046 The Coach Breakdown: Fixing Your Raggedy Mindset

La Tondra: But if you fundamentally are not doing the base work within, if you’re not working on your mindset, if you’re not opening yourself up, even if you don’t like it, which I would maintain you don’t have to like it, but investing in that personal growth, that’s the real key. There’s no system. There’s no tool. People want to jump into that spot just saying, “Yeah, the mindset stuff, I’ll deal with that later. Let me get this money and then I’ll grow.” And it’s the exact opposite.

Welcome to the Hello Seven Podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Rodgers, wife, mother of four children, a lover of Beyoncé, coffee drinker, and afro-wearer, and I just happen to be the CEO of a seven-figure business. I am on a mission to help every woman I meet become a millionaire. If you want to make more money, you are in the right place. Let's get it going.

Natalie: Hello, this is not Rachel Rodgers speaking, if you can’t tell, but rather Natalie Miller. I am Natalie. I am the programs director for Hello Seven. And I am here along with one of our resident coaches, La Tondra Murray. Hey, La Tondra.

La Tondra: Hey, what’s up?

Natalie: So, we are taking over the podcast this week as our queen Rachel is currently on a tight deadline for her upcoming book. So, we are happy to step in and to talk to y’all. So, La Tondra, let’s tell the listeners a little bit about us. What do you do here and why do you choose to work with Hello Seven?

La Tondra: Yes, so as a resident coach, I work very closely with you and our deliver team to provide outstanding coaching to our clients, to really help our clients create momentum and make progress towards their amazing business goals. I’m a credentialed executive coach as well as a Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach. And so, I get to use all of that juiciness in my work here at Hello Seven.

And I really love working with the team because, one, the group is just amazing. We have so many badass awesome people on the team. There are so many unique perspectives. And there’s just this laser commitment to the mission of creating more equitable wealth in the world. And that’s really powerful. I love that. How about you?

Natalie: It is so powerful. Well, I do pinch myself sometimes. Just, I cannot believe – you know, I’ll be hanging out in our Slack channel and I just can’t believe how fun it is hanging out with all of you hilarious, smart-ass, driven, opinionated women. It is just the best.

So, I’m the director of programs here, which means that I do a lot of curriculum creating. I like to say I take Rachel’s info and Rachel’s visions and then I put it into practical courses and tools and ways for our clients to engage. I’m also a master certified life coach. And I have a history of being an entrepreneur.

So, I had a seven-figure brick and mortar yoga business. And then I had a growing coaching business. And, you know, La Tondra, it’s funny, my favorite things to do actually are to coach and to create content. And so, Rachel saw this in me. I was actually a client of Rachel’s and Rachel saw this in me. And she was like, “I feel like you and I are doing the same thing and you’re really good at this and I’m really good at that, so how about we join forces?” And, you know, the rest is history.

So, I also, I love – coaching in our community, I think, is so exciting and it does feel so revolutionary because it’s all about helping mostly women entrepreneurs, but it’s all about helping people who are trying to create a better world, right? So, our clients have various businesses. They do all sorts of things. What they do all have in common is that they are here to make the world better for our larger communities. And that is just so fun to get to be – and so delightful – to get to be part of that.

So, what we thought we would do, everyone, in this episode is to answer a couple of questions that have come up in our free Facebook community, our Hello Seven free Facebook community, which if you are not a member, you should go look that up right now and come and join us.

But we wanted to tackle a couple of these questions, just to give you a sneak peek into what coaching is like in our programs. And also how our coaching is kind of based on this conviction that we have that you are brilliant and you know so much more than you realize you know, and that our job as coaches is actually not to tell you what to do or not to give you all the answers, but rather what we’re here to do as coaches is to help you get clear and help you trust yourself.

La Tondra: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s so funny because I think clients sometimes think, “Well I’ll just go and master this process,” or, “Oh, I’ll just go and check off the things on this list.” And really, it’s about unearthing what’s within. And in most cases, I think almost all cases, clients know the answers.

