“Business coach” is kicked around a lot, but it’s not exactly clear how they work and how they help people grow their business. Lisa Buyer, a friend and client, invited me to her Blab show to talk about this.
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Lisa: Welcome to the Digital Dish. I’m Lisa Buyer and I am the author of “Social PR Secrets” and I’m here with my co-host, Cathy Hackl.
Charlie: Hi, Lisa. Hi, Cathy.
Lisa: Charlie, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Charlie: Professionally, I’m a business coach. I’m also an executive coach.
I help people figure out where they’re trying to go in a way that makes sense to them, as well as the best pathways to get there. Strategy boils down to determining where you’re going, how you’re going to get there, and finally doing it. Sometimes the “doing it” is not the easiest part for people; for others, it’s really easy.
In 2007, I started the website, Productive Flourishing, where we talk a lot about living a rich and full life. It’s directed at creative people, because our particular challenge is getting stuff done.
There are lot of people who just wake up in the morning, go to work, do their thing, and then go home without a bunch of ideas going around in their heads. And there are many days I wish I could be one of them — I’m not.
The rest of us wake up and we have tons of ideas about what to pursue. We over-commit, and then we under-deliver, and there are a lot of emotions and thought patterns that come up. We talk about those at Productive Flourishing.
Lisa: Awesome. Well, Cathy and I have a lot in common as far as being in the same space: digital marketing, public relations, journalism, social media. Our audience is comprised of digital marketing professionals as well as students. One of the keywords that you said everybody has in common is over-commitment and not having enough time in the day to get done what you’ve committed to get done.
This is the second time we’ve worked together. I feel that as a digital marketer and a business owner, I had a hard time because I didn’t have someone to answer to — now, I answer to Charlie. Every two weeks, we have a standing call.
Charlie: It’s an interesting position to be someone’s paid check-in, but that’s where we are. I think that, regardless of whether you’re working solo or in a larger team, the founder doesn’t have someone that they can 1) confide in, 2) share what’s really going on, and 3) have someone that will call them on the BS that comes up, someone who will confront them and say “This was going to take two hours, you had that in your schedule, we planned on how to do it, you just didn’t do it. What’s going on?” That’s a tough conversation to have with people, but it’s the type of conversation that people aren’t having with themselves.
Lisa: How do you know if you need a business coach? How do your clients come to you? How do you determine that you have a problem that you need outside help with?
Charlie: So many people approach coaching from a deficiency mindset. They think “I’m not doing this well, things aren’t working and I’m going to get a coach to help.” If things really aren’t working at a certain point in your business, you’re already in a bad position.
When you work with a coach, you have to go through the stage in which you work through the mindset and self-talk pieces of the problem. Then, you finally arrive at the fact that there’s nothing wrong with you because someone’s helping you perform at your best. Michael Jordan had a coach. Tiger Woods has a coach. You can go up through a long list of people who are at the top of their game that had and/or have a coach.
So one way that I would want people to think about that is by asking “Do I believe I’m performing at my best in my business?” If they do believe that, they don’t need a coach, because the coach is going to help them achieve that mindset. But most people aren’t, and they know at a certain level that they’re not.
The biggest obstacle is affording a coach. I’m probably going to get in trouble here, Lisa, but one challenge I’ve noticed, especially for women, is the willingness to give permission to get help rather than just trying to do it all by themselves. That’s sort of the woman’s journey. The man’s journey is, sociologically speaking, largely around competency. So permission versus competency.
If you’re running your business and you really don’t know where you’re going, a business coach can help. If you don’t know where you’re going, you can end up meandering all over the inter-webs. You’re on Blab, you’re on Facebook, you’re on Pinterest, you’re doing 80 gazillion marketing things. You don’t know if they’re working but they all seem like good ideas.
Cathy: That sounds like me, Charlie. You just described me. I’m like over the place. I’m like…
Charlie: Great. We should talk.
Cathy: Yeah, Charlie. I know.
Charlie: If you have all of that, you have the plan, you have the road map and everything, and you’re just not doing it — that’s another matter. Most business coaches worth their salt will be able to work through the personal dimensions of why that might be, but it could also be that you fundamentally have a misalignment with what your business is and what you want to do.
