Hello and welcome to the Business of Executive Coaching Podcast. I'm your host, Ellie Scarf, a senior executive coach with over 18 years experience coaching, which I now bring to my role as a mentor and business coach to other executive coaches when it comes to coaching business. I have done it all.
I've grown coaching businesses solo and in partnership and with teams of coaches working with me. I've been an in-house coach and I've been an associate coach. So when I talk about selling coaching to corporate clients, you know that I'm sharing from a place of experience and empathy.
I work with coaches now through my group coaching program, the Corporate to Coach Accelerator, where executive and leadership coaches grow their businesses with more corporate clients.
I'm also a mom, a big reader, and an even bigger fan of my miniature schnauzer. Yoshi, keep listening in for lots of practical tips, inspiring stories and prompts to help you grow your business your way.
So I wanted to talk today about an idea I've been hearing and reading quite a lot about lately, which is that sometimes we expect a lot of our businesses, not only do we expect them to pay the bills and to be sources of positive meaning in our lives sometimes we also expect them to be a source of excitement, of entertainment, of novelty, really a source of dopamine for us.
And that is a bit tricky when it comes to delivering on the fundamental things we need from our business. Those things like profitability and sustainability and doing meaningful work. Because the truth is that when you are always looking for.
Excitement or entertainment then in a business that is gonna look like, coming up with lots of new ideas, coming up with new offers, looking at different client bases, looking at different marketing strategies,listening to, low, getting loads of different advice, looking for different technology to use.
All of the things that can give us a bit of a dopamine hit and.There really isn't anything wrong with that on the face of it, right? We don't want our businesses to be a snooze fest. It's really important to me that we enjoy being in business and if every day is so dull, you can't bear it. That is not a business, that's not a life.
It's not where we wanna be. But the problem is that if we are always seeking that dopamine.Through our business then we never really give any of our strategies a chance to really, truly work. And the truth is, most things that work in growing an executive or leadership coaching business, and probably any business, those things require repetition.
They require consistency, and they require persistence. And I'm talking,yes, about things like outreach, about showing up on LinkedIn, about having real conversations with people and sowing seeds for the future. And the things that turn the dial, those things like outreach and LinkedIn and sales conversations, sometimes those things are not the most exciting things.
Some people might say they're boring, but we need to embrace them. We need to figure out a way that we can focus on doing those things consistently and repeatedly. So, instead of thinking of it as boring, think of it as consistent, as predictable, and as in service of your long-term goals.
Because the truth is we can't achieve our goals if we don't stick with those strategies for a good amount of time. So if you find this hard. What is my tip?
I would say you have to stop expecting business to be your source of entertainment. Don't expect it to be your source of excitement.
You have to get those things somewhere else. So maybe you could get it from crochet, a hobby or playing cricket, or maybe you need to become a downhill mountain biker, or maybe you need to sign up for some improv comedy shows.
If you think you have a tendency, or you might have this tendency to get pulled around a bit by shiny object syndrome, then it may be that you are asking your business to provide your excitement, your entertainment.
So your job this week, write a list of all of the other places that you can get that boost on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, and put something into play right away. I'll see you next week.