There may be fear around getting to those answers. There may be a level of being muddled around getting to the root. But I think, fundamentally, that’s what we do as coaches. We help enable that discovery process and really cultivate that trust within our clients so that they can trust themselves. I think that’s the fundamental part of all of this.

Natalie: Completely, yeah. And it’s interesting because even when you are learning new things, like let’s say you join us on the inside and you’re learning a process for having sales calls, we have a process that works. But at the same time, in order for you to actually implement it, that’s all on you.

And that involves what we like to call taking out the head trash, so figuring out what are the fears and the doubts that are getting in my way, that are keeping me from wanting to get on the phone with someone and sell them something. And then also, this process of clarifying how you can take a tool that we have and then customize it for your own use. So, we do a lot of that. We do a lot of asking clarifying questions and then helping to kind of identify and address the basic fears that get in the way of us taking action and trusting ourselves.

La Tondra: Absolutely. And that’s really, I think, the foundation. It’s amazing how, at all levels of growth and success and evolution, that continuous work on self, that continuous taking out of the mind trash, that continuous ability to trust one’s self, but then also to customize things. I think making something your own is really the key. Even when you learn an approach or a tool or a process, fundamentally making it your own and knowing that you can continually do that is really important as you move upward in your business.

Natalie: Yes, 100%. Okay, so let’s jump in and tackle some of these questions, La Tondra. So, here is the first one, “I’m creating my first course and I feel like I’m tossing in too much content. How much is enough? How much is too much? Or how much is too sparse?” So, this is a great question. And I think you and I can both look at this and we can kind of see, we can smell it. we can smell the head trash in there, right?

So, okay, so here’s someone who wants to create a course and is worried about giving too much or too little. So, La Tondra, what are you smelling in here?

La Tondra: Yeah, so immediately, the thrash around too much, too little, too sparse, there’s something at the root of that motion there. So, one of the questions that I would ask initially would be, what’s at the root there? What are you afraid of when it comes to the amount of content? Because there could be a notion of, “Do I know enough? Am I worthy of teaching individuals this content? Am I prepared to deliver?”

And it’s likely that that could be more at the root than anything really related to the content. The content is not typically the issue when people ask questions like this, in my experience.

Natalie: Totally. And it’s almost like that, “Well, if I’m going to charge $497 for this, I better give them their money’s worth.” Yeah, so there’s that. So, okay, so we would look at this and look at that piece of, “Okay, let’s look and see that there’s maybe a worry of not enoughness at play here.”

And then there’s also some clarifying questions to ask. So, we might ask, “Hey, what’s your intention for this course? What do you want someone who finishes your course to be able to do?” And so, as the person kind of steps out of the fear of, “How much do I give?” and more into, “What’s the result that I’m looking for?”

When they come more results-focused, I think maybe the person will be like, “Well, you know what, I want them to be able to do an amazing set of dip nails. So, we go, “Okay, cool. You want them to be able to an amazing set of dip nails. So then, what’s necessary for them to know? What are the most important things for them to know if they want to do an amazing set of dip nails?”

And then you might say, “Oh, okay, it’s like these six things.” I think our expertise would come into play where we would really want to reinforce for them this thing that we see all the time which is that when you are an expert in your subject matter, you forget how much you know.

La Tondra: Absolutely.

Natalie: Right? So, I think about my grandmother – when I was a little girl, my grandmother, I really wanted to learn how to knit. So, my grandmother is, like, this 70-year-old Polish lady and she grew up in Europe 90 years ago now, and she learned to knit when she was six. She was knitting as a kindergartener.

And so, when I ask her, “Hey, grandma, can you teach me how to knit?” Her hands know it so well, she can’t even slow it down to show me. Eventually, I had to learn from someone else because she’s just like, “Oh, it’s simple…” And I was like, “Wait a second…” you know.

And so, the same is actually true for you. You are an expert in your subject matter and you have forgotten how much you know. So, we are here to remind you as coaches, you know, less is more. Get really clear about your intention. And then think, okay, what are the basic things this person needs to master in order to get the result that I want to get them?

