Detaching from Outcomes As a High Stakes Provider

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories, it's about the grit it takes to get there. Hey everyone, this is Julie. Well, welcome back to Million Dollar Grit. Today we're talking about detaching from outcomes, specifically for coaches and consultants who are in any sort of high-stakes environment. So this means you are a business coach, a marketing coach, a Facebook Ads service provider, you are in finance, investing, anything where it feels really high stakes. And how do we lead as experts but at the same time have a healthy detachment from the client's outcome? And this is one of the hardest things you will do as a coach, because if you have any sort of empathy, which you probably do if you went into coaching, it's going to be hard when your customer, your client, doesn't get the results that you want them to get. So I'm going to go through 5 things that I think you should keep in mind as a way to set up a protocol so that you aren't burned out or exhausted or feel like you have PTSD when you open up your phone. So, you know, just a little background. I have been running my mastermind since 2017. So we are on year 8 and I have had anywhere from 50 to 100 clients at any one time. I remember when Funnel Gorgeous just started getting going and I had both Digital Insiders and now Funnel Gorgeous team members in my Voxer. And I remember waking up. And feeling that sort of ping of anxiety because I knew just from a math perspective that because of the amount of people in my Voxer, there was a high likelihood, almost 100% chance, that someone was going to either be mad or be spiraling or there would be some sort of hair on fire emergency. And when you're kind of up and coming or you don't have a lot of clients yet, you can not realize that this is just a math reality. So you can kind of trick yourself into thinking if you get a couple of good clients, you could be like, okay, well look, I have all these great outcomes. Or on the, on the reverse, if you get a couple of bad clients, you could walk away thinking that you're the worst coach ever. You know what this reminds me of? It reminds me of parents. And when parents only have one child and that child turns out great, they think that they were a great parent. And if that child turns out poorly according to society. They think they're a bad parent, but it's only the parents who have 4 or 5 or 6 children that realize that there's a lot that's not in your control, that genetics play a huge role in whether a child grows into a successful adult. And so you tend to detach a little bit from the outcome and the success of your child because you realize that while you are a steward of them, you are not responsible for the outcome. And so I have the benefit of having had enough clients in my 10 years as a coach to know that you're going to have good clients, you're going to have bad clients, and there's really not a whole lot that you can do about it. And so detaching from outcomes becomes absolutely critical. The good news is, is that when you tie your worth to something that you can control, You have a lot more peace in life, and when you stop outsourcing your own feelings of worth or regulation on your clients, it becomes a much happier arrangement, and the client can also sense it as well. All right, so we're going to go with thing number 1. First, you need to build non-negotiable personal business values. So this is What are you promising? What are you not promising? Where is your boundary of responsibility? And then this way, no matter who the client is, no matter what niche they're in, how unpredictable the ads or the funnel or whatever it is might be, you are operating from your business values. You can also publish these business values if you want. You could do it on a blog post, you could do it in a podcast episode, but this is what you live by. And this creates a tremendous amount of relief and safety because clients know what you are going to do and not, and that helps them feel like they understand you. And it also gives you a code and a guideline that you can actually control. And when it comes to high-stakes coaching, consulting, or service work, there are so many variables that you cannot control. So that's going to be number 1. Number 2 is more related to the client. It's about expectation setting. Once you have personal business values, it becomes relatively easy to set expectations because you're going to say, all right, here are my values. Here's what I promise. Here's what I can't promise. And you want to lay that out before the work begins. You want to tell them what's in your control and what's not in your control. And a lot of clients don't understand what to expect, and all they see is marketing material that is designed to make everything look better and rosier than it actually is. So it is your job. Expectation setting is often about education, right? So I'll give you an example. I had a client, I love her. She came to me and she said, I want to have a $100K launch. What do I have to do? How many do I have to sell of my product? And it was a, let's just say for the sake of math, it's a $2,000 product. I said, you have to sell 50 units. She said, okay, well, uh, how many people do I need to be on my webinar in order to sell 50 units? And I said, well, probably if you're really good and you have a 10% conversion, you're going to need 500 people on your webinar. She's like, oh, okay, that's not so bad. She said, well, how many people do I have to have registered in order to get 500 people on your webinar? And I said, probably between 3,000 and 5,000. And now all of a sudden the expectation of like, whoa, okay, well that's a lot. You're telling me I need 5,000 people in order to sell 50 units? And I'm like, yep, pretty much, right? And I made the joke. I said, I feel like I'm a dream killer right now. But that was important that I set those expectations