#224: 3 Signs Your Coaching Skills Might Be Killing Your Coaching Biz

You know how to coach anyone through anything…
 But when it comes to building your business, your coaching skills might actually be working against you.

In this episode, I’m revealing 3 sneaky ways self-coaching is keeping you stuck — and how to flip it so you can stop spinning and start signing clients.

💛 Grab the free guide: A Simple 3-Step Guide Every Female Life Coach Needs to Stand Out, Attract Clients, and Build a Business

🔑 What You’ll Learn:

• The difference between learning and integrating
• Why “trust the process” is keeping you broke
• How to shift from “coach mode” to “CEO mode”
• What to say in your posts so people know how to hire you

#LifeCoachBusiness #CoachingTips #VisibilityCoach #GetCoachingClients #MichelleKuei #MindsetForCoaches #LifeCoachMarketing #CoachingBizBuilder

Chapters

• 0:00 The Self-Coaching Trap
• 1:10 Show Intro & Promise
• 2:09 Life Update & Mastermind Context
• 3:24 Sign 1: Too Resourceful, Not Integrated
• 6:15 Funnels Demystified
• 8:05 Overwhelm From Options
• 9:14 Sign 2: Over‑Trusting The Process
• 11:03 Mindset vs Tracking and Action
• 12:15 Sign 3: Great Coach, Weak CEO
• 14:00 Shifting Content Toward Offers
• 15:15 Listener Reflection & Free Guide CTA