La Tondra: Absolutely. And, Natalie, I think you’re so right. That question around what kind of transformation do you want to enable, I think that’s a fundamental thing that we often bring clients back to. And as you think about what you know and what you’ve experienced and the skills you have and how they all come together, it’s pretty easy to overwhelm a potential client just by virtue of the breadth of what you have in your head and in your heart and what you bring into the world.

And so, once you move out of the fear of enoughness or capacity or capability, you can really get to the root of, “How do I support this transformation? And how do I scale what I know into something that’s consumable for other people, so they can be successful?”

Natalie: Yes, absolutely. Okay, so here’s the second question, “When beefing up the value of a signature offer, how should one go about it so it doesn’t add tons more complexity in your operations or costs in delivery? What should we watch out for or consider when doing so?”

Okay, so what I love about this question is this question is the same question. So, let’s just look at the very beginning of it, “When beefing up the value of a signature offer.” So, that is code, in my mind, for, “I would like to charge more for this.”

La Tondra: That’s right, “I would like to charge more, and I’m not really convinced that I can do so based on the efficacy of what I know and so what other step do I need to layer in so that I can feel okay about it?”

Natalie: Right, oh my gosh. It’s like – Just so you know, part of Hello Seven coaching with Natalie is you are going to be subject to so many metaphors because, listen, I just can’t stop. But I have to tell you this.

So, last night, I was making spaghetti sauce for my children. They wanted to have spaghetti and they love to have spaghetti with what we call fake meat, those veggie crumbles. I went to the freezer, and I realized, “Damn, I only have a half a bag of veggie crumbles.” And I was like, “Okay,” and that’s really what I thought about when I read this; beefing up the value. I was like, “Okay, I’ve only got half a bag of veggie crumbles. What other crap can I throw in here?”

La Tondra: You got some mushrooms, you got some bread that’s a kind of meaty kind of texture. Add the texture. Make you feel like you got more than noodles and sauce, right?

Natalie: Exactly, and so instead of being like, “Okay, you know what…” my intention is a delicious sauce for the kids is like, “How do I pretend like there’s more meat?” And so again, at the root of this question – by the way also, we crack each other up all the time…

Okay, so at the root of this question again is, “I might not be giving enough.” And so, as coaches, before we even talk about, you know, what are you adding and what’s the complexity it’s adding, before we’re even talking about that stuff, it’s this moment of, “Okay, but hold on. Why? What are you worried about?”

And then again, like we were talking about before, what is the result that you want to get for your client? What’s the transformation? Do they really mean more? Does the sauce really need more fake meat, or could you actually do something with what you’ve got and have it be equally delicious, equally effective?

La Tondra: That’s right. And I think one of the other questions that comes up is this notion of, “Well, what do you want to do?” We’ll often ask clients, “What do you want to do?” Because there are times where you might say, “I need to beef this up because I’ve seen what someone else is doing and I’m not even really compelled to make the changes that I see. But I feel that I have to because I’m comparing myself to someone else.” And again, that gets back to the root of enoughness, of fear, et cetera.

Natalie: Woman, that is so good. And actually, La Tondra just shared with you one of the core questions that we’ve been asking lately in our We should All Be Millionaires community, in our membership community, which is, “What do you want?” Actually, what do you want to do?

So often, what we’re doing is we’re looking outside of ourselves and we’re trying to think – do you know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of that old thing from the 80s where some man is asking a woman, “What’s your name, baby?” And she’s like, “What do you want it to be?”

La Tondra: That’s funny, yeah.

Natalie: Totally though, right? It’s like the thing where, you know – yeah, market research is really important. It’s good to know what your people want. But if you’re always trying to look to other people to fulfil their desires without looking within yourself and really thinking, “Well, what lights me up? What’s exciting to me? What do I want to engage in when I’m making this signature offer? What do I want to deliver? What sounds fun to me?” And what we know for sure, to use an Oprah-ism, what we know for sure is that when you’re doing what you love to do, you make more money.

