here knowing I did whatever the hell it took to feet the best numbers I could. A win.

A win because I had the balls to try when all I wanted to do was chalk up the $3.5k I’d paid for the venue up to experience and remain in Melbourne.

I’ve let the frustration of the call to “please some to Sydney” then hearing crickets when I did commit to coming to Sydney go and instead I’ve prided myself on making things work.

***UPDATE….Sydney was a dream!! I set the target for 4 women in this mastermind and I already have 3 ladies with another 2 women very keen. This is an exciting group of female entrepreneurs and I’m so excited to kick this off in Sydney on the 19th of this month!!

I’ve already started ads for my next Melbourne campaign and am also looking at venues in Brisbane.

So the lesson here is to make peace with your inner crap, know there’s a good chance it will surface again when you least need it and be prepared to fight the same old battles again and again but with less effort, over time the crap becomes a minor distraction unless you give it too much airtime (as I did!).

BONUS LESSON – Suck every bit of juice out of your momentum.

The update above is a very telling sign of how I work, whenever I experience success I push again while I’m feeling bulletproof and then again and again and again.

Success creates the type of energy we wish we had in our businesses every single day, the setbacks and roadblocks eat into this energy and deplete us if we’re not careful.

It’s critical we remain optimistic but even the best of us are hit by self-doubt at times, when you have a win and you’re sitting on top of the world milk that feeling for all it’s worth, DO NOT sit back and bask in the glow of success until you’ve followed it up with another win and then another win.

Solidify your success by creating more of it and then spend a moment high-fiving yourself before you set your sights on the next success.

I’m speaking from experience here, 2 Melbourne launches close together kept me pumping, I left it too long between that 2nd launch and Sydney and it took it’s toll, had I kept on and followed through with Sydney when I first set the intention I would have avoided a massive head-f@!K and a bad dose of procrastination that set me back 6 months.

Thankfully I’ve made up for lost time and Brisbane will set me ahead (I’d planned Brissy for 2017), this is the power of using momentum.

LESSON 3 – It’s not as hard as I figured it would be.

This may sound contradictory considering the last lesson but once I made the decision early on that I was going to push through any challenges and find a way to make this thing fly regardless of any setbacks the rest was just the doing.

**This is something that continues to be true….ANY time I truly decide I want something…it happens.**

I was SO called to launch this program and my instincts were proving to be right every step of the way and the way forward seemed effortless, I just KNEW which step to take next every step of the way.

The biggest battle I’d fought in the past (and again more recently) was the one I fought with myself, this is probably a revelation to anyone who knows me (my mum was floored) but I’m as filled with self-doubt and second guessing as the next person, I’ve just gotten better at choosing where I send my mind.

I could have given in to the fear and self-doubt that was holding me back around Sydney but I chose to DECIDE to go ahead and figure shit out along the way….like I always have!

When I first launched my recurring thought theme went something like this… “you came SOOO close last time and you whimped out, you tasted success on a grand scale then you ran scared when you told yourself you couldn’t do it again..THAT is not happening again, THAT is not an option this time round. You’re seeing this through to the end. You’ve got this, you can do it, just do it”.

And with that commitment the road opened up, I think I do look back over my shoulder with rose coloured glasses at that first launch because it seemed like a dream to bring to fruition although I’m sure there were many challenges along the way.

LESSON 4 – Confidence is your best growth strategy.

Whatever space you want to claim as your Zone of Genius (your sweetspot) you need to OWN IT!!

If you don’t believe you can sell your offering or deliver it with excellence no-one else will either.

I had run a small group 5 month program in my last business but had never run anything over 12 months before, I had a very clear strategy for the program but I hadn’t DONE IT yet.

BUT I was 100% confident I could and I was 100% confident I could sell it.

I know for sure that had I gone in with anything less than 100% confidence I would have failed.

The success of that launch hinged entirely on how confident I was that I could make it work and deliver on promise.

