A good coaching business requires Inspiration AND Perspiration

Welcome to the business of Executive coaching. I'm Ellie Scarfe, an ex lawyer turned executive coach. Over the last 17 years I've coached in house, I've been an associate coach and I've run executive coaching businesses with teams of coaches around the world. My clients have ranged from global brand names to boutiques, startups and organisations doing good in the world. I now run the Impact Coach Collective, a community of executive coaches who want to level up their business skills and take action in a community of like minded peers. I'm a traveller, a reader, a mum, wife and dog parent and I know firsthand that our stories have a huge impact on our businesses. The executive coaching business is tough and I've learnt all the lessons through plenty of mistakes and also with some great mentors. This podcast is all about growing a thriving executive coaching business. You can build a coaching business that is profitable, sustainable and that supports your personal goals, whatever they are. I'll be sharing tips and ideas translated for your context as well as stories from the field with brilliant coaches and mentors. If you want to level up your executive coaching business skills, then this is the place for you. Foreign. Welcome to the business of Executive Coaching podcast. So I've had some feedback that people enjoy it when I give a bit of a behind the scenes look, a few updates. So I thought I would start with a bit of a personal and business check in before I dive into today's episode. Firstly, I guess I just want to acknowledge other parents in the southern hemisphere who are just getting kids back to school after what feels like the world's longest school holidays. Now I love school holidays actually. I love having the kiddo around. I really love not making school lunches, but I find it very hard to manage the energy that I want to give to my daughter and the energy I want to give to my work. So I've touched on this before but you know, I really strongly love my work and I always want spaciousness and time to work right to to lean into it. And on summer holidays especially, I just want to be with my family and I want to hang out and I want to be spontaneous and put her around. Now I know every parent has this tension and I don't have an answer to it and really how I'm coming to grips with it is I've decided this is just how it's going to be. I'm always going to want more time to work, I'm always going to want more time to be with the family and I know that it's going to come sooner than I want that I'm actually not needed so much as a mum. So I'm just going to let the tension be. But it is tension nonetheless. Everyone in our house was relieved that school went back last week, although one week in. And now we have hit a new point, which is the exhaustion of being back at school for a week after having eight weeks off and new teachers and all the extracurriculars kicking in. So, you know, if you are in that boat, I'm right there with you. In from a business perspective, I think I mentioned in a previous episode that I. I spent a bit of time doing a strategy review because I'd worked through my strategy in December and it just didn't feel quite as inspiring or exciting as I thought it would be. And that sort of relates a little bit to some of the things we're going to talk about in this episode. But I ended up taking most of January, once I was back from holidays and when I wasn't delivering, to really sit and think about what I wanted to do in 2025, both to grow my business through the accelerator and what impact I wanted to have on my wonderful clients inside the accelerator, how I serve my clients. And, you know, I came up with a strategy that I feel really great about and I. And a planning system which, you know, is still not perfectly being implemented, by the way, but it's on route. And I also finally came up with a word of the year of sorts, of which for me in 2025 is essential. And I think essential came from probably from that tension that I mentioned to some degree between, you know, work and life. But the thing that really came up when I was reviewing my strategy was that I have a lot of more. A lot more knowledge now about what works when it comes to growing my business and, you know, supporting my clients. And I know what I need to focus on to be the best I can be as a coach and mentor in the accelerator. So for 2025, I'm really focusing on those essential things and those things only. So just what is essential? And if you know me, you will know that this is very difficult for me because I am a more person. So I know logically that less is better in many cases, but my instinct is that more is more, right? More is always better. More content, more curriculum, more launches, more products, more everything, more ideas. But this year I'm not going to do that because that is not the stage I'm in. I'm in the stage of needing to really embed what works. So practically what that Means is a slightly different strategy when it comes to welcoming people into the corporate to coach accelerator. So, you know, bringing people in, that's the business development part. And for those, for anyone who doesn't know, the Corporate Coach Accelerator is my group coaching program that aims to help executive and leadership coaches who want to serve corporate clients to get their next 10 corporate clients while really capping their marketing activity at five hours a week. So it's all about the strategy and a lot of hands on support through weekly group coaching sessions. So what I've decided is that the best way for people to join the accelerator is going to be booking in to have a call with me where we will figure out if it's a good fit and then I'm going to be inviting about five new or renewing members into the accelerator each month. So I might choose to do a couple of mini launches over the year as well. But, but that's it. And so, you know, in the past I've been more launch oriented where every quarter or so I would do a bigger launch and that's when we bring people in. But I discovered that people really need to join when they need to join. So I wanted a mechanism that could lean into that. And so that sort of means opening up a limited amount of places each month with a few mini launches over the year. So, you know, and