Welcome to The Masterful Coach Podcast with Molly Claire, where coaches learn Skill Mastery, Business Mastery, and Life Mastery at a whole new level. If you're ready to create a meaningful coaching business that makes a difference, you're in the right place. And now your host, master coach instructor, Molly Claire. Hey, Coach, are you ready to talk about business today, I'm going to be turning things upside down just a little bit on today's episode, because today, I'm talking about setting your life up to support your business building. If you've listened to me for any amount of time, and you followed us in the Coaching Collective at all, you know that what we preach all day long, is figuring out the life that you want, and building the business that supports it. We say it shouldn't be the other way around, right? You don't want your life to support your business, you want to have a business that supports your ideal life.  Today, I'm definitely not contradicting that because I agree that you want to make sure that you are creating the overall life that you want. I also know that for so many of you, including me, my business in and of itself, is an important thing to me and an important part of my life. We absolutely have to make sure that we are addressing that and creating space in our life to support the building of our business. Because sometimes we can get so much in the mindset of making sure that the business isn't taking away from our life or is supporting our life that we can sometimes treated as optional, minimize it, and really not set ourselves up to have success in that area. So that's what we're talking about today. I want you to consider your life and how you are set up to actually succeed in that meaningful business that you want to have.  Before I dive in, depending on when you're listening to this, it is January. No, not January, I'm skipping ahead. I'm telling you, I am so far into next year in my brain already that I keep forgetting that it's 2021. It is December 8th and today I am doing a free MasterClass on how to manage your life and business in the chaos of the holidays. So if you have not yet signed up, and you're hearing this early, make sure to go to thecoachingcollective.com and sign up for our free MasterClass, and you can join us there. For the rest of you, hopefully, I will be seeing you hearing you interacting with you. I am really excited to help you with this important skill because whether it's the holidays or anything else, this is a skill that is an absolute must for business owners.  Let’s talk about how well you are set up in your life to build your business. I want to take a minute and if you're driving, then you are allowed to keep your eyes open. But otherwise, if it's at all possible, as you're listening to this, I want you to just close your eyes for a minute. I want you all to think about taking a step back and having that bird's eye view of your life and the way your life is running and the way that it is set up. I want you to consider how well you have set yourself up in your life to be able to have the time, energy, commitment, and focus that you need to create your business. I want to talk through a few specific areas with you. When you think about the relationships that you have in your life, how well are those relationships supporting you in being able to make your business happen?  When you think about the way you manage your time and your energy in your life, how well are you doing at setting yourself up to have the time and energy that your business requires? When you think about your commitment to your business? When you think about how your commitment in your business plays out in your everyday life, how well is that going? How clear are you in order to truly lean into that commitment in your work time? The last thing I want you to think about as you've taken a step back to look at the big picture of your life, how clear are you about how money goes in or out of your business at this face?  [00:05:00] Meaning, are you clear that you are still putting a certain amount of money into your business? Hopefully, you all are no matter what stage you're at because that's always part of the deal. Or are you really clear that your business is at the point that it should be giving money back to you now? I'm going to talk more about this distinction, but just keeping that step back, what is your answer for you on a scale of one to 10? How well are you set up in your life to have what you need to effectively build your business? So hopefully, you've been given a little bit of insight here. My guess is that most of you see little areas of tweaking. Hopefully, none of you have gone into a self-blame, compare and despair, shame cycle, or anything like that, as this awareness has come up. Sometimes that can work against us. Awareness is amazing, unless we use it against ourselves, and that is not very helpful.  My hope is today that I can help you think through each of these areas and make it a little better this next year. I want you to feel successful in your business. I want you to feel capable in your business. We have enough fears and doubts that come up in building a business as it stands. And so the more set up for success you can be, the better. We’re going to talk about each of these areas, and just touch on them. And I want you to consider what you need in each area. Let’s talk first about the relationships in your life and how they are or are not supporting you in building your business. Now, every relationship in your life doesn't have to be this major positive influence toward building your business. But you definitely want to check-in if there are relationships that are really hindering that, those need to be paid attention to. And what we want to pay even more attention to, are those relationships that are supportive of building that business because what we focus on grows, so we want to pay attention to that.  