Feel Like a Newbie? Here's Why (Not What You Think)

You have 20 years of experience, but you feel like a complete newbie. Does that sound insane? Because it is. Hey, I'm Hui Hui, and I've worked with over 400 coaches who have built their expertise for decades. Therapists, executives, professionals, nurses, consultants, and every single one of them felt like a fraud when they're just starting their coaching business. But here's the thing. You're not a newbie. You're just driving a different vehicle. And in the next 12 minutes, I'm going to prove to you why you already have everything you you need. Let's go. So let me start by asking you a question, and I want you to really think about this. How many years of experience do you have in your current career? Maybe you've been a corporate executive for 25 years. Maybe you've been a therapist for 18 years. Maybe you're a marketing director for 20 years, or maybe you've been a nurse for over two decades. Whatever your field is, you have accumulated years of experience, sometimes decades of knowledge, expertise, stories, obstacles that you have overcome, clients that you have served, and problems that you have solved. Now here's my next question: on the very first day of work in that career, were you as experienced as you are now? Of course not, right? That would be ridiculous. And yet here's what I see all the time with experienced professionals who want to start their coaching business. They expect to be good at running a coaching business from day one. Can you see the irony here? You gave yourself years to accumulate your experience in your career, but you're expecting yourself to be instantly good at running a coaching business the moment you begin. And this is an entirely different skill set. And when you're not instantly good at it, when you're creating a new offer or attracting clients or running a sales event, then maybe you say to yourself, maybe I'm not cut out for this. Maybe I'm too much of a newbie. But here's what's really happening. Let me break down what's exactly going on behind the scenes when you start your coaching business. Think about all the knowledge that you've accumulated over your career, the stories that you have lived through, the obstacles that you have overcome, the wisdom that you have again, the transformations that you have created for others, the fears that you have to go through, the limiting beliefs that you had to run through in order for you to be able to feel the way, the confidence that you have right now. How long did it take for you to accumulate all of that? 5 years, 10 years, 15 years? That knowledge, those stories, those experiences, they are all still intact within you. They didn't disappear the moment you decided to become a coach. Isn't it? And what you're doing now is you're taking all of that accumulated wisdom and you're transferring it to someone else who actually needs the expertise from you. So here's the key insight that I would like you to take away. If you sat down across from a friend at a coffee shop today and you told them your career stories, your expertise, and you gave them advice based on your years of experience, you could do that easily, right? Of course you could. So the content, the expertise, the value that you have to offer, that's not new. You are not a newbie at that. What's new for you right now is the vehicle that you're using to transfer that knowledge. Because maybe you transferred that knowledge through a one-on-one conversation or in a corporate environment or in a hospital setting or through your art or your work. And now you're using a vehicle called a coaching business to transfer that same knowledge. You're now learning course creation. You're now learning how to create high-ticket offers. You're now learning marketing and sales. You're now learning how to attract clients to you. And these are just new skills, new tools, and a new vehicle. But your core expertise, your core value, that's been developing for decades. And let me make this even clearer with an analogy that I love, and I share this a lot with my new clients. Do you drive a car? Or at least know someone who can drive? Think back about the time when you first learned how to drive. I remember when I was first learning how to drive in Singapore, we are right-hand drive here, and I had to coordinate my legs on the accelerator and the brake. And because I was learning how to manual drive, right, I had to learn how to shift the gears with my hand, check the mirrors and watch the road and turn the steering wheel, right? So many things to take care of. And I remember that wishing that at that very moment, because I was just about 18 years old at the time, I was wishing that I had 4 hands and 3 legs and about 6 sets of eyes because there was so much to manage all at once, and every single thing required my full conscious effort and my full conscious attention. I was gripping that steering wheel, I was sitting so straight and gripping that steering wheel like my life depended on it, which honestly it kind of did because I was just starting how to learn how to drive. But now I can drive while having a conversation, while listening to a podcast, and some people that I know They're even driving while they're eating, or maybe they're even talking on the phone, although I'm not necessarily recommending that. But what changed? Did you suddenly become competent at becoming a professional driver? No, right? You just practice enough to be able to become good so that driving becomes your unconscious competence. And you know what? I've done this exact same thing with language as well. When I first started learning storytelling in my coaching business, I have to think about every single word before I said it. The hook, the twist, the lesson. Am I being too vulnerable here? I overthink so much when I first started and it was exhausting. But now I've built my business from zero to $5 million and I share my stories on stages around the world. I've got many clients and I don't think about sentence construction as much as I used to. It just flows because I've said it so many times. So same process, same result, but unconscious competence. The same thing is true for building coaching businesses as well. Right now, learning how to create offers, learning how to have sales conversations, doing sales calls, how to market yourself, is kind of like learning how to drive for the first time. There are so many moving parts, and each one requires your conscious attention. So I always tell my clients, There are 4 basic skills that you have to learn in your coaching business. The first one is speaking. How do you speak to communicate so that you can speak with clarity and to be able to communicate clearly and with passion to your potential clients as well as to be able to talk to your clients as well? That's speaking. Secondly, selling. So how do you sell so that you can actually increase the income and impact, right? Because once you sell, they come into your world. That's how the transformation starts. The third one is how do you then coach your clients, okay? So how do you deliver and coach