Why Marketing Isn't Working For Your Coaching Business
Hi there. This is Ajit Nawalkha, and in today's video, we are talking about something a little bit different. Today we are discussing why marketing strategies or learning about marketing strategies may not be working for you.
And what I can draw from my own experience of growing, not one but many coaching businesses of myself and of my friends. What I'm going to share today is slightly counter-intuitive and it may feel like initially, as to me may not be the right approach or may not be the approach to grow your coaching business and create a really successful enterprise for yourself. But as you listen into the experience that I've had with this particular approach, you'll find that it is more and more congruent with probably what you really want in life. You see, most of the training that you find around growing your coaching business, or of becoming more wealthy, getting more freedom, getting more clients revolves around marketing, revolves around the idea that you need a new funnel, that you need a advanced sales training, that you need more people in the pipeline that you need a social media following, that you need a course, that you need a program. While all of that is useful, what I've come to find is, if your attention is on those marketing ideas and all of those marketing ideas, you tend to find yourself growing at a slower pace. Sometimes not even growing, sometimes feeling like that you're chasing these endless tactics that never really yield the results that you should probably get by this time.
Just for the sake of this video, let's suspend the idea that you need marketing to grow your coaching business, and that there could be other ideas that may be equally or more important that you tend to neglect or ignore, because marketing seems to take all the brain power that you could potentially use in building and coaching business. The idea that I wanna introduce to you today is suspend marketing and introduce learning. Learning that is guided to create particular outcomes that you want in your life. Let me explain.
If you're anything like me, you want one of these five or all of these five things to be the outcomes of your career, outcome of your coaching business. One of these five things or all of these five things manifested more in my life as I focus less and less on marketing and more and more on growing myself on learning more. Let me explain. What are the things that I most want out of my coaching career is impact. I want to make sure that my work impacts lives, that I get to work with people that have a transformation as a consequence of my work with them. And they are able to experience a change in their life that is positive.
And I want to have more and more people experience that. I want to be the conduit. I wanna be the beacon of transformation for individuals. So impact is vitally important to me. It also comes from my core value of service.
I really believe in the idea of service. I wanna serve humanity in the best way I can. And because of that, my idea of impact, my idea of creating transformation is that somebody goes from point A to point B based on data definition of what point A is and what point B is, which means you get to define where you are right now.
You get to define where you wanna go. My job is to help you get there in the easiest, most powerful way possible. Now impact is one of the key outcomes I want for my coaching business.
That's one of the key things that I want for every student of Evercoach. And because of that, I had to question how and what gets me in a state that creates the most impact in the person that I'm going to talk to, or I've created a program for. And what I found is that when I am focused towards, how am I learning? What am I learning? What is that learning associated to? Can I take this learning and really translate to somebody's life and help somebody create a better outcome for themselves? It changes the way I approach impact.
It changes the way I approach my clients. It changes the way I teach. It changes the way I speak.
It changes the way I communicate my message to people outside in the world. And because I am learning and I am growing, the impact I get to have with my clients also grows. Recently, I noticed on our platform, story.line.lay.com under the author, Ajit Nawalkha. I finally crossed 1000 case studies, 1000 case studies of individuals who have actively taken a program, and as a consequence of taking that program has had an outcome in their life. And then we're willing to actually share that outcome in a public forum. They were willing to say openly that their lives were transformed because of a course, a program, a book, something that I did for them, that made me so grateful that demonstrated to me that I am making an impact positively in lives of people.
A 1000 published case study means I must have impacted thousands and thousands of people who right now are silent heroes that people have had the impact, but are not really comfortable sharing it out in the world. I have a question for you today. If impact was one of the measures of success that you have defined for yourself, if that is one thing that you really would like to see in the outside world, real impact with individuals outside, what is the learning path that is best suited to create that outcome? What is it that you need to learn on the next day basis, next week basis, next month basis? And how are you accessing that learning for you to be able to continuously upgrade the amount of impact you wanna have in people's lives? The second thing that is very important to me is money or abundance. I come from a background where I didn't have a lot growing up. And because of that, I have a desire to always have enough that I never have to worry about money, that I am always coming from a place off that I'm abundant, that I have more than enough to go around, that I can contribute to society financially and not just in my spirit by my work. So abundance or money is vitally important to me and I believe that all of us can be very abundant.
I believe all of us can be millionaires. I believe all of us can have all the money that we want. And I truly believe that money helps us live the most, best life that we possibly can. If you had a little bit more money than you have today, you'll probably live a little bit more comfortably. Hopefully you will make better health choices.
Hopefully you will make better financial choices. Hopefully you'll make better relationship choices because money helps you make those choices slightly better. Money helps us get out of the fear mode of, I don't have enough, I don't have enough to a mode of, I have enough, I can take care of myself and my family. Now let me make the best decision I can for myself, for society, for my family.
And that is where learning is so paramount. You see, there is no way in my life experience I've had the experience to work with some of the clients that I work with. Some of the clients that I work with have done this work of coaching for decades. Some of my clients make significantly more amount of money than I make. Most of my clients have had way more experience and have impacted way more lives than I have as of today.