it's a simple strategy, but most people join via my free masterclasses and there's a lot of those if you haven't seen them via this podcast. So they come over to the podcast and book a call by being referred by existing members or other, other people, other parts of my network or from engaging with me on LinkedIn. So those are the ways that people will engage with me and then from that I'll have conversations and you know, we'll bring in, you know, five or so new or renewing members into the accelerator. So it was really interesting to define that strategy because it put some boundaries on it. Right. So, you know, I know now what the limit is. I know where the capacity is, I know how many, you know, people I can support over that period of time. And really that's what I'm focusing on this year. So it's all very exciting. It feels great because I'm focusing on what works and also what I really enjoy. So, you know, one part of decision that flowed from my word, word of the year or sort of my theme of the year being essential, focusing on what really matters is that, you know, and I know this is the right decision, but it was hard to make is that I had intended to run a series of live events this year. So I'm traveling to Europe in summer and had planned to run an event in London. I'm going to go to Singapore later in the year, plan to run an event there as well as a couple of parts of Australia that I intended to go to. And I was going to run full or half day, sort of quite intensive boot camp style workshops where we would work through one part of your business strategy. I have decided not to do that. Instead I'm going to run when I go to those places I will run some casual catch up events, networking events with existing members and if you're interested and you're not a member, please let me know. Happy to invite you to join us, but I think this is the right decision. The reason I made it is that when I looked at the amount of energy and investment to set those up, those events up, I think it was going to detract from my delivery to my clients and from just, you know, doing the things I need to do to maintain a marketing rhythm. But I do still feel a bit of a pang about it, to be honest. Like I'm not sure that I've made the right decision. So if you have any thoughts of that, drop me a line probably on LinkedIn or email. I've also done some work in the business in terms of how I structure my months and my weeks. And I've put some more themes and time blocks in place so that I am carving out time for the important things around marketing and admin, admin and deliver. So that is great. The other big exciting thing that has come out of my strategy is that I have officially hired someone to help me with some of my marketing implementation, which is really taking the work I do in putting together my podcast. So taking the podcast episode and then converting that into all the other pieces of content that flow from that, things like video posts and LinkedIn graphics. And those things in particular. I love writing the content, I love writing the podcast, I love being on the podcast. But LinkedIn graphics and carousels, I know I need to do them, but it's not my strong suit. Although thank you Canva for letting me do it right until now. So I'm anticipating saving up to seven hours a week on this, so I am pretty excited. Other than that, it has been a fabulous summer break and I'm loving being back to work. And now you've seen the subject of this episode, right? Inspiration and perspiration. And so it might all sound a little bit unrelated, but it ties into what I wanted to talk about today, which is that to thrive in our businesses, both personally and for our businesses themselves to thrive, we need to make sure that we are taking care of two sides of the equation. The inspiration and the perspiration. Or as I've heard phrased by Jenna Kutcher, who's got a great podcast, the woo and the work, right? The sort of the, the ephemeral, spiritual, you know, sparkly side, the woo and the work, which is that we actually have to do things to implement them. Or you could even think of it as the art and the science of what we do. And I feel like I might have been doing you, my podcast listeners, a bit of a disservice because this podcast has been so focused on practical tips and advice on the doing side of the equation, right? The perspiration, the work, the science. And yes, we touch on mindset too. And certainly inside the accelerator we talk about mindset. But the episodes you would have listened to so far have been very action oriented and the truth is we need both. So if you have ever been, let's say, manifestation curious, right, and wondered what it was all about and thought, oh, I love this idea because, you know, can I just really embody this or think really hard and then what I want is going to happen. Or you might have thought, geez, that's garbage. If I just work harder and harder, then I'm going to get what I want. That's, you know, I don't need that. That sort of the, the emotional inspiration side of things. And the truth is that either of those approaches is missing something. The real magic comes when we combine inspiration and perspiration, woo and work, art and science. Because, you know, the woo without the work is just a dream, right? That's the same as inspiration without the perspiration is just a hope. And the work without the woo or the perspiration without the inspiration is directionless and unsatisfying and it doesn't give us that sense of, of satisfaction, of joy that, that I want you to have in your business as well. So we need to think of this as a both and approach. And as coaches, we are really used to talking about it's not black and white, right? We can have both and we can embody, embrace polarities. And this is really a good example of one. We need both the inspiration and the perspiration. So to turn it around, like on the perspiration side, we definitely need the Practical advice. We need the expertise, we need the strategies, we need the structure and we need heavy duty implementation and doing an action orientation. And I really believe that without this, your business is not going to do much at all. I can't overstate how important it is that we have such a strong, heavy action orientation in the early days of our business or really in any phase when we're aiming