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Today I want to chat about the antidote to some of the things that actually hold us back in business and how I’ve sourced this antidote myself, and some of the tips and tricks to find the antidote for you. I often talk to mentees and they say it’s because I’m not good enough, that I’m not succeeding and I need to go and get another degree, or I need to go and find another qualification, and then I’ll be good enough to get clients and keep on with this business thing. But the truth is, there’s five things that actually hold people back, especially in the practitioner world and in the business world.
#1: Lack of confidence
It’s that feeling of, “I can’t possibly do this!”, “Someone else is better than me in this!”, “But what if…”, and double checking yourself.
#2: Imposter syndrome
This old chestnut rears its ugly head whenever I’m having an upper limit personally, but I see it all the time in my mentees.
#3: Fear of judgment
You know…that feeling of when you’re just about to put a post on social media or you’re signing up to social media and you’re worried about what somebody else will say, see, hear or take from it.
#4: Lack of support
For me, this looked like not having a sounding board. I didn’t grow up in a family that talked about business. I wasn’t around people who had ever had a small business, and I didn’t even know where to find support or talk to people who didn’t necessarily have qualifications, but were qualified to talk to me because of their experience in the business world. Lack of support is a really big deal for a lot of women in business.
#5: Finding time
I’m talking about rummaging up the time to do the business things and work on the business around other responsibilities. It’s actually been a bit of a thing that’s come up recently in the social media world around the fact that we don’t all have the same 24 hours. And it’s true! That used to be the old adage when I started business…I’ve got the same amount of hours in a day as Albert Einstein. Yeah, well, yes, there’s 24 hours. But he had support.
His wife was looking after his kids. He also had a brain that worked in a particular way. His neurodivergence or his neurotypical illness (depending on which avenue you want to view his life as because he didn’t have a diagnosis), changed the way that time worked for him. And the same goes for women, mothers, people who have neurodivergence, people who are experiencing mental health or physical challenges.
There’s so much more that impacts our time. So finding the time to work on, in, around or through the processes of our business is something that’s going to be holding us back.
Now, all five of these have an antidote. That antidote, interestingly enough, is a human. It isn’t the next app. It isn’t the next AI robot. The truth is, it’s a human. And for me, every time I have experienced these types of things, that particular human that has had my back has been a coach or a mentor.
Now, coaches and mentors have been around for millennia! A lot of the philosophers of ancient Greece have talked about mentors and how the lineage of knowledge, support, ideas and mindset has gone through ever since back in those days. Therefore, finding a coach or a mentor can seem an insurmountable task, especially if you’ve been burnt by businesses, coaches, mentors, therapists and other people before. It can really invigorate your nervous system to try and find somebody who can help you.
But with the advent of life coaching and the incredibly useful tools of personality profiling tools, mentors and coaches can appear from nowhere if you set your intention. But there are five things that have helped me in choosing a coach or a mentor and to not waste my time, waste my money, or waste my energy on ones that don’t match. So, I thought I’d explore them with you today.
#1: Find someone who’s done or is doing something that you would love to do or achieve
This is one of the big ones because the first coach that I was partnered with as part of a small business program when I first starting out, was actually a legal accountant! It was a very strange thing for me, as a practitioner, to work with somebody who was out of my field and wasn’t doing anything that was remotely to do with what I wanted to achieve in the world. So, this person wasn’t helping people on a day-to-day basis with their personal kind of ways of being. They didn’t really have much outside of their world, weren’t really adventurous, and weren’t doing things that floated my boat, per se. I actually had a really hard time gelling with that person.
At the time, I had become a step-mum as well, and this legal accountant I was paired with didn’t have children. This isn’t a game breaker or a deal breaker though, because I’ve had some amazing coaches who don’t have children, but they do have people that they care about…and this is the thing. When you’re trying to find someone who’s done or is doing something that you would love to do or achieve, you need to start thinking about what do you want to do and what would you love to achieve? Is this person either doing it right now or have they done it in the past
I was setting out pre-pandemic to live six months of the year in Bali with my family, with the focus of getting mine and my husband’s business online. At the time I found two amazing life coaches (a couple), although they wouldn’t describe themselves as that. They’re incredible humans and they run businesses online and moved to Bali with their kids, too. Their kids are now grown and work in the online marketing space and they are also incredible at what they do. Anyway, so I joined their six month mentoring program and I had one of the most amazing times! But I didn’t move to Bali.
You see, when you start working with a coach or a mentor, the thing you go into the journey with is rarely the thing that you come out with. The transformation that you have in the meantime is where the gold is. And similarly for me, I went in with the intention of living in Bali, but what I came out with was a depth of understanding with my partner and how to run business together and do life together in a next level kind of way. So, what is it for you to find someone who’s done or is doing something that you would love to do or achieve?