And I’m just going to throw this out there. If you actually don’t want the success that you’re going after — if you feel you have to give up some major part of yourself, if you feel that you’re going to have to sell out, if you feel that you’re going to have to do all these things and live this life you don’t wanna live, guess what? You’re not going to do it at a certain level. You will self-sabotage, and the success is not going to happen, and you’re going to carry this huge story about all the failures that you have, when the fact of the matter is, you weren’t pointed in the right direction, and even if you had won, you would have lost, right? So that’s what I wanted to slide there.
And then sometimes, someone hires a business coach less for coaching but more for consulting and teaching. The thing about business is there are a lot of times you just don’t know what you don’t know, right? A seasoned business coach has experienced that with scores, sometimes hundreds of people, and they can tell you everything that might come up for you, even if those things don’t. There’s value in having external perspective, someone to warn you about what you should be thinking about six months from now.
Lastly, a business coach doesn’t live in your head. And this is a really, really important piece. Because when you try to make any decisions, you have to claw through all the thoughts and stories. Someone outside of that can see things as they are and not how you’re making them. So things will seem delightfully simple to them while they’re just beyond your ability understand, to really come to grips with. And honestly, you just need to call that person. We don’t need a big strategy here, we don’t need a big plan, you just need to call that person, or you just need to write that, or you just need to create this. It can be that simple.
Lisa: Well, let’s use a real-life example, Charlie, of my book, of Social PR Secrets, which to me I’m just trying to get done so that I can start up my next book. I’m just trying to check that off my list and not really doing a lot of the marketing things around Social PR Secrets that I just didn’t think were important. But, Charlie, tell them, tell everybody how you brought it to life. And all of a sudden I’m like, “Oh my god, I really need to be doing things differently.” If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t see it that way. That’s why you need that outside perspective.
Charlie: So this is the thing when it came to Lisa’s kind of project. There’s the approach of “We’re just going to get this done. We’re going to wrap it in and put it up, and then we’re going to move on to the next thing.” But when you really think about the long-term economic value of the book and what she’s trying to do — how it positions her in the marketplace, how people come to know her because of that book — it positions her well, it brings business.
As an author, you don’t earn money off your book unless you’re like Malcolm Gladwell. There are some people who do. Most of us don’t. We earn it from the opportunities that we come across. And so if you’re wondering, “So what? I sell 200 more books. What does that matter?” I say, “Well, how many of those might convert into leads, which turn into service, and how much is that service worth to you?” And when you do the math — I’m not going to do the math because that would give too much information — but when you do it, it’s a much bigger number than just selling books.
So when you think about what your higher-level strategic goals are, if it’s to generate leads, to have the right type of clients and so on and so forth, you could do a lot of different marketing things, or you could take something that’s already working, what people already know you for, that has legs, and do more of that.
And I think that’s the thing, is that for creative people in general, if you’re a small business owner, or founder, or digital marketer, you are creative, that’s the only way you get into those fields. We want to move on to the next thing before we actually finish the thing that we just put out. And we think, unfortunately, that shipping it means we’re done with it. That’s not the case.
Lisa: Yeah, so he really had me, all of a sudden, seeing things in a completely different perspective. And it wasn’t just whether it’s a book or whether it’s the project that you’re working on to get you to the next project or to get you to the vacation or whatever the next thing is, it’s how you don’t necessarily see things in perspective without having somebody like a Charlie, a business coach.
Charlie: Specifically, on that project — sorry, I didn’t mean to jump in, Lisa — I’m trying to be more specific. What we did is go through and look at all of her different profiles and say, “Where do we find the book?” Like, how hard is it to find the book? And there are times where we have to click four or five pages, and think “This is one of your main things, and I have to work to find it?” If I didn’t know I was looking for a book, it wouldn’t happen, right? Small things like that end up making a big difference.
