Ep #239: Signs Your Coaching Business Needs Strategic Reimagining

Hey, this is Lindsay Dotzlaf and you are listening to Mastering Coaching Skills episode 239.

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Hey coach, I’m so happy you’re here today. I want to talk today about something that you heard me talk about a little bit in the last couple of episodes. But today I want to talk about how you know when it might be time to reimagine parts of your business. And even if you’re like, “Oh, this isn’t for me. I don’t need to reimagine,” that’s totally fine. I’m still going to share some things in this episode that could be really powerful for you in your coaching. So, stay tuned. I think it will still be quite valuable.

But I’ve just been having so many conversations recently with some colleagues and with some clients who’ve been in Reimagine and in some of my other spaces where they are feeling consequences of doing the same thing over and over and over, and maybe not making some shifts or making some changes when they start to feel some friction come up.

And I want to be clear, not in a way where you’re constantly changing, never letting anything work. That’s not what I’m talking about. But when you’ve been in business for a little bit and you have been doing similar things over and over, thinking that you have to keep things the same, instead of shifting and making some strategic changes, some creating a strategic evolution in your business as you keep going and as you grow.

And what I see it leading to, which makes me really sad, which is why I was like, “I have to record this episode,” is I hear a lot of coaches describing just being tired or bored of their business or burnt out. And not burnt out in a clinical sense, but just feeling exhausted of their business. Maybe some of them are actually burnt out, right? But just being exhausted from their business. And they always are like, “It’s not that I don’t love my business or what I do. It’s just that, I don’t know, something has shifted, and I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t know how to find my way back.”

So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. How you know when it’s time to strategically evolve in your business. Sometimes, I know from experience that you can feel like, “Oh, I’ve built this thing that’s really successful, and my clients love it, and I love it.” And also, there is something there that needs to shift, right? Or sometimes, you’ve built something one way, you’ve built it up one way, but then the more you grow and evolve, the less that structure works.

So maybe it works perfectly for a while. But then, let’s say if you’re coaching one-on-one clients and the more one-on-one clients you add, that’s going to break at some point, right? You can’t keep adding, adding, adding one-on-one clients, or you can’t keep adding plus have time to work also on the back end of your business. Or maybe something in your life has changed. And I’ll dig into really all the reasons that these things might come up.

But I just wanted to start with that to give you a sense of what we’re going to be talking about and some questions. I’m going to be giving you some questions that are really good to help start revealing for you if there’s any parts of your business that need to evolve or that are time to be reimagined. Because I want to help you prevent this from happening, right? Before it goes too far to where you also are feeling burnt out or you don’t want to do it anymore, or feeling like you want to quit, which is never what I want for you. If that’s not, of course, what you want. If you want to quit, go for it. I’m not in charge of you.

But this really feels very, very close to my heart because I feel so passionate about so many of my clients’ businesses and so many of my colleagues’ businesses that when I see these things, and sometimes when they come to me and they tell me the whole story, I can usually see—it’s something I’m pretty good at. I can usually see, “Oh, shoot, there could have been some changes that you made earlier that could have prevented some of this.” So let’s just dig into that today.

So first, we’re going to talk about some signs that are—could be subtle—that it’s time for change. Also, sometimes if it goes too long, maybe they’re no longer subtle. Maybe they’re screaming red flags, flashing neon lights, all the things. So, I’m just going to go through them and you can decide: Are you experiencing any of these? And are they like a little blip, or are they like a, “Hey, you must pay attention to me”?

So the first one, one of the biggest ones that I see, is just energy depletion. Right? It’s that thing I was talking about that can over time feel like burnout, lead to burnout. When aspects of your business are constantly draining you rather than energizing you. And this can happen even when you love coaching, you love what you’re doing, you love your clients. This can happen for other reasons. Right?

There could be just things that it’s just time for a change. There could be things that you maybe puzzled when you first started the thing, whatever it was, and now you don’t know how to get out of that pattern. Or maybe things aren’t structured in ways that work really well for you. So just in general, over time, your energy for your business, to show up and work in your business is gone. Of course, this is different than like you’re sick for a week or you traveled and you come back and you’re tired. I’m talking about more of a constant energy depletion.