La Tondra: Absolutely. You’re going to stack your bills when you are uniquely you, when you’re showing up as your most authentic self. And that’s not about replicating other people. It’s not about compare and despair. It’s about being rooted in your you-ness, to make up a word.

Natalie: Totally, and you know, the other really fun thing about this question, La Tondra, is that this person’s answer is in the question. And it’s a perfect example of, “Woman, you know. You already know.” So, when beefing up the value of a signature offer, how should one go about it so it doesn’t add tons more complexity in your operations or costs in delivery. What should we watch out for?

Complexity in operations and cost in delivery. It’s like, you know. You already know what to watch out for. And so, coaching with us is not us saying, “Oh yes, here’s the list of things.” Coaching with us is like, “You already know. You tell us.

La Tondra: Yeah, we’re here to help you trust yourself. And that builds a collective muscle that you can then take forward. It builds this ability to assess your own questions, to think about your own decisions, and to continually, in many ways, coach yourself from the inside, to be able to really reflect on what you want to do and why and how you might get in your own way.

Natalie: Yes, well it’s that old adage, right? We’re here to teach women to fish. It’s not the thing where you come up and you’re like, “Hi, I need some fish.” And we’re like, “Yeah, let us catch them for you. Let us show you exactly how to catch a fish you can watch us do it, and we’ll have all the answers.”

No, we want to help you do it, which means that we’re really here to help you dissolve your fears, identify and dissolve the fears that are underneath and unearth the wisdom that you already have, and then trust it.

Okay, here’s the next question, “How do you decide what you need to invest the time to learn and what you should just outsource? For example, should you hire a copywriter or learn how to write more effective copy?”

La Tondra: So, Natalie, you know, as a Strengths Coach, I’m automatically going to tap into talents here. Because I think that fundamentally – now, there may be a point in your business where you’re dabbling and you’re doing many different things. But fundamentally, if you want to exponentially grow in your business, you really want to tap into your natural talents. You want to tap into your natural gifts; the things that energize you.

And so, I would say that particularly as you move forward in your business and you’re in a position to begin to engage help, part of it, what lights you up? What do you enjoy doing versus what makes you want to hit yourself in the head with a brick?

What is sucking the life out of you that you don’t enjoy, that really drains you, and that furthermore takes you away from your natural zone of genius, takes you away from the things that you know you do really well and that absolutely get results and absolutely add value, and that you also, by the way, enjoy?

You can be capable of doing many things at a pretty good level and hate it the entire time. I think there’s an energetic cue to think about here. So, part of the question that I would ask to this person would be to say, “What lights you up? What do you enjoy? What do you really, really thrive – where do you thrive and shine when you’re in your business?”

Natalie: Yes, and even to look at specific things. Like this one is sort of like, so why do you want to learn to write more effective copy? So, whenever the answer is, “Well I feel like I should,” the should word, that doesn’t seem like a good reason.

Now, if it is, “Well, I want to teach copywriting in my program,” yeah, you should probably learn how to write more effective copy then. Or, “I love to write,” or, I’m still establishing my brand voice and I want to do that from within.”

All of those are great reasons. But the, like, “Well I feel like I should,” or, “A copywriter is so expensive…” We would ask you, okay, so why do you want to do this? La Tondra is always good for, like, what lights you up? What are you excited to do? Again, that question, what do you want actually? What do you want to do?

And then, if your reasons are really not that compelling if your reason is a should or a fear, if it’s a fear-based reason – now, if it’s a desire-based reason like an appetitive reason, awesome, we’re here to help you figure out how to do that. If your answer is an aversive reason or a fear-based reason or like an, “I should,” reason, then we’re going to help you clean up your mind trash because that’s just mind trash there.

So, how do you decide? Well, you’ve got to check in with yourself. You’ve got to check in with your yourself, with your talents, and with your reasons. Yeah?

La Tondra: Yep.