Cathy: You know what, Charlie? I just wanna jump in and say that I love the fact that you do this from a positive angle instead of the negative angle. I think that that is very much needed, because other people that I’ve seen work with coaches, it’s so negative. They’re not looking forward to talking to their coach. Especially those coaches who hold people accountable. But if you’ve come in from a positive perspective, it has made things so much better, and I can tell that with Lisa. I mean, Lisa is very yoga, zen, and everything, so I think it says a lot that she works with you as her coach.
Charlie: Thanks. I mean, who wants to show up and talk to someone that’s lording stuff over them? The accountability thing is really, really challenging. And the thing that you have to remember sometimes, is that it’s good leadership, good personal leadership between friends. If people already really want something, reminding them that they want that and centering that, and saying, “Oh, this is what you wanted. Is this still what you want? Did you change?” It’s like, “No, that’s what I wanted.”
The accountability thing becomes a lot easier. So many people get in trouble when it comes to business coaches because they end up getting so focused on achieving someone else’s goals and living someone else’s values that that’s where you get a lot of that sort of, “You gotta do this. You gotta do this.” And I’m like, “I don’t wanna do it. I don’t wanna do it.”
There’s a difference between wanting to do something and understanding it’s going to be a challenge, understanding that some of the steps were things which you don’t want to do, and that’s one thing. But there’s another thing when you find that’s not what you value, that’s not who you want to be in the world. I would say that if you find that, if you are in a coaching relationship or you’re thinking about one and you end up in that position, that’s the time to sit and talk with your coaches and say, “Hey, I’m not sure we’re following my agenda here.”
Lisa: Yeah, and it has to be in a motivational type of situation, and one that you look forward to and that makes you more productive. And speaking of productive, I mean that’s really one of your specialties. I feel like it’s custom to me; so I’m sure that with each person, you customize the productivity tips. So can you share some of the productivity tips or examples of how somebody in our space can access productivity in a more positive way?
Charlie: Yeah, so one of the reasons people struggle with productivity is that they’re chronically overcommitted and they don’t know that, right? Sometimes, Lisa, I think it’s a matter of the digital tools that we use because you can plot 17 things on a list, and then if you don’t get them done, you just change the dates, and those 17 things start to kinda slide and slide and slide. But, wait, you didn’t actually get them done. You added 17 new things to them. And so there’s this long list of stuff that’s not getting done.
One thing that I would say along those lines is, I’m a huge fan of handwriting things into a journal, into a planner. We sell planners and have free ones as well.
Cathy: Hey, I was going to say the same thing.
Lisa: Yeah, I’ve got a planner. I can’t live without this thing.
Cathy: I have this, and then I also have Asana, so I have both digital and handwritten.
Charlie: You know, that’s really great, right?
Physical journaling and planning evokes a sense of constraint and space, right? There’s only so many things you can write on a piece of paper, right? There are only so many things you can write on the 3×5 notecard. If you really look at the right level of perspective and you look at the project-level and the task-level perspective, write three to five projects that you want to finish today down on a note card.
I would be surprised if people ever finished more projects than the lines on a 3×5 notecard. That’s really all you need. There’s the matter of focus and being really clear about your commitments. And so one newer practice, Lisa, is anytime you make a commitment, make sure you write that down, and get it into Asana or OmniFocus, whatever you use, and you can have a commitments page.
With OmniFocus, I commit to something and it goes in there, and then I’m accountable. I look at all the commitments that I have, and then I’m like, “Okay, I need to work on those commitments.” Now, it’s harder when I keep it to myself. We have to remember as creatives is that we are prone and known to be flakes, right?
Lisa: Yeah, yeah.
Charlie: It’s just that we know this, right?
Lisa: Yeah.
Charlie: You can be successful just by not being a flake, right?
Lisa: That is so true. I say that all the time, not just in our business, but in any type of small business. All you have to do is call somebody back, and you’re going to be successful. Just return the call.
Cathy: Just pick up the call. Just pick up the phone and do it and call.
Lisa: Right.
Cathy: You know what? You’re 100% right.
Charlie: I mean, we used to say in the army, “The key to success is showing up at the right time in the right uniform.”
Lisa: Right.
Charlie: That’s really what it was. Everything else, like you were with the right people, you had the training, so on and so forth. So if you showed up in the right uniform, you know, things went pretty well, right?
