Hello and welcome to the Business of Executive Coaching podcast. I'm your host, Ellie Scarf, a senior executive coach with over 17 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 am 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 business with more corporate clients.
You can see more at http://elliescarf.com/cca The link will be in the show notes. Okay, before I dive in, and this is a great episode, so you're going to want to stay tuned, it has recently come to my attention that I have some friends and family who listened to the podcast.
So if that is you, you are so welcome. I know that this is not at all relevant to you, but I appreciate your love and support deeply. Now, if you are not one of my friends and family, but are in fact a coach and are growing your business, I wanted to tell you a little funny story, which is that one of my team members, the wonderful Gillian, who is our operations manager and all around superstar who solves lots of problems in our business.
You may have come across her if you have been in my world in any way, attended any of our events. She's generally, generally brilliant. Anyway, she was telling me the other day that she got quite a shock when she was sleeping and had a podcast playing in her headphones while she was sleeping and woke up in the middle of the night.
I want to say the early hours of the morning to my voice in her ears, because somehow, rather than her recreational playlist, she'd managed to add to her playlist our private podcast internally, which is where we save all of our internal coaching calls and release them to our members as a private podcast. And so if you're listening, and Gill, I apologize, no one needs to hear their colleagues in the middle of the night. So yeah, I do deeply apologize, but I did laugh.
And I'm sure she's worked on her playlist settings by now. Anyway, onto the episode. So today, I want to talk about one of the biggest challenges that I hear in relation to growing coaching businesses.
And that is the stress or the load that comes with marketing our businesses, right, and our business development. And it is stress that is happening on a number of levels, right? There is the stress of not knowing what to do, right? What the right thing to do is the stress of querying whether we truly trust ourselves to go out there and do it.
People when we do know what to do, then there is this stress that comes along with the actual doing or not doing in some cases. And then that's not to mention all the mindset issues that are attached to marketing and business development, including things like the fears that emerge around visibility, the concerns we have about being perceived as salesy, the hesitations we have about tapping into our warm networks.
And at the core of most of this, this, this hesitation, this resistance, the stress that comes with our business development and our sales and our marketing is this concept that I talk about quite a lot with my clients. And that is the idea that there is emotional labor attached to our marketing for most of us as coaches.
And so, so what do I mean when I say emotional labor? What I mean is that marketing and sales and together, I sort of consider that those equate to our business development activities. For most of us, it is not a neutral task. It's not just a case of another thing that we have to check off our to-do list. It generally comes with a lot of baggage and it tends to be quite emotionally loaded baggage and generally negative in its emotional load.
There are some people who are like, I was born to sell and so I feel really positive about sales, but that is the exception, not the rule. So, you know, most of us have these stories about what it means to sell, what it means to market based on negative associations in the media when we grew up, right?
And salespeople in the movies, what our parents have told us, what, you know, what are the messages we got about what it means to, to want to make money, what it means to have to sell stuff, right? And so, it is not emotionally neutral.
It is emotionally loaded. And so, it's all of the stuff that comes along with the doing of our business development activities that is not as simple as just implementing a list of tasks, right? That is the emotional labor that we do in order to be able to get to that point of putting ourselves out there in the world as a business owner.
So, how I see it play out is there's a few, a few ways I see this emotional labor play out. One is that this is particularly labor full, which is the constant negotiating with yourself about whether you should have to do sales and marketing, right? Which is, oh, I wish I could just coach, why should I be doing this? This is not right, you know, not what I signed up for.
You know, I wish I didn't have to do this. I don't want to do this, right? You get the gist. So, that is one example. It's just constant. And you can feel, right, when you constantly have that talk track going, right, or that sort of sense of, why should I have to do this? Do I, you know, got to do it today? Why do I want what, you know, I shouldn't have to do this.
The client should just come to me. You can see that that is quite a heavy weight on us. And it's a weight on us every day. And when we think about stress as something that, you know, is cumulative over the course of our days and weeks, you can see how it's just putting another brick on the pile, right, of our stress.
