Hello, loves. Allison Crow here and this is episode number 51. We’re going to be talking about why Soul-Full Success and why basically the work that I do is life plus biz, with the emphasis on life. I want to go ahead and give a disclaimer, I have been studying The Way of Mastery and I have also been doing this 40 Days of Prayers for the SoulFull Mogul. And I find myself coming home on a little bit of a bumpy ride. So, if I seem a little somber, I’m not somber. I’m just really centered. Why is Soul-Full Success life plus biz? On June 8, 2012, I was in a circle led by Renรฉe Trudeau, and it was a self-care circle. Taped to my desk is a piece of paper from a moment where she guided me to go within and get my wisdom.
Now, I’m about to read that to you. But to set the container around business, I have been a high achiever, an overachiever. I went to college, I went to graduate school. I became a realtor, I became a coach of realtors. I’ve been on a growth and learning path. Once I got into real estate, I really got excited about learning business, and I still get excited about learning business. It just is fascinating to me. I have never had biological children for various reasons, and I have grown bonus kids. And I have three rescue dogs and a husband. And so, I get a lot out of my coaching business. My coaching business is kind of like my baby. It’s something I enjoy putting time and attention to. It’s not even a labor of love. It is just a love for me. And so a lot of my energy, time, attention, money, et cetera go towards my business.
In this self-care circle, as I went in, I am sure that I asked for spiritual guidance or connection around my business. And this is what poured out of me on to the paper. I feel like it was channeled through me as my business plan, as a life plan. And it is still taped, I have laminated it. It has different … I mean, it has been taped to every computer I’ve had since then. And so, here is what it says. “Goddess Allison, surround yourself with beauty. They will come to you. Be spicy. You are the aroma. Breathe in, you are encircled. Focus on your work instead of others. Nurture your insides. You know what is coming. Small bites, kaizen steps. Meditate often. Ask for what you want and need. Write and create every day. Dare to be rich. Thank you. June 8, 2012.”
Honestly, I got to tell you, over the last two days, I have sat down to record this podcast approximately four times. I even recorded a version of it in the middle of a meltdown at my doctor’s office this week, and I immediately deleted it knowing I just needed to flush some thinking out of my head. What I was trying to do in initially recording this podcast was be somebody else. What I was trying to do was emulate the thinking and speaking and teaching of somebody else I admire. I was trying to be more like them. I was trying to be better at this podcast by doing what somebody else does.
And no wonder I joke and laugh that, and those of you who read the transcript will love seeing this in words, you’ve already told me, that every time I sat down in my home studio to do this, my dog, Leroy, would start licking his balls. He didn’t really have balls, but he’d start licking where his balls should be. He’s a neutered dog. And one of my clients was like, “Maybe that’s a sign.” And I kind of laugh in my snarky sense of humor. It is so ball licking to be somebody else’s business, and that’s why the essence, the 98% is life coaching.
I realize that a lot of my clients join because they want better business. They want better systems. And am I the best person to teach them how to do business? Probably not. I am a business coach. I have amazing high-level social media marketing, communication, share your heart, show your work, digital media, and sales skills. I have great pricing skills. I have a strategic brain. And most likely, anybody who ever works with me, from time to time, will get a piece of my consulting brain. I love learning new things. I love growing. I love thinking like the Rubik’s Cube and twisting and turning around all kinds of ideas and possibility, and I have a special gift for strategizing and possibility around monetizing unique gifts.
In Soul-Full Success, once a month, we have a business class. Often we repeat the community building class and the networking and connection class. There’s one other one we repeat often. Anyways, why life mostly? And actually, when I originally started Soul-Full Success, you could join the life track and the business track. My intention, I thought I saw myself as having hundreds of life only clients because I’d worked with so many high-level people that didn’t need business coaching. And so I wanted to provide what I’m gifted at, which is the inner world aspect in a way that they could turn and in their businesses with their partners, in their marriages, in their relationships, in their parenting, could be centered and soulfully successful.
Well, because of the price point, of course, I have a range of people. I have a lot of people in that achievement phase and that’s exactly what they come for. And they come to both the life and business calls, but often, it’s the life calls. Not that they have any drama, but they know very similar to this little piece that I read inside, that it’s about the inner world that creates their outer world. And I love to help new people who are on limited budgets get some support and get a kickstart to business. And I have clients from time to time say, “I just want a system. I just want a system.” And in this day and age, we are certainly, especially online, bombarded with the expert’s courses and trainings and offerings that are full of possibly bullshit bullet point promises. I know that I have bought into them.