Lisa: It’s 75% there.
Charlie: Yeah, so that’s what I would say — for most of us, it’s just being the person that when we say something, we do it, and we communicate if we’re not going to be able to do something. And all those things that we know our fellow creatives do. Don’t be that person. Really huge tip or strategy for being productive. Let’s see…
Cathy: I’ve got a question, Charlie. Can I jump in next to question?
Charlie: Hit me.
Cathy: Lisa and I, in our world, there’s this thing, the fear of missing out, FOMO.
Charlie: FOMO, yup.
Cathy: So as far as FOMO, I see, for example, right now, I’ve got a lot of friends at VidCon and I think “Man, I should be at VidCon.” So I’m searching for those posts then start, like, hyperventilating. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I should be on that stage speaking,” or whatever. Do you see this a lot with your clients? And how do you help them…? I mean, obviously it’s a long process, but how do you, like for my business coaching standpoint, how do you address something like this? Because it’s so prominent with people in our field and in the younger generation.
Charlie: See, I think the fear of missing out is causing us to miss out. That’s…
Lisa: Oh, I love that. I’m so going to tweet that out.
Charlie: I think that’s the thing — we spend so much time looking at other people’s lives and, let’s get real. I mean, we’re marketers here. We show people what we want them to see. And so you see the positive stories of what people are going through, and that’s what you have FOMO about. You don’t necessarily, unless you’re just complaining on Facebook, you don’t see the horrible Uber driver that was racist and was yelling at them and a client. You talked to me about that yesterday. You don’t see all those different things. So that’s one thing.
Also, if you’re not there, worrying about not being there is not helpful. There’s nothing that’s going to change where you are. So the best thing that you can do is to be present with where you are and what really matters to you. None of your clients, none of the people who actually matter to your business are worried about you not being there. We’re also focused on our own stories of what others are saying, like, “Oh, Cathy wasn’t at VidCon. What’s Cathy doing? Is Cathy really in the know?”
Cathy: Quite.
Charlie: Right?
Cathy: Yeah.
Charlie: So while everybody else is doing that, how about you ship your work. While everybody is going to be at the VidCon, then there’s going to be that three or four-day lag, and then you’re going to make all these commitments and get distracted… So there you have two or three weeks of disruption. See…
Cathy: So they can get their selfie at VidCon, right?
Charlie: Yeah, but totally, ship out what matters when everybody’s still in VidCon hangover. Ship something that day that says, “You know what? I wasn’t there, but I was here creating this.” Right?
Cathy: Yeah.
Charlie: Now I’m not going to disvalue or discredit the value of networking and connecting and things like that. But I just want to say that there are, from a business perspective, there are more high-value activities that you could be doing than just hanging out at a conference.
Lisa: I think I’m the poster child for that. Because this year is my first year that I’ve done the least amount of conferences. In fact, I’ve only done one so far and I’m committed to one more, which is a huge decrease in what I’ve done in the past eight years every year.
Cathy: Wow.
Lisa: Any conference I was invited to, I said yes to because I couldn’t say no to it. I never said no, and then that led to other conferences that I missed that I really wanted to go to. So if you add those two together, the ones that you say yes to because you’re asked, and the ones that you really want to go to, and then there’s other ones too that just pop up like webinars, things like that. I mean, you’re just frantically running from one event to the next, and everything in between is just a big blur.
So this year, I can tell you that I feel like it’s my most purposeful and rewarding year of business. And I don’t think it’s because I’ve had eight years of conferences behind me. I just feel like I’ve taken a step back and stopped saying yes, and just had that opportunity like Charlie just described, to let things happen.
Cathy: I need to listen to you guys, because those eight years are like my current year. Like conference after conference after conference. And some of them I do get paid for, but some of them I just I’m volunteering for. So I’m like, what is the real business value in it? So if I’m getting paid, of course, I’m going to…
Charlie: Yeah. So I mean, I think as business owners, as creatives, we don’t really value the time. What’s a day worth to you? What’s a productive day worth to you? Instead, we think, “I’m going to go to VidCon. It costs $500, whatever it costs. It costs me the plane.” And you can do a budget for that. It might be let’s say, $2,500, right? So you’re like, “Okay, four days, $2,500, I can do that.” But what you’re forgetting to account for are the four days of your time that are added on top of that.