because it's not going to do her any good, it's not going to do me any good. And one of my personal business values is that I will always try to be truthful and realistic about what I think is possible. And one of my other business values is that I, I tend to be more on the conservative side, uh, versus the risky side. So you're just going to know this about me as a coach. This is one of the reasons why I think I make a great coach for people who are either risky or conservative. The reason why I'm helpful for people who are risky is because I provide some balance for them. And the reason why I think I'm good with conservative is because I can speak their language and I can reassure them. So I think I have a unique vantage point by being a conservative business coach. Anyway, so number 1 is your personal business values. Number 2 is your expectation setting. With the client. Okay, now number 3 are boundaries. And we hear that word, it's a buzzword. Boundaries are basically working out the first 2, right? So working out your personal values and also working out the expectations. And so boundaries are just the day-to-day execution of what you've already decided. This is where it's really difficult because if you have a nervous system that is a little fragile, or you are someone who doesn't like how pain feels, you don't like disappointing people, anything like that, it will be difficult to hold these boundaries. So let me give you an example. Let's say that you're listening to this and you're nodding your head and you're saying, okay, I have been really bad with this, and I've got some clients who are There's a lot of scope creep. They're expecting me to, you know, read, read the stars about their outcomes, assure them of ROI, all of that stuff. So now you go and you sit down and you write out your business values and you write out your expectations and you feel great, but now you actually have to go work it out in your boundaries. Oftentimes people think that boundaries Or something is broken if the person gets upset. The truth is that when people get upset, yes, of course you could be doing something wrong, but in many cases you're just actually exerting a boundary that was being breached and they're annoyed. So the, the actual, uh, evidence that you are walking in integrity with your expectations and your values usually leads to disappointed, angry customers. And so if that's something that you're scared of, it's going to be very difficult to hold up those boundaries. So again, if in your business values you say, you know, that I am committed to answering messages once a day to the best of my ability, and you do that, and then someone sends you a message 4 hours later with an SOS and you're feeling guilty or bad, this is the moment where you're going to need to put up that energetic boundary. And that boundary may anger that customer. And then you have to work hard to tell your brain that the customer being angry is not a sign that I did anything wrong. It's a sign that I held up my boundary. Okay. All right. Number 4, I want you to recognize when you're being used. This is difficult to do because sometimes the client doesn't mean to. This is not just about like, we all have hell stories about difficult clients that were really mean or didn't pay or charge back or, you know, bad-mouthed you. And that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about reasonably good clients, good people who don't recognize that they are putting emotional and energetic expectations on you that aren't realistic. And so this is not like, okay, you can't you know, work with that person. But it is your job to recognize when that's happening. And the thing is, if you try to insulate yourself from only clients that are perfectly, you know, uh, put together, you are going to have a very small client roster. So here are 3 ways that a client might be using you, and I'm going to call them red flags, but again, it's not that the client means to. The first is the magic 8-ball, and this is when a client is asking you what to do in like a very like, well, what would you do if you were me? Now, if you are okay with that question, and I get this question all the time, I will answer it and I will say, listen, I'm not you and I can't make this decision for you. "but if I were you, this is what I would do." A magic 8-ball client is someone who's going to take your advice and then maybe hold you responsible if it doesn't work. I had a client like this, and she was like, "Well, I did what you said and it didn't work." And so that is where it sort of tips over into this red flag. The other way that the magic 8-ball client shows up is that they want you to predict the future. "Well, what do you think is going to happen?" And sometimes you can predict because you've got more experience, but other times, you know, your prediction may be wrong as well. You know, it's like an investor who says, well, I think you should invest in this stock, but you're going based on a hunch just as much as the client is going based on a hunch, though yours is more educated. So you have to be careful that you can answer all of those questions, but there needs to be an understanding that you are human, that you are not a magic 8-ball, and that you don't truly know the future. Uh, so that is one red flag you just want to be careful about. Just when you see that pop up, be careful to constrain your answer. The second red flag is the emotional regulator. This is the person who doesn't know how to handle difficult emotions. They spin out, they get angry, they get anxious, whatever it happens to be. And again, there's no issue if a client is angry or anxious and is coming into your messages or what have you to talk it through. But there's a difference between holding space for someone's emotions and feeling a level of responsibility to make those emotions go away. That is the difference. And so this actually isn't really about