Brutally Honest Advice To Younger Me Who Wanted To QUIT
In this candid monologue, the speaker reflects on a recent client call that threatened to derail a coach’s motivation and uses the experience to deliver brutally honest advice to their younger self who wanted to quit. The narrative walks through a four‑part coaching‑business framework—niche, offer, marketing/lead generation, and sales—highlighting how to diagnose progress and bottlenecks. The speaker emphasizes the importance of addressing mindset first, explaining brain tricks like recency bias and negative‑thought spirals that convince entrepreneurs that "nothing is working." A pipe/funnel analogy illustrates how a single missing or weak piece can halt revenue flow, and a thoughts‑feelings‑actions‑results model provides a practical reframing technique to break the quit cycle. The talk blends personal anecdotes of past quit attempts with actionable tactics (evidence‑gathering, sales skill work, follow‑up messaging, testimonial usage) to show that a business is always working to some degree; the key is identifying and fixing the weakest link while maintaining a constructive mindset.
Chapters
All right. This is my most brutally honest advice to myself, my younger self who wanted to quit. So I just got off the phone with someone, a potential— well, not a potential, a client actually. And, you know, she had reached out earlier in the week. She booked a call with me or she wanted to book a call with me. And I asked her like, hey, like, what, you know, what, like, what do you want to chat about on the call? And she was saying like, I'm really, I'm really kind of struggling to see like the that this is working, you know? And anyways, it's— she was like, it was just honestly, I was just having a really bad day yesterday. She had had some personal stuff that was going on, like all these kinds of things, right? And so she's like, actually, don't worry about it. Like, probably don't need the call anymore. And I was like, okay, well, like, how are you feeling now? You know, like, I know you're saying that you don't need the call, but like, do you need the call? Like, you know, like, how are you doing now? Like, I'm sure this mindset drama didn't just go away, right? And so it turns out it was probably still a good idea to book a call. And so we did because I was like, honestly, like, I've seen this stuff before. Like, this is— this can totally turn into like, if there's any sort of like doubt, uncertainty, negative thoughts coming up, I'm like, this could turn into a mindset spiral. And I'm like, not on my damn watch. Like, absolutely not. Like, we're going to nip this in the bud right now before this becomes a bigger problem than it needs to be. Right? And so we hop on the call. And I'm like, okay, like, lay it on me. Like, what's going on? Like, hit me, you know? Like, I'm ready. I'm ready for anything. And it was this conversation around, like, you know, I know that this is supposed to be hard. Like, I know that this is supposed to take a while, but like, this seems like it's taking a while. You know, like, surely not this hard, right? Like, it feels like nothing's working, right? That's how it feels. And like, I already— I already knew exactly where to go with this conversation because like, Welcome to having a human brain. Like, literally, welcome to having a human brain. Do you have any idea the amount of times that people's brains convince them that it's not working? And I was like, okay, I know where we need to go first on this call before we solve any problem, before we make any improvements, before we map out any plans, is we need to address, address mindset stuff first, period. Right? And so I was like, okay, let me bring up the diagram that I showed you when we first had a discovery call, enrollment call, whatever you want to call it, right? And, you know, if I was to break, if I was to break having a really successful coaching business down into like, you know, one, two, and I'm going to get to the point of this whole headline in this video, right? But if you were to break a coaching business down into like 4 parts, it'd be like, cool, clarity on your ideal client, right? Your ideal client, your niche, whatever your offer, you got to have something to sell, right? You got to know who you're selling it to. And then you can create something that they, that is helpful for them. That solves a problem. You have something to sell, then you gotta market it. You gotta tell people, you gotta get inquiries, right? Marketing, lead gen. And then the last thing is you have to turn inquiries into clients. You gotta make sales, right? And so I had this like this pyramid on the screen where it's like niche, offer, uh, marketing, lead gen, sales, right? And I was like, the first thing that we're gonna do is I need to show your brain right now that we have made progress and stick with me to the end of this video because it's gonna be so helpful for you. Right. But I was like, I need to— I literally need to show your brain that we have made progress. And I was like, do you remember when you first came to me? Because here's what's crazy. I think— I think there may actually be a thing which is called like recency bias. Like your brain sometimes tunes out like older things and it only thinks about what's happening right now. Right. And I was like, okay, do you remember when you first came to me and the first problem that we had to solve was you didn't have a profitable niche? Like you could— if you would have just stayed in that lane