And so, if you were to add that time to it, you’re not really working for free. You’re working at a loss is really what it amounts to. And so, if you were to take that cost, and do that over the course of a year, then look at the things that you’re not doing that have higher value and costing those out, you might see that there’s a huge imbalance.
And so I see this a lot, where people were like, “Oh, I need this key marketing asset to help me sell my services.” But they’re stringing along from conference to conference to conference, and they’re meeting more and more people who need that same asset. At a certain point, you have to solve that problem. Going to a conference does not solve that problem. That only amplifies the problem.
And so, what I would encourage people to consider is, rather than going on a conference and consuming and connecting, how about you give yourself permission to use that same time and that same money to go on a creative retreat so that you can create the things that you need to, right? The cost is the same. The value, different.
Lisa: You know, a mistake that I have made doing what you just said is combining the two. “Well, I’m going to go to this conference. I’m going to be in Las Vegas, and I’m going to have a hotel room to myself. I’m going to order room service, and I am going to get so much done.” Wrong. You end up getting back into the conference, you stay out too late, or at least I did.
Cathy: You’re in Vegas, for god’s sake.
Lisa: Yeah, but I mean, it could be New York.
Cathy: Anywhere, anywhere.
Lisa: That’s my rationale to my husband, to my family, to myself, for not every conference, but a lot of them. You know, “I’m going to stay an extra day. I’m going to go a day early so I can just lock myself in my hotel room.” And I do get a lot done in hotel rooms or in new places that aren’t my office. But I don’t need to go travel across the country to do that. I could go to, you know, the spa for the day at the Ritz and get so much done, and not go to a conference.
Charlie: Yeah, let’s imagine if we can — imagine a jar, and inside there was all the time, energy, and attention that you’re going to have in any given day or week or month. So the jar kind of expands. When you put travel in there, you take these other things, and put them in there. Then you put connecting with people in that same size jar. The jar doesn’t get any bigger. It doesn’t get any smaller either. What changes is what you’re putting in there. And so you can’t fill up half or three-quarters of that jar and expect to get the same amount of stuff done. It doesn’t work. And that’s not any particular deficiency of your willpower, it’s just the fact that it takes time.
I’ll say, for my clients and for myself when I go to conferences and events, what can you do to be 100% fully present there? Because if you’ve gotten your butt on a plane, the very best value you’re going to have at that event is being in the moment, present, connecting with people, and being 100% there. Not half there and half thinking about this thing you need to finish. Not half there and thinking about all the other things you need to do, but 100% fully there.
And I think that might be where, you’re talking about zen and space, Lisa, I think that being present and focused with what you’re trying to accomplish is the single best way to get results in your life and business. The more you’re all over the place, the more you’re not in any particular place at a time.
Lisa: Exactly. And I feel like, with the business coach, that’s what exactly what it does, is it brings me to this focus of the goals that I want to achieve and make me realize what’s really important and what’s matching those goals. And it’s all about the zen and the focus of being coach-able. Have you had clients that are just not coach-able? If they’re not coach-able, then what can you do?
Charlie: Yeah. So the thing is, if you work with a coach, expect that you’re going to need to change your behavior. If you’re unwilling to change your behavior, don’t hire a coach. It’s a waste of money and it’s a waste of your time. Because if you’re just going to keep doing what you’re doing, why pay someone to keep doing what you’re doing? It’s a frustrating experience for all parties.
The other thing that, I would say for me, in this particular way about my methodology, be prepared to give up something that matters to you, but it’s not what you think. The thing is you might think, “Oh, I’m going to give up my personal life.” You’re never going to give up your personal life with me. That’s just the thing. But there might be this project that you might have been hanging onto for three years that it’s time to say goodbye to. It might be this client that you haven’t had the heart to say goodbye to, but that’s making you crazy.