Transcript

Michelle: 0:00

Confession time. I have this habit of coaching myself through everything. And I mean everything. Like having a bad day. Let's just reframe it. Really stuck. What is the story I'm telling myself? And when I have a complete meltdown, take a deep breath. And let's name that emotion so that we can release it. Or maybe you find yourself sitting in front of your desk, opening your journal with a pen, and you're telling your journal more things instead of finding the right support to work it through. Let me know if this sounds like what you do. Because self-coaching is great, having the skill as a coach is fantastic. But when it comes to building your coaching business, self-coaching might be the exact thing and the reason why you are not getting any paying clients. So today, let's talk about signs that you being self-coaching may be a little too much, and why your coaching skills might be the thing that's killing your coaching business. Hey coach, welcome to Make It Visible Podcast. I'm Michelle Quay, your visibility marketing coach, and I help female life coaches to get seen in all the right places, attract happy paying clients, and build a coaching business that actually feels good to run. Even if you are still trying to figure things out. Each week I'm giving you visibility tips, simple marketing strategies, and showing you how to create the kind of content that connects with your audience so that you can stand out, build your authority, and attract clients who's already feeling like a yes before they jump onto your discovery call. So grab a notebook, pour yourself a favorite drink, and that's make your coaching business visible. So full confession because last week I was all busy, and those of you who's following me on social or you're in my podcast community or email community, you probably have gotten a lot of information about the enrollment to Coaching Biz Builder. And this is probably going to be my last enrollment to the program itself this year. Um, I am taking some easy time for the next two months or three months. Um, I am traveling to Austin, Texas. Those of you who are in Texas, give me your shout out. Um, go and follow me on my Instagram or send me a DM. Let me know if you're in Texas. So I'm taking a couple of days. I'll be spending some time in Texas. There is a mastermind that I belong to that my mentor coach is running, and so I would like to learn. This is where the coaching skill comes in. So resourceful in finding solutions and looking for solutions. We all have that mentality of there is no problem, there's only solution. And only if if I can uh find that solution, everything would be fine. So, sign number one of how our coaching skill is sabotaging us or killing our coaching business is that we're being too resourceful. So we find ourselves in this learning mode. So, back to the story that I was gonna tell you, how I'm gonna be spending a couple of days in Texas. I'm gonna be working through a couple of the things that I wanted to strategize moving forward, like the things I wanted to do in 2026, and also to really look at the things that I've been doing, all the program that I've been offering, like how I can expand, and also to scale to the next level, right? We're always looking for room to grow. But the reason number one, and sign number one, why your coaching skills might be the one that's uh killing you and sabotaging you in your business, is being resourced, finding yourself saying this too, is where you're listening to podcasts, you're watching YouTube video, and nowadays we have Chat GPT, so you might also be asking ChatGPT all these different questions about how do I get more paying client or how do I market myself. And honestly, ChatGP is great, it's going to give you a list of all the things that you need to do that you should be doing and you probably want to do in some time in your business. But at the end of the day, you have all these ideas and you're learning from all these different places. But the thing about learning is that you can learn all day. It is about taking those, what you learn and implement and integrating them into your business. Now, the integration part is probably the most challenging part because you have to know exactly what to integrate from the information that you have learned. That's a creating a funnel, right? There's all these different types of funnel that you hear out there. In case you don't know what funnel is, is basically how do you get more clients, right? How do you get more clients? And the funnel is going to help you to whether it's on social or in person, how you're being found to how does someone start working with you? And that journey is basically what a funnel is designed to do. It brings people closer to you so that you can turn them into paying clients. So for those of you who's not familiar with what funnel is, that is what essentially what is a funnel. Okay. Now, when you when you learn that for the first time, you're like, oh, that sounds great, you know, because then I can put myself out there, I can get more clients by just creating a funnel. But there's all these different kinds of funnel that depending on what you choose and what you're capable of, your knowledge, your technology, how familiar you are with technology, you may come across some challenges or difficulty in integrating them. So, for example, there's a video funnel. Okay, there's video funnel, and there's like uh things that you create with a PDF or a workshop or a webinar. So that's say you are creating video funnel. Now you might learn that, oh, creating a funnel is great, and the next thing that you learn is a video funnel. So now you take that video funnel, that idea, and what kind of lighting do I need? What type of microphone do I need to uh buy and purchase? And how do I how do I get someone to watch the video? Where do I need to be? So it starts to spiral just because that you're so open-minded to learn that one thing that will bring your leads into clients. So we're so resourceful, we're looking for information, and what do we do with this information? It creates a roller coaster of overwhelm. And that's where overwhelm begins. So if there's idea floating around your Google Drive and um, it's just not gonna grow your business, right? So I'm in this place of I believe simplicity is going to help you to build your business, especially when you are in the beginning of your journey. Don't try and overcomplicate, like a lot of these strategies that you hear out there, you know, they're great, they work, but you really have to be uh conscious and trying to pick the right one, right? At your stage, it gotta make sense. Some of the strategies that I hear like my clients have learned or heard from the past, I'm like, yeah, it's great, but that doesn't make sense in your business at this stage of your life. So why are you following that, right? So you gotta think about how you integrate these information because essentially you don't