The One Thing Holding You Back from Growing Your Coaching Business

You know the drill – as soon as you come up with an idea for a new program or offering, you have a million reasons why it won’t work or why you can’t do it.

You worry that no one will buy your new online course or enroll in your amazing group coaching program.

You spend hours tweaking your Instagram posts or emails, trying to get the perfect message across.

You lie awake at night wondering if you’re really cut out for this.

You fear you’ll never make enough money - or have enough courage to work your business full time, because deep down, you believe you’re not good enough.

You know what you need to do to grow your coaching business. You’ve learned the strategies and the how-tos, yet something is holding you back from really putting yourself out there.

Here’s the one thing holding you back from growing your coaching business:

That one thing? Confidence.

Confidence is a deep trust in yourself and your ability to be successful. It’s a belief that you can accomplish what you set out to do, and it’s the most important factor and enabler in your business growth.

Looking at it another way, confidence is a feeling of self-assurance arising from your appreciation of your unique qualities and abilities – that means you know who you are, you know your strengths, and you trust yourself no matter what.

You have skills and qualities that others don’t, that make you who you are, and you appreciate your uniqueness. Sometimes, when you experience something unique about yourself, it makes you question yourself. You might wonder, “Am I different than other people?” 

Instead of questioning if you’re different, if you are confident, you know you’re different, and you’re proud of what makes you unique.

Many times, when business owners aren’t making the progress they desire, or aren’t seeing results in their business, those issues stem from a lack of confidence. That might look like limiting beliefs that say what you’re doing isn’t good enough, or it could look like a fear of putting yourself out there and hopping on a Facebook live or reaching out to a potential client.

The good news is: it is possible to build the sustainable confidence you need to grow your coaching business by building trust in yourself and your abilities.

Why Sustainable Confidence?

In the inevitable ups and downs of life, if you build your confidence from a shaky source, it will collapse. For example, if you’re relying on likes or comments on your social media posts to uphold your confidence, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.

Sustainable confidence means that you trust yourself even when you make a mistake or hit a roadblock or experience a setback. Sustainable means you can continue to build your confidence over time as you accomplish both small and big wins.

So whether you enroll six clients this month or no clients this month, you’re still confident in who you are as a coach and what you provide as a business owner. Or, if you launch something new and it was a total flop, it doesn’t faze you. You know you don’t have to take it personally, and you can instead look for the lesson, do some investigating, and figure out a way to improve for next time. 

Instead of taking on the blame for something that didn’t go as planned, you take it as an opportunity to get curious. “No one signed up for this free training! I wonder why?” replaces “No one signed up for this training – I’m a complete failure!”

Why is this important?

Being an entrepreneur involves a lot of emotional management. There will be times when no one buys what you put out there – I’ve experienced it myself! There will be times when your technology or system malfunctions and you have no idea what to do to fix it because that’s not your area of expertise.

There will be times when potential clients tell you you’re too expensive or they can’t afford to work with you. Clients might criticize your programs or complain that you’re not holding them accountable.

Not to mention, early in your business, and even as your business grows, you are the only one working in your business. You might be alone a lot, especially if you’re working from home. Your friends and family won’t understand the challenges you’re going through because they aren’t entrepreneurs.

As a business owner, your business feels like an extension of you. You put your heart and soul into it, and any little criticism or doubt from others feels like a blow to the chest. There is a lot to manage emotionally, psychologically, mentally, even physically.

You won’t always feel naturally confident, especially when doing things for the first time. Fear is a natural part of doing something new or doing something for the first time. You haven’t done it before, so you can’t see the path ahead. It looks really uncertain, you don’t have it all figured out, and that can be really scary.

This goes especially for women, because we’ve been so conditioned from society to play small. We’re told to be quiet, to shrink, and historically, white men have not trusted women or women of color with leadership positions. They didn’t trust us, which led us to stop trusting in ourselves. 

Building confidence and trust in yourself enables you to overcome those shifting emotions and remain steady while the storm rages.

Confidence and Mindset

Much of what we experience in terms of low confidence is actually rooted in scarcity mindset.

A scarcity mindset is the belief that there will never be enough – or that you will never be enough. It can cause you to limit yourself through your beliefs and actions. A scarcity mindset also increases fear and overwhelm, keeps you in your comfort zone, and prevents you from allowing yourself to be seen.

