Signal + Noise: Five things coaches can stop paying attention to

Anyone exhausted from the never-ending conveyor belt of advice about what coaches should be doing?! 

Start a Substack. Build a funnel. Use this *one magical caoching tool*.

I reckon instead of asking: “What else should I be doing?” we should start thinking about what it's safe to stop paying attention to.

In this episode, I’m exploring five seductive distractions that can pull thoughtful coaches away from the work that actually matters, and how to tell the signal from the noise in your business and your coaching.

Mentioned in this ep:

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello and welcome to Courage Inspice for Coaches, where you build your self-belief and your business in under 30 minutes a week. I'm Seth Peterick, your host. I'm a coach, supervisor, and unapologetic self-belief nerd. My mission is simple. I want your coaching practice to feel like a right fucking bitch. Let's go. So last week we were talking about learning to play the business game and some questions to ask yourself when business is feeling a bit wobbly. And I wanted to build on that because I think sometimes the best question to ask is look, what should I just stop paying attention to? Like, do you remember The Generation Game? It was this BBC game show hosted by Bruce Forsyth in the 70s. It even played in New Zealand. And there was this moving conveyor belt where the winners had to memorize all the prizes that were coming along on this belt. And there was always a cuddly toy involved, and the audience would yell that out. And anyway, sometimes I feel like social media is a bit like that endless conveyor belt, and it's just advice and trends and opinions and apparently urgent decisions. And I think it can be so discombobulating, especially if you're not seeing a lot of paying clients coming in or even inquiries to work with you. We start to kind of look outside of what we're doing and feeling a bit vulnerable, and then some ad pops up with the answer. And who among us have not bought the $27 offer, the cuddly toy? And I think when you're in this place, you might find yourself being really distracted by all of these kinds of questions, like should I start a Substack? And is Instagram dead? Should I change my niche, raise my prices? Um, should I reduce my prices? Do I launch a group? Do I do more training? Like we start to look outside of ourselves for the answer for how do we escape this discomfort? And they're just often loads of distractions. And the thing is, the answer to any of these questions could well be, yeah, I definitely think you should do that. And it might also be, nope, I think you should do the opposite, right? So the conveyor bow of compelling distractions is always gonna kind of try and seduce us. And I think it's really worth sitting with some curiosity about what you might be distracting yourself from. Because often I think this is really protective. And I was thinking about like all the ways I've distracted myself were things that didn't really matter because I was trying to avoid the stuff that just felt more uncomfortable, like being more visible than the average bear, or making clear invitations, like, oh my god, I used to labor over emails that never mentioned my coaching, but trying to be super helpful and relevant and you know, targeted towards my ideal client, just never wanted to be salesy. And I'd have this apologetic little PS at the end, you know, if you want coaching, just hit reply, okay. Thanks, bye. You know. So, whatever that is for you, that that kind of uncomfortable thing, often I think what looks like procrastination is just a really noble attempt to do something in our business and feel like we're moving forward because the thing that we are avoiding is just too crunchy. So, you know, we can rewrite our bios or enroll on a course about funnels or faff about with our websites, but it's really hard to force someone to trust you or hire you or have a massive transformation within a neat schedule of six sessions over three months, right? Like there's lots of things that are really complex about our choice to do this work. So, look, I think there are about a squillion different things that will distract us, but I think there's five things that you can probably ignore for now. And this has really helped me to kind of keep my eyes on my own page. So if you feel a bit like every time you go on social media, there's just this endless distraction, these are the things I would say stop doing. So the first thing is to stop paying attention to what everybody else is doing. Like there is a huge, huge difference between being informed and inspired and becoming really kind of overly oriented to what other people are doing. Sometimes that's because you just see another coach launch something and you start to question your own direction, or someone announces that they're booked out, and now your nervous system thinks you're behind someone's talking about this sparkling new course platform, and you just think, oh, maybe I'll relocate my entire business there, right? And so the problem isn't really the comparison or the paying attention. Like sometimes that can give us useful information, but it becomes a bit of a problem when we allow someone else's visible choices to become evidence that what we're doing either isn't enough or there are a squillion other things that we should be doing. So yeah, I would ignore what everyone else is doing, and partly because every coach is playing a different game to you, like your business is a standalone one-off. You have different audiences, circumstances, values, business models, preferences, right? So instead of paying attention to what everyone else is doing, ask yourself like what's the game I'm playing? Like, what does progress look like in my game? Is this information relevant or has it just activated me? And what am I trying to distract myself from? Alright, the second thing is don't give your attention to getting your positioning perfectly right. Yeah, so one of the things we talked about in last week's episode was how important it is to know the problem that your coaching helps to solve. And I genuinely believe this is so key. It it's the foundational thing that builds so many things, right? It helps you create coherent offers and a bit of an ecosystem that's designed to help real humans, like