Everyone has experiences they can coach others to be successful in. You can learn what is a life coach and how to make lots of money helping others from this terrific expert in being a life coach.
Today, I am excited to have Amanda Walker on the podcast. Like Amanda, you can be successfully unemployed.
How Amanda Makes Money Without Having a Job
Amanda is a health and life coach and she makes her income by working with clients one on one, in a group setting, through short-term intensives, and through retreats.
She has multiple streams of income, but they all come through the same umbrella.
Amanda Was Originally Going to be a Physician, But She Wanted to Teach
Amanda earned a degree in physiology, was pre-med, and had an internship at a family practitioner’s office. It was an amazing experience.
One day the physician was going to take her in to see an 80 year old man who had a hernia and he asked her if this was really what she wanted to do for the rest of her life.
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She realized it wasn’t, because what she really wanted to do was teach in a classroom setting.
Amanda went to grad school to be a teacher and taught anatomy and physiology for years in the high school setting.
She loved every second of it, however, she felt like she was being called to something else.
Amanda and her husband had children, and everything changes when you have them. Her husband worked nights as a police officer and she worked as a part-time teacher.
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Every other week her paychecks were $623 and she was working 30 hours a week. It no longer made sense. They knew there had to be something Amanda could do in fewer hours for the same amount of money.
Amanda decided to leave her teaching job and they sold her husband’s new truck, went on a massive debt-free journey, and overhauled their life. Amanda still wanted to work.
She knew she wanted to help women and that it would look and feel different than anything she had done before.
Amanda Started Going Through Her Own Mental Health and Physical Health Journey
Even though Amanda wanted to change her physical health, she realized real happiness is cultivated when you marry physical health with internal transformation.
Now, Amanda is helping women who are on similar journeys. Not only is she helping them build a healthy lifestyle, but helping them build their businesses as well. It is fun to watch people chase that in their lives.
The doctor she worked with who asked her the pivotal question saw in her a fire to serve, and he knew she wouldn’t be able to give it to that profession in the way the profession was moving.
His practice is now closed and if she could find him, she would tell him that she is standing where she is standing now because of that conversation.
It Doesn’t Matter What You are Teaching, You Need to Listen to the People You are Going to Serve
The frequently asked questions you get is the content people need. Entrepreneurs want to be the expert all the time, but we can learn so much by listening and being the best listener possible.
To know what is a life coach should be doing for their students, they need to listen to what people are asking for. These people make your content for you if you choose to listen.
The first Friday of the month, in her health coaching program, Feel Amazing Naked, they have a first Friday business connect.
Some of the women in her business program, The Inner Circle, mentor some of the other women. They gain confidence in themselves and start taking more risks in their lives.
Culturally, we are taught we need to have the credentials first: we get the teaching first and then do the thing. Amanda has found that passion and experience will trump academics.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get education, but experience brings a level of empathy that really brings the connection people need. Those who learn what is a life coach will be able to teach their students and help them to succeed.
Success! Amanda Lost 70 Pounds Twice
Amanda gained over 70 pounds during her pregnancies with both of her kids. She didn’t learn after the first time. She had miscarriages and she was doing a lot of emotional eating.
She had a level of anxiety and emotion and she wasn’t able to take care of herself in the way that she should have.
The biggest tip is magic fixes and quick fixes don’t exist. When you are willing to accept slower pace, slower results for consistency and true habit formation, then it is something that sticks around for a long time.
We often avoid doing the work, because we want a template to follow. If you follow a template, you will never get to the root cause.
Amanda Has Two Programs: Feel Amazing Naked and The Inner Circle
The notion of Feel Amazing Naked is feeling so good in your skin physically, emotionally, and mentally that you are willing to take risks.
You are willing to follow through and you do things you never thought you could by knowing what is a life coach and how they help people.
The business part, The Inner Circle, began because of what clients were asking.
They wanted help with that next step. Amanda isn’t a business coach, but she is good at helping women get through the doubts in their minds and find out where to start and where to go next.
These programs are both on her website feelamazingnaked.com.
Where to Begin When Starting a Business
A lot of the way business is taught is the money piece first. This isn’t a bad way to build a product, but Amanda believes you need to build the dream, vision, and life you want from it first.
You need to have clarity around why you are doing that thing, so you are constantly connecting to what that might look like.
Amanda wanted to be able to take her kids to school each day, not meet clients in person, she wanted flexibility in her schedule to volunteer at her kids’ school, and to be able to spend time with her husband when he was off work.
If you could take money and time out of the equation, what do you dream it could actually look like? We are taught that we need to start at a certain point and there is a graduation and evolution from there.
If you start with the end in mind, there is so much understanding. It shouldn’t feel forced. Looking at what feels good to you consistently is so important, because it is going to keep you excited and showing up when the alarm clock goes off every morning.
Amanda always felt like she should write a blog, but it didn’t feel right to her.
However, people kept showing up for coaching, so she went that route being what is a life coach.
How to Get Coaching Clients and Help Them Realize You are the Right Person to Work With
Figure out the end result you want to provide as a coach. This is inspired by your own story and your own shift.
