Pretty Good Year

This week I am looking back on a year in the life of this Podcast and my Coaching business.  There have been a lot of lessons learned, and I share the two most important ones with you. I focus on the absolute necessity of continuing to build self-trust and how I apply that. I also dive deeper into what it means to hand over responsibility to my audience in deciding what resonates with them and what does not.          

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Transcript

Welcome to " You need a coach bitch with Chris Hale. I'm your host Chris Hale. I'm a certified life coach that helps queer creatives. Take their passion, turn it into a purpose and get paid. If you are looking to make an impact on the world with your work by dismantling internalized, oppressive thought systems by using coaching spirituality and a lot of cursing, you are in the right place.

So let's get to work.

 Hey girl. Hey. What's up? How are you? I'm so good. Today is a very special day. It's one year of podcasts and I'm just blown away by myself, actually. Um, I can't believe I've been doing this for a year. And, uh, funnily my husband was just saying that I'm the only person that is worried that what I am doing isn't going to pay off.

Um, And I think he's right. I believe in all of you, way more than I believe in myself. And I realized it's what I'm selling and why people are drawn to me. I'm selling you on yourself. And I recently sort of reed myself. Um, Well on Instagram and I don't know, maybe the rest of the world, but I am now calling myself the Intrinsic Authority Coach for Ziel Pop Divas because it's the fucking truth.

I help people claim their self-governance, and yet I give my own self very little credit for my own accomplishments. So in a way, I am super surprised at myself and my commitment to this show every week for the last year. And on the other hand, I'm not at all surprised because this is in fact for you. I think of you out there listening and it inspires me to keep giving.

So today I thought I would share. Some of the things that I have learned over the last year, both in doing this podcast and also in working on my business full-time, and there are like two main takeaways that I have realized kind of over and over and over again, but they seem to be like the, the most, um, impactful.

So the first one is doubling down on self-trust. I may have mentioned this before, but I will say it again. The world is full of people that are going to give you advice, but at the end of the day, you are the authority in your life and you are the one that needs to decide what is right for you. I have learned this lesson 10 times over this year for myself.

I've really needed to go inside and consult my inner guidance so much because I have been extremely tempted to buy more courses, pay for more coaching, join a mastermind, like all of these things. But I decided every time to walk my talk and listen to my inner knowing, and that was not always easy. Now I wanna say I don't fault people for selling their way.

It's what we all do. If you download my intuitive scheduling workbook, As much as I'm selling you on your uniqueness, I'm also selling you on my process, which is to say, I am offering you what I know to be true for me. Capital M, capital E, right? These are my truths and I'm hoping that some part of that resonates with you and it helps you find your way.

And that is what I do with my clients, right? Like this process works with my clients and I'm always adapting it for the person sitting in front of me. But I also wanna say that it can be so tempting with all the amazing marketing that people are doing to want to try to buy your results, especially when you aren't getting the results you want, right?

Um, I've thought about joining a mastermind so many times because I want to buy the result I think the Mastermind is gonna give me, but I have to be honest, I haven't been able to justify the price for myself at this point. Why? Because I know myself intimately that is like the work I've been doing this year is to really get to know myself and coach myself closer to me instead of farther away from me.

And I realize that one of the biggest benefits as something like a Mastermind is the community aspect of it. Obviously the teaching from whoever's running it. Is amazing. But I think that a lot of the reason why people, especially people's businesses, end up excelling is because of the connections they make and, and the way that that helps to like further spread their word.

Right. It like, I've seen it so many times with like, people in masterminds, like they just keep hiring each other to, to like work for each other and that's great. Like I think it's, it's what it is, right? It's. Like it's connection, it's community. It's being inspired by the people that you're in the room with and in the space with.

And I think that that like community and mutual support and respect is so important, but like I am not going to engage in that. I don't engage with community very much, like in like someone else's community. Especially virtually. I'm actually doing like a 10 week course right now where I have yet to ever show up on camera, and the only person I have engaged with is the person I already have a close relationship with.

So I can't see myself paying like somewhere between five and $25,000 to be in a container that I'm not gonna fully participate in. And what's funny about this is that I've actually coached people on helping them decide that they've gotten what they came for, right? When they're sort of like lamenting about having like bought a course or joined a mastermind.

And I do believe that that is the correct coaching because once we've made a decision, it does not serve us to beat ourselves up. We can examine why we did it right so that we can learn from it. And maybe not do that again, but if it's paid for and you aren't getting your money back, we have to let it be.

I've talked so much about having your own back around the decisions that you make, and it does not serve you at all to go back on that decision and decide to beat yourself up about it. And so this is where. I wanna help you learn from those people's mistakes and from my caution. And the lesson is that the reason people make these decisions is because they're trying to solve for an emotion by believing they can buy a new one.

