How to Know if You'd Benefit From Working With A Creative Business Coach
Why should a creative business owner hire a business coach?
The short answer is…. to have a trained brain show you when your brain is stuck in a pattern.
A lot of what we think is fact is just a story on repeat in our heads.
I, as your coach, show you the multitude of possibilities, help you devise solutions, and ultimately help you move forward with a decision you love.
One way to imagine our habits and thought patterns is to imagine a trail of ants.
In my 20s on a study abroad in Mexico, I saw ant paths so old that the millions of tiny feet had burrowed a deep channel into the earth- over what must have been decades of uninterrupted travel. It was like the Grand Canyon for ants.
Your brain works the same way.
At some point, probably when you were young, a thought or belief was presented to you.
You believed it, and continued to think that over and over.
Your brain LOVES efficiency, patterns, and ease so this thought, over and over, created a belief so well worn in your head that you thought it was even part of who you are.
Any thoughts can do this.
Useful thoughts like, “I can figure out anything.” and not useful thoughts like, “I screw everything up.”
These thoughts are so worn and part of us, we forget they are a choice and they come up automatically. Without even consciously noticing they are either supporting our creative endeavors or holding us back - keeping us small.
Here’s some of the challenges some of my creative business owners come to me with:
building and running a creative business is hard, and you are sensing burn out.
you are dissatisfied with where you are.
you believe your wealth, or your success, or what’s possible for you is in any way capped.
you ‘cannot lead a team’ and you think that is holding you back.
you think that by offering someone to buy your offering, you are somehow being skeezy.
If you don’t know how to (fill in the blank).
you spin out in self-doubt and judgement.
you don’t see how you can make enough money.
you make decisions based out of fear of what might go wrong, or what you can’t handle.
One of my first coaching experiences came about the time I had my first child. Until then, I had gotten by with a part-time assistant and a project based on-call crew. I knew that to have my babe with me at work for a year, I was going to need to amp up my staff.
I’ve dabbled in this before but always failed- because my thought habits involved something like this:
My clients hire us because they want my design skills
I can’t find anyone to do all the things I can do.
I’ll have to settle for lower quality designs.
I will have to take a pay cut because I’ll have to pay more for labor.
I won’t be able to take more work because we won’t be able to handle it- and I don’t know if I want to handle it with a new baby.
My staff won’t be able to handle all the things that can go wrong without me.
And it’s no wonder I failed with thoughts like this running amok in my head. What do they all create?
Distrust in my staff,
Avoidance to looking for the right staff,
Judgement of the very people I would need to depend on.
Discouragement and dread over what was to come.
Gross right? What’s funny is you might be reading some of these and thinking… ya, you might have to take a pay cut.
Here’s the thing though. Every one of these thoughts was an error. Every. One.
They were stories and were wholly untrue. Not only did my staff thrive without my micromanagement guidance, but it was our most profitable year to date- that means with a larger staff, the company and I made more money than when I was bottle-necking the operation.
What made that success possible when I had failed in the past?
The coaching I received to view my people as an asset.
To trust their abilities, intuition, and their own growth.
The willingness to find processes that would make success likely.
The confidence to raise my prices and trust that the outcome could be better than I had imagined.
listen, if you are nodding your head to any of this, I want to tell you that i can help you get to the other side.
As your coach:
I’m not your best friend (I’m not here to just listen)
I’m not your drill sergeant (I’m not going to make you do something that isn’t in line with what is right for you),
I’m not your therapist (I don’t care why you are the way you are- only steps forward)…
I’m here to show you when your brain is being a butthead- when it’s leading you to an empty parking lot instead of an overflowing garden.
I’m here to show you how to redirect your focus on the things that are, the things that are inevitable, all the truth options that you are not seeing because your brain has worn a path to take you somewhere else.
When that well worn path is creating a brain environment that leads to you spinning out in confusion, procrastinating, or over-worrying… that’s when I can guide you to the path that will lead you to taking the bold actions you need to take to make it to the other side of your obstacle.
That path probably needs a little pruning before it can even be identifiable as a footpath.
I’ll show you how.
Email me to chat about how I can help you through coaching.