How is it that I'm still able to change their lives? How is it that I still am able to show up for them and they are addressing and excited to talk to me? What are the reasons to that is because I'm always learning. I'm always leading edge of what's happening. What's next? How can I transform somebody's life? How am I investing in myself? Time and money-wise consistently so when I show up for a coaching conversation, there is no doubt that the person sitting across me is going to have a transformative experience. I wanna share a personal success with you that recently I was able to experience. You see when I first started coaching, about seven years ago, I had an ambition, a secret ambition I had never shared with anyone. I had written down my goal as something that was seemingly impossible to me at that time.
You see, at that time my annual fee of working with a business was $10,000 a year. You could walk with me for $10,000 a year, I would talk to you every two weeks or something. And my goal was that one day I will add so much value to my client that my annual fee will be the bonus that they will pay me.
Just something that they say, "Hey, I wanna gift this to you." Without me asking, without me suggesting it'll just happen. This was about seven years ago.
I had written it down that one day, I will finally make that impact. About two months ago, I'd help the company with some clarity, some focus word, try to just help them organize their own team and within their own family. And the founder of the company about four weeks ago, sends a card in my mail and I get wine bottles and cards all the time, and I mail as a thank you note from the clients that I serve. So I got up...
I got a card, I didn't think anything off head, I just simply said, "Oh, this must be from that particular client." I put it on the side of my table. I'd just had my daughter. So I was just not really looking at anything at that time. I put it on the side of my table.
And one night while I was just relaxing, I opened it. And there was a card of course, a beautiful message from this particular person. And then there was a check in there, that check was for $10,000.
Now I want you to know that they didn't owe me that money. This was not the part of the fee. This is something that they were giving add on, just to say thank you. The person that sent me this check is an amazing individual themselves. Like they are absolutely amazing and really transformative for a lot of people. And me being able to change their lives so much so that they sent me $10,000 means something is hidden in this idea of saying, if I could keep learning things will start to happen in the way I think they need to happen.
The focus was not to somehow communicate a marketing message that send me a bonus, right? I wasn't trying to tell them. I didn't tell them for that matter. When they send me the check, I send them an email saying, thank you so much you just made my secret wish come true. And they couldn't believe that that was my secret wish.
What I'm really trying to communicate here is abundance happens lot more easily if you invest your time and energy into learning. Now, it can't be just any learning, right? A lot of times we think, oh, I read Instagram posts and I was reading blogs, and I was reading all of that stuff means I must be learning while you're not, because learning has to be directed. It needs to train you to develop a skill. And we know how critical it is for success for coach, which is why we're introducing a very special offer but if you see this video on time will still be available. But what for that offer below this video, because that will give you access to all of our most amazing quests that are really, really amazing discount.
Our quest learning from these great teachers that we have brought on the Evercoach platform is one of the foundations of my success and one of the foundations of my learning. And that is why I wanted to create this very special opportunity for you. So if you haven't yet checked it out, just go on, click on that link below, it'll open a new window and you'll be able to check it out later after you're done watching this video.
Now let me come to the third thing that you and I made resonate with. And that is freedom. Isn't it that everything that we do, one of the primary reasons for that is so we could have freedom, freedom of time, freedom of money, freedom of being able to say, I wanna do this and that's the only thing I wanna do and be able to just do that.
That we are not bound by, you have to do something, you can choose to do something. It was really important for me because growing up in India, I felt really constrained in my life through my childhood. And so as an adult, freedom became really, really important to me. I wanted to be able to make decisions of my life, own them fully and be able to choose what I wanted to do and what I don't want to do in life. And that brought me to the idea of learning, how to really create that freedom in my life.
And I'm so happy to report that if you focus on the learning of each of these focus areas that you're gonna learn inside of Evercoach Membership, you will be able to create freedom for yourself. You see about three years ago, I ran an experiment where I said, what if I only worked four days a week for four hours a day? Which means in total in a week I would work on these 16 hour weeks. Will my business grow? Will I be more abundant? Will I be able to have more impact? Will I be more creative? Will I be blank? Will I be able to spend more time with family? Will I be able to spend more time with my friends? Will I be able to invest more in my health, so on and so forth. And so for a month I ran an experiment that I worked only four hours a day for four days a week. I'm happy to report that even after three years, I only work about four hours a day for four days a week for most of my time, except when I'm doing an intensive project, which may be once in a while as a choice I would make.
But my regular work is only about four days and only about four hours. If you focus your attention to what I'm saying, hey, I want freedom in my life. And I wanna learn contextual information that will help me create that freedom, you can create that freedom. You can have a four by four philosophy and you can still be able to grow your business, have more impact and have more creative joy in your life. Now I know a lot of you may wonder, hey, I did buy you know, all these amazing entrepreneurs say, you have to work hard and you have to hustle.
