#306: Bring Your Ideas to Life – Behind the Scenes of My Latest Project

Michelle:
Hello there, health coaches. I hope your fall is off to an amazing start. I've been enjoying mine very much with the kids back in school. I had coffee today with a friend of mine who is also an entrepreneur and podcaster, which is lovely because when everyone else is at the office, we kind of make our own schedules and we can get together. So that has got to be, I mean, I don't know about you, but for me, that is the best part of running your own coaching business. It's the flexibility. Love it. But it's like a double- edged sword because the hardest part of running your own coaching business is that all that flexibility means there's no structure, and you're just kind of freewheeling, aren't you? It is up to you to decide what you want to do when you want to do it, and then actually make it happen.

Has anyone noticed that this can be tricky? It is a blessing and a curse. It is, in many ways easier, although I feel like I'm entirely unemployable at this point, so I will never go back to working for anybody else. But in many ways it is easier for a boss to tell you, here, I need you to do X, Y, Z tasks, and then you go ahead and you do X, Y, Z tasks done. So today I thought I would share a little behind the scenes of my own business and how I've recently brought an idea to life that had been shelved for a while because I just couldn't figure it out. I just didn't know how to do it yet. And as you'll see, I'm still not entirely sure how to do it yet, but yet it's happening anyway. This is certainly not the first time that I've created something brand new from scratch, something that's never been done before, or at least something that I had never done before.

I'm thinking back to 2010, that was the first year of my health coaching practice, and I got run. I got this idea that I was going to run a short detox program online. Detoxing was very hot in 2010, and online programs were very, very new. I had never taken one. I had certainly never offered one. I'm sure other people were doing it maybe, but I felt like I was basically the first. I didn't have a model to follow. How was I going to advertise it? How was I going to get people there? How was I going to collect money? How was I going to meet with all of the participants? I had to figure all that stuff out from scratch, and it was so worth it. I mean, there were definitely some hiccups along the way, but I had participants from all around the world for the first time, and I thought, Hmm, there's real potential in working online. PS I've been fully online ever since.

So there's one example, and then I remember even just starting this podcast, having absolutely no clue how to start a podcast. I had basically never even listened to a podcast before. I just asked my assistant to take the weekly q and as that I was doing right here inside the health Coach Power Community Facebook group, and could she publish them to podcast for me? And she was like, do you want to record an intro? And I was like, oh. So I did. And that's how we started the first and now the biggest podcast in the health coach business niche. But my point is, you're going to have ideas, and I know you have ideas and you won't know how to go from zero to a hundred right away, but if you go zero to one and I want to do that with you today, and then you go from one to two and then two to three over time, you can figure this stuff out. And that is the secret to success when you're running your own business. You just start and you figure it out as you go. I've heard of entrepreneurship as being explained, as jumping out of of a plane and building the parachute on your way down. You figure it out as you go.

So if you are here with me live, and I know that several of you are, I'm recording live as I do every single week in two, our Facebook group. Tell me in the chat, what's an idea that you have for your health coaching business, big idea, small idea, things that you think that would be really cool. I would really like to do that, or this would be such an interesting thing for me to explore, or I'd like to do something like that other thing I saw. Even if you have absolutely no idea how you would ever accomplish it, in fact, especially if you have no idea how you would actually accomplish it, just shout it out to the universe and we'll start here in our chat area if you're brave, because this is a start. This is a safe place. Just to verbalize what you are thinking somewhere in your head would be really, really cool. Let's see. Rosalyn's saying a menopause program and then moving the clients into a membership. I mean, Rosalyn, I don't know about you, but most of our coaches are like, ah, I don't have a first clue how to do any kind of membership. How does that work? Right? And it's all right. If we're just in that space of where would these people come from, what would I share with them? Yada, yada, yada. Question after question. It's all questions in the beginning. So we just make the statement. We put it out there. The other day, I told my boyfriend that I'm interested in doing triathlons, and he laughed and I laughed, and we both laughed because it's hilarious because I don't run. I definitely don't bike. I don't really swim well, but nonetheless, it interests me. So I spoke this idea out loud, and that right there is going from zero to one. I was just saying, that's it, just zero to one. That's all you got to do today. Just that part where you crystallize the idea, you bring it into existence. That's it. That's your first step. And he was like, well, you got to start training. You got to do this. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. I just had to speak it out loud. That's where I am today. And then here's what happens with all of these ideas. Sometimes they sit on the shelf for a day, for a year, for a decade. Who knows? Maybe nothing happens. But in my experience, and I'm sure you've all felt the power of manifesting something new, once you speak it, once you write it, once you tell someone about it, you're like 100 times more likely to make it happen. I don't understand the mechanics there. I just know that's true, and that's been the case with something that I've been working on in my business lately.

