Wendy McCallum (01:37)
Hello, welcome back to The Coaching Edge. I'm Wendy McCallum. I am your host. We are talking today about a topic that I think is probably gonna be relevant to every single one of you. My guess is you have either struggled with this and already reckoned with it in your own coaching business, or it's something that you are doing right now. And I say that because I think all of us do this. I think this is like one of the most common mistakes that coaches make when they are...
building their coaching practices. And that is falling into the trap of over delivering, over giving as a coach. So today we're gonna talk about why over delivering does not equal great coaching and why it's actually not helping you or your business or your clients. Okay, so stick with me because I really think every single listener who's a coach is gonna get something out of this. You're going to, ⁓ I think, get a whole new...
lens on what value really is in a coaching engagement and how to create that and how to get your clients acknowledging and connecting to that value in the coaching sessions that you have with them as opposed to all the other things, all the other bells and whistles that you're trying to deliver to them all the time. So we're going to be talking about how to deliver value.
That's it, not over deliver, not under deliver, but deliver value that you feel great about and that your client feels great about so that you can get yourself out of the trap that we often fall into where we're just trying to add more and more and more things. Because the more things we add, the more support, service, bells and whistles that we give people in our coaching packages, whether we're talking about group programs or we're talking about one-on-one, the quicker we get to burn out as coaches. I don't want you to burn out. I am in the business of helping coaches create
reliable, sustainable, profitable, but most important, balanced businesses that allow them to have the work life that they crave and desire, but also maintain a really robust and joyful personal life. And if you are over-delivering all of the time, you are going to burn out. That model becomes impossible. So.
That's what we're gonna talk about today. There's gonna be some really great, I think, practical stuff that you take away from this, but I also think you're gonna understand a little bit more why you might be doing this ⁓ or why you may have done this in the past. Again, this is something that comes up constantly inside the BBB where I support coaches in building their businesses. My coaches, especially the new ones, often are coming to sessions saying,
Here, I thought of this, I could also add this to my package, or could add this to my package. And so this is a conversation that comes up all the time. Here's what I wanna say, as somebody who is a burnout coach as well, I have two niches. I coach coaches in the first five years of their business, which is who this podcast is geared towards, obviously. And I run programming for those coaches, but I also am still a personal coach and I coach professional women who are feeling overwhelmed and burnt out.
And I've been doing that for a really long time now and I keep doing that because I love that work. I have personal experience with burnout and I just love working with that demographic of clients. And today what's gonna happen in this episode is I'm gonna bring, I'm merging my two worlds, they're coming together. So I'm gonna be talking as both a burnout coach and also as a business coach for coaches. I want to start out by saying, this is something that a lot of people don't realize, but.
you can absolutely burn out doing something that you love. And I say that because most of you, if you're like me, you went into coaching because you love it. It's joyful for you. It's so much fun. It's so rewarding. I love sitting down at my desk every day. I love my client sessions. I love coaching my groups. I love all the work that I do. And that's what I want for you too. But just because you love what you do doesn't mean that it can't take you down.
you can't burn out. I think there's a sort of an assumption that people who burn out are people who are doing work that's not joyful, that is you know exhausting and not fun for them. And that's not actually true. Most of the women that I work with on the burnout side of my practice are women who at certainly in the beginning and for a lot of them for many many many years, sometimes decades of their career, absolutely loved what they were doing. But at a certain point the scales tipped and that was no longer the case. So I want to be clear you can burn out.
doing something that you love. And that something that you love is probably coaching. It can feel like you are really doing everything right as a coach and that you are sort of even enjoying it, to be honest, in the beginning, some of these things that are actually going to lead to that burnout. So here are some of the things that coaches do.
that feel like they're like the right things ⁓ and can feel, like I said, joyful in the beginning. So we often get into a habit of responding really, really quickly. So we send responses to emails as soon as they come in. send them, if we get an email inquiry, know, nine o'clock at night, we send a response to that while we're sitting on the couch. We never leave our businesses and we're ultra responsive to DMs, to texts, ⁓ to emails, to phone calls, to all the things.
A lot of us get into the practice of sending like really elaborate summaries after every client session. And sometimes those include additional worksheets and resources, journaling prompts and big inquiries that we want our clients to contemplate and journal on over the course of the week between now and the next session, that kind of thing. A lot of us offer unlimited access or relatively unlimited access.