Natalie: Okay, one more. Let’s do one more, “Any tips for the zero to 100K club?” So, for our people doing four figures, or hell, three figures, five figures…

La Tondra: Any figure…

Natalie: “What are two to three tips you could offer to keep going, or tips for how to trust the process?” Such a great question. I don’t know, where would you start?

La Tondra: Yeah, my starting place would be to ask, what could you do to build more trust and confidence within? The question talks about trusting the process. Fundamentally, what we see with so many clients, and really clients at ever level, not just clients at this initial starting point, but really, clients at ever level, how can you trust yourself? How can you invest in your growth? How can you invest in your personal evolution as a gateway to the growth of your business?

Natalie: I love that. I think that personal evolution piece is so key, La Tondra. Because what we see in every business owner, in every entrepreneur is that personal growth equals business growth. And business growth requires persona growth. It’s not optional.

La Tondra: That’s right.

Natalie: It’s not optional because, as you grow your business, you have to start to make some big decisions. And it just requires so much personal growth.

La Tondra: Absolutely, it’s funny, we were talking in our We Should All Be Millionaires community just recently about the idea that tools, you know, are amazing, but they’re not the channel for your growth. So, you can learn about ActiveCampaign and Ontraport. You can learn about how to configure those things and install them.

You can do all of those things, but if you fundamentally are not doing the base work within, if you’re not working on your mindset, if you’re not opening yourself up, even if you don’t like it, which I would maintain you don’t have to like it – sometimes you don’t feel like it. But actively investing in that personal growth, that’s the real key. There’s no system, there’s no tool. People want to jump into that spot just saying yeah, “The mindset stuff, I’ll deal with that later. let me get this money and then I’ll grow.” And it’s the exact opposite.

Natalie: It’s the exact opposite. And there’s a piece too, when I think about someone who’s in that place of just kind of starting out, just starting to grow, I’ve been there. You’ve been there. So, it’s usually a place where this is maybe a side-hustle. You have another way that you’re generating more of your income. Or it might be a place where, you know, you’re also a parent or you’re also a caregiver of some kind.

So, almost always, there’s something else that you have going on and so another tip in addition to really kind of making it about, you know, recognizing that it’s going to require a lot of personal growth is recognizing that you’re going to need fuel for this journey. You’re going to need fuel, so it’s also like up-leveling your self-sustenance, right?

The word self-care is so, I think, overused it’s almost an empty word. But I even like to think of it as, like, self-sustenance. It’s fuel. So, this will be a place where it’s time to invest in your energy. It’s time to protect and value your time, to nurture yourself in many ways because oftentimes, in this moment first of all, there is a lot of personal growth happening that you need energy for.

And then also, you’ll probably have a lot going on. And so, to double down on self-love, again, not like, “Well, when I make it, after the launch, then I will start to take the weekend off.” That’s not going to work. We have to be layering in the self-sustenance as we’re going along.

La Tondra: Absolutely, and that becomes a pattern that you can then extend and sustain going forward as your business grows, even into the mid-six-figures, as you continue to grow. Part of it again, it’s cultivating – a lot of the things we’re talking about, it’s a practice. It’s about cultivating and building muscle memory around how you move through the world, but also how you show up and how you treat yourself, knowing that this idea of grinding and hustling, you know, to the very bitter end will leave you broken and really not positioned for success, not positioned to shine in the way you were meant to shine.

And so, if you can learn from the beginning, as you build your business form the zero-dollar point, if you can build those practices in, you can sustain them throughout your business, throughout the growth of your business. And as it takes flight, you’ll have that fuel for your flight. You’ll have that fuel to go forward.

Natalie: You’ll have that fuel. And you’ll have that fuel so that when things get hard, you don’t give up. Because that’s the other thing. That’s the other thing. When you’re starting to get something off of the ground, you can hit an obstacle and if you don’t have enough fuel, why keep going? You could just stop there. So, that’s super, super important.