So this one started over a year ago when I went to San Diego for the Health and Wellbeing Coaching Conference, which I shared all about in episode 248, if you want to hear about it. Now, that was the first time that I saw an event for health coaches that was not associated with a particular health coaching school. It was however strongly associated with the N-D-H-W-C, which is cool, but I thought, what about an event for all of us, for all health coaches, regardless of the school, regardless of your certification or your level or the type of diet that you follow, or whether you're more functional medicine based or more holistic, earthy, crunchy, health coaches come in. All types, all types. And here's what we have in common. We all need clients. Yes. Who here needs clients? It doesn't matter what school you went to, we're all very much in the same boat there. So I put out to the universe, which was really my team, my inner circle here. I said, I want to host something like this. I want to host a conference or some type of event for all health coaches, something that spanned between business building and social time, and of course wellness activities, something that got health coaches out of the house. I mean, most health coaches are women. Most of us are in age range where we're taking care of the kids. We're doing a lot of caretaking in our lives. We don't always get that break. I think it's important, right? We want to get health coaches out of the house, out of working in their usual kitchen table.

I know a lot of my business was built just sitting at my kitchen table by myself. I want to bring everyone together. That was the vision. Do you like that idea? Just give me a thumbs up in the chat if you like that idea so far. I mean, it was like a big idea. This is far beyond anything I had ever done before. I did not know how to do anything like that. I have never hosted an in-person event like that before. No way know how not to mention a multi-day event. So this idea went on the shelf, that's where it went. I dusted it for a while. So maybe you have an idea like that. Wouldn't it be cool to fill in the blank? But logistically it seems impossible or financially it seems impossible. Don't throw the ideas away, keep 'em on the shelf. Look at them every so often, dust 'em off a little bit. So then what happened was this past spring, I had a chance to host an in-person gathering in New York City. Now, it was not a full on conference or anything like that. It was only a few hours on one evening. I knew health coaches were going to be in town for the Heal the Healer conference. So I kind of piggybacked on that, and I tested this idea of bringing coaches together for some social time, and it was delightful. But putting that together, even just that small event, honestly, it required a totally different skillset than organizing an online event. I can pull off an online event in my sleep. I've been doing this for 15 years, but the logistics of finding a location, looking at menus, oh my goodness, getting people there, getting myself there.

This was all brand new. Again, I thought this went well. So it would be really cool to go back to that idea about hosting a bigger event, something on a larger scale. So here's what I guess I didn't learn it for the first time, but here's something that I was reminded of and I want to pass it on to you. If you have a big idea, my best advice is to try it out in smaller ways. What would that big idea look like at half size or quarter size or one eighth its size? Could you make that happen? What's the tiniest version of that idea that you could pull off right now? So for Rosalyn, she says she'd like to do this membership, but she has no clue about memberships. I always suggest to health coaches before you open up some type of membership program, which is very tricky. I'm just going to tell you right now, do it for do something that's like four weeks. See if you can get people signed up for that, and if that's a big success, great. Next time it could be 12 weeks. And if they want to do it for 12 weeks and they still want more, that clues you in that this might be something that you could do on an ongoing basis. You got to do things in that tiny version first, and then when you actually do it at miniature size, what you're doing is you're to flex the muscles needed for the bigger thing, right? It's like anything. So what might the tiny version look like of your big idea? Other thing that I learned in New York is that an in-person event requires a ton of energy, like a ton of energy. I am more of an introverted person by nature.

I could not imagine hosting something for several days straight where I'm on the stage, the actual stage or the proverbial stage or whatever the whole time. Because when we do stuff online, we do a webinar, we do a live stream. It's 30 minutes, maybe it's 60 minutes, but for a multi-day in-person event, oh no. I was like, I'm going to need other presenters, other activities, other people helping run the show for sure. And that was really scary to me. Maybe some of you have done stuff like this, but I've never done anything like that. I'm not even much of a party planner in my personal life, so I'm like, gosh, who would I invite to stand on the stage with me? What would that even look like? How would I get them there and would they want to come and would they want to be part of my event?

All these ideas just flooded my brain. I kind of froze, and the idea went back on the shelf, all right, back on the shelf. Every time. That's what kind of happens. You make a little progress and then you're still not sure how to go the whole way. It's not a straight line. The creation process, I was thinking about this because I went to college for art. My first degree was in graphic design and any kind of creative process, it's never linear. So you could be oil painting, you could be concepting the next technology innovation, and you're going to go in circles, you're going to double back. You're going to have false starts in different directions, and this really is all part of the process does not mean you're failing. I don't know if you've felt that way with any of your ideas so far. Even a simple thing.

