Hello and welcome to the Business of Executive Coaching Podcasts. I'm your host, Ellie Scarf, a senior executive coach with over 17 years experience coaching, which I now bring to my role as mentor and 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. And when I talk about selling coaching to corporate clients, you can know that I am speaking from a place of experience and a place of deep 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. So I love to share things that I'm learning from my own coaching processes with my clients and of course with you here on the podcast.
And there was a concept that landed for me with my coach a couple of weeks back. And interestingly, my coach is also called Ellie. That's pretty wild, right? Anyway, this concept landed because I really felt it from my own experience. And I also think it operates on two levels and it works for your own relationship with growing your business.
And it is also at play when you're engaging with your potential clients and they are making a decision whether to make a leap and invest in coaching or working with you. And I think that applies to both organizations or potentially individual clients as well. And so I wanted to share with you today. So the concept is self trust.
And the way I'm thinking about it is that as a coach, you might be able to trust a coach like a business coach or a mentor like me, you might get a trust that a coach knows what they're talking about. You might trust that they've got great strategies, great training, they can probably help you get an ROI on your investment.
Like it all looks good on paper. You might trust that. But what is sometimes the harder piece is to trust in yourself to be able to do the part that is required of you to make it real, right?
To go from these things that you're teaching or learning from your coach and to implement them to achieve the results, to take the action, to do the thing. And sometimes it isn't really obvious that this is the problem, that lack of self trust is the problem because it might look like, you know, you want to be cautious or careful which you should be,right?
Or wanting an investment to have a clear ROI to stack up and you should want that. But what it might look like is that when you find that those things are answered, you can't really hear that, right? You, the resistance remains and the resistance, you know, is probably not that the pathway for growing your business or achieving your goal doesn't exist. It's that you don't trust yourself to be able to do what is required.
And, you know, I think this really does bring us to this point that it might mean grappling with some of those demons, right? Grappling with some of those demons about visibility, about sales, about the stories you have about success and failure. It will mean trusting yourself to learn new skills. It'll mean trusting yourself to be okay with discomfort and uncertainty.
And being able to trust yourself with that may not be something that comes naturally immediately or right now. And so, you know, I really invite you to think about what might be holding you back and growing your business. Is it truly that you don't have an avenue to get support or that you don't know what to do or that you don't have the answers?
Or might it be that actually the resistance, what 's holding you back is a lack of willingness or ability to trust in yourself. So, you know, if you think that that might be the case, then I think there is a journey to go on,of course, right? And then whether that is, you know, some self coaching, whether that is coaching, making the leap before you feel comfortable, all of those things may be appropriate.
And,you know, here's one little thing that you can do. A really simple task is I want you to pull out a piece of paper and a pen. You can type it or you can write it. And I want you to write a list. And I want this list to be something like a tada list rather than a to-do list, which is, you know, if you look back on your life and your career, what have you achieved?
What have you overcome? What demons have you grappled with? What tough situations have you navigated? And sit back and look at that list and make it as long as you possibly can.
And when you look at it, I want you to think on that basis, how could you think that you can't do this, right? Would someone who has written this list have any reason not to trust themselves to create this new destiny, this new direction, this new option for themselves?
And, you know, now it won't necessarily be easy. And sometimes, you know, with my clients inside the accelerator, you know, I consider it to be my job to hold their self trust for them for a little while while they catch up.
But, you know, I know that of the people that come to me that I work with, you absolutely can do this. And so, you know, putting in place that self trust is almost the priority and is quite transformational. And just to shine the lens on this from another perspective, let's think about our clients, right, who are coming to us as coaches, sorry.
And so we may have organizations who may have individual leaders who are really brought into the idea of coaching or, you know, or facilitation, team development, whatever the service is. But there's a hesitation and it's likely not because they don't think that you're great at what you do. But it's because they don't know or they don't trust that they will be able to get the most out of that opportunity.
So, you know, will they, they or will their leaders be able to commit time to it? Will they have the skills to be able to do what comes up? Will the organization be sophisticated enough for their teams to absorb the process? So, there's this sense of, oh, well, we trust you, but can we really trust ourselves to get the most out of this opportunity? And in this case, it can be helpful to focus on building their trust in their capability by meeting them where they're at.
And so that means by making sure that, you know, a content of a workshop or coaching is tailored to their needs, that the language makes sense in their environment that stretches introduced gradually.
And we can do those things for our clients to help them build trust in themselves. And we can also do it for ourselves when we are growing our businesses. And a good coach, a good business coach as well,will walk with you along that journey and hold your hand as you, as you grow that self trust to be able to say, yeah, I've got these, give me the tools and let me take them, you know, and someone can, someone can help you with the early phases of that journey, if that's what you need.
So I hope that this idea sparks something for you like it did for me. I'm still thinking about it. And so if you think self trust might be at play for you when it comes to growing your business,
Just drop me a message and let me know how I'd love to hear your experience, whether this idea resonates and any reflections that you might have on this concept. And you know, I hope it it sits with you and you think about it and make sure you write that list. It's really, really helpful. Thanks for tuning in. And I'll be back with more next week.