I also know that I have a room of 70 or so members and half of them have taken class after class after class, spent thousands, $10,000 on a speaking programs, have taken the famous global business training schools, have taken classes on website, on copywriting, on sales, and all these other things. And if you were to look at their life or business right now, you don’t really see evidence that they’ve actually done that because it’s never the how-to that stops us. It’s always the inner world. It’s always the things that life coaching touches. I think the word business coaching is fascinating. It almost doesn’t make sense to me. It’s either business consulting or business training and life coaching. Yes, the silence is there on purpose. It’s about life.
Yesterday, I had on my calendar to record this podcast. It was like the only to-do I had, and my life got in the way. My thinking got in the way. And there would be no amount of business strategy that could create profit, income, clients, connection, whatever it is. There’s nothing in the way of business coaching that could have served me yesterday and honestly today. There’s nothing business-y that is going to help my grow my business any better. That might be different for somebody who’s brand new and still learning and training, but we are so inundated from the outside in, from cultural consciousness, from mass consciousness, that there is a right way and a wrong way of doing this.
I told a story today on a coaching session. I had a client who is considering doing his website. And he keeps getting stuck because he thinks it needs to be right. I so feel him. Don’t you? You think about your copy, is this right? You think about your email and your list or your lack thereof, and you think, “Is this right?” And you think, “Am I worthy? Will somebody want this? Is it going to get rejected?” All these monkey mind thoughts that come in. And I’ve had clients throw the objection up, “Well, if I just knew how like you do, I’d be more confident.” And I’m going to tell you right now that 15 years, actually 16 years self-employed and 13 years as a coach, just because I know how to do it, does not make me more confident. In fact, I was often most confident when I didn’t know jack shit. The stories we tell ourselves, right?
I wrote this post today thinking from when I was a kindergartener. I’m sorry, not when I was a kindergartner when I taught kindergartner, and I’m going to go ahead and share it with you. I had a little boy whose name was, we’ll call him Joe. That’s not his name, but for his privacy. I was a kindergarten teacher in the late ’90s. And sweet little Joe, five years old, loved to color. He wrote and drew always with a turquoise crayon. He found so much joy in his art, in his colorings. Day after day, he colored and wrote in his favorite turquoise color. So much joy and innocent. We’d have these little color baskets, all different colors, and he always went for the turquoise. One day, a fellow teacher told him, “Joe, sunshines are not turquoise. They’re yellow and orange.” And instantly, I saw the light and joy drain from Joe’s being. I tried to tell him, “Sunshines are whatever color you want them to be,” but the damage was done.
Early in life, the experts tell us the way it should be done, how we need to do it, and what is the right way. And here was this five-year old with an authority figure saying, “This is the right way.” At this stage in my business, I’m not new. I don’t need any more training at this moment. I’m weary of nexting and reaching for the right next expert. I’m tired of my feeds being filled with this concept that there is a right way to do it. We think if we have the right way, we will be safe and successful. And I am remembering that I get so miserable when I try to do it right.
So, I’m declaring today to do it my fun way. Like that little boy, Joe, I’m picking up the crayons and the colors that I want to. When I look back at my own successes, they are when I did it my way. And the coaches that fostered me in doing that were the ones that I never got business acumen from. I want to take my crayon and color in a way that feels good. And this is what I try … This is not what I try, this is what I do provide to my clients. Today, I had the benefit of one of my members, last week she hit her year-long membership in the program. And when you’ve been a member for a year, my clients get this cute little T-shirt that says, “Breathe you all.” No one else can get it unless you’re a year member. She posted herself in her year member T-shirt. What I love is that her excitement for the T-shirt didn’t represent what I offer. It represented what she did for herself.
And I’m going to tell you, it makes my ego feel great when someone says, “Allison, help me.” But the longer I do this and the more I realize what works and what’s important is when I empower my clients to be the deciders, to process through this stuff, to learn through life, to find their self-trust and confidence. And at the end of her post, she said, “These are the shifts I had made,” and every single shift was an inner world shift that I have no doubt that will create massive ripple after ripple after ripple after ripple of outer world and business effects.
Maybe someday I’ll have the guts to just be a life coach. Right now, the problem is that business building and thinking about business and marketing is just really yummy for me. It’s fun. That’s why I still do it. I think it’s fun. And there’s a tipping point, where when I get so business-y or I find that my clients get so business-y with all the rights and wrongs that we forget about remembering the core of who we are in life. And so, this is why a few years ago, after all the names I call myself, I declared myself your favorite life coach because as Steve Chandler says, “If you’re alive, I can coach you.”
And what gets me excited about that is if you’re alive, and whatever container you’re working in, business, family, body … Excuse me. Whatever container you’re working in, let me take a sip of water, it only ever goes to the deep inner part of our being. And this is where I find the magic. This is what my guides or God or spirit channeled to me that day in my journal, in that circle. It was a list of how to be, what to remember. And then yes, of course, there is some doing. Of course, there are tiny steps. Of course, there is action. And a lot of times, there’s massive action. But massive action exactly as the experts say is absolutely not as successful as shitty action done in the perfectly you way. And so, why life plus biz? Because my job is to help you claim your life from the inside out so that it might be embodied in whatever vehicle you use in the world. And most of my clients happen to use the vehicle of business.