So we tell our clients that they can reach out to us at any time during the session, between the sessions, if they have questions or concerns or they want to run something by us, they can send us an email or a text or a note or whatever. A lot of us also check in very regularly with our clients between sessions. that, you know, it might be a daily thing, it might be a bi-weekly thing, but we're checking in with our clients between those sessions. This is a big one. This is a big thing that we do.
that often leads to burnout. We add a lot of bonuses. So when we are making an offer to somebody, whether that's on a discovery call or maybe it's in, know, social media posts or whatever, newsletters, we're making an offer, we just throw in everything. We're adding all of these bonuses to it. And those bonuses are bonuses that take something from us. Those are bonuses that involve our time. So it might be I'll give you an extra session or...
I'll also give you, we'll also do a five minute check-in every morning and a five minute check-in at the end of the night, whatever it is, we give bonuses and just overall, we over deliver on everything. And that's really what we're here to talk about today. All of these things are examples of how we can over deliver. This all feels like, this is good. This is just me being really supportive as a coach. This is me creating more value. And objectively, it looks like that.
But what usually happens at some point when we're doing this is we get to a place where it starts to feel tiring. We start to get a little bit resentful about how on demand and on call we are and how much time we're giving people. ⁓ And so what I really want to get you thinking about today in this episode is where is the line between being deeply supportive as a coach and over giving in a way that hurts both me and my client? This is what we're talking about today.
Overgiving behavior, this over delivering behavior, it sneaks in, you know, I think for all of us and it sneaks in in a really kind of benign way. This isn't like, this isn't villain behavior here. This is just like normal. I think it happens to everyone. And I say that as somebody who supports hundreds of coaches. I know I've seen this. It happens for all of us. It's happened for me before. It is usually rooted in insecurity.
and good intentions. I want to make that really clear. This is not done with any kind of, like I said, it's not villain behavior. It's well-intentioned behavior, but it is rooted almost always in insecurity. And that's why we need to talk about it today, because there is a whole other way to build confidence and to help you get over this insecurity. And I also think that once you realize what the consequences of this insecurity are,
and the way that it's playing out for you in your business and also the way it plays out for your clients, you're gonna look at this through a completely different lens. So here are some of the common reasons why we over give or over deliver. And again, think of these as all like connect these all back to insecurity, because I think it's gonna be pretty obvious that they are really rooted in insecurity. So we over deliver because we are struggling to charge what we're worth. So we know what we should be charging.
On an hourly basis, we know what the market rate is for us, whether we're a brand new coach or we're a really experienced coach, obviously rates change based on experience, rates can change based on niche. There are different things that affect rates, but we have a sense of what we should be charging on an hourly basis. And we are struggling to charge that because we have some confidence issues around our worth. We are worried that our clients won't think what we charged them was worth it. So we throw in everything except the kitchen sink, right? We throw it all in.
And so it was really a matter of us trying to be wanting to be able to justify the rate, right? Which I get, I have struggled with that insecurity myself. The other reason why we over deliver often is because we just wanna be the best coach. Like we want to be seen as the best coach. And we think that the more we provide for people, the better a coach we are. also, a lot of us struggle with some people pleasing tendencies.
I'm not really sure what this is about, but I definitely see it across the industry. A lot of the coaches that I work with and support are people pleasers. I am a reformed people pleaser, but still somebody who has to consciously work on it all the time because my default is to be a people pleaser. And I see that a lot. It seems to be a very common characteristic in a lot of the coaches that I work with. And so I think the people pleasing is another reason why we might, again, default to...
offering more and delivering more. Definitely with coaches who are in the really early years of practicing, there is often an insecurity around your skills. So there's ⁓ a ⁓ real worry that you're not gonna be able to deliver value in the session because you're just not a good enough coach yet. And that can really play into the over delivering, the desire or the propensity to over deliver.
That is so common. That is, mean, I've been talking a little bit about the CCSI in the last couple of episodes, which is my Confident Coaching Skills Intensive. It's closed now for registration, but that program is one that I created because I see this so often because it is so, so common that coaches get stuck and they won't even get out there and try to market themselves and build their businesses because they're so stuck in this imposter syndrome around not having the skills to create value for clients in coaching sessions.
And of course, when we're feeling that way, it makes sense that we would add as many things as we can into the offer to try to compensate for that. Also, I think we over give and over deliver in the beginning because we have time to. So it can feel absolutely doable for us when we're first starting out, we only have a few clients to be offering all these other ways of support and points of connection for our clients.
