How to build a successful life coaching business - Coaches On Fire - Pam Sterling

There’s no secret to building a successful life coaching business. Anyone can be successful with a combination of the Right Skills, the Right System and the Right Support.

Let me unpack thisĀ a bit.

The Three Keys to Building A Successful Life Coaching Business

Right Skills

The primary skill that’s required to having a successful life coaching business is to be a Master Messenger, and specifically to be a “messenger of resonance vs eloquence.” What do I mean by that? We need to be able to deliver our unique message to the world with absolute clarity, certainty and conviction. This is what sets us apart from the thousands of coaches out there. This is what distinguishes us as a market of one, and as a thought leader in our industry. And the key component of that message is NOT how eloquently we speak it, but rather how well our message resonates with the unique dreams, desires, aspirations, discontents, fears and concerns of our perfect clients. In the end, people don’t care about us and our story, or our 6 points, or our “proven system”. They care about how well we are able to tell THEIR story. They want to know that we understand THEIR pain. And they want us to give them hope that the future THEY long for is possible.

Success requires that we become a Skilled Messenger of Resonance, not eloquence.

Right System

To have a successful life coaching business, that business needs to be sustainable, and that requires the right system. How do we know what the right system is? The right system is measured by one thing, and one thing only – The right system is measured by RESULTS… not by effort. If you’re getting the results you want, you’ve found the right system. If you’re working really hard, but not getting results, you haven’t found the right system yet. The challenge for most of us as coaches is that we are “accidental entrepreneurs”. We got into coaching because we LOVE being involved in the transformation of people’s lives, and it’s often by accident that we discover we’ve just become an entrepreneur and we need to figure out how to make money at this. The problem is, there are so many people out there teaching a thousand different systems to build a business.

Which one is the RIGHT system for growing your business? I got some great advice when I was looking for a personal trainer, and that was to find someone who had the exact results I wanted and the exact look I wanted, and work with them. That was super helpful. It helped me weed out the female triathlete and the male body builder. Although I wanted to be super fit, and I wanted to increase my muscle mass, those weren’t the exact results I was looking for. Instead, I found a female trainer who was about my size and and had transformed her body in the exact same way I wanted to. It was the perfect match.

The same is true when looking for the right system. Find someone who has the exact results you want, doing the exact thing you want to do, and learn their system. If you want to grow your business as an inspirational/motivational speaker, find the person who is the best and most successful inspirational/motivational speaker in the world and learn their system. If you want to build your business by coaching a handful of high paying, highly motivated female CEOs, then find the person who has done that exact thing and learn their system. I created the Coaches On Fire Academy for those coaches who wanted to consistently create five figure months while increasing their impact, income and independence by learning how to grow their coaching businesses online. For those coaches who have wanted to do that, the system I teach in the Academy is a perfect match.

Success requires that we implement the Right System, which is measured by Results, not effort.

Right Support

There is support that helps us move the needle forward, and there is support that doesn’t. On the road from our current reality to our desired result, we will hit inevitable roadblocks. The Right Support requires a mentor or mastermind that focuses on removing roadblocks, not engaging in empathetic exchanges. I don’t mean to sound ‘non-empathetic’, but if we really want to have a successful life coaching business, the last thing we need is to surround ourselves with others who have been stopped by those same roadblocks and can empathize with our plight. Instead, what we need is to surround ourselves with a mentor or mastermind partners who hit the roadblocks, and found the best, fastest, and most effective way to get past them, so that we can learn from them and achieve our desired results more quickly and more easily. This means we seek to ‘partner up’. We hook up with others who are ahead of us on the road to success. They become thinking partners, acting partners, and partners in believing when we have a hard time believing in ourselves.

This is an affirmation I use for the kinds of people I want to surround myself with – “I surround myself with people of passion, purpose and possibility who know who they are, who’s they are, what they have to offer, and are doing it. Together we inspire each other to dream bigger, dig deeper and shine brighter than we ever have before.”

Success requires that we have the Right Support, and that means a mentor or mastermind that focuses on removing roadblocks, not engaging in empathetic exchanges.

So the good news for all of us is that having a successful life coaching businessĀ indeed, is not a secret. But rather having a successful life coaching business is about dedicating ourselves to building in the combination of the Right Skills, the Right System, and the Right Support to help us achieve the level of success we truly desire.

Your Turn

Of these three – Right Skills, Right System, Right Support – which has been the most significant to you in building your business? Of these three, which do you feel you need to shore up in order to increase the level of success you are currently having?

Pam