Identify what has changed your life so much that you want to share that with the world.
Dig into your own journey and also figure out your own skillset to find your strengths. Amanda recommends journaling.
After that, collect data and do some market research. Have conversations with other people. What are other people struggling with? Find your buyer first and ask them what they need.
Find the pain points of your customers.
Don’t Build the Ship Before You Know What Parts Are Needed to Build it
Amanda has seen many people around her build online courses without seeking input from the people who will eventually purchase it. They spend a lot of time working on it and when they put it out into the world, it is crickets.
They’ve invested their time and finances and it doesn’t work.
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A pain point is when you dig deep with someone and ask them what is stopping them from going where they want to in life.
For some, it may be that they really want to leave their job for others it may be motivated by helping.
To learn what is a life coach, it is so important to talk in someone else’s language instead of your own.
When you are being sold something, you need to connect with it. That is how you attract those ideal clients and repel those that aren’t the right fit.
You Need to Come to the Understanding in Your Own Mind That Not Everyone is Going to Love You
Amanda wanted everyone to love and engage with every piece of content she has. She didn’t realize that part of the journey is that she doesn’t want everyone to love her, she just wants the people she can really provide value to love her.
We can still have friends who want us to succeed and encourage us from the outside, but not everyone will love us and that is okay.
Amanda requires an application from anyone who wants to work with her. She knows, before she gets on the phone with them, exactly what they are struggling with. Social media offers so many ways to ask questions and clients give you back that vocabulary.
When you start to build clients and you’ve had the opportunity to work with one or two of them, you are going to find that you love working with some of them.
Find out what was different with the ones you love working with and what it was that made you jive so well with that person, so you can use that vocabulary with others and attract more of those people.
Some people may give you one star, but you need to look past that.
All it Takes is One Person
It is so easy in business to put yourself out there and have the expectation that there will be a lot of discussion. You spend all this time crafting something for social media, and then it’s crickets.
There have been times this has brought tears to Amanda’s eyes, because she was discouraged and it made her want to quit.
It takes one person, one message, to make you realize you want to keep showing up.
There is somebody out there that is going to read that post and it is going to profoundly impact them. Are you putting the message out there because you need the validation?
If so, that is something you need to work on.
If you are putting content out there out of service, you need to have more trust and faith that the one person that needs it is going to read it.
It is easy to compare yourself to people who have thousands of followers, but it is the people that need you that show up behind the scenes and show up on direct message or private email.
Why are you showing up to share the content you are sharing? Have the self-realization and evaluate it.
How to Reach People and Have Them Trust that Transformation Will Happen
Storytelling is really important. If a person has a mindset that success will never happen, that is a root cause and a story they are telling themselves.
Leisa Peterson shared with Amanda that business comes down to storytelling, because people connect to that.
As a content creator or a person trying to attract clients, we need to tell stories that clients can relate to. The right ones will hear those stories and will be intrigued to continue listening.
Create some way for them to come closer to you so they can trust you, like a free workshop, an opt in, a challenge, etc. When other clients tell their stories of success and show they are on the other side, it helps new clients build trust with you.
It is all about planting seeds.
As a coach, it is our responsibility to call clients out on why they are not getting results.
Ways Amanda Makes Money from Her Business
When you are a coach, or a personal brand, you are your own limiting factor.
You only have the capacity to coach so many people. When you are first starting out, typically, the easiest way to coach is one to one.
You get more experience, you can have private conversations, you gain confidence, experience, and clarity surrounding what feels good and what doesn’t and surrounding your strengths and weaknesses.
From there, if you keep building the pipeline, you are going to get to the place where you don’t have the capacity to serve and build. You not only need to work in your business, you need to work on your business, and you need the white space to do both.
The way to scale is a group opportunity so you can coach one to many and lead the women on a similar journey and they get to learn from each other.
Amanda has imbedded accountability partners so clients can talk with someone as they are going through the journey.
Find out what feels good to you by starting and gaining confidence on how you can scale the business.
- For pricing, the one to one opportunity is the highest level offering
- the group opportunity is slightly less
- then you can incorporate a lower cost
- passive opportunity where you take the core common teaching and build those into the lowest price point for someone who just wants to get a taste of what coaching is.
The course could be an intensive where you are working on one skillset, or it could be a few core principles that are recorded and can be accessed over and over.
It depends on what works best for the coach.
The best part is having a way clients can level up if they are interested. An intensive is a short-term coaching experience, where you focus on one particular skillset. Amanda offers a few of them that are live.
How to Incorporate Accountability Partners in Coaching
When a woman joins Amanda’s program, they complete an intake survey. One of the questions she asks is if they would like an accountability partner to join them.
If they say yes, Amanda will try to find someone who is opposite of the other person. Maybe one person has it together in the health space and they are working out consistently and the other may have a great mindset that they nurtured.
She likes to combine people with opposing strengths and weaknesses.
Amanda sets the platform, introduces the two partners, and she has expectations she shares with them in an email. She allows the two women to engage from there and she keeps herself out of it.