not the made-up client avatar from the $27 cuddly toy offer you bought that one time. And what can happen when we start to make the link between the kind of coaching you do, the outcomes your clients are looking for, designing offers that create that really obvious next step for them is that we can get a bit stuck in getting it right. And look, I mean, I so get this. I and as I started to find out, like the biggest common denominator between all my clients was actually self-doubt. Like, I did not go, great, let me create um a business that reflects that. That took way longer than it needed to because I went off and did a two years master's degree because I felt like I needed to be legit enough to claim that work. So you don't need to be doing that, right? And I and I do totally get that feeling that somehow if I land on the perfect niche or the tagline or the kind of elevator pitch, right? Then my business will finally begin to move. It's that idea that when it's right, then I'll be safe. When it's right, then this will be easy. And look, I think positioning really does matter. People do need to recognize that our work is relevant to them. But how you talk about it, you know, claiming a specific niche and being able to put that into some elevator pitch, it's not the magic, right? There isn't some sacred sentence or a way of explaining your work that's buried somewhere that once you kind of dig it up and it comes to light, it's gonna make all the difference. I think it's so much better to just have a working theory, like a direction of travel, and it will become clearer and clearer through your connection with actual humans as you're coaching and listening and sharing ideas and seeing what lands, making offers, like you'll notice the language people use, you'll discover the specific challenges that feel really alive to your clients, and which ones you just kind of made up because you didn't really have that the knowledge yet, right? So that they looked great in your notebook, but when you test them out in the market, it's like, oh, actually, this isn't really landing. So I think we find the answers when we're in action. So I would say openness, curiosity, adaptability matters way more than certainty. Waiting for that clicking into place and searching for it before you show up. It's just a massive distraction from kind of getting your hands dirty, right? Like I think that the perfectionism, the idea that there is a right way to do this, it can be a super seductive substitute for actual participation. Okay, third distraction thing I want you to stop paying attention to right now is the machinery of business, right? Things like websites, funnels, branding, lead magnets, automations, platforms, content systems, the one sentence you must use that will mean a cold audience, start to follow you and then buy everything. Like most of these aspects of the machinery of a business are useful. Like, you know, I love a gorgeous bit of copy, copy, an elegant system as much as the next person. But what I want you to remember is that the machinery of your business is gonna amplify what's already there. So a funnel can't rescue an offer that people don't want. Sexy branding can't replace some trust from an audience, an automated nurture sequence, it won't compensate for you never talking to anybody, right? So and also like the machinery is super appealing because it's largely controllable and measurable, right? We can kind of go off and create this thing, whereas the human connection stuff is much messier, but your business infrastructure is going to support your demand, the demand for your work. It can't create it, right? So I would just say if you're getting a bit distracted with all of that stuff, ask yourself like, is this bit of machinery solving a real problem in my business? Or is it just allowing me to feel busy without doing the more vulnerable work of being known and building relationships and making invitations? I'd also offer that if you're in an early stage of business, you can absolutely create a full client roster with a Google Doc and real life conversations about your work. And I know that sounds ridiculous, but having having a Google Doc that says, look, this is my offer, this is what I provide, and you're answering the questions like what problems does your coaching help solve, who are your ideal clients, what what are they experiencing before they work with you? How do they recognize themselves in your offer? That is gold, and this is the the work that your clients actually want. They don't really care about a sexy website, it's a nice to have. So having a really powerful conversation in real life with different people and having a way of saying, hey, yeah, look, if you want to have a chat about working with me, I can send you a little doc which has got some info about the kinds of people I work with. See if that resonates and book a call with me. That is the gold. That's all you kind of need. It's such a low barrier to entry. You'd be crazy to wait for a website that you're probably gonna need to rewrite in the first year anyway. And I totally understand that having a website can make you feel legitimate. But I would say for the first year of my business, the first sort of 50 to 100 hours of client work, I literally had a free blogger site with a link in the sidebar to contact me for coaching. I didn't really have a niche, I was still kind of coming to terms with becoming a life coach. So freaking cheesy, it felt to me. So I called myself a life transformer. I had a little robot icon on my site, right? But I did show up a few times a week. I turned my blog from what I now can see was the most cringe, confessional kind of public diary, to more coaching-relevant content, writing, sharing, inviting. And about a year in, I created a much more professional website. But I think you know, don't get distracted by needing all these things in place. Be willing to have conversations. Your website is not your business, your your coaching skills are your business. Your list of subscribers is your business. That's the first thing I would do if I was starting again now. Once you get a bit more established, you'll know that you'll probably need more infrastructure because the demand will be there. Okay, the fourth distraction, and probably the most important one, is please stop giving your attention to worrying about