Another way I see it play out is fixating on the shoulds, right? And this is related, but slightly different, which might be things like, oh, I should be good at this. I should do more of this. I should be getting better results.
I should already know what to do. Everyone else seems like they know what to do. I shouldn't feel so crappy about it. So the shoulds and the shouldn'ts, right? And we really, really fixate on that a lot. And again, you can see how exhausting that is, right? If that is the talk track going through your brain, often subconsciously, of course, that's exhausting, right?
That's going to be really hard then, to do those things that we need to do to learn the things to experiment is going to make it very hard. And again, we're putting another, another brick on that pile of stress that we're dealing with. We're starting to build that up. Another example is that I see it play out the emotional labor that is needed every time you want to put something out there in the world, right?
This is really kind of visibility focused when you want to make a post when you want to do an outreach message, for example, and you have to really psych yourself up every time, right? That there has to be a little pep talk, a little bit of a, you know, like you've got to convince yourself that there's nothing wrong with what you're doing, that you know, you might have to write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite.
And it's not because of the post, it's because of the feelings, right? It's because of the mindset. And so again, that is a heavy load. There is emotional labor that you are doing every time you post, every time you have a message that you want to send.
Another slightly different way I see the emotional labor of marketing play is if you are finding that every day you get to your desk and then you start with, right, what am I going to do in my business development, in my marketing today, right? What is that? And so that is the emotional weight of decision making, of prioritizing, of, you know, probably navigating a bit of avoidance, all of those sorts of things.
So you can see how, again, a lot of emotional labor when we have to make that decision constantly. And then finally, another way I see a play out is that we then find that our marketing is coming from this place of reaction, reacting, sorry, rather than implementing a deliberate strategy or plan, which means that it's not really coming from a place of intentionality, it's coming from a place of what can I possibly bear to do?
Like, what is the bit that feels okay to me? What can I cope with? What can my nervous system handle? So there's just a few ways of how it plays out. And I'm willing to bet that if you are a coach growing a business, you have experienced this emotional labor, right, that you've experienced the overthinking, the shoulds, the need to psych yourself up, the avoidance, the what am I going to do today, not knowing, you know, where to start?
And so there are consequences, of course, from the heavy load of this emotional labor. Now, what do we see? We see avoidance, of course, right? If you are in that state of feeling like all of your business development is taking a lot of effort, a lot of emotional effort, then it makes sense that it's not going to get done because your brain is going to do everything it can to direct you to things that feel less emotionally laborful.
And it may be that there are some parts that you find a little easier. They're the things you're going to go to, right? It might be, you know, faffing about with your website. And I hear this all the time, right? I'm going to update my website. When that's perfect, then I'm going to be able to do these things.
Also, I see the consequence of this emotional labor. Another consequence is procrastination, right? And, you know, avoidance and procrastination, obviously very similar. Avoidance generally lands on just doesn't get done, but procrastination is almost more insidious because it's like, well, I'm just going to push it back. But also, often other things don't get done because even though you've put it off, you haven't put it off in a way that opens space to do other things or other meaningful things.
It's sort of, it still takes up all of the energy and all of the time, even though you're not doing the task. So, if that's you, I see you. I really deeply have some experience in this space
as well.
And, you know, I come up with ways to justify procrastination to myself as well. I don't know if anyone else is very clever at this, but I think I have, I've become expert level in justifying procrastination, which is that I've started to refer to it as incubation so that I might procrastinate, writing something.
And for me, often it's writing marketing emails, for example, I call it incubating. So, I might not write it when I need to, but when the crunch is on, by God, I can write it really fast then. Anyway, don't use that strategy. That is my advanced procrastination tip and I don't want you to do that. Anyway, another consequence of, you know, when you're feeling this emotional labor very heavily attached to your marketing, is that I see a lot of a bit of disconnection from the business, right?
