#308: Getting Started or Starting Over as a Health Coach

Hello there, health coaches. First, before I forget because today has already got me thrown off my schedule and I just know I'm going to forget. This episode is brought to you by my upcoming audience Attraction virtual Retreat for health coaches. So if you're tired of working alone and would love to connect with the health coaches in our community, plus get expert guidance to attract a bigger audience, which we're going to also talk about today, get your free ticket. It is completely free at healthcoachpower.com/audience. This event starts September 29th, 2024, and that's coming up. So don't miss this Health Coach event of the year. I'm bringing together coaches from all areas of the industry and free tickets, again are at healthcoachpower.com/audience and popping that in the chat over here. I see Debbie is joining us live as well as a few others of you. Thank you so much for being here.

We have had this big influx of new members into our free Facebook group, which I'm assuming is because of this event that's going on. We have lots and lots of new members joining us. Very exciting. Did you know that this whole thing, this whole Health coach power community, it started as a Facebook group. I know many of our listeners find this show searching on Spotify or Apple or whatever, but about 10 years ago, this whole thing just started as a little Facebook group. It was me and a few of my health coach friends. That's all it was for a while until I started getting all these requests from other health coaches to join. So I was like, fine, fine, I'll let in other health coaches that I don't already know. And suddenly the group took off, the community took off. I started doing live sessions like this every week and eventually started publishing them to podcasts and the community itself, this is still the heart of everything that we do.

So I am always in our Facebook group. I am always noticing what you're asking about, what you're looking for, and this week I saw Nikki's post and this is what Nikki had to say. She said, honestly, I need help to figure out where to start. I was so pumped to get started after completing my course, but had too much going on to dedicate the time it needed. And now that I have more time, it seems overwhelming thinking about how to get started, how to find my first few clients without already having success stories. So are you like Nikki, can you relate to this at all? It's been a while since I did an episode for those of you just starting out, and I don't know that we've ever really talked about this idea of starting over, but it happens a lot. Coaches will get certified, maybe work with a few clients or maybe even work for a year or two, and then we get derailed for various reasons. You get married, you get divorced, you become a caretaker for an elderly parent, and when you come back, welcome back. We're always happy to have you back, but it does feel like starting over, doesn't it? And you need to do so many things, or at least that's what your brain is telling you. I can't start because I can't start until it just feels like you need so many things to get back into the game. Like Nikki thinks that she needs client success stories, for example. What are you worried about if you're here live with me? Tell me in the chat, what is it that you're telling yourself you need before you can, A lot of coaches think they need a website first thing before they can really begin, or you need a whole client management tech setup or you need to be on social media every day, or you need a fancy program designed and built.
I'm getting high blood pressure just thinking about all of that. What else do you worry about that you need before you can start your health coaching business? Mimi says, I'm in the same boat as Nikki usually when I have this conversation with coaches, my main advice as this, and this is still good, solid advice, I'm just going to expand upon it today. My best advice for you is you need a mailing list. That's what you need. That is true. You need a mailing list before a website. It's way more important than a social media account. A mailing list is going to be much more helpful than just about anything that you can spend time on. However, and maybe your brain is already saying this to you, our brain is like, oh, it's just always trying to protect us. And what happens in your business is your brain just starts coming up with the reasons and the excuses and I can't becauses.

So coaches are always very quick to point this out. You might already be thinking, well, who's going to be on my list? Were you thinking that? And then we get stuck right there. I see this happen time and time again. I'm giving you guys the answers. Every week. I'm try this, do this, do it in this order. Here's how this works. I'm saying you need a mailing list and you just go, but I don't have anyone to put on my list, Michelle, so I can't. I can't. And that's where you get stuck. Of course, we all start small. We all start with a list that's comprised of a couple friends, a couple family members, but it's a really good question. I mean, I got to admit you're forward thinking. All right. I like that you're thinking, who is going to be on my list, not just today, my sister, my mother, my best friend, but in the future.

So I'm going to amend my fallback answer of, to get started, you need a mailing list to...to get started, you need an audience, any kind of audience, you need a following of some kind, and that might look a little different for each of us. So I'll give you some examples and then tell me in the chat what kind of audience you already have. So for example, when I started my business, I had a health blog, a very rudimentary basic, didn't know what I was doing, but I had a health blog and my blog had loyal readers for some odd reason. Anyway, that was a following. That was an audience that I had available to me at the time. Now, I was also teaching yoga, and I know many of you are either doing yoga or Pilates or personal training or reiki or massage or whatever it is you're doing in addition to health coaching or before you became a health coach.
So for me, it was yoga. Every week I was standing in front of a room of maybe, I don't know, over the course of a week, 50, 60, maybe, I dunno, a hundred people eyes on me talking about their bodies, talking about their health. That's an audience right there. You might not think of it that way because you're like, well, that's my other job or that's another thing that I'm doing. But if you have eyeballs on you in any capacity, that is an audience. So again, if you're here with me live as I'm recording this episode, tell me in the chat where do you already have some kind of following, some group of people who know about you and in some way paying attention to you. Now, it's a bonus of course, if it's something that's around health and wellness. But even if it's not, I want you to consider the audience you already have and how you can lean into it.