and kept going, you could have like not signed any clients for like the next 3 years, right? And then like totally given up and quit, right? We solved that problem. And I know that we solved that problem because like I— we went over some of the people that were booking calls with her and like it is very clear, very, very clear that they know they have a big problem and they need her to— they need help solving it, right? It's like this is compared to the niche we had before. This is night and day. Like I was like, I'm actually jealous a little bit of your niche because there's such a painful problem. Like for me, like helping people get to, let's say, $5K a month, $10K a month, whatever. That's a little bit more of a nice to have sometimes than is like, I need to fix this. And so I was like, you're honestly, your people that hop on the phone with you have a bigger pain point than the people that hop on the phone with me, period. Like I'm a little bit jealous, right? So like we have checked that box. If we didn't fix that, I'm like literally trying to show her the progress, right? I'm like, if we hadn't, fix that, then literally like you could have went on the path you were on for like forever and it wouldn't have worked, right? So we got that. Your offer, we have that nailed. I know we have it nailed because we've gone through it right now. Your marketing, I was like, cool, like how many inquiries have you gotten recently, right? And she's give me the number of inquiries. I was like, okay, so you're getting inquiries. I was like, okay, well how many people turned into clients? Zero. Okay, well we have a problem with sales, right? We don't have— we haven't figured out the skill of sales yet, right? And we just did a bunch of work on her sales. Like, she was, um, I mean, that's always been one of her biggest issues, right? One of her biggest bottlenecks. And again, stick with me to the end of this, but, um, and I almost need a diagram to in this to show you, but whatever, it is what it is. We're doing, we're doing audio. Um, I mean, you can see me talking obviously, but I don't have a visual on the screen. But anyways, I was like, okay, so basically we're telling me that your, your, your niche, step one, amazing, right? Offer that you have, great. Amazing marketing. It is working. You are getting inquiries, right? We've— you've been booking calls. You wouldn't be booking calls if your marketing wasn't working. It is working. It's just like, how well is it working? Right? Like it's on a continuum. It's not black or white usually. Right? And so it's like, well, you have people coming in, so that's working. Now, is it working as well as it could? Probably not. We should make some improvements. Right? But it's working. And then with sales, even with that, like she hadn't closed any calls. I mean, but is it working? Like, I mean, to some degree, yeah, it is. Like, I looked at some of her stuff, right? I'm like, this is pretty good, but here's the changes we need to make to make this better. Right? But I'm like, that's the biggest bottleneck. Like your biggest constraint right now. It isn't even honestly your marketing or your inquiries. It's sales. And so we need to fix that. And we did a bunch of stuff to fix it. Right? And then I was like, okay, now Let me pause here for a second. Do you see how, like, do you see right now before we go into what to do next, solutions, next steps, whatever, to get more inquiries, you know, book more calls, close more calls, whatever. Does your brain right now in this moment see that this is in fact working? Do you see the progress? Yes. Okay, good. Your brain needs to see this because it will convince you that you're making no progress. It will convince you that this isn't working. And this is where people— and she was telling me, she was like, maybe I need to do this, maybe I need to do that. I'm like, no, this is where people, their brain tricks them and then they go thinking that it shouldn't be this hard or like whatever. And their brain gets all sideways. They go into a spiral and then they convince themselves that there is some other strategy. There's some other thing that they need to be doing. Oh, I should be launching. Oh, I should be doing this. Oh, I should be doing that. Honestly, maybe, but probably not. Okay. And in this case, I'm like, no, I know that that's not going to fix it. Like going from selling one-to-one to launching, that's just actually going to make it worse, right? So it's not about that. It's actually like you need to see that this is working. You need to show your mindset that this actually is working. And then once you have that, okay, great. Now we can let go of some of that negativity that you're experiencing right now. And we can move on to solutions, right? And again, the whole piece of this is going to wrap around at the end of this video. And then we started mapping out solutions of like, here's exactly what you could do with the people to follow up. Here's exactly how you could use your stories to get to book calls. Here's exactly how you could use, you know, the stuff that we just did with your messaging to create better content. Here's how you can use your testimonials to create— we got very tactical with it, right? But it's like, first we need to address this thing, okay? Because if you don't address this thing and you keep thinking that the effort you're putting in is not getting you a result, you will not do this for very long, right? So we need to show our brain that. And then we went into the