I know for some of you, you're like, I haven't started a mailing list yet, Michelle. I know I have to start a mailing list. And you're just like, okay, I'm going to put it out there. I'm going to start my mailing list. Sometimes you're not able to move through from the idea to completion. That's not failure. That's just how great things eventually emerge. If you keep doing the work, you keep dancing around the idea, you keep touching that idea on the shelf. Sometimes the thing you end up with at the end, the masterpiece, it's not even really what you intended. Sometimes it's even better, and that's been the case so many times in my life. So I'll tell you the next thing that happened. I'm just living my life over here. I'm working on all our usual this podcast week, all our different courses inside Healthy Profit University. It's just like business as usual. And my friend Jana O, who has been on this show several times, so maybe Jana, Jana invites me to be part of her micro audio summit. I'm like, what's that? I had never heard of such a thing. So she told me about it. I agreed, and I saw how simple and streamlined it was. The way she ran it, I got to kind of observe. And for an event that had multiple presenters, I thought it was a really lovely collaboration and she handled it really gracefully. And I thought maybe there's something to that. I don't want to do exactly that, but maybe there's something to that. So I asked Jana how she did it, and she actually pointed me to a woman named Wendy Breakstone who coined this term Micro Audio Summit. So anyway, like I said, it turns out that even though most of that model is not what I was looking for, this path, this discovery led me to figuring out a way to bring multiple experts together.

That was new for me, and that might not seem like a big deal from the outside, but once you're working with other people's businesses, you've got to consider their schedules, their business model, contracts, all sorts of things that I just never really done that before. And this fall actually in just a couple of weeks, the next slightly larger iteration of this idea of this big idea of mine is coming to life. So if you haven't already heard, it's called the Audience Attraction Virtual Retreat for Health Coaches, and it's got all this stuff that I had envisioned. It's got a place for all health coaches to come together regardless of certification or what kind of coach you are. I pulled from my pretty vast network and I invited very specific industry experts who I knew would bring value to this event for you. And some of them are technically, I guess you would consider them my competitors, but in this industry, I never see anybody as a competitor, and I hope you don't either. We're all on the same side. We're all working to make the world a healthier place and just elevate health coaching as a field. So anyway, we're going to include wellness activities. We've got coaches from our community all getting some exciting exposure, and we'll have live time together through social connection every single day. Now it's all virtual. One day, I still would like to see this be an in-person retreat, somewhere warm somewhere with great food and massages and swimming and all the things. The vision is still emerging. However, I also know that something like that would come at a significant cost for all of you, right? We'd have plane fare, hotel, et cetera, and that means that not every coach would be included, not be able to go, right? Even just the scheduling. It's hard to get away for a whole weekend. It's hard to get away for a whole week.

I think it would be great, but I also know there's challenges there. So I'm like, you know what? For now, for now, I'm going to lean into this virtual idea and the strength of things being done virtually. So this Fall's Audience Attraction virtual retreat, it is entirely free. So there's that meaning really entirely free. There's no upsell, there's no product being promoted, none of that. There's no pressure to buy anything at all. It's just going to be there for you to enjoy on your own timeline. And in that way, hopefully the goal of reaching all health coaches can actually be accomplished much better than a retreat to the Caribbean, although I would also really, really love to do that. So free tickets are available. Remember, this is probably not the final iteration of this idea, but it's where we're at right now, and free tickets are at healthcoachpower.com/audience.

You can go grab yours now and tell your health coach friends about it because so far, first of all, it's been a wild success already. I'm shocked and all the pieces are falling into place very easily. I want you to remember this in your own business because I think when you allow something to unfold organically, one doable iteration at a time, then there's a flow, there's an ease to it, and all the pieces do fall into place, and here's what's going to happen. If we get a great turnout, will there be another iteration in service of the Health Coach community? Yes, of course, you bet. If we can have more involvement, maybe we'll have sponsors in the future. I mean, this thing can grow. It can evolve further, for sure. We'll see. We'll see what happens. But this episode today is really like my next declaration of, here's something I want to do.
I want to tell you all about it so that the universe really hears it loud and clear. Here's the intention. So let's manifest something brilliant. Let's get on that for now. Get your free tickets at healthcoachpower.com/audience, and then my challenge to you is to strongly declare your own vision. Name it, crystallize it, write it down. Come put it over here in our Facebook group. Whatever you got to do, and then do the work to allow it to unfold exactly how it's meant to. Thanks for being here, everybody. We'll see you at the Audience Attraction Virtual Retreat, and we'll see you back here next week for our next episode. bye-bye.