you finding clients who know how to regulate all their emotions. It's about you recognizing when a client is looking to you for emotional regulation and you holding the boundary. So let's give a real tangible example. Let's say that someone, you know, I'm a business coach, someone is in the middle of a launch and they are spinning out because they're on day 3 and they're not getting sales and they invested a good chunk of money into ads and they are just feeling all kinds of regret and they're spinning out in, in your messages. Okay. That in itself is not an issue. Okay, but the flag should go up because you, as the coach in a high-stakes environment, need to be able to hold space for this person's emotions without feeling obligated to fix it. So if you go into that exchange and you reassure them, well, well, this and that, and, and, well, what about this? Or we could try this, or, you know, just like that sort of solving, fixing energy. And guys, I'm really good at fixing things, so this is a big tendency of mine. It's not that that's inherently bad, but what it does is it sets up a scenario where you are the rescuer from bad feelings, right? So every time they have a bad feeling, they're just going to come to you because they want you to save them from the bad feeling because they don't like how it feels. So what you could say in that situation is, this is really hard. I'm sorry that you're feeling so crappy, uh, you know, What can we do right now to help, you know, regulate you? Do you need to take a walk? Do you need to journal? Do you need to scream into a pillow? And then orienting them to the current plan. All right, well, here's the plan. This is what we're working through. This is what we're gonna do. You know, we will debrief, but it's not providing some sort of savior, this is how we're gonna redeem it, or, you know, here are all the things we're gonna try, or here are all the reasons you shouldn't feel bad. Because that puts you in a position of regulating someone else's emotions, and that can be very tiring over time. And then you tend to not want to talk to the client because you begin to resent that position. But keep in mind that you put yourself in that position. The client didn't put you in that position. Okay, all right. And the third is what I like to call the hype girl. And again, I'm going to repeat this over and over and over again: you are not trying to find clients who don't do this because Everybody does this to some extent. And when I say recognize when you're being used, that's what I said at the beginning. I don't mean used in a bad way. I just mean you're being pulled into a role that is going to burn you out as a coach, and you need to watch that. And it's your job to watch that. It's not the client's job to watch that. I mean, in theory, it would be great if the client could watch it too, but it's really not their job. Um, in, in the sense that it's not their job to make you feel better. It's your job to keep your energetic field clean. Okay, so the hype girl is the person who, uh, has lots of ideas, possibly neurodivergent, possibly not, but they are constantly bouncing from idea to idea to idea. Shiny objects, you know. Little dopamine-fueled chaos, if you will. Again, not always a bad thing, but it can feel very jarring to a client or consultant. Let's say you're a Facebook ads service provider and you go through this entire strategy and you build it out, and then the person goes away to a 2-day retreat and comes back and has a whole brand new plan that they want to execute. And so then you go and do that, and then 3 days later, it's not working, so they want to can that. They want to go back to the original one, right? This can feel like your job is to just be their cheerleader, their hype girl, their monkey doer, right? Like, you just gotta jump from thing to thing to thing. It's not your job to accompany them on all of their pivot plans, okay? And so you need to have strong boundaries of like— and obviously, if you're doing work for people, so like in the, in the example of the Facebook ads coach, if you're actually doing the ads for them, you're going to have to charge every time they want to change, right? That needs to be set clearly in your expectation setting, right? Which was number 2. And then you have to hold to that, which is number 3, the boundaries. But if you're just a coach or a consultant and you don't actually have to do the work, you're just talking about it. There's a couple things you can do. Number 1, you can say something as simply as, "I think this is a distraction," or, "I don't agree with the whole premise of your question, so as your coach or as your consultant, I wouldn't even entertain this idea. I would stick to the plan." But you can decide if you want to say, "Given that you're asking my advice," Here's what I think of that idea, but please keep in mind that I wouldn't even be entertaining the question. I just did this for someone the other day when she said, I wanna do this. And you know, I started to talk it out with her and then I stopped and I was like, but hold on, why are we doing this? Like, why are we having this conversation? Like, this all started with like a big dream, you know? And she's like, well, I'm a dreamer. And we laughed, you know, I love her so much. She's amazing. I was like, oh, right, okay. Well, you're a dreamer, and so that's fine. So if we're going to engage that dream, here's what I would do, but I'm telling you that that's not realistic. And so I'm, you know, kind of living in the world of reality here, and this is what I think is more reasonable. And so as you see these things pop up, they are red flags only in the sense that if you don't manage your energy and you don't recognize what's going on in the dynamic, you might end up burned out or exhausted if you multiply this by 25 clients over 5 years. And I see this all the time. People don't want to, you know, I don't want to be