tactical stuff. But here is my point with this, okay? My point with this is usually it's not that your business as a whole isn't, quote, quote, okay, air quotes if you can't see me on the podcast or the whatever, the YouTube video. It's never that it's totally not working. It's that there's a piece that's not working. Okay. And what I like to explain this, the way I like to explain this to people is like your business. Imagine that your business is like a pipe. Okay. Imagine water flowing through a pipe and you can even imagine this is like a piece of plastic PVC pipe. And, you know, water comes in the top, right? Maybe these are people who follow you, whatever. But like water comes in the top and it flows all the way through the pipe and it comes out the end., right? Now, and that pipe, that, you know, plastic PVC pipe, let's imagine it has like 11 parts to it. Okay? I want you to apply this analogy to your business. Your business is very similar. Okay? So imagine it like when someone follows you, they come into your world, right? They're coming into that pipe. And then there's a, there's a bunch of pieces that make that up and they go all the way through whatever your marketing thing is, right? Some people will call it a pipeline or a funnel or whatever, right? It goes all the way, all the way through. That, right? And on the other side, they become a client. Okay. But the issue is with that pipe, like, if there's 1 out of 11 of those pieces missing, the water does not flow through the pipe. Okay. You may very well have 10 pieces of that pipe constructed beautifully. And you, like, you may be I mean, I should have used a better example. Let's just pretend there are 10 pieces to the pipe now. Okay? There's 10 pieces for easy mathematical purposes. But if you have 9 out of 10, you've put in 90% of the work. Like your business is 90% of the way there and yet it still doesn't work. You still haven't made money. You still haven't signed clients because you're missing one of the pieces. And what you need to do all the time in your business is you need to solve for the piece of the pipe that is either not there at all. Those are obviously the ones you need to solve first, right? Or the ones that you need to solve, you know, not that they're not there at all, but they could be better, right? Like, for example, if you don't have an offer, like you literally don't have something to sell, well, that's a piece of the pipe that's literally not present right now. Different example. Let's say everything's working. You're marketing, getting tons of inquiries, whatever. But you're only closing 1 out of 10 of your sales calls. Okay, great. Well, that's working, I guess. Like it's working to a degree, but it's not as good as it could be. It's not fully working. Right. And so your job in your business is always to figure out what piece of the pipe am I missing completely? Or what's the, what's the one that's working like the least well, if that's even English, I don't even know. Anyways, like what's not working as well as it could be working, right? Like what's the biggest problem? And then you go fix that and that's just all you do. You just repetitively fix the problem. And so this is where I want to wrap this around. And I just, I just want you to just with my soul, I want you to understand this. It's never that it's not working. Like, I just can't drive this home, this point home any harder, really. It's just like, it's not that nothing is working. Your brain is convincing you of that. Like, your brain literally, this is how your brain thinks. Your brain's like, I haven't signed a client in X amount of time, or maybe you've never signed a client, whatever, right? Or I haven't hit an X dollar month and whatever, it doesn't matter. Okay, great. Like, it's just, it's not, that's not the issue. You know, like, I mean, I understand why your brain's thinking that, but your brain is like, I, this isn't happening, therefore nothing is working. And that's never, that's never really the case. Okay. And then what happens when your brain thinks that it's like, I can't see a dollar coming in the door. Therefore, nothing is working when in fact a lot is working. And what happens is you get yourself into these, these negative mindset spirals and it just goes down and down and down and down until maybe you quit. Okay, that's what happens. And if I could give advice to a younger version of me who did want to quit, and if I'm being completely honest, at sometimes with the coaching thing, I actually did quit. Like at sometimes, like, I mean, there were some times where I was like, you know what, screw this coaching thing. I'm just going to go get a quote, real job again, air quotes. I don't know, I'll go back into engineering. I'll go back and I'll take a trade or like whatever it is. And, you know, I would, I would like quit and eventually I would be like, dang, I still want to do this coaching thing and I would restart. Right. But it's like almost every single time it's like my brain was convincing me that because I didn't have this result, I didn't make— I didn't sign a client or whatever the thing was that it wasn't working. And that's almost never the case. And so if you take nothing from this video, it's just like, it's not that black and white, okay? It's your business. Like, if you're posting a piece of content, your business is working to some degree, right? Like, your, your business, like, not working at all would be you haven't posted anything. You've not said anything to anyone, you've