for. For growth. A lot of the time as coaches, we underestimate what is involved in terms of practical doing. Right? So where we might think that we need to do 10 pieces of outreach to grow, you know, to hit a particular goal around client growth, the truth is we might need to do 100 right in reality. So this part of the equation is about volume, it's about habits, and it's about consistency. Perspiration is super important. On the inspiration side, though, it's really easy to undo. Underdo this part. And today I want to focus on why it's important and how you might tap back into your inspiration if you are feeling that, you know, it sometimes is less present for you. Firstly, as coaches, I think one of the reasons why our inspiration can sort of be a little bit hard to pin down is that we spend so much of our time thinking about other people. We think about their motivations and their values and how they can connect to their purpose, what helps them to manage their stress, how they should cope when they feel burnt out or if their spark is dimmed. But we very rarely do it for ourselves and I believe we need to prioritize it, you know, so forget, you know, getting a manicure or taking yourself out for coffee. This is real self care. Actually. Actually, I think it's all real self care, but this is an area of self care that we tend to neglect. Probably because it is a bit deeper, it's a bit harder, it takes a bit of deliberate attention. So, you know, I want to share a few ideas about how you can tap into the inspiration to supplement the perspiration and the hard work that you're doing now. I appreciate the irony. Look at me focusing on practical steps after just telling you that this episode is more about, you know, inspiration. But I think that practical steps are helpful to give us some idea on how we might embrace the inspiration. Right. And also, you can't really, you know, I can't fight habits, so I'm always about the practical steps. So here are some ways that I think you can tap into your inspiration. The first is, and I don't know how this sits with you, but you have to walk the talk. You have to do your own work as a coach. And by that I mean, you know, do you have a values exercise that you do with your clients, do it for yourself, do the meditations you recommend, do the things you advise professionally when it comes to, you know, tapping into intrinsic motivation sources like do, map out where you are on a. And that, you know, the house of change. Do all of those things. Walk the talk, use your own tools, do the reflection. I think that's really important. The second tip I have is that as coaches, I think we, we more than others, need space to think. And one way that I think we can do that is through retreat. And, you know, this doesn't have to be big retreat. This can be little retreat. This can be micro retreat. This can be literally go sit at a coffee shop for a few hours with noise canceling headphones. Or it could be, you know, once a year or once a quarter, take a couple of days somewhere where you can go and, and plan and dream and strategize. I love doing that. It's the ultimate luxury for me. And I try to do it at least once a year. Often it ends up as part of a family vacation where I'll take a day and specifically focus on this. And this year it ended up being for a lot of, a lot of January when during my working hours I would give, I gave myself permission to think and reconnect and figure out what was important. And honestly, I loved every second of it. The third tip I have is to find your community. And what do I mean? I mean, let's imagine a Venn diagram, right? We've got two circles. One circle is people that are in businesses similar to yours that want to talk about business, want to talk about business. They're excited about it. It's, it's great. So they're people who are similarly motivated at a similar stage. On the other side of the, the other circle, what we have is people whose company you truly enjoy right where it is fun. They are inspiring. They make you feel great about yourself. You can ask them questions. You know, there's a sense of, yeah, this is a really, you know, fun and fulfilling relationship. The intersection of these two circles, those people are the community you need to build. So people who are in business who want to talk about it and who bring out the best in you and who you can have fun with, that is gold, right? Those are, that is the golden, golden zone. So if you find people like that, hold on to them. Another tip I have is journaling so at the moment, I am trying to build a deeper journaling habit, honestly just a journaling habit as opposed to like a very random journaling process. Because I want to give more oxygen to this side of me and I want to understand my inspiration a little bit better. And so what I'm using to support me are, you know, you can get like decks of cards. They're a bit like tarot cards, but instead of being tarot, they might have like a quote or a prompt or something like that to help you think about. And so the ones I'm using are by prism and flow and they're called reflection mindful ritual cards. Right. So each card, and if you watch this on video, which you probably won't, I'm holding one up. They're really beautiful cards as well. I really love the look of them. But they each include like an idea or a prompt. And I then will reflect on how it applies to me. And sometimes I've only got 30 seconds, right. So I just write one idea down. And sometimes I have a bit more time. I also have a set of cards which is totally different, but it's the Brian Eno Oblique Strategies cards. And these are a little bit different in that they're. I think they're great for if you are stuck, if you need to think differently about something. It's just like they've got different ways to think about challenges or. Or anything really. And so, you know, sometimes I pull these out just to see what comes up, even if I don't have a specific challenge in mind. And so today I pulled one of these cards and it said simple subtraction, which was so great. And it reconnected me to that theme I have for the year, which is essential or, you know, sort of less but better. And I thought it doesn't actually just apply on a macro level, it also applies on a micro level. Right. So every day there's an interesting process for me to think