#2: Find someone you vibe with
Now, call it what you will, it’s really hard to describe what a vibe is. But you need to find a coach or a mentor that has a similar vibe to what you want to be around. Because the likelihood is, you’re going to be with this person for three, six or twelve months and if your personality grates up against theirs, then it’s very unlikely that you’re going to either follow through, listen to what they have to say, or actually do the things that are required to get the transformation that you’re looking for.
Another way of describing it would be the therapeutic effect. For example, when I was a naturopath, the therapeutic effect would be the effect that particular clients have with me versus another naturopath down the street. Or opposing, if I had a particular client that I didn’t quite gel with and then I found a referral to find the right person for them.
Just like finding a naturopath or a specialist, finding a coach or a mentor that has that therapeutic effect or the perfect vibe is really important. It’s one of the reasons why I highly reccomend consuming some of their free content, listening to some of their things online or on watching their videos on YouTube. I’ve got a lot of my stuff on YouTube for that reason, so people can understand what I’m into, how I work, and get a taster for that.
#3: Check out their skills
A coach or a mentor, similarly to naturopathy, isn’t a regulated profession. Therefore, doing a little bit of a search on LinkedIn is a really great thing. Because they have to write down their qualifications and where they got them from, LinkedIn allows you to gain instant information about someone, whether that’s information on their training in NLP (neurolinguistic programming), other training for personality profiling tools, and getting certifications in those, or the experience with which they have, whether they’ve been running programs, speaking or doing other things in that particular area.
#4: Lean into the challenge
Now, this is where you have found the right person, you’re really excited to work with them, you get on the discovery call with them or you find their program and then you see….oh no! It’s going to cost X amount of money, X amount of time, I’ve got to jump and leap through all these hoops, I’m not quite sure that I can fit that in…
This is the thing. There is a particular moment where you will choose either not to work with that person or work with them later on. But leaning into the stretch and the challenge is part of the process of coaching and mentoring, and whether that stretch or challenge is financial, you’ll usually value it more. And trust me, I’m speaking from personal experience, having spent $20,000 a year on coaching (up to $50,000 in the past year).
What we’re talking about here is how to stretch into that financial area, because you’re going to value it more than if you got it all are free. Now, you can think, “Oh no Tammy, I would totally do it for free!”, but think about all of the downloadables that you have on your computer right now that have literally thousands of dollars worth of worth in them…if you’d just taken action on them. But because you downloaded them for free, you haven’t done jack.
Now think about how many you have on the computer and if you’d have actually taken action on each separate one of those as though you had paid $50,000 for each of them. It’s a whole different experience when you are stretched. And it’s only really a mindset thing, because the main purpose (if you’re looking for a business coach, for instance), is to get a return on investment. Whether that return is financial, then you should be looking for a coach or a mentor who’s going to teach you how to get the same amount (hopefully more) of money you invested, back.
If you also have a stretch on your personality or your preconceived notions of what you’re capable of, then that’s leaning into the challenge of getting a coach or a mentor, as well. So often there’ll be a stretch when it comes to your coaching and mentoring and that’s the bit where you need to lean into the challenge of it.
#5: Consider the logistics
You have to start to consider what your life is currently like, what you would love it to be like, and if getting a coach or a mentor will fit in with it. It is an ongoing membership where you have to give an hour a week to something? If you don’t have an hour a week, is there a different mastermind program or 1:1 mentorship that you could do that gives you an hour or a half a day every month with your coach or mentor instead? However the logistics could work best for you that you show up for, would be an ideal situation.
So, whatever actually works for you to stay accountable, to keep a cadence, to be most compliant and get the most out of the program or the coaching, the better off the results will be.
My challenge for you is to check that the logistics are going to either work for you or you can be stretched and challenged by it. Like #4 above, you need to lean into the challenge. It might be a time challenge where you need to start considering how you can schedule the commitments into your life to get the most out of something like this. What is it for you?
Have you been looking for a coach or a mentor? There are so many different ways and means to get the support that you need and the antidote to all those things that we talked about in the first place. I’ve had coaches and mentors for my health, for my finances and investments, for business, for my relationships, for creativity, sensuality and my art practice.
If you found yourself with any of the symptoms I mentioned up above, a coach or a mentor might be the antidote that you need. If you’re looking for a coach or a mentor and thinking about checking me out, use these same five things that I just described to you! Go to my website, check out everything I have on offer and see which one might fit for you. Same goes for any other area of your life.
If you got something out of this blog or you know that somebody else will, please share it. Want to take an extra step? Reach out to that coach or that mentor and check out what they have on YouTube or their free resources and start to get to know what’s available to you in those places and spaces to get you to that next level and out of the struggle that can sometimes appear in small business.
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