There might be some particular marketing thing that you’re doing, some particular activity that you started doing at some point that’s no longer serving you that you’re going to have to let go of. And I think there’s a grieving process that happens a lot of times, that people are not willing to let those things go. People aren’t willing to look at, say, the products that are just not selling, that they have put so much heart into them and then kill them because they’re taking up digital billboard space.
They’re not looking at these types of things saying, “You know what? This activity, this project, this product, this client, it’s no longer relevant to where I’m going, and I gotta let go of it.” And part of that, and I’m slowing down here, because here’s what happens: part of it is we attach such a story to those things like, “I’ve been doing it for three years. How could I ever stop doing it? This is part of my business. This part of my life.”
Well, you know, things move on. Kids move on. Friends move on. Cities change, whatever that is. Change is a constant. The second you recognize and you can sit down and say, “You know what? This is not serving me in the way that have served me in the past. It’s time to let it go.” So I think that sometimes, Lisa, what happens with people is 1), they’re not willing to change their behavior; 2), they’re really not ready to let some things go; and 3) is that they’re actually, at some level, are afraid of success that they’re chasing, and they…
Lisa: Self-sabotage?
Charlie: They’re self-sabotaging. They’re not willing to make the decision to do something different, because of sunk cost and all of those types of things. So I would say those three things are things to be watching out for.
Lisa: Okay. I want talk about the ROI before we run out of time, like how much it costs to have a coach, how much it costs to not have a coach? I mean, I think that’s really the question that I’m now realizing; how much would it cost if I didn’t have somebody like you? You couldn’t give me direction. At the beginning of the year, I started back with you, I was thinking, “Can I really afford this? How am I going to…?”
Just figuring all of that out. And it was really the best decision, and I was worried about whether I could afford it, and everything has fallen into place plus a hundred. It’s perfect. So I think that it’s a hard decision to make but there is the ROI, and I put some statistics in the document that we shared, but can you speak to that, Charlie? Like what you see just from the surveys and the investment standpoint?
Charlie: So first we have to say there’s a range of rates for coaches, and there is some expertise involved. There is different experience involved. I’m not saying the rates are arbitrary, but they are all over the map. You can…
Lisa: Kind of like attorneys, probably.
Charlie: It’s kind of like attorneys, right? What I have experienced is, I was recently talking to a guy who really wanted to work with me, and it ended up not being a fit for me because of where he was financially. And he was like, “Well, you’re the golden standard. I just don’t have enough gold right now.” Which happens, and I completely understand that. So that’s one thing to think about.
You know, while I can’t speak for all business coaches, I can speak for me. When I work with a client, I become their partner. I become a steward of their resources as well. And the other thing that I start looking for is how… I mean, let’s be frank. I’m a business coach, which means part of my responsibility is making money for my clients. That’s the deal. You’re not paying me just to feel good. There are therapists that are great for that.
And so part of my drive, Lisa, is, how am I paying for myself? Because it’s not fun for me when I can’t see how it’s paying for myself. It’s one of those things, where if you know you’re doing things that aren’t taking you forward, that are costing you time, that are costing you energy, that are costing you attention, those things are probably costing you money.
What I’ll say here, the bigger your team, the more indecision and inaction it costs you because you’ve got payroll and you’ve got people working on stuff. They’re doing something. Are they doing the right things? And so, I think once we accept that as entrepreneurs — we’re already investing our time, our energy, our attention, our money — then it’s not a question of, should I do this type of thing? It’s like, what’s the best way to use my money, what’s the best way to use my time, energy, and attention?
And if you get stuck for six months or a year, what’s that worth to you? If you know or you think you would have been able to build another $2,000 a month but have been stuck, over the course of a year, that’s $24,000 that we’re talking about that you did not build because you were doing other things.
However you choose to look at that, I’m glad you brought up the opportunity cost aspect of it, Lisa, because I don’t think we’re looking at our current activities as an opportunity cost. If you were to think about different decisions that we make, we always have to remember that there is a cost to maintaining our current decisions, it’s called decision inertia. We normally don’t put that on board. We only put the cost of switching on board.