The next one is what I would call diminishing returns, which is when you’re working harder for the same or less results, right? So you keep working harder, harder, harder, adding more things, feeling like you’re hustling, which sometimes can feel good or bad. I think there are different ways we can talk about hustling. Sometimes it can start feeling good and then turn to, “Okay, I can’t keep this up. I can’t do this any longer.” But just that idea of you’re doing the same things, maybe they used to work and now they’re not, but you just keep doing them because you’re not sure what else to do.

The next one is something I would call alignment friction. So this is when pieces of your business conflict with your personal circumstances, with your neurotype, with the way you think, with the way you function, and it creates this constant friction. Friction is one of my favorite words because it doesn’t, like, to describe this, because it doesn’t always feel terrible, right? It just kind of feels like you could also call it like swimming upstream. Like you just constantly feel like you’re swimming upstream instead of kind of going with the current.

And that can be fine when it’s happening for short periods of time. But when it’s happening over long periods of time, especially if you’ve completely structured your business in a way that just doesn’t work for you, or you’ve structured your business in a way that it did work so well, and then you had some personal circumstances that changed. Right?

Maybe your schedule has changed, your personal needs have changed, your attention needs to go somewhere else for a while, anything. It could be anything. Anything that changes on your end, like your business is running fine, it’s running smoothly, and something changes for you as a human and no longer is in alignment, right? And it just can create lots of friction.

The other way I see this happening so often with my clients, was something we coached on a lot in this last round of Reimagine, is when they’ve built businesses structured the way, you know, they thought they were supposed to, or the, I’m going to say in air quotes, the “professional way,” or the way everyone else is doing it, which is always a lie by the way. All those things I just said, all lies. So if you notice yourself thinking them, just question them, maybe.

But they’ve, you know, built it that way and it worked because they hustled through and they kept going and kept doing the things because that’s what they were supposed to do. And they were thinking, at some point it’s going to get better, it has to get better. But spoiler alert, it doesn’t. It doesn’t get better.

You have to find the ways to shift things to work for you, right? Like you aren’t going to intrinsically change as a human just because it would be more professional if you did. Right? And I don’t mean like change your thoughts or change your beliefs, but it’s really hard to overcome, you know, every natural tendency that you have and just be a totally different person 100% of the time. So that’s a big way I see it coming up.

And then the next one is just resistance. Almost like an intuitive resistance, just like a knowing of like, I don’t want to do this thing. And it could show up looking like procrastination. So, procrastinating on tasks that you used to love to do or that you used to enjoy, but something has shifted and you haven’t taken any time to examine it. You’re just kind of like, “Yep. Okay, I just keep putting this thing off. That’s okay.”

And I don’t mean any procrastination because I’ve talked about this before. I can sometimes procrastinate. So, all procrastination isn’t bad. This is more of a noticing of I used to, you know, it’s like a shift. A shift in the way you’re doing things, a shift in always wanting now to not do certain things. Maybe not wanting to show up to your calls, to your coaching sessions, not wanting to create the content that you used to love to create. And so, there’s something there, something has shifted and it just needs to be examined.

Sometimes these things can be the simplest little fixes and just noticing, “Oh, here’s why that’s happening,” can be the first step in shifting it. And sometimes it can be like, “Oh, I’m not ready to look at that now.” That’s sometimes what I hear from clients. Or, “I don’t even know what I would do about it, so I’m going to kind of ignore it and keep going.”

So, some common myths that I see often about making changes in your business is that I should wait till it’s completely broken. Right? Like, well, it’s still kind of working. Even though, I know I’m not loving it as much, but it’s still bringing in money and it’s still technically working. So I shouldn’t really make changes now.

Now, there is something on the other side of this that I just want to mention, which is not giving something long enough to work and then always thinking it’s broken and always changing it. Right? So like if you’re, for example, if you’ve coached with me in any business space, you’ve heard me say this. But for example, if you’re constantly changing your price for no reason other than like, “I think it might be too expensive,” or “I think it might not be expensive enough,” but you don’t have any proof, right? You’re just like, “I don’t know, it’s not, I’m not really selling it, so it has to be the price.” That’s an example of just changing, changing.