So, I also have, after all these years, quite a bit of evidence and success stories that support not only my theory but this way of being. I remember early in the real estate coaching days, and a lot of times in real estate, we were literally coaching to time on task and the number of tasks done. So, how many calls did you make? How many hours did you spend lead generating? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Perhaps, there was a little intro of mindset, but a lot of times it was coaching that way. And what I found was that my clients of all different experience levels, at the time, when I first started, I was working with brand new people who were also needing training. But the ones who we did life work were the ones that made it that.
And they say, “In real estate, 80% of people who get their real estate license aren’t going to make it.” There’s an 80, 20 rule. They’re exactly right. About 20% of my people focused life first, did the inner work, and then when they got that aligned, they went out and did the outer work. And to this day, many of those people are successful agents, owners of brokerages, et cetera, and they’re still out there thriving because not only do they have a beautiful work ethic, but they also nurture their insides. Their insides actually fuel their work ethic. Since I’ve started my own company, once again, this is one of the reasons that I did sister circles. I know, for example, my client Diane Bleck, she is a high-level visual facilitator and she had a very successful consulting company offline.
A few years ago, five years ago, she wanted to spend more time with her family and her kids. And so, she came to me to work on the next level of herself and the next level of her being, so that she could implement. She also hired a little bit of outside support and learned from Chalene Johnson and did all sorts of things to support her outer world. But her heavy, heavy, heavy work was the magic of the inner world, was the magic of conjuring her magic. And it’s so fun to watch her and to have been just the tiniest little slither of success for her. And then to have her come back to Soul-Full Success just to get the good juju of life coaching while she implements the next phase of her online business.
And this woman has grown enormously with her online courses, her online coaching. She is working with Kajabi right now and is teaching a lot of my clients how to build their online courses. She’s actually doing a lot of training for my clients and for people and Doodle Your Dreams. You can find more out about Diane at thedoodleinstitute.com. But Diane is just an example of somebody. If you only looked at her outer world, you would think it was all about her application of skills. And what I love is that yes, she absolutely goes and studies and learns and applies business skills, but before and while doing that, she makes sure she is fully supported in her inner world, both by hiring coaches and by spending time in her journals. So, I love that story.
And I just see it over and over and over and over again. It’s not just the doing. It’s those that give a holy and sacred place for the being, for the inner work. I know for me, that’s my success. I could take up even more of your precious time today telling you story after story, but I want you to take a moment and think about something that you’ve been successful in. What was it that supported you in being successful? Was it just your outer work? Maybe I’m wrong. But for me, playing basketball as a high schooler, yes, I had some skills. But what kept me going was my inner work, my mindset. When things were hard or they didn’t work or I had a day off, everything was about my inner resilience, my inner self-trust. So, those are some of the same principles. It’s not just about the form, it’s also about the essence. And for me, life coaching is working with your essence so that you can take your form and put it out into the world through experimentation so that you get the results.
I wanted to share that with you today. I also asked on my social media feed on Facebook, I asked for you to answer why life plus biz. I want to share a couple of the responses. So, Beth McKay says, “Ever since I entered the coaching world nine years ago, I haven’t been without a life coach. It’s important to me that I continue to walk my talk in my own journey. At the same time, over the last nine years, I’ve hired three different business coaches. I was looking for help with the business side of coaching, setting up, marketing, finding my voice, what I’m supposed to be doing in order to enroll clients.
Here’s what I learned. They were all great at asking powerful questions, but not so great with practical steps. Do this, then do that. I get that there’s no one size fits all. Now, it’s about finding your ideal client and speaking directly to her. Still, how does one learn to be a copywriter, a designer? What’re the practical steps to take in order to start growing your presence online? I’m not sure I’m answering your question about why hire a business coach. I’m telling you more about how they haven’t worked for me. What I wish business coaching would’ve done for me is help me with my tagline, help me bring, store two months worth of content after identifying my client. Teach me how to take the intangible outcomes of the benefits of working with a coach and turn them into compelling copy.”
I so get that, Beth, and you are not alone. I think that’s where we mix up the word coaching because we think that, what we really want is either hands-on consulting … What I’m finding we really want is we really want to be able to hire the experts. And often in my coaching, when I’m talking about business, I use the example of a pizza parlor and the things that a pizza parlor or any brick and mortar business might do when opening. And a lot of those are not companies of one. Many of us online are a company of one. Well, I’m learning that I just need to be the expert on me and then to hire implementers, to hire experts outside of me. It is really difficult.