The way I like to think about the relationships that are in your life that are really benefiting you are by thinking about those relationships that are supporting you from behind, meaning I've got your back, I'm behind you, I believe in you. And this can be any number of people in your life. Those relationships where you're standing side by side, meaning someone else who's simultaneously building something where you're supporting one another, and those relationships where someone is in front of you. Meaning this person is a mentor, a leader, and inspiration for you. So my hope is that you have someone in each of these categories, if not more than one person. And if you don't, put it on your list to find that person.  The other thing I want to offer up to you is that not every relationship is exactly going to pour energy and support into you as you build your business. But that doesn't have to be true of any relationship. As a perfect example, most likely, if you have kids that may not be the first relationships that you're thinking about that are really pouring into you and giving to you, but how amazing when you can get your kids on board, get your kids excited about what you're doing, when you can have someone in your life to be a part of what you're doing. I think it's really important that we as business owners, and as women, so many of you listening I know are women, I'm not excluding you men at all. I can just speak for myself and also the many women that I've spoken to that it can be really hard to ask for an advocate for what we need. I think it's important to ask of those relationships, what it is we want a need to feel supported in our lives. That’s category one relationships. Make sure that as you go into this next year, you're conscientious of the relationships in your life that are going to support you in building your business.  Let’s talk about how you're managing your time and energy in your life to support your business. How well do you do with managing your time? Now some of you may be very type A, very organized, very time focused, and if that's you, and you're checking off the sparks, awesome. Some of you may be a little more free-flowing in your time. And if that's you, I don't want to suggest for one minute that you need to be more orderly or more type A because I don't believe that to be true at all. So if any of that is in your head, go ahead and move that aside and just think about in a practical sense for you, how well are you doing with supporting yourself so that you have clear time that you are focused on your business, that you have enough time that you have enough energy to put into your business.  [00:10:09] That's the big question. It doesn't really matter how you manage your time and energy, but right now, are you set up in your life to give your business enough time and enough energy? And if the answer to that is no, what is it for you that needs to shift in order to do that. I can't emphasize enough the importance of being clear on how you're going to designate what your business needs in terms of your focus. Each of you can just kind of evaluate audit that area. And my recommendation always is to think about one or two tweaks that you can make. If we try to go into the New Year with this hardcore extreme plan, it's not going to work, it's never going to work. So you want to just lean into those shifts.  Let’s talk about your commitment. How committed are you to what you're building in your business? I think oftentimes, we can shy away from that commitment, or that clarity of the vision because let's face it, it can be scary, right? If we're clear, and then we don't make that clear goal, what are we afraid of? We're afraid we're going to have all those feelings come up of failure, of incapability, of inadequacy. And so I understand that fear, I know it's real. In fact, I was just talking with some coaches this week that several of them right in a row said, “Well, I'm afraid of committing because when I commit, I go all-in on something. And that makes me really nervous because I want to make sure I'm ready for this.” And so commitment for all of us has different fears associated with it. But for you, think about how clear that commitment is.  If that commitment is not quite clear enough, figure that out, sort it out, understand for you what it is about that clarity and commitment that is scary for you. Sort through it and get a little more clear in the coming year because when you have more clarity about what you want in your business, and more clarity about what your time, what your life, what everything requires in order to make that happen, it will simply make you more effective. It will minimize frustration, it will minimize the vagueness and that uncertain energy that we waste, feeling like a failure, because we're trying to avoid feeling like a failure. That is my challenge for you with commitment.  The last thing I want to touch on is money. So all of you, hopefully, are putting money toward your business at whatever phase you're in. For me at this point, while obviously I am making money for my business, I still put money into my business. It comes from the money that's coming in. But we are running ads, we have marketing costs, we have social media, all of these things. So that's always going to be there. I think that I find two problematic mindsets around money. I want you to think about where you fall, and where is a healthy place for you to be. So I see two main problems when it comes to money and starting a business. I want to talk about each of these. And have you think about where you fall in these two options, or possibly somewhere in the middle, and figure out where is a healthy place for you.  I see some people pouring a lot of money into their business constantly, buying this course, paying this coach, doing this thing. Now, I think paying for those things as a positive thing. I've spent plenty of money on courses and coaches and it's been definitely to my benefit. The problem is when I see coaches spending in excess, and not really making use of the resources that they have, what this would mean instead of working with a process or starting with something and utilizing it, it's hiring one person and then hiring another and suddenly you have four or five coaches that you're working with, you have 10 different programs, and it's just not effective.  