have a learning problem, you have an integration problem. So that was sign number one of you're being too resourceful. Uh, sign number two of how our coaching skill is sabotaging us, and believe me, I use this one a lot. Um, especially if you uh so I graduated from iPad coaching, and one of the phrases that we have inside the program is trust the process. Now, if you also graduated from iPad coaching, I would love to hear from you. Uh, just go ahead and hit reply to my email, or there's a there's a little text message that you can send, click on that link, and you can send me send me a trust the process. What does it mean for you? I really, I really want to hear like from from my fellow coaches out there. What do you what does it mean for you to trust the process? Uh, but sign number two is that you're trusting the process a little too much. Okay, now here's what I mean. There's things that don't work or things that didn't work the way that I was hoping it to work. So when that happened, I would always come back and I would come home and I would say, well, I just need to trust the process because building business is part of that process, right? So if it's something is not working, I need to trust it and give it some time because eventually if I just show up more, people would notice and people would come, right? Except three months into my business, I was totally trusting the process, but there was no clients coming in. So that's when I start realizing that yes, manifesting it, having the alignment, trusting the process are all important, but essentially what really going to change a business is sometimes you need to lower, have a lower level of energy. So I'll give you an example. So in the past, I would write email, I would send it out, and I'm just like, well, it's out in the universe, right? Because I wrote it and I sent it out and I showed up, or something like writing a post. I showed up, I posted it. So I'm just gonna trust the process that if it needs to land with somebody, it's going to land with somebody, right? It's somebody out there is going to receive it and it would be the right person, it would be the right time. But in reality, you could be having that great mindset all day long, but that is not going to help to track the result, to narrow down your effort, to streamline your energy, to make sure that the actually the right people would see the post or read the email. So trusting the process is great, but trusting yourself in taking those actions, that's even better. So just think about that. Are you trusting the process too much? So let me know if you're trusting the process a little too much. Um, sign number three of how our coaching skills are sabotaging us in our coaching business is that you're being too good of a coach, but not enough being a CEO. And what I mean by that is I go around and I remember this is also something that I did um when I was doing live coaching, mindset coaching. And I would go on to social and I would write these posts, and they're very inspirational, very powerful. And you always get people to think about the things that they need to think about in their life, right? And I get comments on, oh, that was really inspirational, or oh, that was very motivating. But at the end of the day, I didn't want to just like coach them for free. I want them to sign up. And so this is what I see a lot of time is that a lot of coaches are creating posts or writing posts in the way that they're being a great coach, giving away mini sessions, but they're not being the CEO or the business owner where they're thinking about my job is not to give away the mini coaching session, right, for free. My job is actually to invite them to look at the solution that I can offer and help. And that ultimately creates a more sustainable result for your client, for your audience. If you change your mindset or the way that you show up on social, instead of being a great coach, how about you blend in a little bit of the CEO business uh side of you so that people are not just leaving comments or leaving likes or thinking that, oh, your what you share is very inspirational, but actually thinking about, get them to think about how they can start working with you and why they should be working with you. So those are the three things that show up very often in my life in the past, where I coach myself through a lot of things. I was stuck in this learning mode to applying them, and I was really trusting the process a little too much because everything when something bad happened, I was just talking myself out of it. I'm like, oh, it's it's okay, it's not the end of the world. This is all part of the learning. I just need to trust the process. I'm sure you're very familiar with those uh those words. You probably repeated them in your mind too. And the third one is I was being a great coach and I'm always showing up and being very helpful, and I leave people with inspiration. But at the end of the day, they're not thinking about, oh, um, perhaps, you know, I need to start working with her because this is exactly what I need and how I need help. So if those resonate, please let me know. Um, I would love to hear from you. Like, what are some of the coaching skills that you have found is actually doing you a disfavor in your business rather than helping you moving forward? Um, maybe it's the self-talk, whether it's positive or negative, what are some of the things that you have noticed that your coaching skill is kind of sabotaging you and causing you feeling stuck or staying stuck? Now, if you are nodding your head alone and you're looking for ways exactly, what are the steps? Like I said, you know, one of the things that I really love is how to simplify um things in our business. You don't really need a whole lot or complicated steps in order to get your paying client. So if you're interested, I put a resource together. It's called the three-step guide to stand out, attract client, and build a coaching business that feels like you. So all you have to do is there's a link in my description box down below, and you can go ahead and grab it and and start working through it. It's totally free. The link is um down there. Um, because honestly, your coaching skills are too good to be the best kept secret in this world. Until then, let's make your business as powerful as your coaching. I'll see you in the next episode. Thank you for listening to Make It Visible Podcast. If you love this episode and want deeper support for your coaching business, head over to elevate lifecoaching.org and see how we can partner together to turn your passion into a profitable business. I help female coaches launch and scale their coaching business faster than ever without wasting time and money, filling the gaps in your marketing strategies, creating a simple and easy to follow system so you can accelerate on the path of coaching business that you love to wake up to. Head over to elevate lifecoaching.org and grab a free strategy out today.