And yes, they are true in some way, because that's the only way they know how to make business work. And their ambitions are sometimes to the magnitude that yes, maybe they have to slog away 80 hours a week or more, right? But if you're trying to build a coaching business, if you're trying to build a training business, if you're trying to make a few million dollars a year or under you don't need to work 80 hours a week, you could work a lot less and focus a lot more time in actually learning. I may only work four days a week, four hours a day, but I invest a lot more time and learning every single day because I know every time I learn, I invest time and energy in learning or growth. I create greater outcomes for you as my coaches, I create greater outcomes for me as a person, for my relationships, for my health, for my wellbeing, for my business partners, for my friends, for my... For society at large, I'm able to create better outcomes. So focusing your attention towards learning also helps you gain more freedom, which brings me to the fourth reason why I became a coach and why I'm excited about doing this work.
And I'm guessing you are the same is meaning. Isn't it that we as coaches have at least one time wondered, what's the point of all this, right? Why do we exist? Why do human beings exist? Why are we on this planet? Is there even a purpose to all of this? And what I've found through philosophical education, which is so wider in coaching is to understand philosophies of life and philosophy. Then study those philosophies of life is that I've understood the meaning of life is to make things better, is to make life better for ourselves, make a life better for people around us, make life better for our society, create balance in humanity, so we can all enjoy the experience of life.
And that becomes the meaning of your life. Now, I'm not saying you will find the same meaning, but if you invest your time and energy in learning and not on some marketing gimmick and learning marketing gimmicks, you will find that you will find more meaning in everything that you do. When you find more meaning in your life, you find that everything that you do becomes more meaningful, and that is where our attention needs to go meaningful work, finding meaning in our lives, whatever that may be. It doesn't have to be what I have as my meaning in life. But the idea of finding meaning the idea of even being in that direction, being able to ask those difficult questions and explore those ideas for yourself. You need to be in a learning environment for you to be able to lean into these complex ideas, which brings me the final thing that's very important to me and why I became a coach and how I've been able to get all the outcomes that I wanted in my coaching career and coaching business.
And that is creation. As a coach, don't you feel that you have inherent urge to create better ideas, like better courses, better books, better programs, better coaching environments, better events, better conversations, creating all of this requires you to be in an environment where things are constantly new in your mind that you are creating constantly in your mind. So creation can keep growing. A learning environment is the perfect environment for creation to be nourished.
Because when you're in a learning environment, you're constantly in a creative mode because you're constantly learning new information. And so creation is organically being formed because of the environment that you've set yourself up for. Learning triggers creativity.
When you are in a learning environment, when you're learning somebody's best material, you are triggered to create, you're triggered to find, hey, what's my idea around this? What is it that I am learning here? What is it that I need to create around this perspective and this ideology and so forth. And it develops and then it informs your methodology then develops and informs your practice significantly because you're in an environment of learning from the best about the best models and methodologies and so forth. Because I put myself through a learning environment and a rigorous learning environment on a daily basis, being the co-founder of one of the best learning training platforms for coaches. I've found that in the past few years, I've written three books, I've written five different programs. And I have now co-created about four different certifications. And all of that has happened in the matter of just last few years.
And that is because I'm in a constant state of creation and I'm in the constant state of creation because I'm in a constant state of learning. So the argument I wanted to make today was to take you away from this idea that everybody throws at you. And usually even the marketers that are throwing at you is that you need to learn how to market that you need to learn how to sell, and that you need to learn how to create more epic programs and do this and do that. And all of that is useful information, but that's not what makes you successful. That's not what makes you phenomenal.
That's not what makes you the most extraordinary coach you can be, that's not what makes you somebody that you look up to one day, it just makes you a better marketer. And yes, you may get some short-term benefits of becoming a better marketer, but a better product will always outperform better marketing. You can always sell a great product without much marketing, but it's hard to sell a poor product for a long time, even with great marketing.
I wanted to invite you today to this conversation because I see we are in that time of our lives, where marketing is coming at us, telling us that's the most important piece. And as a coach, as a leader in this industry of coach training, I feel that it's my duty to reinform you and put an argument at least in front of you, that is to become a better coach, to become a more professional coach, or to become a more extraordinary coach, to immerse yourself in an environment that asks more off you in context of what you really want. Out of the five things that I mentioned, money was one of them. Yes, we all want abundance, we want money, but what about impact? What about creativity? What about meaning? What about all the other things that you want in your life? And we'll just getting better at marketing create that? Probably not. So my invitation for you is to ask yourself this question, what is it that you intend to do to create a learning environment around you? Not just now, but forever.
Share with me in the comment section below, because I would love to see how you're creating learning environments around you. If you like this video hit that like button. If somebody who's a friend of yours who needs to hear this message, please share it by hitting the share button. And if for whatever reason you haven't hit the red subscribe button, go ahead, hit that red subscribe button. So you can get weekly videos from us that will help you become a better coach.
Thank you so much for watching. This is Ajit Nawalkha and you're watching this on Evercoach.
2021-07-31 11:16