So they might be feeling insecure about building a business, and they want to feel certain, they're trying to buy that certainty. It's not gonna happen. You're never gonna be able to buy an emotion. So every time I was faced with the idea of buying something new, I stopped and asked what I was looking for.

No times ever was I actually trying to fill in a knowledge gap. I was looking at my results, deciding they were not good enough, feeling defeated and looking to buy some certainty or relief or confidence. There were things I could have spent money on that I would've gotten some kind of return on my investment.

There is one thing that I can be certain of. If I am thinking of spending money on something so that it forces me to take action on it, then it is not the thing. What I have learned and will probably forget, and then remember again, is I'm here to wait. Melanie and I talked about this with me being a reflector.

When I'm ready to do something, I do not need to be forced. It's a go. It's a full body. Yes. And then I can look at whether or not there is something outside of me that will support me in that. But I don't wanna start from that place of lack or that place of believing that I need to be taking action.

Because sometimes the belief that I need to take action is actually ju just again, me trying to solve for an emotion. And you know, what I found is that often. Like I can find a free resource or something like the course I'm currently doing, which is a low ticket offer that is gonna fill in that gap. Now, you may think, this sounds like I'm advocating against my own interest being someone that does offer what some might call a high ticket coaching package, right?

Like high ticket is subjective. But to that, I say, One. I also offer a ton of free guidance in the form of this podcast. My socials the intuitive scheduling workbook, and two, I am willing to pay for stuff when I need it. I pay a therapist. I paid my own coach $6,600 when I started my business because I knew I needed that support at the beginning, and it was worth every penny.

I paid $18,000 for a coaching certification. And this is all just in the last four years, over my lifetime and my career as a dance educator, I paid a lot of money for Gyrotonic and a B T teacher certifications like I am not against spending money. The message here isn't about not investing in yourself.

It's about tapping into yourself to really know when an investment is the right thing at that time. I could very well decide tomorrow to join a mastermind or to do another certification, but right now I don't see how those things would be doing anything other than me thinking I could buy success faster because I want it now and not like five years from now.

I don't do that. That is not for me. I'm not gonna purchase things to assuage my impatience. I'm gonna feel my impatience. I'm going to examine my impatience, but I am not going to purchase things to make it go away, and I'm never gonna encourage someone else to do that. I recently had a consult with someone that was ready to work with me, except she was having a little drama around the price.

Which is that they currently didn't have the money, which is a thing, and they could work to get the money or they could believe that like working with me would help them get the money, which I believe it would've. But my point here is they were ready to talk themselves into it, and I could see that they were using coaching against themselves.

And I'm paraphrasing kind of what they said and like my own assessment of it, but it was like they were thinking. That if they were willing to spend the money, then it would, it would mean they believed in themselves. That's what they were using as evidence that they believed in themselves. And I just asked them if that's how they wanted to make the decision.

And they were kind of a bit taken aback by that, cuz I think it's unexpected in a consult especially, which is essentially a sales call. Right, for someone to sort of question the way that you're making your decision, and if you like that way or not, because most people assume that like you're getting on the call to be sold and that someone's going to be like convincing you to buy, but really I'm only just convincing you.

To like trust yourself. Right. I'm not convinced, I'm not trying to convince you to like, believe me, I'm trying to con, I'm trying to help you get closer to you and believe in yourself. So we actually got off that call and I suggested to them to like do some of that work around, like how they wanted to make that decision, if they were gonna make this investment, what they wanna decide to believe about it.

Right. They were also grappling with like not wanting to. Put pressure on working with me and meaning that like they didn't wanna have the thought that like, if I invest in working with Chris, I need to make money. And I was like, why not? Like peop, that's why we make investments, right? If you're gonna work with me and you're coming to me because you have a business and that's something that you wanna work on, of course you wanna make money.

Like that's the point. So how can you make that decision to think about it that way? So that it doesn't feel pressurized because that's the problem. And that's when it's like, are you gonna make it mean that it wasn't worth it if you don't immediately see a return on your investment? And that's because again, if we're looking to buy something so that we can buy a feeling, we're looking for an immediate result, we wanna know right away that we're gonna get what we want out of it.

And that's not just, and that's just not always how it works. A lot of the coaching happens after we finish the package. I know this from teaching dance for so long that things that I like talked to my students about, did not click for them until long after they worked for me, and sometimes they needed to hear it from somebody else, and then they put the pieces together for themselves.

And I do believe that the teaching that I gave them is partly responsible for giving them that result. They just weren't gonna get it in the moment. So I never want. Anyone buying for me because they're believing that if they really believed in themselves that they would spend the money on the coaching, because that's not always true.