Now, there can be the other side of that, which is like you have really good reasons, you love your reasons, you have proof because you’ve worked with a bunch of clients and you just want to change your price. That’s very different. Right? I just want to be sure we’re clear about this.

The next myth is that making changes will confuse my clients or damage my brand. I actually think that’s just a huge lie, basically, right? Because really, what is happening, like you’re evolving always as a human. Your clients are evolving always as humans. And if your business isn’t keeping up with the evolution of yourself and just with the industry and with the world, then that is what I think will actually confuse your clients or just lose clients over time or damage your brand. Right?

Whereas if it makes really a lot of sense, the changes you’re making for who you work with and how you work and your coaching style and business style and all of that, then it’s going to be like, of course. Like it’s just going to make sense. And we can’t control all of it. So of course, there could always be a few clients who will be confused or that you may lose along the way. But that’s okay. That’s different than thinking all of my clients are going to be confused or they aren’t going to come with me. Because really, as long as you are in really great alignment, what will happen is that your clients and future potential clients will feel that and feel really drawn in by it.

The next myth is I need to know exactly what’s next before I can start reimagining. And I say again, false. Because the sooner you start it, when you notice some of those things that I mentioned to begin with, right? The energy and the friction and the resistance and the diminishing returns, when you start to notice those, the sooner you can really dig into it and decide like, “Oh, what’s causing this? Where is this coming from?”

Sometimes it’s not even about making a huge change from like, “Okay, right now I have this thing and I’m changing to this thing.” Maybe it’s just a natural progression of your offers or going from one-on-one coaching to group coaching. But the moment you can start to see it and like, “Okay, I can see that might be next,” then you can just have some time and space instead of waiting till the point where you’re completely exhausted, burnt out, and depleted, and then having to make changes out of more of an emergency, or until it’s not working at all, right? For whatever reason, and something has to change right now and you have to hustle and do it.

The next one is, if I’m making good money, I shouldn’t mess with my business model. Now, you’ve probably heard me say before, if it’s working, we don’t really want to make big changes to it. But that’s not always true, right? What I mean usually when I say that is we don’t want to throw out everything that’s working all at once.

Even if you’re creating something new and you, like for example, when I was a one-on-one coach and then I shifted into group, I just decided to go all in. No longer taking one-on-one clients. Now only filling this group. So that was making a big shift all at once, but I wasn’t changing everything, right? I was still working with the same people. The offer was actually still quite similar. It just was going from one-on-one to group. So a lot of things were staying the same. It was just the format that was changing.

So, when you think about that, right? Then it allows you to see, “Okay, I’m not changing everything. The clients that are working with me, the money that I’m making now, this is all still possible as I make some shifts and as I just follow this path of like this is where I know I’m going and I might as well start moving in that direction now.” Right? Because just like I said a second ago, this kind of goes back to just because something’s working doesn’t mean it’s going to work forever.

So, the opposite of I’m making money, so I shouldn’t mess with my business model is I’m making money, and so I’m going to keep doing something that doesn’t feel totally aligned or that no longer works, and over time, that’s going to create making less money. Even if it’s a perfectly viable offer and business model and you are just tired, right? Or constantly procrastinating or, you know, any of those things I, you’re just depleted. That is not the state that is going to make you money in your business.

Next, I want to give you some questions that you could ask yourself to start exploring this for yourself, to start revealing maybe what your next steps are if anything is feeling out of alignment for you. But this is the part where I want you to also—we’re going to take a break and consider everything I’ve said so far. You could apply this to so many different situations, right?

So I am obviously specifically talking about your coaching and your business. But this could be applied to life, right? You could put a relationship in this and go back and re-listen and think about, you know, if things aren’t feeling great in your relationship, do you just ignore them or do you start thinking about what do you want? What does that look like? What could it look like?