You know, you said something there too, La Tondra, that made me think being open and curious also feels really important in this. And this is part of growth mindset, being open and curious, being willing to grow, being willing to experiment, being willing to take a chance, being willing to fail, being willing to put shit out there that is not perfect and not fully formed.

All of those things, really being in the world with a joie de vivre or an openness, like I’m kind of in this for the journey, for the fun of it as much as for anything else. When we get super-graspy and we’re like, “I’m in it to make money, I’m in it to make money,” making money is an awesome motivation, but making that the sole motivation, I don’t know that that necessarily works for all of us.

I think, when we begin to frame this period, this business growth period in terms of our personal growth and in terms of, “I don’t know what could happen,” you know, I think there’ s a lot more resilience. There’s a lot more resilience in that.

La Tondra: Absolutely, that’s beautifully said, Natalie; beautifully said. And for all of our perfectionists out there, you know who you are. All of our folks who are mired in the absolute perfect details, just know that there’s a beauty in releasing that. I know that from a personal perspective.

Natalie: I know, I was going to say, we know who you are because we are your people. And so, we’re constantly working on that too. It’s how we know the fear of not being enough is at the root of so many questions. It’s like, we know. We have that too.

I was just going to say, actually, I know you asked for two or three tips, but you know, but I have one more. And that is also be sure you have a community. You need a community where everyone is in this together. You need a community where people aren’t asking you, like, “Did you get that business off the ground yet?”

You need a community where people are like, “Hey, have you tried this?” or, “Hey, sis, I see you. I see you showing up on social media,” or, “Let me get a bunch of people to come to your webinar,” or whatever. Having a squad, a support squad that gets you, that may be the most important thing, yeah, La Tondra?

La Tondra: I absolutely think that that’s the most important thing. You know, now that you’ve added that – and I think that was a glorious tip to add – I think that’s one of the most fundamental pieces that you can put into your arsenal as you think about a business, as you get started really on any dream is how can you have a group of folks who are going to uplift you, support you, call you on your crap when you get mired in something that’s a little bit on the ridiculous side?

Will you have people call you out but also people who will life you up and hold space for you, but also challenge you and tell you, you’re not dreaming big enough, tell you that you’re not putting your talents out in the world as regularly as you should be, let you know that you’re dream and more is possible?

Natalie: Yes, oh my gosh, okay. So, this is the part where I do what one of our clients calls, “My afterschool special recap.” I can’t help it. It’s like too much – I’ve just been a teacher for too long. So, okay, here’s your afterschool special recap.

When you come for coaching at Hello Seven, you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to ask you, what do you want? We’re going to ask you what you want. We’re going to ask you what lights you up. And we’re going to help you keep steering yourself toward that. So, that’s one thing.

Another thing is we’re going to help you take out your head trash. And yes, you have head trash. We all have head trash. We’ve all got it. We are sanitation workers here. We’re mental sanitation workers here and we’re like, “Yeah, we need to… That’s something that needs to go here. There’s something rotting in there. let’s find that. Let’s get rid of that.” It’s not a Febreze situation either. No, we want to get it out.

La Tondra: Don’t try to mask it. Don’t try to mask it.

Natalie: Don’t try to mask it. We just want to get it out, right? So, we’re going to do that. And then, you know, I think more than anything else, we’re going to believe in you. We’re going to connect you with people who also believe in you and celebrate you and support you as you come along.

So, there you go. There’s Natalie Miller and La Tondra Murray, coaches at Hello Seven, talking to you about what it’s like on the inside. Thank you so much for listening.

La Tondra: Yeah, thank you.

Natalie: Damn, La Tondra, you could do that for a living…

La Tondra: Rachel may not be here, but her guidance is omnipresent. She wanted to make sure we invited you to grab our free guide called Million Dollar Behavior. In it, you will learn the 10 behavior shifts you need to make to build wealth, claim power, and have an impact.

In this guide, Rachel lays out the Million Dollar Behavior required for you to define your own success and chase after your goals on your terms. Get this free guide now at helloseven.co/guide. It’s been a pleasure sharing this time with you and we hope to see you in our private community soon.