Most people are wanting you to buy their business coaching or their program. Heck, I want you to buy my business coaching and my program. But what I want to do is empower you. And we get frustrated when we go through these courses and we’re kind of stuck. I have my own ideas about what works and what doesn’t work and I share that all behind the scenes with my clients. And if you really want to do some research, I have about 10 blogs over the last 15 years that share my way of enrolling clients and what worked for me. I think we can find the answer to this in any number of books, in any number of YouTubes, or like I have done recently with Uncommonly More, I’m actually hiring somebody else to think for me so that I can do my inner work and help my clients.
Thanks for that, Beth. I totally get it. No individual help, right? Oh. That’s one of the reasons I created Soul-Full Success, so that instead of spending $1,000 a month, we could spend 222 on this community and this collaboration, and that there might be other people in that group that would be experts or we have money leftover. This is, of course, me basing off what I always did, which I know not everybody does, but many of my clients over the past 15 years have paid a minimum of $1,000 a month. And I kept thinking, “Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if they had money to implement this idea? Wouldn’t it be nice if they had money to hire a copywriter to actually consult with them?”
And that’s what I’m learning that the true experts do. So, as a business coach, like I said, I have a couple of specialties. I have a little bit of a specialty in sales, and I have a little bit of a specialty in social media marketing. And those are not my zone of genius. I’m good at them because I do them, but it doesn’t mean that I’m a genius at teaching them. And what working with Stacey Harris of Uncommonly More did was see that she was a genius at taking my brain and implementing it into a system. It wasn’t a system that fit over my brain. She absorbed my brain, my thinking, my content, and molded it into a system that fits my business. And so when I thought I was getting marketing help, I wasn’t getting marketing help. I mean, I am. But what I really got was somebody to implement. She’s my implementer.
And I think, Beth, that’s what a lot of us need, is you don’t need to become an expert in writing copy. I mean, for years, marketing and advertising have hired the experts. My ex-husband was a professional copywriter. 3M didn’t write their copy, they were an expert at making tape. And so that’s why I call myself a generalist and I want my clients to use the money they’ve saved. Yeah, we might spark some business ideas, but use the extra money to invest in hiring the experts to implement for you.
Okay. A few more. Lauren Holder, previous client. Woohoo. Love her. She says, “Business and life are intertwined. Life improves when I get biz support and biz gets better when I focus on my personal growth. I receive both and offer both. I started with biz coaching, and when all my clients hit their ceiling, it was coaching them and who they were being that helped them bust through. One doesn’t exist without the other for me anymore.” Brenda Nicholas says, “My life is art and so it speaks to both.” Trying to see if I have any others.
Andrea says, “Why life plus biz coaching? As a stay-at-home, work from home mom, I’m often faced with these challenges. Am I doing all I can? What more can I do to make money and be a better mom and wife? Having a life coach challenges me to reflect on myself in all the good I’m doing and how far I have come. I know many are just like me and we are our biggest critics. Dishes aren’t done, house is a mess, dinner isn’t homemade. Late for practice, didn’t close the deal, lost a client. These thoughts affect my growth both as a person, mom, and a real estate agent. Coaching is a way for me to connect and challenge me. So, I guess what I’m saying is that I can’t have one without the other maybe because they intertwine so much. I might have gotten a little [skrilly 00:30:50], but my fingers just keep typing.” Thank you, Andrea. I so appreciate all you all’s feedback and interaction.
I’m doing an experiment over the summer moving everything to my Facebook business page and to Instagram and not using my personal Facebook page, and so it’s so fun to have you guys engage with me there as much as you did on the other page. So, life plus biz. If I were to put a ratio to it, in my own world, when I keep it 10% business and 90% life, I find that’s my formula for success. Any time I spend out, I am nexting myself or shooting myself or getting too much into the biz. I’m judging myself for the business aspect when really, it’s the inner world. And when I get my inner world and life self-aligned, then I find so much more flow in the business. And so this is why Soul-Full Success is not just a business program. It’s not a training program. There happens to be some training because I love it. I like whipped cream on my chocolate shake too, but I like the chocolate shake.
And so I really want to encourage you to, one, consider becoming a member if this resonates with you. Number two, if you’re a successful businessperson … And you know what I love about working with most of my, actually all the realtors that I work with? All the realtors that I work with, it’s so fun because quite a few years ago, they were calling and wanting to work with me, and I was like, “Listen, I will work with you but we are not talking about how to negotiate contracts or get another listing. You know how to get it.” And the reality is, most of us know the how, but our thinking, our inner world tries to convince us that we don’t. And it creates a lack of confidence, it creates doubt and fear even in the most advanced businesses.
So, yes, if you’re brand new, you might need a little bit more training and try to offer just a little taste of that. But the real work is in the world of life coaching. I love you. Thank you for listening, and I would love to hear your thoughts over on the Allison Crow page on Facebook or on Instagram, what works for you. See you next week.
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