a coach anymore, I don't want to do one-on-one anymore, I don't want to do Facebook ads anymore, I don't want to build funnels for clients anymore, you know. And everyone is just sort of, you know, burned out on dealing with humans. And the thing is, I hate to say this, but with AI, human connection is going to be the thing that remains valuable. And so all of the passive income that we love and the digital products and the courses and, you know, we love making money passively. Is fine, but there will be a point in time where AI kind of does it better than all of us, and it's going to be very, very inexpensive, and we're going to start to see some of the collapse of that industry, which means what will remain— and yes, people could argue that coaches, AI coaches, will be better than real coaches— but what will remain is a desire for human connection, for humans that want to seen, that want to be in relationship with other humans, that want to not feel alone in their work. And as a coach, you have an opportunity to continue to provide that for people. And so you don't want to burn out on coaching. You want to remain excited about your coaching practice. You want to wake up in the morning and not feel PTSD. And I am speaking from an extraordinary amount of experience when I say that it is possible to have 50 to 70 clients and wake up in the morning and not be overwhelmed. And of course I'm human. There are days when I'm exhausted and I'm tired or I'm worried about something or I'm, you know, holding somebody's outcome a little bit too closely and I want it to work for them so bad. And those are days where I fall down on my boundaries or I try to, you know, be the magic 8-ball or regulate someone's emotions or, you know, jump on a dopamine-fueled rabbit trail. But 90% of the time, I wake up and I feel centered and I feel grounded. I feel excited to talk to my clients. I feel helpful when I'm able to give them advice. I feel happy when they succeed. I feel down when it's hard, but I am not tossed by the wind. And that is not because I have tapped into some version of humanity that you don't have yet. Because I mean, I would argue that I have amazing clients and they're, you know, the, they're the best of the best. But I want to make it clear, if you're listening to this and you're like, well, Julie, has great clients and that's why she's fine and I have shitty clients and that's why I'm not fine. I, I'm gonna push back and I'm gonna say, no, that's probably not true. You probably just have human clients like everybody does, and you need help with your boundaries, your expectation setting, and your personal values. And you also probably don't recognize when you're over-functioning, which is the number 4. Okay, so number 1. Like I said, was your personal business values. Number 2, setting expectations with the client. Number 3, working out those boundaries day in and day out. Number 4, recognize when you're being used in a way that's not your responsibility. Again, be careful not to moralize this. And number 5, the last one, when you are a coach or a consultant or a provider, your nervous system is your business. Like it is the operating system of your business because your business is primarily your brain, your expertise. And so if your nervous system is shot, everything that I just said will go right out the window because you will over-function. You will take on their panic as your problem. You will get resentful. You will get reactive. You will regret the things you do. You will, uh, do, you will probably put back on the clients The very thing that they have been doing to you. And that's sort of the irony is that if your nervous system is not in good shape, you end up being the magic 8-ball, the emotional regulator, and the hype girl in the opposite direction, because you want your clients to have predictable outcomes so you can feel good about yourself. You want your clients to remain steady so that you don't have to regulate your own emotions, right? You become the hype girl that decides to burn your business to the ground or change your offer 100 times. And that's because we're all human and we're all, we all have these tendencies. This is not like something unique. And so if your nervous system is not functioning well, you absolutely need to get your nervous system in tip-top shape. So as I wrap up this episode, I would love to make a plug for my coaching and my Digital Insiders Mastermind. And if you've never been in a coaching or mastermind experience where you have both personalized coaching, nervous system support, and marketing and business, you are missing out. So if you, uh, haven't heard about Digital Insiders, you should go to digitalinsidersmastermind.com. You can always private message me on Instagram. Right now, Digital Insiders has some openings available. We are at a great time to join. We are beginning a fun, uh, contest. We have an upcoming retreat in November in Disney World. And of course, when you join Digital Insiders, you don't only get a mastermind, you also get private one-on-one coaching from me. From, uh, my head coach Helen, who is focused extremely, uh, on nervous system support, trauma-informed coaching. And you also get access to one of my tech wizards, Nuno. And so you get 3 personal, private, one-on-one coaches for your investment into Digital Insiders, plus the events, the content, the group, all of that fun stuff. There's a million things. So if this has resonated with you, if you are a coach, a consultant, or a service provider, and you are nodding your head going, I need help with this, I would love to coach you. I think that experiencing me as a coach and then also my support in helping you work through these 5 things along with my fellow coaches would be really powerful. So you can go to digitalinsidersmastermind.com. Hope you have a great day. And there you have it, folks, another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.