Now, here's an example of a non-health and wellness related audience that helped me tremendously in my career. So I used to work in big advertising, worked at the ad agencies. So I had a group of people. There are hundreds and hundreds of us in that office. I think we had 800 employees in the Boston office, and I had connection to all these people, many of whom were very interested in what I was doing. After I left advertising, many of them were following me. They were interested in hearing about what I was going to do next because so many of them felt the way I felt stressed, having health problems, seeing no way out of an industry that pays really well, but just runs you into the ground. So that was another audience I had that didn't have anything to do with teaching about health. I'm going to tell you how many of those people ended up becoming my clients or led me to opportunities that led me to clients.

So what do you got for me so far? No one is telling me about any audiences. Your brain is telling you, I don't have an audience. I don't have that. I'm not like Michelle, dah, dah, dah, dah, right? These are the all I can't be causes. Let's see here. Debbie says in the dog park, I'm a life coach with a holistic integrative approach. In the dog park is the dog park your audience. What? Think about that. Think about your community. Think about your walking group. Think about your book club. Think about the dog park. Wherever you are, where people kind of already know and trust you, this is where you want to lean in when you're getting started or when you're starting over, it's much harder to get new eyeballs on you than to work with the ones you already have. Mimi says, I remind my ladies on Facebook to perform their self exams at the beginning of every month.
Not many comment, but I consistently do this. Okay, great. I didn't even mention this because I'm always trying to tell you guys, you don't need social media in this case. Hello. You might already have a bit of an audience on social media, right? In the beginning of every month, Mimi's friends are waiting for her to post, or they're not surprised when she posts and said, Hey, don't forget about your self exam. You can lean into this if you already have a following. Now, if you don't have an Instagram account and you've never been on Facebook and you start one, you don't have an audience there yet, start with what you already do have. So that's a starting point. These are people that you will want to eventually and hopefully sooner than later, get onto your mailing list. These are the people to invite to your events.

These are the people that you're going to tell about anything that you're doing as a health coach because they're already listening. They're already communicating with you. So I remember teaching yoga classes back in the day and way back when I would offer a 21 day detox. So leading up to that detox program, I made sure that my yoga classes were full of a lot of twists, like a real twisting sequence. And when I had everybody bound up like a pretzel, I would talk about the detoxifying nature of twists and just how healthy they were for you. Talk about their digestion, talk about ringing out the body, which was a perfect segue to mentioning that I had a detox coming up and it didn't even have to be a hard sell. I'm not telling Debbie to go to the dog park and start pitching her services really hard, but there's a way to weave it into your conversation.
So I would just mention it, and sure enough, my yoga students would come up to me after class asking for more information. So whose eyes and ears are already on you? What else do we have over here in my chat? Debbie said, Nikki nailed it. But many things freak me out. I need better skills. No matter how many examples I watch or practice, I still feel I need to get it down the mailing list. Endless freakouts. I know, I know. Which is why, again, I'm going to tell you that if you can build an audience, lean into your current audiences. I didn't have a lot of confidence as a new coach. Any of my first clients would probably tell you I wasn't that good at it. But the secret, I was good at it though because I was there for them. And that's like at least half of it.

It's just being there for someone regardless of what you say or don't say or whatever. So I know you can do this, Debbie, because I went through it too. But again, I built confidence in just those small interactions. So with my yoga students to start talking about the fact that I was also running a detox program. I didn't know what the heck I was doing. I really didn't, but they thought I did. They assumed that it was going to be great and thank goodness for their confidence in me, that gave me confidence in me. So you just having these small interactions, if you have people and now you start just talking to them like 10% more about health or 10% more about your business, and then a little bit more and a little bit more. It just comes with practice, it comes with time. So I promise you this is the best way to get started.
And I know I've shared this story before, but I used to make it a point to go to the grocery store. Well, I mean I was there anyway, and you're at Whole Foods and somebody standing there looking at the wall of leafy green vegetables with a shopping list in their hand or a recipe in their hand, and they're like, and I would just kind of wait for them to start looking frustrated and I would say, what are you looking for? And they'd be like, bok choy, and I would be regular or baby. It was so easy for me to help them out, and there was just a small way for me to start to engage with people and build my confidence. They were like, oh my gosh, you're amazing. And I'm like, I am kind of amazing. I know where the Bok Cho is. It was a small thing, but it was a big thing.