what other people think. Because that's always going to probably be there, right? We worry that they'll think we're too much or too visible or too confident, too expensive, too earnest, too ambitious, too niche, not niche enough. We worry that people will see us trying and make judgments about us. And the paradox of all of this is that these things are totally possible, even likely. Like that's probably gonna happen that people will think those things about you. And we almost never stop to identify who these people actually are and what role we want them to have in our world. So often there is a kind of imagined audience that we just assemble. They might be former colleagues, that's often a big one when you're first starting out. But family members, people from school, someone you worked with 15 years ago, strangers on the internet, these these folks kind of form a like an invisible committee that are sitting beside you. And one thinks your offer is too expensive, and one thinks coaching is just nonsense and doesn't get it. And frankly, Brenda from your old job is appalled that you've used the word transformative. She thinks you've joined a cult. So now you're trying to make business decisions that receive unanimous approval from a committee that you've made up in your head. Maybe this is just something I did. But if you if this resonates, like, but I think the thing to notice is nothing's gone wrong. Like, of course, we care what people think. Belonging matters, reputation matters when it's your business, right? Being misjudged or rejected can feel really uncomfortable. It still does to me. Being witness trying feels risky. So I don't think the answer is to become someone who doesn't care. Like, stop just stop caring what people think is a pretty brittle instruction. But instead, I just think we need to get a bit more discerning about whose opinion deserves our attention and what is just a distraction. Like whose opinion deserves to influence me? What risk is my imagined committee trying to protect me from? Because often the job of the committee is to reflect back our own fears, our own internal worries and doubts, and we give them to the committee, and then it feels like external evidence, right? So none of this makes the risks meaningless. It just means we probably need to slow down, stay with the facts so we can respond to what is actually happening. Like probably nobody has judged you yet. Maybe a protective part of you is just anticipating that judgment so you can edit yourself in advance and avoid the vulnerability of finding out. So discernment comes in and just says, you know, is this feedback I've actually received or something I'm almost anticipating? Right? Is this a worry I actually have and what do I need to do to take care of it? Is this actual feedback that's really bloody useful? Because I think sometimes what other people think can really help us. Like your prospective client's confusion about your offer, so helpful. A trusted supervisor's concern about your scope of practice, really useful. But a random coach preferring a different business model is not necessarily information that you need to build around, and neither is your former colleagues' imagined opinion about the fact that you now work on the internet, right? But when we don't distinguish between meaningful feedback and the possibility of judgment, we can start organizing ourselves around preventing disapproval, which makes our messaging softer, probably a bit beige. It can make the offers broader. We might price according to what feels least likely to provoke a reaction or be difficult for anyone, and that becomes exhausting. It also doesn't necessarily make our offers better or our business stronger, it often just makes it harder to recognize because when we're trying to not repel anyone, we also stop giving the right people anything really clear that says this is for you. So instead of paying attention to the people we want to serve, the quality of our work and what we genuinely believe, our attention becomes captured by this imagined committee or by people whose opinion just isn't relevant. So we stop asking, is this true? Is this useful? Is this the work I want to stand behind? And we start getting really distracted by, oh, how will I be perceived for saying this or doing that? And I think the risk is this doesn't just happen in our marketing, it will follow us into coaching conversations. So that's when we start to worry whether the client thinks we're doing a good job, or whether our question was clever enough or clear enough, whether the session feels valuable, whether this client will renew or leave a glowing testimonial, right? And I would just want to say I have a morsel of these worries still present. Now though, I'm just super aware of when they show up, how to take care of myself, and my primary focus is to minimize any entanglement with the client. Because when I need my client to think that I'm a good coach, part of my attention is no longer available to them. So I might start rushing towards a breakthrough because I want the session to feel really impressive, or I might avoid creating some useful tension because I don't want them to feel uncomfortable around me. Or I might offer an interpretation too soon because sitting in that not knowing with someone makes me feel a bit crunchy. I might also mistake their immediate satisfaction for some aha moment for evidence that the coaching is serving their deeper development. And let me just be really clear. I've absolutely brought all of these things into sessions. Like this is part of the gig. And so we just try to remember what Auntie Maya says, you know, when you know better, you do better. To recognize, like, okay, what's my work to do here? For me, it's usually boundaries, right? It's usually not rescuing clients. So when you sort of worry about what other people think and it's a huge distraction, I think the way to sort of tip out of that is to start to become really interested in what you think. Like be onto yourself. Know when you're hiding, protecting, waiting, like you'll know how that you're doing that because you it will just feel different in your body. Know how it shows up in your business because it's probably going to leak into your client work. Like, if you're trying to be acceptable on social media, you're probably gonna do this in sessions too. And the other