posted no content, like that'd be like not working at all. You have done nothing. All you've done is think about it. Cool, yeah, your business isn't working, right? But if you've, if you're posting content, if you're doing something, like your stuff is working to some degree, it's just to what degree is it working? And your job is again, to figure out what that thing is that's either not there at all, right? Or that's not working as well as it could be and solve that problem. And you just do that over and over and over again.. And you have to do that long enough without convincing yourself that it's not working. And so if you take nothing from this, find the evidence whenever your brain is coming up, like literally, if I could give you, I'll just give, I'll just leave it with this. I'll give you a mindset framework, right? This is one I got for, I got, honestly got this from like a life coaching. It was a life coaching journal that a friend gave me like forever ago, but it was this whole framework of like thoughts lead to feelings, lead to actions, lead to results. Okay. This is the mindset framework. Usually the thoughts are the problem. Okay? But thoughts are really hard to grab a hold of. But feelings, the next thing, thoughts go to feelings, go to, you know, actions go to results. Feelings are usually pretty easy to grab a hold of. You know, when you feel like trash, you know, when you feel amazing and joyous and everything's great, right? So when you're feeling great, amazing, cool. Don't change anything. Keep thinking the thoughts you're thinking, keep doing what you're doing. Everything's great, right? But when you start to think negative thoughts, right, you're not gonna have as much awareness of what you're thinking, but you do have awareness of, okay, I feel like crap. I feel negative. I feel depressed. I feel unmotivated. I feel whatever the feeling is. All that tells you is there's a thought that's causing that feeling. And this is where you have to do the mindset work. Usually it involves some sort of reframing, right? What's going on so that you can think new thoughts, you can feel differently, and you can continue to take the right actions and then you'll get results, right? So let's play this out. You feel like crap. Okay, great. The thought that's causing that is, I've been putting in all this work and I've been trying to build this business for 3 months and you know what? I don't— haven't signed a client yet, right? And that's what your brain's thinking. But you don't like maybe sometimes always have like full awareness of maybe I can't— not cut out for this. I'm not da da da. Like who knows what number of crazy subconscious or conscious things or whatever that your brain's coming up with in the thoughts column, right? How do you feel? You feel like crap and you're like, you feel negative, you feel down, you feel depressed, you're not motivated, right? Cool. What kind of actions do you think you take when your brain has convinced itself that things aren't working? Do you think you're going to put in extra work or put in extra reps? Probably not. Like, you're like, this is pointless, right? So you don't take the action and obviously you're not going to get the result. In fact, you might quit, right? But let's play this out a different way. If we go back to the feeling and you realize, oh, I'm feeling like crap about this, cool. Something, some thought in my brain is causing this problem. What is it? Let me go looking, right? It's there. I know it's there. And then you're like, oh, my brain's convincing me that I've been putting in all this work and it's not working. Well, is that true? Like, is that 100% true? Well, I don't know if that's 100% true. Okay, well, what's the evidence that it's not 100% true? Well, I did this and I did that and that's actually working and I did get inquiries. And now that I think about it, like, whatever, right? New thought process. Okay, great. Now you feel a little bit better. Now you feel a little bit more empowered, right? Cool. Now your brain sees that it is working. Amazing. Next step. What kind of— do you think you show up differently and take different actions when your brain sees that it's working and you feel good? Yes. And so you go take those actions and guess what? You're going to get better results. It's literally the difference between quitting and achieving the thing that you want. And I don't care if that's $5K months or $100K months, right? But this is the stuff that goes on between your ears. You have to be aware of it. And so if I was to give myself, my younger self who wanted to quit, any advice, this would be the advice that I would give myself. And it's basically that the— as a principle here in this sense is like, it's never that it's not working. It's what, like, to what degree is this working? It's always working to some degree. Okay. And you have to show yourself that. And then if you want a tactical way to, you know, have a better outcome, then you can use that framework of thoughts, go to feelings, go to actions, go to results. Usually very hard to get a hold of thoughts. Usually a lot easier to get hold of feelings. Like, you know, when you're feeling like crap. And so when you have that awareness that you're feeling like crap, you go back to the thoughts, you reframe some stuff, you reprogram some stuff, and then you get a better result. And so anyways, this is just being inspired by a client chat and I thought it was valuable and I wanted to share and I hope that it was. And that's all I got.
