Welcome to the Anything but Average Podcast where I will teach you how to create a coaching business one step at a time. I’m Lindsey Mango, a life coach passionate about helping you create the life of your wildest dreams by creating a coaching business. Let’s get started.
Hello and welcome back to another week and another episode of Anything but Average. Guys, you’re never going to believe me. When this episode goes live, I am going to be in Arizona. I was joking with Chris that the first half of this year is like, packed with travel, which I’m so grateful for.
Because especially with last year when we weren’t really allowed to travel, and just so you guys know, I’m taking all the precautions. You have to take COVID tests, and do all the things, and wearing the masks. So I’m making sure that I’m doing my part.
But I also am still living my life and exercising the freedom that I’ve created safely and socially distanced. But we were just cracking up about how much travel is going on the first six months of the year. And eventually we want to have a bun in the oven and how that will kind of limit my travel. So I’m just trying to get it all in while I can.
Alright, so today what I wanted to talk about is a thought error that I see so many people falling into when it comes to making the decision to start their coaching business. Now, if you’re listening and you’ve already started your coaching business, this is going to pertain to you too.
But I know we have lots of listeners who have been thinking about starting a coaching business and they’ve been on the fence, and this thought error is keeping them stuck. So just so you guys know, before we jump in, a thought error is essentially an automatic thought or process that your brain goes through that is an error.
And when I say an error, I don’t mean your brain has – something’s gone wrong with your brain. I mean your brain is just doing its job, but the error, it happens when you use this automatic process in your life every day or in your coaching business and it’s not going to produce the result that you want.
So essentially, a thought error is when your brain is thinking or going through a process that isn’t going to serve you to produce the result that you want. And this thought error, I’ve talked about this a little bit before, but this thought error is when we take past evidence and we predict future outcomes.
So our brain always likes to take our past experience, collect it as data, and use it to predict what’s going to happen next. Now, this isn’t a thought error when it comes to your survival. Our brain does this for a very specific purpose. It does this so it can keep us alive.
So just to give you guys an example, let’s just say back in cavewoman days, I picked a berry off of a tree, I ate it, and then it gave me a stomachache and made me sick for the next three days. My brain is going to take the image of that berry, where I got the berry from, and it’s going to predict the next time I’m out gathering up berries, to not go to that tree and grab that berry.
It’s like, oh, this is what happened before, we don’t want to get sick again, so we’re going to avoid that. That is where this is very useful. Same thing, if I go into the woods in a specific part, the other night, Luna ran out in our backyard and apparently, it’s mating season for coyotes and they came running up. Lucking Chris was watching, and he ran out there to scare them away, but they came up to attack her essentially.
And I’m hoping her brain works this way, but her brain, a human’s brain would collect this as information and be like, wow, don’t go back out there. Last time you almost got eaten by a coyote. That is where this really serves us. It serves us to keep us alive.
Now, on the other hand, the reason why this is a thought error when it comes to making the decision to start your coaching business or really doing anything in your coaching business is when you use past evidence to predict your future results in your coaching business.
Meaning if you’re not starting your coaching business because you did network marketing four times or started other businesses and they didn’t work and your brain’s going, “Well, those didn’t work before so this likely won’t work either.” This is not useful. This is a thought error. This is your brain trying to keep you safe and not allowing you to take the action, take the step you need in order to produce a different result than what you got in the past.
Or maybe your brain is going, “Well, you posted before and that never worked. Nobody paid attention. Or in high school you tried to be the leader for something, it never worked, people don’t admire you so you might as well not start a coaching business, no one’s going to listen to you.” This is not productive.
This is where we stay in our safe little bubble and we never do anything different, and we never create and produce different results. So again, it’s important to differentiate that sometimes this is useful, sometimes it’s not a thought error. Let’s listen to the things that are actually going to kill us.
But then let’s become aware of the places that this is showing up that is keeping us safe and keeping us from creating a wildly successful coaching business. The reason why this doesn’t work is because when you look at your past to predict future outcomes when it comes to starting your coaching business, you’re not accounting for growth.