And this is a huge sort of cognitive fallacy that we get caught up in. Running your business already costs you $8,000 a month, whatever might cost you, how might we better use that $8,000? So opportunity cost is huge; we all know those people who have been stuck on a plateau for two, three years, then kind of in business for five years, but they’re really not growing.
And here’s what I have to say about this. I’m not a grow, grow, grow, always grow guy. It’s really about your goals, what makes sense for you. Like for Cathy, she just recently had a baby, so growing the business 10x would be the worst thing that could happen to her right now, right?
Cathy: Yeah.
Charlie: At the same time…
Cathy: I can’t handle it.
Charlie: You can’t handle it, and she would lose something that matters to her. So that’s really what we’re looking at. There’s always this delta. And, again, I want to go back to the performance aspect as opposed to the deficiency aspect. A good business coach is going to help you perform better in your business, and my belief is that a good business coach is going to help you live a better life as well. If your business is getting better, but your life is getting worse, something is awry.
Lisa: And not to make this a gender thing, but I feel that I have to throw this in there, women in business need coaching. They need the coaching to give them confidence, to take on certain situations that… It’s just been our society or just culture that women act in a certain way. And having a coach that’s objective, who’s giving you the guidance. It’s not your boss, it’s not your parent, it’s not your significant other. It’s somebody that has an objective perspective and can give you guidance. And I think women more than ever need it.
Charlie: Yeah, I think if we look at the way we socialize women and girls, we don’t necessarily sit down with them and help them learn finances. So, for instance, my mom, given our situation, I was helping my mom do budgets and figure out what we’re going to spend with her income when I was like 12. I’m not sure that would have happened where I a female. We don’t sit down and have these conversations. I was also a boy scout, and there’s personal finance courses within boy scouts and things like that.
So there’s this implicit way in which we cultivate boys and men that slides in some of the soft and hard skills around leadership, around budgeting, around all those different types of things that women are largely excluded from. And it’s a huge disservice, we can’t… I mean, we can change that at a social level but what you have to understand is, if you’re sliding into business as a woman, unless you grew up with entrepreneurs that taught you those types of things very directly, or unless you took the business classes, you’re starting at a cultural disadvantage.
And that’s just reality. It’s not about capability. It’s just about socialization. But when you work with a coach that has worked with all kinds of people, you get the combined knowledge of all of their clients when you work with them, which is why really good experienced coaches are a lot more expensive than junior coaches, because you don’t just buy the coach, you buy the experiences that they’ve had with hundreds or thousands of clients and scenarios, and that’s time somebody else paid for, quite honestly.
Lisa: Right. Yeah, good point.
Charlie: What I think is also part of socialization, the way we socialize women will sometimes push them away from the analytical side of things as well, and so they’re not necessarily taught how to see patterns and data and things like that. And so they end up being at a disadvantage there, too.
So I’m not trying to tell you that you should hire a male coach. I will say that I’ve noticed with a lot of my clients, especially my female clients, that I provide a perspective of the world that’s different from their native way of seeing the world is, and it creates a team, and Lisa knows this. As soon as a client hires me, actually before that, it’s already a We. We’re already saying we. We’re already going on. So, yeah, I think that’s what you get to.
Lisa: Okay, awesome. Well, we are almost out of time. Cathy, any other questions? Do we have any other questions from the audience?
Cathy: Not really. I’m going to sign out in a couple of minutes.
Lisa: Okay, so Charlie, thank you so much. Just tell us if anybody wants to get in touch with you, where is the best place to connect? On Twitter, LinkedIn?
Charlie: All roads lead to productiveflourishing.com. So I would say start there. We also have a new group. It’s called the Creative Giant Campfire. It’s where we’re talking about issues like this and just showing up, being real, talking about what’s going on, providing inspiration, things like that. I’d love to see you there as well.
Lisa: Okay, awesome. And the tip of the day is get a journal and write it down in addition to using digital tools. So Charlie, thank you so much.
Cathy: Thank you, Charlie. Thank you, Lisa.
Charlie: Thanks for having me.
Lisa: We’ll see everybody next week.
Charlie: Okay.