way I see this showing up is um when it feels risky to trust your intuition or to uh be with uncertainty, coaching tools become incredibly. Appealing, right? Like we want we want to know what the questions are, a framework that we can stand behind, or a question that might create this visible breakthrough that reassures both you and the clients something valuable is happening. And that brings me to the fifth distraction, which is collecting more coaching tools. And of course, I bloody love coach training. I mean, honestly, don't you just wish every human could have that? I remember my first training with the Coaches Training Institute, live in London, in-person training. I remember when we did that. And I had this genuine mind-bending moment of what do you mean my thoughts aren't real? Like, like it felt like I'd unlocked some hidden level of adulthood. Like when Copernicus discovered the Earth is moving around the sun, and for centuries before that, we just believed Earth was at the center of the universe, it was that level shift, right? So, yes, training, amazing. Learning is definitely one of my love languages. I've spent years studying coaching and psychology and human development, and I've trained almost a hundred coaches in my own methodology. I'm a huge, huge fan of coaching tools. And particularly when we're newer, tools give us structure when the blankness of an open coaching conversation just feels really bloody daunting. And this takes us, I think, into those first kind of 200 hours of coaching, um coaching with clients. There are always going to be points in every coach's experience where the client finishes speaking, looks expectantly at us, and then our entire brain just leaves the building. Right? So a framework gives us a place to begin. Good questions create movement, and exercise can really open something up that the client hadn't considered before. And over time, these tools will probably become part of your repertoire, right? You you stop following them perhaps quite so carefully, and you adapt them and combine them and begin to recognize when introducing a tool would interrupt something more important that's already unfolding. I think this is how practice becomes embodied. But the distraction begins when we start feeling like there's just a deeper layer that we aren't reaching with our clients, and you might start to feel a level of dissatisfaction or feel like something is missing. Here's how that tends to show up. So you're working with clients that are intelligent and insightful and self-aware, and they kind of know what they should do, and they might even understand why they aren't doing it. And the same patterns keep returning, right? You're sensing something more significant is happening beneath the story they're telling you, but you're not quite sure what to listen for or how to work with it. Understandably, this is where we tend to go, oh, I just need another model, I need another tool, a more powerful question or an exercise. But I think there is also a stage of maturity, if I can use that word, in our coach development, where we don't really need more tools. What we need is different ways of seeing what's already happening, right? Our own kind of Copernican revelation. And I sometimes think about coaching as having layers, that these conversations we have with clients have layers. There's the story the client brings, right? The difficult boss, or the decision they can't make, the boundary they keep avoiding. And beneath that story, there might be a pattern that has appeared in other parts of their life, or a belief that makes that apparently obvious next step feel much more risky than it looks from the outside. And underneath this, there are even deeper layers, which are about meaning making and identity and the way that we make sense of the world. All of the layers matter. But when we only pay attention to the presenting problem, we might help the client solve this version of it without really getting to what keeps recreating it and how to actually move out of that story. So being able to name the layers is super different from coaching an actual warm breathing five-dimensional human to move through it. Because clients don't arrive, obviously, with their story, their patterns, their underlying belief systems, their identity markers into nice kind of color-coded folders. They contradict themselves and change direction and they tell us something that feels important and then casually reveal the real stuff while you know there's three minutes to go on the clock, right? That happens all the time. And we are not standing outside the conversation objectively, like we're in this relationship too with our own responses and histories and assumptions and need to be helpful and all of that stuff. And I think that's why this work is asking for more than just knowing the right tool. So if this sounds familiar to you, I think what you're being asked to notice, what you're being asked to develop, perhaps, is the discernment to make really thoughtful choices about where the conversation goes next and what layer would best help the client. And that's really the thread that's running through everything we've talked about today, right? In your business, discernment helps you separate meaningful action from seductive busy work. In your coaching, discernment helps you listen to the story the client brings while being open to what's actually happening beneath it. Just to say, I've actually created a new free masterclass that's called Beyond the Story. It's for coaches who feel like they've reached the edge of what they were trained for. And it's for those sessions where the client understands the problem, you've asked the awful questions, and yet you can sense that you're circling something deeper. So if this sounds like fun to you, please do check out the link in the show notes. Um, it's not till the 2nd of September, so it gives us both something to look forward to. But the link will take you to a page that gives you all the info and you can see if this would be helpful for you. Um and this week, like really notice what is receiving your attention? Is it a lot of signals pointing you in a direction that your discernment is really interested in, or is it a lot of noise? What becomes possible if you stop giving the noise so much of you? Alright, love, have an amazing week. I will see you next time.