Some of those partnerships turn into nurtured relationships that exceed beyond the capacity of Amanda’s program and sometimes they fizzle.
The reason people don’t have results is because they don’t go all in and invest in themselves and commit.
There is a level of carrying that through and showing up.
How to Make Sure People Continue On with Your Program
A lot of this is a mindset.
If you are investing in a Walmart handbag that is $10, you will treat it different than you do a $1,000 handbag.
Amanda looks at investing in herself the same way as the different handbags. She invests a lot into her education and in surrounding herself with other people and mastermind groups every year, so she is upping her game.
Amanda is very clear that if she is going to spend $500 or $20,000, it is going to look a lot different. When you invest more, you get better results, because you show up more.
This is a crucial part of the discussion.
When Amanda started, she was missing invoices, charging too little, wasn’t requiring more than a one-month commitment, etc., so people would take a couple months off.
Be smart about your own financial security and require a longer-term commitment with people you work with. Real change isn’t cultivated in 90 days.
Six months to a year is a sweet spot for Amanda.
Make sure you put these pieces in order to make the exchange mutual.
When you put money into something, something shifts in your brain and you become more committed.
To Level Up, There Has to be an Investment
If everyone is saying yes, you are not charging enough. There needs to be some no’s.
People have to consider the investment for it to be worthwhile for them too.
When it comes to working with you, they aren’t just paying for your time, they are paying for your education and the things you have learned.
The things Amanda is learning from her masterminds and the courses she is taking, she is immediately passing those down to her clients. They didn’t have to pay for the course and take it, Amanda did.
It is Amanda’s obligation to continue investing in herself so she can continue to pass along her knowledge.
With price point, it should feel slightly uncomfortable at first, and maybe always. It is going to feel good when someone says yes and you are going to show up really big for them.
You can’t put a “right” dollar amount on coaching, it just has to be right for you. There is going to be someone out there who is far less qualified asking for more money than you, because they believe in themselves more.
You need to work through that, because there is no regulation or price list in the coaching industry.
Amanda’s Thoughts on Bringing on Another Coach to Help Her
This is a personal decision for everyone. Amanda doesn’t want to bring on another coach, because there are other ways to grow and scale your business. Amanda wants to be doing the coaching, because it brings her joy.
To be successful and to be able to focus more on your clients, Amanda believes in hiring a team for the areas you don’t enjoy doing or aren’t your zone of genius.
Amanda has a small team of people that work in their specific, unique tasks each week, so she doesn’t need to do it. She has built systems so she can hang out in content creation mode and coaching mode and the others do their pieces.
This gives her more capacity in coaching.
When she is at capacity, her next step will be to increase pricing and, maybe down the road, offer certifications so other women can learn her coaching so they can reach more people.
How to Know What to Outsource
Write down a list of all the tasks you do in your business that feel good and a list of tasks that don’t feel good at all. Amanda noticed the things at the bottom of the list were being forgotten.
She didn’t have the bandwidth to do those tasks, even though she wanted them accomplished.
From that, she started creating a standard operating procedures folder, so if she brought somebody on to do that task, it would list the task and the steps to complete it.
Amanda went on a hunt to hire someone to do those things.
It wasn’t a good fit, so she had to look for someone else.
First get clarity on the steps the person will need to do and then realize the more tasks you take off your plate, the more money you will make, because you are able to be more present in the tasks you do really well.
Amanda looks at how much it would cost to have someone do different tasks and compares it to how much she could make during that time if she outsourced it.
This includes those tasks you are good at doing.
It takes money to make money. When you outsource, you are helping others provide for their families.
How Amanda is Making the World a Better Place
Amanda is helping the next generation. She has two kids, and by pursuing her passion and dreams, she is giving her daughter permission to see the world differently.
The entrepreneurial spirit and limitless mindset starts young.
Amanda gets to work with women who are rewriting their stories and they are passing that down to their kids, and that motivates her even more.
Advice for Those Who Want to Start Coaching
Create a parking lot of ideas.
Open a Google Sheet and “park cars” there. The creative spirit is on all the time and you need to write it down when ideas pop up. Do this any time there are ideas you see or ideas you have.
Don’t erase those, even if it seems like it is far away.
The Advice Amanda Would Give to Her Younger Self
Be a better listener. Amanda feels like she lost a lot in her life in relationships with friends, mentors, etc., because she likes to be right. She wanted to be right more than she wanted to listen.
She has recognized this more in the last five years and it has made her a better wife and a better coach.
The Tools Amanda Uses in Her Business
Google Drive is everything to Amanda, because she keeps a lot of things in there. She shares files with teams that is really helpful.
Insight Timer App for meditating. This is important for all entrepreneurs, so they slow down and take care of themselves.
The Non-Fiction Book Amanda Recommends
The Big Leap, by Gay Hendricks
Never Lose a Customer Again, by Joey Coleman
Find Amanda on Online
Website: feelamazingnaked.com
Website (coming soon): amandawalker.com
Podcast: Feel Amazing Naked