about how would I apply. That theme of essential and simple subtraction was a really interesting way, like, what would I remove from my day to. That would help me to be more focused. Focused on. On what matters. So anyway, I thought that was awesome. Number five is that, you know, inspiration can also be re harnessed by deliberately offering what you do to a community that you feel passionate about on a pro bono basis. So, you know, this may or may not work for you, but in the past when I've felt an inspiration gap, I remembered what I really care about and I'll do just one Small thing to help or give back or contribute. And usually that is, you know, volunteering for something or offering pro bono coaching or, you know, a workshop or something like that. And it just gets me back on track. It gives me more focus, it makes me feel great about what I'm doing and the impact that I'm having. And that is. That helps me. And then finally, I think we should focus more on deliberately having fun. Now, this is a very personal story, but once I worked with a nutritionist and you know, she was wonderful. And I think she was a bit different to a lot of, you know, nutritionists or dietitians because she was really interested in the psychological dimensions of, you know, of. Of what we eat and when we eat, how we eat it. And you know, we were talking about my tendency to eat mindlessly when I am stressed or overworked or, or, you know, bored. And she pointed out that it seemed like for me, a lot of the times, these behaviors. And honestly, I think eating is one example. You may have a different behavior, right? So drinking or who knows what it is. It's a way of giving ourselves dopamine when we aren't getting enough through doing things that we find fun or joyful. And you know, if you experience adhd, you might find that this is even more exaggerated, right, because those pathways are more significant. I think it stands to reason that if we deliberately inject more fun into our lives and our days, that it will reduce the need for us to lean on these more unhelpful avoidance behaviors. And I think procrastination is sort of a concert in our work, is a consequence of one of those, you know, particularly where there are less pleasant or less novel tasks. I think we'll do less of that because we are buffered. And what it means is that we're ready to get down to it. We have less obscuring our focus on what is really important. And that's my hypothesis anyway. And so how you have fun, of course, is up to you. But you know, see some comedy, watch a funny movie, jump off a pylon in the ocean, go on the swings at the park and see how high you can go. Hang out with friends who make you laugh hysterically. Just do something that is purely for fun and for joy and just to give yourself that experience. So I'm curious, how is your blend of inspiration versus perspiration? Are you over leveraged one way or the other? For me, focusing on the inspiration means that the perspiration comes easier. I don't have to Force myself to do the work as much. It feels more natural, it's easier to sustain. So I'm in a season of focusing on the inspiration, the, the joy, the why, the, you know, all of that stuff. So that's it for me today. I'm going to go and do something fun. Actually I'm not really, but if I can think of something that I can do in the next 30 minutes before I go and do school pickup, I might just do it. If you are curious about the corporate to coach accelerator that I've touched on here and I do think that while it is all about structure, systems and knowledge, you know, the accelerator is also a brilliant community full of coaches who will cheer you on. Then book a call with me. So the link is in the show notes or you can go to www.elliscarf.com bookacall and we can talk about where you're at and what you need to do to get your next 10 high paying corporate clients or take the next step in your business. And in case you've been wondering what to expect if you book a call in with me, I know sometimes it's like book a call, what are we gonna do on this call? Are you just gonna, you know, do a hard sell? The truth is that this is how it usually goes. So usually we will get to know each other for a little bit. You know, there will generally be some laughter and then I'm going to, you know, really lean into my inner coach and ask you a lot of questions. So I want to make sure that you get some value from the call regardless of whether you choose to join the accelerator. And currently about 95% of people do choose to join, but there is absolutely no pressure to do so. This is truly an exploration call. I usually explore where you are stage wise in your business, what you are finding difficult. And then we talk about what you should prioritize as sort of a, as a triage or a treatment plan to help you navigate your immediate challenges. And then I want us to talk a little bit bigger picture and I'll often share with you my thoughts about some interesting avenues you could take based on your background in terms of your markets, where you're going to be disproportionately advantaged or, and the offers that you have. And then if you're interested, I also often show people the full, you know, back of the accelerator which includes like all of the curriculum, the portal, the tools, the, the feedback portal, you know, all of that. So I can show you all of that. So if that sounds interesting. Please do book in to have a chat with me. I would love to speak to you, love to meet you and be part of your community. So I will speak to you again next week. Have a great week ahead. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Business of Executive Coaching. If you found it helpful, please share it with a colleague or friend on LinkedIn. And don't forget to tag me so I can say thanks. I would be tremendously grateful also if you would leave a review on Apple Podcasts. More reviews means more people can find us. This episode was brought to you by the Impact Coach Collective where executive coaches grow their businesses in a community of peers with business education, mentoring, deal clinics and more. If you'd like to contact me or work with me further, all my free resources, courses and more info on the Impact Coach Collective can be found@elliscarf.com have a brilliant week and I look forward to talking to you again soon.