In this candid monologue, Mary Schiller ("Mary in Paris"), a coach since 2016, confesses a pivotal mistake in her business approach: she underestimated the central role of personal authority for solopreneurs and coaches. She explains that authority—authentic, self‑authored voice and lived examples—is the foundational driver behind effective messaging, offers, and reusable assets. Mary illustrates the point with her own journey, from early life‑coaching work where she claimed her authority through personal transformation stories, to later years when she sold private‑label‑rights (PLR) materials that unintentionally subverted her clients' authority. She expresses regret for that mistake and now refocuses her coaching on helping clients surface and package their own voice via mini‑books, live events, and other content formats. Mary emphasizes that claiming authority is an individual, non‑coachable decision; a coach can support but cannot create it for someone. The video serves both as a personal confession and a warning to other coaches to prioritize authentic authority above tactics and assets.
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I made a mistake, and in this video I am going to come clean about this mistake because you might be making the same mistake, and I think we both need to get on a better track. If you are new to me, my name is Mary Schiller, also known as Mary in Paris. I have been a coach since 2016. I started as a life coach, and then about 3 years into being a life coach, I started to bring in some business coaching because people were curious to know how my life coaching business took off so quickly. So I've been doing a little bit of both all of these years, but primarily business coaching. So what is this mistake that I made? Well, what's so fascinating about this is that I almost had it right. I was this close to having it right. But I was missing something really fundamental in my own business and in the way that I have been coaching people around business. And that's what this video is about. For a long time, I have been wondering why it is that some solopreneurs, particularly coaches, do well, make money, and others don't. And I've been really fascinated by this topic. I've spoken about it. I've talked about what it actually takes to be a solopreneur, which is what I am and what I want to stay. I don't want to have a big team or anything like that. In terms of self-leadership, in terms of resilience and sticking with something and being consistent and all of those things. I have given many talks and workshops on those topics. I, of course, have also talked about strategies and tactics things like your messaging and your offer. And here is the crux of it is I have also talked about creating assets for your business, meaning things that can represent you out there so that you don't have to show up live all the time. So I've encouraged lots and lots of coaches to do a live event, let's say like a masterclass, and then have the recording work for them. They share the recording or they make a book out of the transcript, all kinds of things like that. And this is what gets me is all of those things are important. I'm not saying that they're not important, but they aren't the thing that makes the entire difference. And without this one thing that I'm about to share with you, none of those other things will work. And I'm also going to give you a really powerful example of what I'm about to talk about. So what is this thing that is the driver behind everything, that is the foundation underneath everything, and without it, your business, my business, no one's business will work? It's authority. Authority seems obvious, right? Because without authority, people are not going to trust us. They're not going to see us as credible. And they're not going to buy from us. That's as simple as I can state it. This is where most people falter. I see this all the time where a coach, let's say, will go through coach training, and I'm not knocking coach training, I'm just saying this is what I've seen, and they will adopt the language of whatever the trainers are saying rather than seeking their own understanding of something and bringing that to the fore with their own authority. Here is the powerful example that I want to share with you, and that is my own. When I first started coaching as a life coach in 2016, I was coaching in a specific topic that had some very big names in it and still does. I learned from those people. I didn't take any coach training from them, but I did learn from them because it was something that transformed my life. And without those people, I never would have discovered this for myself. But when it came time for me to talk about my own transformation and how that occurred, I couldn't use their language. I couldn't use their vocabulary. And even the basics of what those coaches were talking about didn't really fit. I couldn't speak about it in that way. If you go back on my channel, back 10, 11 years, even before I became a coach, you will see that I had a very different approach from most people in this particular topic area. And it wasn't because I was trying to buck the system or, you know, be a rebel or anything. It was because I was speaking about my own life transformation. And that occurred in a very specific way. And I had to use language and descriptions and examples that were from my own life. Really, one of the times that I saw this most clearly, that a mistake that other coaches were making back then, was when I started editing people's books in this particular topic area. And I noticed that book after book after book used the same examples as all of the big-name coaches were using. I would go back to these coaches and writers and say, you can't Write like this. This isn't genuine. It's not you. It's not your authentic voice. And when they rewrote it in their own voice, using their own examples, of course, it was more powerful. They asserted their own authority. They claimed their expertise. They realized, you know what? I do have a perspective on this that is different and it matters and it's powerful. And when they did that, everything shifted for them. The reason I was so successful as a life coach was because I claimed my authority right away. I knew that what I was talking about was real. I had seen myself in the before and after story, and I could talk about that with complete confidence because I knew it was a fact. There was no doubt in my mind ever. This is where most people falter. They are not relaxing into their own expertise. They are not claiming that, and they're not proclaiming that outwardly. This is why I'm going to correct this mistake now. And going forward, every single thing that I do related to business and talking to people about business, and also in my own business, is going to relate to authority because without it, nothing else can work. That's why you have so many people doing things like buying private label rights materials that they can rebrand and sell and it not working because that isn't from them. And I am guilty of this. I sold those materials and I thought I was doing people a favor because They were struggling to figure out what to sell. I created something beautiful for them to sell, and they did make sales. But looking back, that was not right. I should not have done that because I was subverting their authority. And I do regret that. If I have to say, there are several things that I regret, and that is one of them. So I just have a couple of things left to say in this video, and one is I really can't help you to claim your own authority. I can be supportive, but it's something that you have to do yourself. And I have learned this lesson recently too, in that I've realized that my area of authority is in helping people to take their voice and bring it forward into form. That's what I have done for more than 30 years as a writer and editor, writing teacher, online educator. I have helped people to bring out their voice in words and powerfully, even in speaking. I used to teach public speaking as well. So that is where my focus is on helping people to get their own mini books out there, whether they have me write them or they write them themselves. I've got programs coming out about that, and I'm also going to help people to host good live events online because that is so important for putting your authority out there in a way that people can experience. They can see and hear and feel and touch and all of those things. So that's one piece of it. But the other piece about claiming your authority, that is something that each of us individually has to do. We cannot be coached in that. It's something that we have to decide that we are going to do. And then we can decide to start showing that authority through these forms like books and videos and audios and whatever way that we want to do that. Authority is the crux of everything. It's literally everything. And what I find so ironic is that just as I started to come into this realization for myself, I have started to hear a lot of other coaches talking about this, big name coaches, so I know I'm not alone here, which is somewhat exciting and encouraging, and it helps me to not feel so bad about missing this big piece of the puzzle.