And I will say if someone is saying that to you, if they're selling you that way, Right. Like, why don't, why aren't you willing to make this investment in yourself? They are being manipulative as fuck. Get the hell off the call run for your life, right? Because that is not the kind of person that you're gonna be able to feel safe with because they're not creating safety on that call because they're trying to like manipulate you into making a decision that might, that might go against your best interest.

Okay. I'm gonna calm down now. I got a little heated. So anyway, I did tell them to like go and do that work, to do, do it off the call with me so they didn't feel like I was trying to like pressure them into that. And we'll see if they come back and wanna work with me in the future, I'm here. We can do that work when they're ready, when they have the money and when they've decided what they wanna make it mean and when they've decided what they wanna specifically get out of that coaching.

The other very big lesson I learned and relearn every few days is that, I do not get to decide what other people think is valuable as it pertains to working with me. Last week I talked a little bit about handing my clients back their responsibility, and this is an ongoing thing for me that shows up in so many different places within working on my business.

I actually got coached on this because I don't believe everyone needs coaching, and there are some coaches out there that are convinced that everyone needs a coach. I don't, but I was failing to see that that is not actually the point. But I do allow myself to get caught up in this debate with myself.

More often than I would care to admit, and it's probably just a deflection from some other thing that I don't wanna like deal with or work on. But here we are. It does happen. So I really needed to like understand that first of all, people buy shit. They do not need. All the time, like no one needs a Louis Vuitton bag.

I have one. I don't need it. I love it. Right? No one needs to go on weeks long vacations to the Cayman Island. These are not need. These are people buying feelings, buying experiences that they, that like do, they're not life sustaining. Right. And those feelings, that experience. Don't last a lifetime, they last seconds.

We often build up experiences like vacation so much that they're not even enjoyable. It's more enjoyable to daydream about being on vacation than it actually is to be there because we've built it up so much in our heads like y'all, you're gonna be the same person you were back at home. And I've gotten very clear about that.

It's why like I know how I need to travel. I needs to be low stakes. I can't be trying to get the most out of anything that's just gonna stress me out. At least with coaching, it's an investment that's gonna continue to improve someone's life long past the initial purchase. And like I said, often the lessons that you learn from coaching continue to like reveal themselves as you do the work.

Because it's neural pathways, you have to build up the habit of your brain functioning that way. So it really has to be people by coaching because they want coaching. This is the thing I need to accept and just move on from. And to no longer let myself indulge in the debate of whether or not I need to tell people they need it or don't need it.

It's not for me to decide. It's for me to talk to the people that want it because no one needs it. Not everyone wants it, but the people that do get to decide that for themselves, and I just need to let them have their minds back. And the reason why I wanted to talk about this is because I think it's particularly important.

For my creatives to actually make and sell art in some way. No one needs your work. No one is going to come up to you and ask you to put your work out in the world. That's not gonna happen, but people do desire it. It does improve the quality of people's lives. They can absolutely live without it, but there are many that simply don't want to, and there are some for whom you are The example for what is possible, you could argue that these people do need you.

I'm not entirely sure that that's true, because they may find another catalyst to inspire them to action, but we can't know if they will or not. So why not believe that you are the representation that they've been waiting for? Who does that hurt? No one, and it could help so many. So that is what I will continue to build belief around daily.

It sounds kind of trite, but like just knowing that I've helped a handful of people helps to keep me getting up every day and putting more of it out in the world. And I think that these two lessons together, like this self-trust and the trusting that other people know what they want. And that they're can go and get that and that some of them are gonna want me really go hand in hand and helping me chill the fuck out, honestly.

Right. I just, I feel more relaxed when I can. Believe in myself and believe in my ability to make decisions for myself. You can see how these two feed each other, right? Because it's like this, it's a, it's like a feedback loop. Like I believe in myself and trust myself. It helps me trust people. Which then if I trust people, then I can also trust myself, right?

Cuz I'm people. And I think some of the best lessons and some of the best coaching is that kind of coaching that just kind of continues to reinforce. Things that are useful instead of just things that like we wanna try to believe because we think they're the right thing to believe. I personally want to thank all of you that have been listening for the past year.

I am enjoying sharing with you so much. And I love hearing from you and knowing that you are getting something from this work that I am putting out in the world. And I am excited to keep bringing you the magical inner workings of my mind and to bring you more guests in the coming months that I know will inspire you just as much as they do me.

So happy anniversary to us all. Thank you for being on this ride with me and I will talk to you soon.



If you are loving what you're hearing here on, you need a coach, bitch, please subscribe like and share with your friends. And if you want more information on how you can work with me, one on one. Go to theonlychrishale.com where you can find me on Instagram, theonlychrishale.