I want to talk about things that made me unhappy as I built my coaching business. These are things that I might have recently gone through and some of these are over things that occurred over the past five or so years.

I've been coaching for a long time and I've done things by the book and I've done a lot! So I feel like I have been the guinea pig of the coaching business. I've tried it all. I am a happy person. I am a very structured person, so I thrive on all of this.

But there were some things that made me unhappy and I just want to put them out there. Maybe you feel the same way because I'm on a mission to make sure that coaches are building happy businesses so they can thrive and they can scale with grace and ease.

This leads me to things that made me unhappy, and if you can relate to any of these, definitely, comment or just message me.

So there are three big pillars of things that made me unhappy. It's funny when you start making a list of things that make you unhappy, you’re kind of like, “Wow, there's a lot of things here. We need to talk about this!”

Content Creation

The first thing that made me unhappy, which is such a surprise for me to even say out loud, was content creation. I was so burned out on content creation. and the little legs that come from creating content. So if you are creating content, you're doing the YouTube thing, or you're blogging, you're doing podcasting, whatever it is, it's not just that, right?

It's not just, “h, you hop on a video, you record and you walk out of your office.” If you're doing this by yourself, that's not how it is, right? So the part that I started to hate was setting it all up and spreading the word. I can go on video, I can talk, I can do that all day, but then if I have to repurpose it on Pinterest and repurpose it there and pull the audio and make my marketing graphics and do all this stuff, it gets overwhelming, especially when next week comes and you have to do it all over again.

Now, mind you, I've been doing this for many years. I have a lot of podcast episodes on my plate and videos. I've, I've done all of that, so I have every right to say that I don't enjoy doing all of that anymore. I just didn’t. Which led me to feel like, “Gosh, am I not going to ever create a podcast episode again? Am I never gonna create a YouTube video again?” No, that's not true. What I am going to give myself permission to do is only do it when I feel like I want to. and that feels amazing. And so not Lindsay. Lindsay is very like, “Yeah, but you did this last week, so you have to do it this week, or else the world will fall apart…”

And I had to really work on that because you know what? I haven't published a new podcast episode in almost a month and a half. And you know what? The world didn't fall apart. My business didn't fall apart. Everything's fine and dandy. It's actually really nice to not have to be so rigid with my content creation.

And I think that leads to like the whole scheduling thing. Scheduling all the content, the Instagram content, the posts, the text, the captions, everything. Maybe I'm just venting, but it just got really overwhelming because it seemed like it was just a never-ending thing.

And then there came a day when I just didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to.

Do you know what I even did? I canceled my Instagram scheduler. 😲 I know it's such a big dramatic move…but I canceled my Instagram scheduler because I was tired of scheduling Instagram posts and I was, and I thought, this is definitely not Lindsay!

Lindsay would never do this. It felt so darn good to say. I'm not scheduling Instagram anymore. , I'm just going to create a post when I want, and I'm gonna create a reel and I can save them on Instagram. I'm simplifying. It felt so good, and that completely erased all of the negative, unhappy feelings I was having towards content creation.

So it might not be like, “I hate creating content, period.” It might be, “Well, what parts of it do you not like? What parts of it make you unhappy?” And I had to fix those things because I know that as an online business coach, creating content is kind of necessary, right? To stay relevant. So I knew that those things needed to be looked over. So that's what I did.

Launching

The next thing was the hamster wheel of launching. This whole year, I rinsed and repeated a process that worked. I was gonna go through it for the whole entire 2022, but then in August, I decided not going to do it anymore. I was burnt out on it.

It's a great strategy. I actually talked about it on a past podcast episode of what I did, a new, new way to look at launching, but I just, you know, I grew tired of the launch lifestyle and I wanted to just do things that I feel like doing. I am the business owner. Why was I sticking to a schedule that I didn’t like?

Why was I doing things that I didn’t like?

Why was I being my own worst boss ever?

So I kind of had, to rein it in and tell myself that it’s okay to uncheck all of these things that you have to do on your calendar in order to prepare for next month. Just clear it. And it felt so good to do that. It felt so good.

The little parts of launching that were nagging at me were things like deadline dates, the tech, and the simple workflow of resetting everything for the next round. And I thought, why can't I just have my program open? Why can't I just do that? If somebody wants to join, why can't they just join? I'm gonna trust in everyone else's timeline and when I want to launch, I'm going to and when I don't want to, I'm not going to.

That was a hard one because I thought I tied up all those efforts into, “Well, if I don't do that, then I won't get students in my program, and then I won’t get clients. Simply not true.

All is well. And that is like, such a huge mindset shift. It's like not living day to day, week to week, month to month anymore because that is running a really high-pressure business. And I don't want to do that. I don't work well under all of that. So, I decided to back up and take a bird's eye view, I talk about the bird's eye view all the time, and see, like, I don't even know where my business is going in the future. I'm excited about where it's going, but I'm not gonna narrow down my focus and feel like everything needs to happen in the month of October or else… I'm not going to run my business that way. So it felt really good to let myself off the hook with all of that stuff.

It felt so good. So good. If you're launching and you're tired of doing the same thing over and over again, same results, good results. But if you're, if your heart isn't in it anymore, what's gonna happen is you're gonna start getting results that you didn't want, that you weren't expecting. But if you show up in a place where “Here I am, I am launching, I have to do all this stuff…” Everyone's gonna feel that energy from you. And you don't want that. So if you're feeling like, “This isn't my style, this isn't working for me!” Then change it before everyone else sees that it's not working for you.

Control

Another thing that I know that makes me unhappy is when I don't have a lot of control, which means when I had too many hands in my business, it just didn't work for me.

I used to listen to people who preached about having a team, having people handle this for you, having people handle this for you and those were coming from great people who had the best intentions in mind, but especially I thought, I was always hearing from these bigger people that, “You have a lot on your plate, Lindsay. You have your kids at home and you homeschool. You need to hire people to help you.” So I did.

And then I felt like I lost control of the vehicle and I didn't know where we were going. And I had to make sure we were on everyone else's schedule because they were expecting things from me in order for them to keep working. Because if you have people on your team that is working on schedules that are a month out, it almost feels like your creativity is blocked. And for me, I can't operate like that. When my creativity is blocked I know that's like a danger zone. There's something going on.

I am a very creative person in my business when I'm happy. And when I'm not feeling creative, I am not happy. Sometimes we don't even put the two and two together, so for me not having control and me not being able to be creative or want to do a random class and I want to do it for my club, or I want to do it for my list, or whatever.

It was hard for me to do those kinds of spontaneous things because there were all these other hands on deck. Amazing hands on deck. Wonderful hands-on deck. But I just need simplicity. I crave simplicity. I need to keep things easy. And if I want to change something, I need to know that it's not gonna affect all of these people. It's not gonna affect a month's timeline on my calendar or someone else's.

So do you ever feel like your business is making you unhappy? I hope that you don't feel that way right now, or maybe you can relate to some of the things that I said, but I think that coaches have a really big responsibility to own up when they are unhappy.

And I get it, you don't wanna admit that you're unhappy or something isn't making you happy in your business. I get that because you don't want to be that person. But what if you owned up to it and you could help somebody who's coming into that mode, right? In a couple of days, one of your clients is like, I'm not feeling good about this.

And you're like, Gosh, I just went through that. I can help you. And I think that would be a lot better of a move for a coach or a mentor to be able to relate to their past experiences and help their clients rather than saying, Tough it out, Stick it out and build a business that makes you miserable because there are unhappy abundant coaches out there and there are happy abundant coaches out there.

And it's up to you which one you want to be.