So, rather than feeling really like a really strong sense of conviction and that what you're doing is so important and that it is making a difference in sort of that, that really feeling in love with what you're doing, feeling in love with your offers, really passionately believing in that. Instead,
there's a bit of a disconnect, right?
So, you're not fully connecting with that, which is then visible, right? So, it becomes a bit of a negative spiral. I also see a consequence being that we then, so when we're either feeling this disconnection or we're feeling this, you know, emotional labor, there's discomfort with, for example, writing our content, this is when an over-reliance on AI can pop up.
And what that over-reliance can look like is, you know, really bland content that is really, shows your disconnection, right? And then leads to disconnection from your potential clients because you're showing up with the mask of AI rather than your own voice.
Now, if you think that this could be you, I did. It was a few months ago. Now, I have an episode that is on how to use AI without reducing connection in your content. So, do check that episode out if you get a chance. I also see that, you know, one of the consequences of this heavy load of emotional labor is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?
So, if we're saying, I'm not good at business development, this is all too hard, then of course you don't do it. And of course, you never get better and more comfortable at it. So, you can see that it is pretty heavy stuff. And so,
I'm not going to leave you hanging. I want to give you some tips on what you can do about it. Some of these are mindset, some of these are more practical. The first thing is that, and I think this is foundational, is you have to give up the idea that this is optional, right?
That business development that sales marketing is optional or is something that you get to choose to do or not to do. In fact, it just is, right? Business development and marketing is neutral. It is part of business ownership and you must fit it into your week in some way.
And so, I really encourage you to make that decision once and save the daily and weekly monthly negotiations with yourself about it. Make the decision and let that be a decision you make. Now, of course, then you're going to have to go on to, you know, there are questions about, well, how do I fit it in? When do I do it?
When do I bring out the best in me? But firstly, getting past that even thought process about whether you're going to do it will help so much. Another thing that can help is that you need a system, right?
You need a system for your business development and your marketing and you can get the system in lots of different ways, right? Obviously, you can work with a coach like me who has a proven system that you can follow.
But you can also build your own system from research and mentors. You can get a system from, I don't know, you could ask Claude or chat GBT to build your system. I would just, I have some red flags about that. Usually it's going to recommend very much B2C strategies, which don't land so well.
So, you know, just, that's a bit of a buy-able wear. You can also just start experimenting, right? You can tap into your inner intuition, create a system and then experiment with it. But whatever way you choose to get your system, right, it has to land in a place where you are not making decisions every day about what you're going to do.
And so, I want you to be in the place where there is just a set of actions that you implement because the system coupled with your strategy tells you what to do, right? So, I want
to take all of the decision fatigue off.
I want to take all of the emotional labor of having to decide whether to do it, decide what to do and decide how to do it. I want those, those gone. And believe me, that is a massive load of when you can actually have a system telling you what to do.
Another thing you can do is give up the idea that you have to be perfect or that you even want to be perfect. We need to give up the idea that it's the aspiration, give up the idea that there's in any way that perfection is attainable. And because I know that a lot of you listening are very much high achieving perfectionists, very high standards, right? And so, it's going to be very hard, but I'm going to tell you you need to aim for B plus work only, right?
I used to say B minus and I discovered that for the high achievers, that is just a bridge too far. So, B plus is where we've landed. I want you to think about it. As you are writing a post or an outreach message and you're like, oh, it's just not quite right. I want you to say, is this B plus? Is this B plus?
Can I give myself a B plus? Can I give myself somewhere between 70 and 80% if so, just don't even think about it for one second, send it. And part of this is that the reason we do this is because get it is because getting it out there is so much more important than the increment, right?
From B plus to A plus or 75 to 85%. Getting it out there is what is going to make the difference. And you must go on this learning journey, right? You're going to have this learning journey at some point and I would rather that happen sooner than later so that you get to that later stage quicker and perfectionism just slows you down, right?
