Claiming your Confidence as a soul led Coach
When you are confident in the value you provide to your clients, people feel it. They seek your expertise, gain value from your content, and are also confident to buy from you (even referring others to your work).
Yet with the prevalence of cancel culture on the internet it’s easy to re-question everything you’re doing. Such as, the ethics of whether you are really credible to teach what you claim and whether people should even listen to you.
This is especially true for marketing yourself as a coach because there is no regulation checking credibility in the industry. In other vocations, you gain that through your degrees and titles but the same thing is not true for coaching. It’s the wild west of the internet.
As a spiritual life coach myself, I’ve gotten to that point of re-questioning and re-assessing my business as well. I’ve built a business making high 4 figure months, only to tear it all down, and rebuild it all over.
And I can say it’s not easy. It takes a lot of humility, self awareness and trust to really feel good about marketing yourself as being able to help others with absolute confidence.
But that confidence does not come from repeating mantras and affirmations about how you are already a coach who makes millions. Nor does it come from hyping myself up with motivational phrases like “you can be a coach, anyone can be a coach. All you’ve got to do is to believe in yourself” type-a-thang.
Rather, what I’ve learned is that, it comes from deep integration, specifically in 4 different areas of your Self (which includes your business). And I want to share with you how I’ve been able to embody unshakable confidence within my business as a coach, and how you can do so in the value you provide through your work without a flinch.
Daily Embodiment
Nothing beats daily devoted embodiment when it comes to battling self-doubt.
You can be reading books about eating healthy all day, getting certifications on eating healthy your whole life, and even be teaching others how to eat healthy. But when you don’t eat healthy yourself, you’re going to have imposter syndrome in your work no matter what.
Just like that, the same thing applies to getting results in whatever area you are helping people in – whether that is making more money, reducing stress, or experiencing euphoric love-making.
Are you doing the things you said WILL change your clients’ life?
And most importantly, do you experience change in your own life?
Your life does not have to be perfect (or have a perfectly curated image on Instagram) in order to help others. But what I do believe is that we have to be first-hand experience-rs of the value we provide, on a daily basis. That is, to live your life as if your client is living through you.
This can look like going through your day as if your client is watching you on a livestream while taking notes about your outer actions+your inner thought processes. It can also look like talking to yourself just like how you would talk to a client.
Through daily embodiment, not only do you have firm conviction about how amazing your work is, you also have deeper knowledge of potential barriers, limitations, and breakthroughs– which leads to having more potent, insightful material for your marketing+ offers as a result.
2. Refining your Marketing/ Messaging
In the coaching industry, a lot of traditional marketing advice revolves around being as loud as you can about how you can lead people to the outcomes they want.
While claiming your work powerfully is an important aspect of marketing, what I’ve noticed is that trying to ‘puff up’ your marketing with the sole intention of having as many people flock into your offers, can skew the actual message that is reflective of your gift+value.
Which leads to imposter syndrome because your messaging+marketing is more ‘puffed up’ (aka more sensationalized and hyped up) than what you are actually confident to provide.
This was a lesson I learned early on in my journey, when a business coach told me to overemphasize the things people in my niche want and then, link how my gift can help them get there. This made me end up sounding like another business coach– because a logical common desire that the people in my niche (coaches/service-based entrepreneurs) want is money. When the truth is, my work goes beyond making more money; it is a reconnection to their inner happiness+soul and then showing up in business from there. Money is just a side-product of the actual abundance I help people get connected with.
The lesson was that: your marketing has to be a solid, pure reflection of the actual work you do. When it is overemphasizing only the parts that you think people want and not communicating your unique approach + actual value you offer, you may find yourself resistant and doubting yourself when it comes to selling.
3. Healing childhood programming
Unlike the previous causes for lack of confidence in selling, this layer is much deeper and stubborn to remove: like a crusty, old pancake that was forgotten on a pan for decades (pun intended).
Those are, the internal beliefs embedded in your subconscious, such as, the beliefs that you’re not good enough, smart enough, rich enough etc.
And when you have beliefs that you are not enough, in whatever way that you’re lacking, you may find yourself either:
-working extra hard in your business to prove to other people that you have ‘made it’
-Or being in paralysis for showing up in business, with fear of being judged, made fun of, not being liked etc.
I have experienced both because growing up I was bullied and ostracized in middle school, while needing to constantly prove to my parents that I was good enough through my academic grades.
Only after years of being unhappy/discontent in my entrepreneurial journey, I realized that my unhappiness/discontentment stemmed from the deep ingrained beliefs of not being good enough. And they did not go away no matter what I did, earned, or achieved.
In terms of running a business, this can look like constantly seeking validation from clients that you are good enough, seeking validation from social media, seeking validation from the numbers in the bank account to prove your worth, etc.
And whenever we are seeking validation (from anything), it also means we can’t go all in following your soul (and thereby receiving her desires).
For example, you may find yourself hesitant to create content prolifically from your heart + sharing your unfiltered thoughts, because a part of you is wondering what people will think of you. When we do this, we block our hearts, from fully expressing her and therefore being seen by the right type of people who are meant to work with us.
4. Channeling Wisdom
Lastly, I have learned that having confidence as a coach comes down to being a channel of wisdom.
What I mean by that is, we have to be both an abundant receiver and a giver of wisdom.
For instance, when we are reading books, learning from mentors, listening to podcasts, and so on, we are receiving wisdom.
However, no amount of gaining wisdom will be enough, until we have applied the wisdom ourselves.
No amount of wisdom we acquire from books/mentors/podcasts can ever replace the wisdom from actually doing the things ourselves.
In other words, the wisdom we acquire from external places have to pass through us— through our own actions, our own trials and experimentations, for the wisdom to actually be ours.
But when you are just passing on what you’ve heard from another coach/person without actually integrating it yourself, you won’t be fully confident and it won’t feel right. And people can feel it.
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On top of that, what I’ve learned with regards to gaining more confidence through our wisdom is to channel it. In business, this looks like giving away an abundance of information (education) for free!
Not only does it build trust and credibility around your brand, it also reaffirms the fact that you do know even more (actually wayyy more) than what you think you know.
I’m learning that myself as I write these blogs— it’s like, the more I write, the more I realize how an unlimited well of wisdom already harbors inside my soul. And what a bliss it is to let all these codes of wisdom come through!