There are several problems with this. Number one is that your business just becomes a new way of spending money. Number two, you're going to be moving sideways instead of forward. What I mean by this is you're bouncing from side to side back and forth with different focuses and not really moving your business forward. The other thing is that I often see that the spending, the constant spending, and hiring and buying comes from really trying to get rid of all of the fear and doubt. I'm feeling uncertain. I'm feeling fearful. I'm going to spend money on this. I'm going to have something New. [00:15:00] It’s going to just sooth that discomfort for me. And of course, the problem with this is that that discomfort will come back. And if this is you, I think the important thing to do is give yourself a little bit of time to figure out why you buy every single time. And it's going to be very important for you to create a check-in process for you because I definitely agree that hiring services is important, improving your skills, having a coach all important. I don't necessarily subscribe to the don't buy anything, don't do anything, but you absolutely have to have a check-in with yourself. What is going on for me that I'm moving toward this decision, that I'm moving toward this purchase, and especially checking in and making sure that you are making the absolute most use of what you've already got, what you've already paid for?  Now, the other problem that I see is coaches fearing so much spending too much money on their business, that they always have the brakes on their funds. And the reason this is a problem is that the reality is that if you are wanting to build a business that brings in good money for you, and hopefully something that's sustainable, and hopefully, you're all working to create something that's working for you now, and probably some automated products as well, where you can have a little bit of passive income. And the truth is that if you want to have a business that brings in good money, there is an upfront cost to that. I think back to a time when I lived in a neighborhood with a lot of med students, we lived in these little townhouses that were really inexpensive. They were really hard to get in because it was decent housing and it was extremely inexpensive. There were a lot of med students in there because word would travel. And in order to get in, you had to be on a waitlist. And they would tell everyone, so there were all of these med students in this little community where we lived.  These students were focused on this time of their life, where they just spent money. That was the mentality, they were paying for med school, they were going into debt to keep things going and that was their entire view of it. I'm spending money now, I'm putting energy in now and I'm dirt poor, and it's going to pay me back later. I think that oftentimes when we get into the coaching world, we have this promise, this idea that we will just be able to make all of this money. And we forget that there's also a place for investing in creating that because if I'm expecting to build a business that's going to adequately support the life that I want, that's going to give me plenty of money, plenty of time, plenty of freedom and flexibility, I've got to put something into making that happen.  If this is you, and you've been really hesitant about spending money, I want you to be realistic about the business that you're building. Now, you can absolutely keep your business costs extremely low. You can have referral-based businesses, you can build your business slowly, you can build your business to be any kind of business that you want. I'm not suggesting that all of you need to go out and spend a lot of money on your business, but what I am suggesting is that you want to be clear about what it is you want in your business and what you expect your business to give you.  If you are wanting to have a business, that is six figures and above, if you are wanting to have a business that is possibly going to have the long term benefit of passive income, any digital products, those kinds of things, just know that there is a cost associated upfront. It’s important to spend money on coaches, it is important to spend money on Skill Mastery and it is important to spend money on building your assets, like your list, like your social media following. So hopefully you see the difference between these two. There's the perpetual spender who has excessive debt and just keeps spending. Then there's the person that doesn't want to spend any money on their business. And for you, the most important thing is having clarity with it. What role does your business play right now in your finances? Is your business in a place where it requires money to be put into it and you can make those funds available in your life? Or right now is your situation such that you want your business funding your life now? Neither one of those is better than the other but I think it's important to be clear about it so that you can adequately decide in your life if you need to have funds ready to put into your business, or if you can expect your business to be paying you. [00:20:08] All right coaches, that's what I've got for you today. Make sure that you're set up to succeed in your business. If you're anything like me, building your business matters a lot to you. Don't minimize it, don't downgrade it, make space for it, and decide that you will set yourself up to be successful. I'll talk to you all next week. Thanks for listening to The Masterful Coach Podcast. You can check out www.thecoachingcollective.com for info about the ultimate program for coaches building a business. To find out more about Molly, you can visit www.mollyclaire.com.