Scarcity mindset takes this self-doubt to a whole new level with limiting beliefs that you’ll never be enough. We create these stories of not enoughness – I am not enough, I don’t have enough – which cause us to lose trust in ourselves. 

Impostor syndrome is a phenomenon involving the belief that you’re inadequate, incompetent, and a complete failure despite evidence that you actually are successful. It’s also the inability to believe that you deserve success or that you achieved success as a result of your own efforts, skills, or expertise.

As you start to take small steps toward growing your coaching business, impostor syndrome may step in to remind you of past failures, mistakes, or missteps.

It whispers thoughts that you’re not good enough or smart enough to grow your business. It will say you don’t know enough and you need more education, experience, or money to be a great coach. It will remind you that you’re not ready and you may never be ready because you don’t deserve to find happiness and meaning in your life.

On the other hand, an abundance mindset flows out of a deep inner sense of personal worth and security. It’s grounded in the belief that there is more than enough for everyone, and that we are enough already – exactly as we are.

Mindset shifts are one way we can rebuild trust in ourselves to build sustainable confidence. And, the secret is: confidence comes from taking action.

Related: How to Shift from a Scarcity Mindset to an Abundance Mindset

How to Build Sustainable Confidence

You already know that trust is key in any relationship – and that goes for your relationship with yourself, too. Remember that confidence comes from trusting in yourself and your abilities. When you don’t believe in yourself or when you don’t see the results of your work, that trust can begin to erode.

As a coach, your clients trust you to deliver on your promises. They trust that you can hold space for their transformation. To grow your coaching business, you need to have that same level of trust in yourself and your capabilities. So how do you rebuild that trust once it’s broken?

One way is to keep the promises you make to yourself and honor your commitments. These are the things you said you would do like emailing your list regularly or posting on Instagram every day or writing a blog every week.

You might have the best intentions and start off being consistent, but maybe something comes up and you skip a day – then you beat yourself up or feel guilty because you didn’t write the blog post or email. This breaks trust because you doubt your ability to stay consistent or follow through on what you said you would do – so you apply that to other things. “I can’t pre-launch this group program because I won’t be able to fulfill my promises and create enough content for it!”

As simple as it sounds, the best way to rebuild trust when this happens is to acknowledge the dip in consistency and start again. Keep going even if you miss another day and build trust in yourself knowing that you can complete the tasks you set out to do.

Another way to build trust is to take responsibility for your decisions. We break trust when we second-guess ourselves or question if we did or said the right thing. When you do that, what you’re secretly telling yourself is that you don’t trust yourself to make the right decision.

Instead, build trust in yourself by acknowledging the decision and be at peace with it. We can’t always control the outcomes of our decisions, but we can control our reactions. It’s okay if the decision you made didn’t work out as planned – the key is to find the lesson and learn from it so you can grow over time.

And speaking of growing over time, the third way to rebuild broken trust is to break down big goals into smaller steps or action items that help you build confidence over time. If you’re like me, then you set big goals for yourself. And that’s amazing! And, you’re probably feeling like there’s a lot to do to reach that goal. And if you don’t reach that goal you start to believe that you can’t ever reach it, which depletes your confidence because you don’t trust your ability to achieve the goals you set.

So instead of focusing on that one big end goal, see if you can break down your goal into more manageable and attainable steps. If you have a goal to make $10k this month and that feels too big, how can you break that down? Maybe you need to sell five spots in your signature program or find five clients to purchase your $2k package. Okay, that’s one step. Now, how will you get those clients? What small action can you do? Write a blog post sharing thought leadership? Reach out to previous clients who may want to reengage? 

Think of something simple you can do in one day, then build from there. Choose something that’s not too far outside your comfort zone, but not so far out that it’s unrealistic. When you see the little wins, your confidence grows because you continue to prove to yourself that you can do it – you can rely on yourself to be consistent.

The Takeaway

Confidence is a deep trust in yourself and your ability to be successful, and it’s the one thing holding you back from growing your coaching business. You can build sustainable confidence in yourself by honoring your commitments, taking responsibility for your decisions, and breaking down big goals into manageable steps and actions.

Take action now: Think of one area in your business where you’re not as consistent as you’d like to be. Recommit to this action and break down any big steps into smaller tasks or items. If you miss a day, keep going! 

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