Sydney was the same, sure I stuffed around and made a mess in my head but I did the work to get myself feeling 100% confident I could pull it off, made the decision to go ahead and then continued to feed my confidence every day so that when I ran my events I owned it.

Had I gone to Sydney a whimpering mess of self-doubt the outcome would have been very, very different.

If you’re lacking confidence your job right now is to do whatever it takes to get yourself to a place of 100% confidence.

Look at your past and current successes.

Look back at why you figured this would work in the first place.

Look at others doing what you’re doing…if someone else is doing it successfully so can you.

Have confidence in yourself to push though any challenges and to find a way to figure shit out so you can move forward with the next step.

You have everything you need to make a success of whatever it is your doing, you just need to work out how to use gifts you’ve been given, this includes the ability to know your limitations and to outsource when you need to.

My biggest challenge is that I exceeded my own expectations decades ago and so every step higher on the success ladder is unchartered waters for this little mind of mine, when you leave school at 14 and grow up in shitty circumstances with zero expectations you’ll do anything special it’s not a bar set very high.

Setting huge goals and achieving them is normal practice for me but when I achieve I have this weird mix of “I knew I could do it” Versus “I can’t believe I just did that!”, the part that had been winning was “I can’t believe I just did that” which lead to thoughts of “So I probably can’t do it again”.

My biggest personal lesson has been opening up and really allowing myself to see the possibility before me and to believe that I have as good a chance as anyone to succeed, in fact a better chance because I need it more, I want it more, it means more to me and I know from experience now that I can have anything I want in this life once I figure out how to get it.

My take-away for you here is that awesome quote “feel the fear and do it anyway”.

We all have fears, we all have our own crap that holds us back, the trick is to fight and win the battle and to keep fighting and winning the battle.

You are destined for greatness, don’t let your crap win out and deny you of it.

LESSON 5 – The Biggie…..Oh…THIS is me doing it!

This is kind of a weird one and potentially something only I’ve experienced but here we go…

There have been many days where I’ve been sitting at my desk feeling the need to PUSH, to DO, to MAKE SHIT HAPPEN and I become frustrated when I don’t know what to do next.

Upon reflection I realise I’m doing it and there is nothing more, unless I want to create busy work.

When I’m launching my events I’m running ads, keeping an eye on my feed and messages to answer any questions that come up, tweak ads if I need to, I’m still doing podcast interviews, blogging, running my newsletter, hanging out in Facebook groups and making a noise, following up old enquires etc etc etc

THAT is me doing it….this is the goal achievement process in action…it’s happening.

It’s at this point that I realise I need to relax and trust the process, the strategy, the fact that this worked last time and the time before that.

Then there’s the white knuckle fear of stretching myself, diving in then having to figure out a way to make it work.

These are the times I ask myself “what the fuck were you thinking???” and “why did I do this to myself???”.

Then I remember that THIS is also the goal achievement process in action.

It’s scary and painful and uncomfortable and riddled with fear and anxiety but this is the way big goals get met.

This is part of the bigass scary goal getting process.

I catch myself in these moments and then remind myself I need to start to get excited because any time I’ve achieved anything HUGE in my life it has been preceded with these feelings.

I remind myself “oh yeah, this is me doing epic shit, this is what it feels like, payday is just around the corner”.

Every time it seems the world is conspiring to make my life difficult when I’m trying to achieve something great is a reminder that the breakthroughs follow the (near) breakdowns, this is The Big U testing you…how bad do you want it?? How bad do you REALLY want it??

Birthing a bigass goal is just like birthing a baby, messy, painful, scary and something you’re never really 100% prepared for BUT the reward is so worth it.

Don’t be scared of feeling all of those emotions that make us anxious, instead acknowledge them for what they are…they’re growing pains, they’re necessary and part of the deal when it comes to massive growth.

I love the quote “If you can conceive it and believe it you CAN achieve it”. I totally believe that, I don’t believe that we can conceive of an idea without innately knowing we can have it.

Be still, listen to your gut and be guided by the next step.

Now my dear…go forth and conquer!!

Michelle xo

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