It's just a blocker. So, give up the idea that perfect is attainable or even an aspiration. You also are going to need some strategies to ensure that your business development and marketing doesn't leach into every single hour of every day and your thoughts even when you're not at work.
And so, there are a few things you can do to stop this. One and my favorite one is time limits, right? And that means giving yourself a limit of how long you will spend writing any one post or writing your hero content or writing an outreach message because it will fill the space that you give it, right? So, I now and this has taken me a while to get to this place but I write a week of posts and I schedule them to LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook in just one hour.
So, there and that is posting daily for me. Not that I don't think you should necessarily be aiming for that but that is what I do and that's what I do. I have a week an hour a week that I spend on content writing. Now, I have got a system which makes it easier, right? Which includes that I've written my hero content which in this case is my podcast.
So, you know, twice a week, there's a post that references my podcast. I also have content pillars which say this is what I'm going to talk about on these other days of the week. And I have some time limit, right?
So, I don't let myself spend more than a certain amount of time writing any one post. And I have, I hold onto that idea of B plus work and I hold onto that idea of experimentation. I'm going to see what works. I'm going to do more of that. And yeah, again, again, boundaries, you need to make sure you're really clear about when you won't work and when you won't think about work as well. So, getting clear on those will help.
And another thing that will help you to not let your work become part of every part of your life or at least that emotional, stressed emotional labor can stop it. Keeping you up at night can stop you thinking about it on the weekend by having a really clear set of criteria. So, at the end of the week, you can say, yes, that was a good week.
Yes, I ticked off all of the inputs done. And that might be this number of outreach messages, this number of posts, I did any other criteria you had and it's not just about sales and marketing, by the way.
But what is it that's going to let you turn off at the end of the week and say, yeah, this is really good. And you could apply that each day as well. And then I also think you to help you to manage that emotional weight, you need to practice neutrality in your language and your mindset. And what I mean by that is the talk track or the mindset that I often hear
is, I'm terrible at LinkedIn, I hate sales, I wish I didn't have to do that.
You can imagine, I bet you're all going, yeah, that's me. So, I would encourage you to think about what would a more performance enhancing, enhancing thought or statement be that you can focus on thinking and that you can say next time you find yourself defaulting to, oh, I hate LinkedIn or I don't want to do this.
And it might be something like, you know, like, we're not going to go, I love LinkedIn, I wish I could be on LinkedIn all day long. It's not going to be that. But maybe it's something like I'm experimenting with LinkedIn or I know sales is so important for a growing business.
Just things that you can believe in that are going to bring out a more, I guess, neutral and productive and action oriented approach to your sales and marketing. Another thing you might choose to do is, you know, just really, really recognize where you are at.
And so with all of these, all of these ideas for what you can do, it may be too much to turn the Titanic, right? If these are very well entrenched mindsets and habits. So, you know, your coaches, I'm not, I'm not, this is, I feel like I shouldn't really say these sorts of things to coaches.
But I want you to start by choosing just one small shift that you can commit to making that will remove just some of this emotional labor, right? That will just take one brick off that wall of the emotional labor that is in place around your sales and marketing. And I promise it will make a difference.
And I promise it will start the ball rolling on the other tasks, right? Because you remove one brick, you then have access to the next breakdown, which you can start to remove. So, thank you so much for listening today.
If you find this podcast helpful in your coaching business journey, I'd be so grateful if you could take a moment to rate and review the podcast, wherever you listen in.
That is really helpful for me when it comes to making sure that people who need this podcast can see it and it shows up in search. And of course, if you would like more support to grow your business with more corporate clients and you want a marketing system to help you do that with minimal emotional labor, you might be a great fit for my program, the Corporate Coach Accelerator.
You can check out all the details over at http://elliescarf.com/cca And then you can book a call with me to discuss how I can help you to grow directly at http://elliescarf.com/bookacall I'll be back with more next week. See you then.