You’re not accounting for the fact that you have the ability to evolve and change, to change the way you think, to change your commitment, to change the way you show up. That is what will produce a different result. That is why this doesn’t work when it comes to making the decision to start your business or making any decision when it comes to your coaching business.
Now, how do you actually get around this? Because it’s a very – just like you would be afraid to go out and eat the berry, it’s a very real fear. This didn’t work before; this won’t work again. That comes up. It’s a survival emotion. So how do we actually get around this?
We get around this by recognizing first what I’m telling you, that this isn’t a life or death scenario. Taking the step to start your coaching business might be scary, yes, but you’re not going to die if you take that step. The other thing is remembering that you as a human have the capacity and the ability to grow and change.
I guarantee that who you were when you started those businesses was a different person. And if it wasn’t, realizing oh, I have to do something differently, I have to become someone different, I have to think differently if I want this business to be different. But just because it didn’t work before doesn’t mean it won’t work this time.
You have to look for all the ways that this time it could work, instead of all the ways that it won’t work because of your previous experience. And you have to make sure that you get the coaching and the help and the support that you need to make sure this time is different.
You guys, I started network marketing twice before I started my coaching business and it went well. I grew a pretty good sized team, but eventually I kind of got sick of it, it wasn’t my true passion for me and I ended up changing. Had I brought that same thought process to my coaching business, I probably would have done it for a short period of time and quit.
That is why I hired a coach. Because I realized I need to become someone different. I need to think differently, I need to do different things if I want this to work. So I don’t want you guys to hear this and say, well, using past evidence to predict future outcomes, I’m just stuck here. I want you to see this as an opportunity to change, as an opportunity to invest in yourself or take the step that you need in order to grow and create the result you want.
Because the cost of that is your dream. If you don’t change, if you don’t make a different decision, then you will never get out of the cycle that you’re in right now. You will never stop thinking, “Oh, but if I do that, it’s going to happen like last time.” And in 40 years you will literally be living a variation of the same life you’re living right now because you didn’t change.
You didn’t change the way you think, you didn’t change who you are, you didn’t change the way you show up. That’s why when women join Anything but Average to start their coaching business, we set the foundation of who they need to become and how they need to grow in order to guarantee their results and produce a different result with their coaching business, whether they’ve started hundreds of businesses before and they haven’t worked, or whether they’ve tried a hundred other things and they haven’t worked.
So recognize when your brain is doing this. You’re going to start to notice it does it a lot. It’s like, “Oh, well, this didn’t work last time, it’s probably not going to work this time.” And start to question it. The first step of any growth is awareness. Seeing when this comes up. The second step is asking, is this actually serving me? Is this going to get me the result that I want?
And then questioning, what else could be true? How could it be different this time? This, just this one thing, implementing this in your life, in your business, and starting your coaching business is going to change every result in your life. It’s going to change the way you do things; it’s going to change who you are, and that is what we are here to do.
Now, before you guys go, I want to make sure that you know in one-week, next Wednesday, you guys know this comes out every Wednesday. I always think about people who listen to this on like, Thursdays. Next Wednesday, March 24th, I’m going to be doing a free training. It’s just a one-hour training called How to Know If You’re Meant to Be a Coach.
So if you’ve been kind of teetering this decision, thinking like I might want to be a coach, I follow Lindsey, I’m inspired by the work she does, or I follow other coaches, I think I want to be a coach, but you don’t know how to bring clarity to that decision and go all in on it, or make a decision, like a hell yes or a hell no, you have to be on this training.
Some of you guys might be thinking, “Well, I’ve tried to start it but I’m still questioning whether I’m meant to do this,” come to the training. Because it’s going to offer the clarity that you need and the decision-making process you need in order to go all in or go all out.
Because at the end of the day, when you’re in indecision, you can’t make a decision either way and you can’t move forward. We need to know, is coaching for you. That’s what this training is about. Go to lindseymangocoaching.com/meanttocoach. Sign up there and I will see you on Wednesday the 24th. I love you guys and I will talk to you next week. Bye.
If you’re ready to take this work deeper and create your own coaching business, join us in Anything but Average, where I will walk you through the step-by-step process to become a coach, start your coaching business, and start signing clients. Go to lindseymangocoaching.com/anythingbutaverage and I will see you on the inside.
