In this post, you’ll learn:
ALL the ways that receiving mentorship and support serves us as we grow our business
What holds us back from getting mentorship in our business (when it’s what we need the most)
The difference between "busy work" and using our time wisely to grow our biz
How to rewrite our stories around ”receiving” so we can open ourselves up for success (and support)
Watch this post by clicking the image below or keep scrolling to read
(This video is hosted in the Healthy Wealthy Society, a free group for health coaches & wellness entrepreneurs. If you have trouble accessing this video, you may need to join the group first.)
The Importance Of A Mentor When Growing Your Business
One of the topics that I’m frequently asked about is failure and how a lot of women who want to move forward in their businesses are actually more afraid of failure than they are of success.
It is human nature to be afraid of success and failure.
People will often not step forward because they're scared they will fail and this, in turn, causes people to start focusing on “what if I do take the leap and it does unfold?” rather than “what if I do succeed?”
Although many of my clients dream about being successful in business, they don’t always act on these dreams and this is where our fear of failure really trips us up and can be paralysing to our business month after month, year after year.
One of the questions I’m specifically asked about failure is “what if I fail and what if I make mistakes?” and it is a common concern for people who are considering moving into one of my programs.
The honest answer is: you will fail. You are going to fall over.
This response is usually met with disbelief. I am told by people that the reason they are joining my program is so they don’t fail and I say, no, it's not. You are actually joining the program so that you can start to fall over and you can begin to make mistakes.
Related Post: Why Failure Is A Necessary Part Of Success
Undertaking a mentorship means being prepared with support so that when you do fall over, you don't fall over in a puddle in a heap or in a corner for months on end and perhaps not return to your business.
Instead, with the support of a mentor when you do fall over, that mentor is next to you.
A mentor is someone who has been in your exact position before, who will actually know the solution to the problem and who will guide you to help you fix it. They will coax you to get back up and try again and that is how you get up, stay up and get running.
Therefore, the point of a mentorship is not to escape failure altogether or to skip through the trials and tribulations of learning to run a business, but to speed up the process.
Failure is not something you need to take personally. It does not have to be a big deal, but so often I see people giving up or using it as an excuse to support their belief that they aren’t good enough instead of realizing that failure is part of being in business.
Another barrier to taking up a mentorship is that people believe they can work things out for themselves. This is true and if you Google for long enough, look online for long enough and try for long enough you will work it out for yourself.
There is nothing that is not figure-out-able. So, why would you have a mentor if you will eventually find the solution to your problem on your own?
A mentor saves time, money and energy.
They can save you from searching for the wrong things, falling over in the wrong direction and walking down the wrong path, and instead, share their plan from having had the experience of falling over ahead of you.
They can help you see the way through the dark.
An experienced mentor can illuminate possibilities and probabilities of success through choosing a path well-travelled. They can help you make informed decisions and estimations so you understand the vicinity in which you will position yourself and provide a step-by-step plan of how to reach the next destination.
“But, now’s not the right time for a mentor”…
When people question the need for a mentor, they often use the excuse of time; not having enough time or the time not being right for them.
People who choose to better themselves and seek help to do so will often spend more time on this endeavour than they think.
A person who believes they do not have the time for a formal mentor relationship may still spend time each week downloading free training sessions and trying to piece things together themselves before realising they are missing an important piece of the puzzle. The search for the missing piece then commences, but not before more time is spent trawling through auxiliary training, webinars and articles that may prove tangential to the initial goal.
So, when a person says they do not have time to enter into a mentorship, what they are usually doing is miscalculating the amount of time already spent seeking help, albeit in a roundabout way.
A structured mentorship on the other hand, which can take between 1 and 3 hours a week, can actually be time-saving as your business grows.
The difference between "busy work" and using our time wisely to grow our business
Our relationship with time is actually the biggest construct of our physical beings.
It can be all-encompassing and even suffocating because we continue to try to convince ourselves that we don't have enough time or that it is not the right time to be pursuing interests or opportunities.
Questioning the timing of an opportunity and letting it slip by may be a Catch 22.
Although it doesn’t feel like the right time, waiting until summer, until the kids are at school, or until you have built a client base might mean you actually waste time simply by waiting for the right time to roll by.
Recently two best friends expressed interest in joining my program. One ended up joining and the other didn’t. The friend who joined the program ended up making $12,000 over the next 12 weeks and the second friend who had initially elected not to join changed her mind pretty damn quickly after seeing her best friend achieve that outcome!
She had been determined that she wouldn’t enter the program until it was the right time for her and that she would work it out in the meantime because she needed to build her confidence first. After six months had passed, the friend who joined later said that she realised she had wasted that time by not joining, as it meant she spent the same period going around in circles again.
The lesson is to think carefully and realistically about how your time is actually being spent and whether you are being supported to excel during this time.
You are deserving of support
Time is valuable and so is a strong sense of self-worth. Believing that we deserve to have our dreams come to fruition and feeling that we are worthy of having people help us all hinges on our own self-value.
Many of us believe that other people don’t want the best for us and that other people don’t want to support us. These beliefs can cause insurmountable challenges when we try to invest in a mentorship because we feel at a deep level that we are not actually deserving of that support.
It is when this belief takes over that stories about not having enough money and time tend to manifest in our minds, which can, in turn, become detrimental to utilising our time and money efficiently.
“I’m short on money”…
Alongside a shortage of time is a shortage of money, with a lot of people believing they can’t afford a mentorship yet. I like to approach this by asking people to think about the money that they have left on the table in the last, say, three months.
Let’s use the example of a health coaching business. Imagine if you had the formula and system to make $5,000 a month from your health coaching business (on top of what you are already earning). Now imagine if you had made that last month, the month before, and even the month before that, but you choose not to invest - that is money that has been left on the table.
It is a choice not to make money day after day after day, either because you don't have the skills or because you don't believe that getting the right skills will actually start bringing in that money.
It’s not just about the money
Let’s go back to the health coaching business. If you hadn't been making $5,000 a month for the last three months, that means you were probably missing out on three, four, or maybe five clients a month.
Now, think about how many people didn't get your support last month; somewhere between three and five. That’s potentially five people who went somewhere else for coaching. So, over three months that’s 15 people’s lives that could have been completely transformed through health coaching.
The internal dialogue in these situations always comes back to the question of “what if I fail?”
When we ask ourselves these questions the fear perpetuates and continues to control us until we are ready to get in our power and start being the coach that we want to be.
What a successful coach looks like
There's no way that I would have built my business to where I am today without consistent mentorship, consistent coaches on my team, consistent mastermind sisters around me and in my program, I highlight what a successful coach looks like.
A successful five-thousand-a-month coach:
Structures her time and uses a plan.
Doesn't scatter herself around.
Invests in mentoring and starts committing to making that money.
Commits to starting to get her work out there.
Allows herself to be a beginner and have vulnerable moments where she reaches out for support so that she can get past that.
That's the only way to do it.
If you want support around this, doors are currently open to my UPswing Mastermind - my high-touch 6-month program to creating consistent clients, cashflow and the confidence to live the life you TRULY want as a health coach or wellness entrepreneur. CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE AND APPLY!
Love,
Amanda xx
P.S. Not ready for my Mastermind but want to learn how to boost your coaching confidence so you feel like a PRO and get MASSIVE results? Click this link to get instant access to my FREE resource on Coaching Confidence >> https://training.amandajdaley.com/coachingconfidence/
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