Hey, welcome back to the life coach Launchpad. My name’s BJ, and I’m here every week talking to you about all the online business things that, as it turns out, need to happen in order to have a successful life coaching business. I’m a business coach. I love to help life coaches make more money, get more clients, have more fun, and to do what they love to do, what they’re meant to do. And that’s coaching. So let’s dive right in. I shared a message with a group of friends the other day, actually is at a Mardi Gras party. You know, me talking business, personal development at a party, very cool.

But the message was this, the only way to fail is to quit. It resonated with my friends. I’m 40, they’re that age and a little older. And I think it resonates with anyone who has witnessed that life isn’t always that easy. We usually think of a fail as something that’s bad. It means that we tried something. We may have worked really hard at it, but we didn’t get the result we wanted. We failed.

In a sense that is exactly accurate. Failure means not getting the result you want. But what I like about this phrase is that it adds in a time component to it. If you fail, get back up, you’re still in the game. You may have fallen off the wagon, but that just means it’s time to get back up. This phrase makes a direct link between failure, which I’m defining as that you didn’t get the result you wanted, and quitting. If you quit, if you stop trying, if you stop creating content, if you stop telling people you are a life coach, then you are guaranteed not to get the result you want. And I know what you want.

Do you want more clients? You want more revenue? It’s just a beautiful short phrase showcasing how getting the results you want is always possible. If you just keep trying, keep putting yourself out there, keep making the videos, making the podcasts, letting yourself, your coaching skills be seen and heard so that you can make the difference in more people’s lives, like, you know, that you’re capable of. When I was a manufacturing engineer, so that was before five years ago, when I became a business coach, I was trained to sniff out stops and root causes of what causes downtime of the machines. We were making soap. And that downtime equals money because that can lead to more overtime, people’s overtime, people having to work extra shifts, and there’s always work to do to make bottles or cases cheaper. And this is called continuous improvement. It’s built into every manufacturing company’s culture. So you make a change.

Does it help? Do you get fewer stops? If not adjust, make a change. All improvements, no matter how small, they equal money saved. So if you make any improvement in the downtime, you are saving money. Conversely, it’s not like the company is just going to stop making soap because of an uptick in stops or downtime. That would be a fail if the company, this multinational company, just folded, declared bankruptcy, said, we can’t make soap anymore because we can’t make it cheap enough and we’re not going to raise prices or whatever. That’s a fail. So pretend like you’re a multinational company and the only way forward is to try again, another place that the only way to fail is to quit. Well, really popped up this week.

I noticed it this week. Is a client that I’m helping. I am launching a mini program for her. She helps women in menopause lose weight. She’s a coach. Her mini program calls out the fact that if you’re trying to lose weight and you suffer a setback, what do you do? Well, the answer is, you got to come back. You got to get back on the wagon and keep going. You got to try again, try something else.

But if you stop, if you stop trying, whatever you’re working on, and in this case, she is working on mindset, the mindset that’s needed in order to lose weight. If you stop working on that, then, yeah, that’s a fail. The only way to fail is to quit. You didn’t get the result you wanted. Now, if you come back and keep trying, that is not a fail. And if you keep doing that, you keep coming back, you are guaranteed to succeed because you never quit. You always keep moving forward. So I got to say, this has been a pretty fun launch.

I got to see her try new angles, new messaging, and it was really fun. The messaging, the words, the ideas come from her, and I put them into words, or the copywriter that I hire will put them into words, whether it’s for emails or sales pages. And I got a glimpse into understanding how she gets her ideas when she told me some unsolicited feedback, she said that working with me is absolutely freeing because she knows that whatever idea she comes up with, I can make it happen. She knew that she had this new idea for a mini program, but she wasn’t quite sure how to make it happen. But she brought it to me. We fleshed it out, and I was able to run with it and make it happen. And it was just a really fun launch to be going through with this different messaging, this different angle, and we got a lot of good feedback from it. This third example of the only way to fail is to quit is from a different client of mine who this person is just starting their entrepreneurial journey, and he asked me, what can we expect in terms of a success rate? That wasn’t how he phrased it, but basically, how much money are we going to make here? And my answer, of course, is, it depends.

And that’s the standard business school answer. We were interrupted when he was asking, and I didn’t get a chance to answer him completely, but it’s the same answer as the theme of this episode, is that you are guaranteed success if you can learn to come back to keep trying when there’s a setback, of which there will be plenty of, because there will be plenty of in online business, or really in business at all, business in general. I know in some sense that’s an unfulfilling answer, because we want to hear that, oh, you’re going to make 100,000 in x months. But the truth is, no one can give you that answer. We can tell you what we’ve seen, but the reality is that results may vary. I mean, results vary, but if you can learn to keep trying something, incorporate feedback, pivot, make a change, keep going, your progress will compound on itself and you will eventually get what you want. An alternate way to think about this is, are you going to be satisfied if you stop or don’t try at all? You are a coach. If you went through both the time and money investment to get qualified, or go through the learning process of how to coach, that tells me that coaching is something that matters to you.

I think that life is all about expressing your passions and gifts to the world. You gotta get them out. Wayne Dyer has a famous story about a man who lived his life according to other people’s expectations. He realized at the end of his life that he was wrong and should have been doing what he knew he should be doing all along, not what others thought he should be doing. He equated that type of life as dying with the music still in you. Just as a musician has to create music to get it out of their head, to make it real, to make it exist, to make it alive, we have to perform the work we know we are meant to do. So considering that stopping the pursuit of a thriving coaching business is not an option, because no one wants to die with the music still in them, the only logical option is to keep going. Well, that’s what I’ve been thinking of this week because it shows up everywhere.

I saw it multiple times this week. It made me think back to other parts of my life. And you’re going to see it too, once you start listening for it. The only way to fail is to quit. That’s it for this week’s episode. If you’re looking for help figuring out how to keep moving forward in your coaching business, how to fail and keep moving forward, or better yet, even fail less, let me know. I can help. Talk to you next week.