Written by: Pamella Pritchard, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
The promised land of a fully-fledged coaching business, working with dream clients, doing work you love, and being paid grandly, is of course, very-attractive for the professional who is sick of the corporate grind.
So when you start your coaching business, it can be a rude awakening when the clients aren't freely rolling in and it isn't as simple as Gary Vee makes out on Tik Tok. A huge part of the transition from employee to CEO is not just in the act of starting your own business, but also in mindset. This requires both deconditioning and unlearning. To begin, here are 5 signs you are in your disempowerment as a new coach building your business around the 9to5.
5 signs you are in your disempowerment as a coach
You feel like you have no idea where your next client is coming from.
You are not taking action steps even though have great ideas, such as creating that reel or writing a direct CTA, or if you do, but immediately doubt it or worry it wasn't good enough based on engagement in these first 24 hours.
You find yourself looking for inspo on successful coach's pages, but secretly you're looking for the missing link and find yourself in comparisonitis ultimately wasting time.
You think about just quitting the 9to5, but you don't have a plan or external business support.
No one is buying your coaching and you're not really sure why.
I speak about this candidly, because I have been guilty of every single one of these in the past. None of what I'm about to share created ease, or flow in my business. But they were all examples of being in the employee mindset, which is disempowering at best.
If you feel slightly called out this is a great thing ‒ no one taught us this. In fact, a huge part of entrepreneurship is deconditioning from the corporate grind culture we have known for the last 10, 20, 30 years, even if you are at Senior Management to C-suite & have responsibility for large budgets and/or teams.
The employee mindset is impacting your coaching business
To step out of your employee mindset you need to first know how it shows up for you. Here I explain exactly how:
1. You having no idea where your next client is coming from is like Gucci saying they don’t know where their clients are coming from except the front door. It simply doesn’t fly. Employees are regularly disempowered to take ownership beyond their own responsibilities or to bring true innovation or creativity into their role without challenging the status quo or stepping on anyone’s toes. This is preventing you from not only knowing exactly how to create clients but also bringing more fun into the process.
2. You're struggling to take massive action because you've been used to reporting into a hierarchy all your life and sticking to the constraints of what is accepted or allowed. Think about it, as children we obviously take guidance from our parents, at school we must seek permission from teachers. Then straight through to university and into employment, we are educated to wait for instruction, permission, jurisdiction, procedure, risk assessment, or consensus agreement (e.g., from your board or management) before taking action. The system creates excellent employees, not CEO’s.
3. You're used to receiving a salary regardless of output, so even though you work damn hard in the 9to5, the pressure of getting clients from a single post in your biz is overwhelming. This ironically leads to more avoidant procrastination for fear of getting it wrong or overthinking and excessive engagement in watching to see if it's yielding results. You cannot hustle your coaching business and have it be sustainable, but you can hustle the 9to5 and be rewarded, no wonder it’s your go-to even though it isn’t serving you.
4. Comparisonitis against other coaches is the entrepreneur's form of imposter syndrome. Especially if you're current role is well established and you've worked hard to climb the corporate ladder, starting from the ground up and it is all on you and all about you have you questioning if you're really cut out to do this.
5. Quitting the 9 to 5 without a plan about how to make money in your business, as well as not having support to teach you strategy or energetics in your business when you've never done this before is not taking 100% radical responsibility for your results. When employees go through restructuring, redundancy, or organizational change this is often underpinned by blame culture and entitlement. Bringing this mentality into your business owing you an income or thinking it should be easier is dangerous and leaves you at risk of showing up from a graspy and repelling energy. Needless to say, does the opposite of creating clients with ease.
6. Many organizations rely on micromanagement, red tape, excessive reporting, and KPI management to enforce or maintain productivity levels. Whilst not having this is freeing as a business owner, you're not yet aware of your own non-financial and intangible measures of success, (hint ‒ the likes on that post are not it), which are leaving you confused and unable to troubleshoot for your own business challenges.
Shifting into the CEO Mindset
The first step, as always, to shift into the CEO Mindset is awareness. Without awareness, we cannot see where we are getting in our way.
Recognize the employee mindset as an opportunity to step into growth both personally and for your coaching business. The added bonus is you can make these shifts whilst you are in the 9to5 and to the benefit of your existing job too. Win-win.
Next, join my free Masterclass, the Employee to CEO Shift as I share eight distinct ways to shift into your CEO mindset in order to grow your coaching business around the 9 to 5.
This Masterclass is not to be missed.
Access the masterclass HERE.
Pamella Pritchard, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Pamella Pritchard is a certified business mindset and life coach to coaches who are building their soul-led coaching business around their 9to5. Bridging the gap between corporate and purpose-driven entrepreneurship, Pamella helps professionals navigate the transition from employee to CEO in mindset, energetics and strategy. Her signature program THRIVE helps coaches make this transition with simplicity, confidence and clarity, you can schedule a free consult here. Pamella has now left her own corporate London career to travel, and is currently based in tropical North Queensland in Australia.