your clients? The fourth one is leading. So how do you become a leader, what I call a fearless leader, leading your tribe and leading your clients towards the outcome that they desire? I promise you, once you learn these 4 skill sets, once you start to practice each one more times, when you go from conscious incompetence to then conscious competence, and finally you reach the stage of mastery, which is unconscious competence. It becomes just like driving, just like storytelling, just like anything else that you have learned in your life. Just like I tell my clients, there are only 3 activities that they have to focus on in order to have a thriving coaching business at any point in the week: organic contents, genuine conversations, and conversion events where people can see, hear, and feel who you are as a person and how you can help them. So from zero to six figures, focus on these three activities: contents, chats, and conversion events. If you wanna know more about this, let me know in the comments and I'll create another episode to share with you these three steps to growing a successful six-figure coaching business organically without ads. Just drop it in the comments. I read every single comment. If you're still with me, You're clearly serious about building your coaching business the right way. Out of everything that we've covered so far, the newbie paradox, the knowledge transfer concept, or the stacked analogies about language and driving, which one is hitting you the hardest? Drop it in the comments. And if you want me to go deeper on any of these ideas, let me know. I'd love to be able to help you on this. So here's the reframe I'd like you to walk away with. You're not a newbie at your expertise. You're not a newbie at the value that you provide. You're not a newbie at the transformations that you can create for your people. You're simply learning a new skill set called building a coaching business. And when you can separate these two things inside your mind, your decades of experience versus the new business skills that you're acquiring, it takes all the pressure off. Because learning a new skill, that's just a matter of time and practice. Think about every other skill that you have learned in your life, from young learning how to walk, to learning how to tie shoelaces, to learning how to drive, to learning how to cook, to learning how to type, to learning a new software, and perhaps right now learning AI. Were you instantly good at any of this? Of course not, right? Neither am I. But did you eventually get good at it through practice? Of course. If you put your mind through it, of course you will get better. So this is no different. So I would like you to give yourself permission to be bad before you get good at the business side of coaching, while recognizing that you're already exceptional at the expertise side of it. So you don't need another certification. You don't need to wait until you're ready, and you certainly do not need to compare your Chapter 1 with someone else's Chapter 20. You just need to commit yourself and obsessed about learning this new skill the same way that you committed to learning your original profession. So I actually talk about this in a separate video where I talk about the Obsession Formula, where I almost gave up at one point in my coaching business because I got English phobia. If you want to watch that video and learn about the Obsession Formula, click here. The truth is you just need to commit yourself to learning this new skill the same way that you committed to learning your original profession. And honestly, if you can immerse yourself, and the keyword here is immerse, in learning this business skill set for just 6 months to a year and really immerse yourself, practice, practice, get support, stay consistent, and you will not recognize the version of yourself 12 months from now. So we are just at the halfway mark of a 6-week sprint that we are doing with our current ELITE clients since the beginning of the year, and the results have been astounding. Sheryl got 2 new clients for a total of $9,000 USD just 2 weeks in. David is getting more leads than ever from groups. Denise is breaking her own record at doing chats. They all started from scratch. They were exceptional at their expertise and they're getting better at this business side of coaching. So you absolutely can do this as well. So let me give you some perspective on timelines. You spend years, maybe decades, becoming excellent at your profession or your career. You didn't expect to be great on day one, right? But with your coaching business, if you can give yourself 1 year, 12 months, 1 year dedicated to learning the skill sets and be focused and immersed on practicing it, you can build something extraordinary. Not 10 years, not 5 years, 1 focused year. And within that year, I've seen my clients get to 6 figures. I've seen others sign their first paying clients within their first 90 days. I've seen them create transformation for their clients that they never thought possible. But it requires you to stop calling yourself a newbie and start seeing yourself accurately from now on. You are an experienced expert who's just learning a new vehicle to offer your expertise. And that's it. That's the truth. And from that place, from that identity, you can move forward with confidence knowing that you absolutely have what it takes. You just need to learn the vehicle. So I've worked with therapists who have become 6-figure coaches, very successful corporate executives, pastors, nurses, teachers, lawyers, marketers, people from every background imaginable. You can start a coaching business and you can grow it to 5 figures, 6 figures, and beyond. And you know what they all had in common? They all felt like newbies at first. They all had the imposter syndrome, and they all doubted whether they had what it takes when they first started. But they gave themselves permission to begin anyway, and they separated their expertise from the business learning curve, and they championed their dreams when they first started. And that's exactly what I'm inviting you to do today. So here's what I'd like you to remember from now onwards. You're not a newbie. You are an expert learning a new vehicle called business. So give yourself permission to be bad before you get good at the business side of things and trust that your expertise will do the rest. If this episode helped you to shift your perspective today, I would love for you to do 3 things for me. First, hit the subscribe button so you don't miss the next episode where I'll dive deeper on how to grow your business to 6 and 7 figures. Second, drop a comment below telling me how many years of experience do you have in your current expertise. I would love to celebrate how not of a newbie you actually are. And third, if you know of an experienced professional right now who's feeling like an impostor, share this episode with them. They need to hear this and it's gonna help them so much. As usual, I'm championing your dreams. You've got this. I'm looking forward to see you in my next episode. Thanks for watching.