“Make them feel the pain of inaction!”, she roared. “Paint such a vivid picture of how miserable their lives will be if they don’t hire you, that they can’t help themselves but buy your coaching services!”
Have you ever wondered why the social media posts of so many coaches instantly make you feel half-depressed?
It’s because we coaches tend to hire business coaches, and many of these business coaches teach us things like this*
And because all the other coaches seem to be dutifully rubbing salt in the wounds of their potential clients, we start believing that’s the way to successfully attract clients - even if it has the exact opposite effect of what we wanted to achieve when we decided to start a coaching business.
Somewhere on our road to success, we casually drop our moral compass.
And recently, I see more and more people (coaches and regular humans alike) pick their compass back up.
“My business coach told me I should make my coaching sessions more expensive, because coaching is only effective when the investment really feels like a stretch for my clients. That didn’t sit well with me, so I implemented a sliding scale and now my lowest paying clients are often the most committed ones.”
“Other startup founders tell me that the only way to succeed is to force everyone to work their fingers to the bone. I believe there’s more to life than work, so I’m taking Friday afternoon off to be with my kids, and I encourage my colleagues to do the same.”
“At my company, a bunch of us kept an informal list of CILFs - Colleagues I’d Like to F*ck. At first, I thought it was funny, but when I realized how insulting it was, I spoke up about it.”
Sounds easy right? You just speak up, or change the way you do things when they don’t sit well with you.
It. is. not. easy.
First of all, when everyone around you seems to find the way things are going normal, you might not even notice that there’s something off.
And if you notice, it’s freaking scary to go against the stream.
“What if making my clients feel their pain is the only way to put food on the table?”
“What if my startup fails because we didn’t put in the extra hours?”
“What if my colleagues think I am boring for not ‘playing’ along?”
But in a world where misogynists around the globe can run for president, we need to dust off our moral compass and voice a different perspective, like the 200.000+ brave people that protested against the far-right AfD party in Germany. Examples like these, big and small, give me so much hope for the future.
So, here’s my question for you: what’s your moral compass inviting you to speak up about, or do? And what’s holding you back from taking action? I’d love to hear from you!
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