And these questions I’m about to ask you, these could be questions that you use in your coaching. Actually, some of these, I’ll give you examples of some of my very favorite coaching questions because these are pretty, like yes, I’m going to refer to your business, but these are great questions that you could ask, no matter what type of coach you are. You could ask them to your clients. You could also ask them to yourself or journal on them for yourself, for your business, for your coaching, but also for any parts of your life.

So, here are the questions. The first one is, if you could change one aspect of your business without any consequences, what would it be? And maybe I should have said before I started asking the questions, just let yourself answer the most honest answer before you judge it. Right?

So for example, with that question, maybe an immediate answer came to you. Maybe it was like, “I never want to be on social media.” Right? And then instantly you were like, “Ugh, yeah, but I can’t possibly build a business like that,” or, “That would never work. That’s not what I’ve been taught.” Just notice if that happened. If you had an immediate answer and then you immediately told yourself, “No, that’s not the right answer.”

Because for now, I just want you to answer whatever’s honest. And then I’ll give you the next steps of what to do with it after that, right? Okay. So let’s go back to the questions. So, if you could change one aspect of your business or your coaching, you could ask either, without any consequences, what would it be?

One of my very favorite coaching questions, if you have been in any of my containers, I’m positive you’ve heard me ask this question. This is what I ask when maybe someone’s trying to make a decision about two things or, you know, like which direction to go. And maybe we’ve done a bunch of coaching on it. They have a lot of awareness around it and they kind of know like, “Okay, you know, it’s either this and like here’s how that would go or it’s this thing and here’s how that would go.”

One of my favorite things to do is like, “Okay, let’s put aside like all the drama that’s coming up. Let’s put it on the shelf for now.” And then you just ask yourself, or I ask my client, “Okay, if you knew they would both work, 100%, they’re both going to work, which path would you choose?” And sometimes that can be very revealing. And you can, you know, take that question, use it as you will, alter it however you want to alter it. It’s a really powerful question to ask your clients.

Next question, where do you find yourself making excuses or creating workarounds in your business? That’s a powerful one. I asked myself some, I came up with these questions because they’re questions I’ve been asking myself. And just kind of noticing, right? Like I have kind of told you, I’m planning for my own reimagine, reimagining, and these are areas that I’m exploring.

What parts of your business energize you versus deplete you? So, you could also ask it, like what parts of your business light you up and what parts do you dread? Right? Which parts do you look forward to? Which parts do you not look forward to?

Next question, has anything changed in your life, interests, or circumstances that your business hasn’t adapted to? Right? So is there—do you have any big life changes? Do you have, you know, maybe you started your business 10 years ago like me and you’re like, “Okay, it’s time to make some shifts.” Maybe you, you know, have sudden circumstances that happen, you know, that you need to tend to or that need more of your attention. So just anything, has anything changed in your life that your business hasn’t adapted to? Or that you think your business can’t adapt to?

Okay, so now I want you to notice what came up with all those questions. And maybe you even thought of an alternative question that, you know, feels really useful for you. Obviously, the ones I just gave are not like end-all be-all of questions, but maybe in your brainstorming or me just asking those, it prompted you to think about something else. Or maybe even coming into this episode, you knew. You saw the title and you were like, “Oh, I know this is for me.” So maybe you know there’s something about your business that isn’t working or that you really want to change.

So I’m going to now just give you the steps to start thinking about how to do that, okay? So I’ll use if you could change one aspect of your business without any consequences, what would it be? Let’s just say your immediate answer was, “I don’t want to be on social media.” And so, let’s just say, we’ll just use that as an example. Let’s say that was your answer.

Here’s what you can do with that. You can take that and say, you know, often where our brain goes, like I said earlier, is like, “Well, that’s impossible. I’ve built my business on social media,” or “That’s not, you know, what I’ve been taught to do,” or “That’s not what real business people do,” or whatever, all the objections that come up, you set those aside, right? And I always say like, you can pick them back up later if you want, but for now, you’re going to set them aside.

And then you’re going to say, “Okay,” you can do a couple of things. You could ask yourself using that specific example, what’s working about that now, right now, and what isn’t? Right? To kind of show yourself very specifically, maybe there are some things you like about it and some things you don’t, or some things that are working and some things that aren’t. Right? That’ll just give you a really good idea of kind of an audit, right? Of like, what’s working, what’s not.