Debbie said, I've joined Meetup, but I'm afraid of that hard sell. Yes, I was just talking to one of our healthy profit university members about Meetup. It's not something I've touched recently, but that is a really interesting avenue to get people together. Now you can say, here's a meetup group, and I'm inviting you all to this very specific event for my business, but I've seen coaches start walking groups or book clubs or other reasons to get people together that are tangential to what you're actually selling. It does feel pretty salesy to be like, come to my thing that you have to pay for. And they're probably not going to go for that. But try to find a reason that people actually who have a common interest would want to get together. And then once they're there, okay, now you have an audience. Now you're having conversations. Now they're going to say, oh, well, why'd you start this group? Or you could say, Hey, what do you do for a living? And then they're going to ask you, and this is just how just a normal conversation is going to begin. Alright, all right. Good start, everyone. I can hear your brains churning like this. Debbie says, ah, yes. Right. Sometimes we just overthink everything so much that the more obvious stuff does not occur, and that's why it's good to always have outside help with your business. Someone who can see it clearly from the outside. So we've got people somewhere in the world that we're connected to. Good. We've got a mailing list, hopefully we're going to get a mailing list to move them onto. That's where you want to be. But if you think even half a second into the future, beyond that, you're going to see that this is somewhat of a finite group, right?

The people you see every day in your community or the same 20 people in every yoga class. We're always talking about building your mailing list as your health coaching business matures, this is so important. So we have to think, how are we going to do that? We don't just build a mailing list once. We need to continuously build our audience, continuously grow that following just the other day. I shared a picture on Instagram from 15 years ago, and it was me standing there with David Swenson. I don't know if you know who David Swenson is. He's something of a yoga superstar. He's one of the original yogis to bring the practice from India to the US and practiced the traditional Tonga method. And I studied with David all those years ago when he visited Boston, and I learned so much. It still informs my practice to this day.

Honestly, that's not the interesting part. I posted this photo, one of my followers on Instagram messaged me. She said, that's where I met you. And I remembered, so Laura, this woman Laura, she had been in the same training with David Swenson. We'd met, we talked about my work as a health coach. She had actually hired me for a little while. That was so long ago. That feels like a lifetime ago. I didn't even have kids yet. It was forever ago. And so she messaged me. We haven't exchanged any type of communication all these years, but she said, that's where we met. And I have followed you all this time, which means she has seen through the magic of the internet, and she's probably been on my mailing list too, as I had each of my babies, as I've moved up and down the East coast, she must have noticed when I got divorced, she's still following me now. She's seeing my boys grow up. You know how that happens when you're following someone, she's probably seen how my style of eating has changed through the, and at some point, she's probably shared my stuff with a friend or a family member, and quietly without me even realizing it has played a role in building the audience I have today, even just by being a follower, even just by hitting the button here and there, it helps your stuff get seen. She's just been playing this teeny role in helping to build the audience that I have at this point. And I was just like, whoa. It was crazy to think about the compounding effect of who you meet today, who you talk to today, years down the line, you can still be connected to, and they'll still be part of how your business grows. So my advice when you're starting out and when you're starting over is to invest heavily in this type of audience growth.

Set up that Meetup group, set up three meetup groups. I don't know. Get out, go to the dog park, talk to people. It means putting yourself in places and in groups and experiences and having to simply meet and talk to new people, especially related to health and wellness. But remember, even if it's not any normal conversation, at some point is going to come around to like, well, what do you like to do for fun? Or what do you do for work? Right? There's always going to be a way for you to bring it in. That's where you start. Go hang out at Whole Foods, buy the leafy greens, right? Everything will come from there. It's not going to happen in two days, but you're playing the long game here. And as I told Nikki, it is really hard. I'm going to say it is basically impossible to do anything as a health coach without an audience. I mean, what would you like to achieve in your health coaching business? Would you like to work with anyone? Then you need an audience where they're going to come from. Would you like to run a group of some kind? Do you want to have an online course? Do you want to impact lives? Well, then you need those lives in front of you. That is the basis. So your audience can be in person. They can be people that locally, places that you show up and you speak. Your audience can be online, people reading and listening and watching your content around the world. I've had clients on six different continents at this point, which is so cool. I love thinking about that. It can be a mixture of both online and in real life. And we are going to be covering lots and lots of ways for you to build that audience with next week's audience attraction virtual retreat.

So if you haven't already, want you to go register to join us for free at healthcoachpower.com/audience. Someone asked earlier, what if I can't make it that week? That's okay. It's going to be recorded. You're going to get access to all of the sessions. There's no upsell, there's no BS like that. You're going to just sign up. You're going to have access to, and just as a parting note, don't try to have all the pieces of your business in place and all the skills of all the best coaching in the world in place before you get started. You're not. It's never going to work that way. None of us got started with everything in place first. And you're not going to have client testimonials in the beginning, and you're not going to have a fancy program or a fancy website, and it will all come in time as with everything in life, right on the schedule that it's meant to. But you can start today just by getting in front of people. Got it? I'll see you next week at the retreat. Thanks for joining me, everybody.