And then you can say, “Okay, if I no longer want to be on social media, then I have to replace it with something,” because that’s where, let’s just say that’s where most of your audience is, maybe it’s where a lot of your clients come from. You could ask yourself, “Okay, well, what are the other options?” Right? If I really want to be off, what are the other options?

And just give yourself permission to explore and to brainstorm without any immediate commitment or judgment. Right? And just get really all of the ideas. Just make a whole list. You could even take this to chat or to Claude and brainstorm, right? And you could say like, “Okay, here’s this question, here was my answer, and now I feel stuck because I don’t know where to go from here. This feels impossible.”

And then you could say, “Here are everything that’s working about social media, here’s everything that’s not. Can you help me brainstorm some other options?” Right? Or you could brainstorm some middle options. This is what I often do with my clients that are, you know, the ones that are like, “I just want to be off of social media.”

Well, what I often do is like, Okay, like if that is where most of their business is coming from, I’ll usually ask them like, “What are you not loving about it?” Right? And then is there anything that you do love about it? And then from there we’ll say, “Is there a middle ground?” Like you’re going to fill in this other thing, you’re going to bring in this other thing that might replace it. But do you want to have any presence on it? Right?

Like you can look at what it is you don’t like about it and you can solve for those things while still having a presence on social media, almost more like a website or, you know, just similar things that you just kind of post over and over. Like maybe it’s the constant content creation. And so, you know, maybe just having something there so that you just have a presence. Or, you know, I had one client who was like, “I love,” I forget what she said, but it was like, “I love podcasting or I love writing a blog or I love,” there was some like long-form content that she told me she loved. And I was like, “Oh, perfect.”

So, if you want to keep your social media, all you have to do is take that, break it up into small chunks. It doesn’t have to be perfect and beautiful. It could literally be, you know, screenshots that you turn into, you know, pictures that would fit on whatever social media it is. It could be, you know, a video of you talking about the thing broken down, like whatever the easiest path is. Right? And she was like, “Oh.”

Because sometimes it really is just figuring out like what’s the part you don’t like about it and how can you solve for that, instead of just deciding to throw it all out. And sometimes it’s not that. Sometimes it’s like, “No, I want to make a drastic change and here’s what we’re going to do.” Right? But either way, you can still do the same steps. You can look at what you like about it and what you don’t, and then just give yourself permission to explore all options and all possibilities without any immediate commitment or judgment.

And then when you find the thing that you’re like, “Okay, this would feel really good.” That’s when you can kind of pick up all the drama that you put on the shelf and examine it. Right? Like this thing would feel really good. Now you’re going to see, “Okay, what are my objections to doing it this way?” Now what comes up when I have a lot more clarity around the direction I want to go.

Okay, so, obviously, this is the work we do in Reimagine. And if you are an established business owner and you are like, “I know there’s some reimagining in my future,” I urge you to join us because this round is going to be incredible. I’ve already been doing some calls for it. I’m happy to hop on a quick call with you just to answer questions you have. We will put the application link, which then leads to booking a call in the show notes. And I would love to help you do this work.

It is really, truly kind of a specialty of mine because I really love helping every coach, every business owner, really adapt their business, the way they do things, the way they coach and work with clients, like really adapt it to them and who they are, so that you can also enjoy your life. Right? You’re not building a business to be miserable all the time or to be just hustling all the time. And I encourage you to join us. I can help. Promise.

But if it’s not you yet, save this episode. Keep it in your back pocket because at some point, I want you to come back to it and listen whenever you feel stuck or whenever you’re like, “Ah, I don’t know what’s going on. Why isn’t it working?” Or feeling any of those things I mentioned in the beginning, come back and re-listen to this. I think this is going to hopefully be one that will help you for a while.

All right, have an amazing week, friend, and I will talk to you again next week. Goodbye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Mastering Coaching Skills. If you want to learn more about my work, come visit me at lindsaydotzlafcoaching.com. That’s Lindsay with an A, D-O-T-Z-L-A-F.com. See you next week.