The main thing I want you to take away from this is that over giving is a confidence problem. It's not a value problem. Like it is almost always rooted in underconfidence, not in undervalue in a program. And adding things like unlimited access to you, know, constant texting, late night responses, detailed call summaries.
know, fancy worksheets and ⁓ constantly following up with your clients and checking in with them. That is not where the value is for your clients. The value is in the coaching session itself. And this is the shift that I really want to like hammer home today. The value is in the coaching session. And the sooner you get really clear on that, and I'm going to tell you how you establish that for yourself and how you build your confidence in that and also how you get your clients to establish that.
As soon as everybody's clear on that, this all becomes a whole lot easier. It becomes a whole lot easier to scale back. It becomes a whole lot easier to not over deliver. And that's really the important shift that I want ⁓ to push today in this call. The real value as a coach is...
inside of the session. So it is the value that you deliver in that 45 minute, one hour, whatever it is session that you have with your client that week. Here is how I, and this is such a simple little system and you may have heard me talk about it before on other episodes and other seasons, but I haven't talked about it for a while. And I think it's a good reminder for everybody. This is how I establish value in every single coaching session, whether it's a burnout session or it's a
business coaching session or it's a group call, I do this every single time. This is such a good little trick to practice. And I just want you to get to a place where this is just automatic for you and you do this in every single call. Literally just got off a call before I started recording this episode, did this. I do it every single time. At the beginning of every single client session, I check in with my client on how they're feeling right now.
How are you feeling coming into this session? Sometimes I can read body language or it's just obvious to me and I might notice that for them. ⁓ But we always have a conversation around how they're feeling right now. What's their emotional state? What are they feeling? I ask them what's on their mind. ⁓ Even if I had a plan for what we were gonna focus on in that session or if the two of us had made a plan for what we were gonna focus on, I always check in to make sure that there isn't something else that they'd rather focus on today. So we have a conversation around how they're feeling
and what they wanna focus on today. Then we have the coaching session. We do the coaching work. And at the end of the session, every single time, I ask them how they're feeling now. And then I note and mark the difference between how they were feeling at the beginning versus how they're feeling now. And we celebrate that. It's always a positive delta. They always feel better. I ask them what has shifted for you in the last hour? So what has shifted for you in our coaching session?
What are you taking away from this session? Sometimes I'll say like, what are you taking away that you can take into the week with you to do things differently or think differently? And I asked them the specific question, what was most valuable to you today about our coaching conversation? That of course leads to my clients reinforcing their awareness. It helps them.
to articulate in their own words what the value of the session was, what shifted for them, what they got out of it. It also ⁓ anchors for them that transformation in terms of how they were feeling at the beginning of the session versus the end of the session. And basically get my clients to establish themselves the value of the session and to say it out loud. So that provides them with a measure of value of the coaching session and it also gives it to me.
It provides me with a measure of value. When my clients say, my gosh, I'm taking away this really cool thing that I had not thought of before. I have this new way of looking at things. So my clients, the client I was coaching this morning, we were talking about the difference between equity in a relationship that's based on ⁓ objective external measurements, like how much money somebody makes or their education level versus equity in a relationship that's based on confidence. And what a relationship that was like.
had confidence equity would look like versus a relationship that had equity based on some of these other characteristics. For her, that was a game changer and that's what she was taking away. So when she tells me that that's the value that she got from the session, that's the thing she's taking away, that's something that's really going to shift the way she thinks this week, that establishes value for me and helps me build my confidence as a coach. The sooner you start doing this in every single session,
The sooner you are going to buy into and it's going to become very clear to your clients that the real value is in the time they spend with you in the coaching room. And the sooner you are going to stop feeling this need to overcompensate everywhere else. Trust me, this is how it works. So again, reminder, how do you do this? So simple, start every call with, how are you feeling today? Get really clear on how they're feeling right now in the session and then ask them what they wanna focus on today. What feels like the thing that's taking up the most space for them.
What is the thing that they are bringing into the session that they really wanna work through with you? What's the thing that's keeping them most stuck? There are different ways to ask that question, but you make sure that they are buying into whatever the coaching topic is that day, that they have some stake in that and ownership in that. Do not make the mistake of doing agenda-based coaching. I've talked about this in other podcast episodes. Don't come in with an agenda, even if it's something that you and your client talked about talking about, like this client I'm talking about that I had right before this recording.
We were supposed to be doing part two of a values exercise today together, a personal values exercise. But she came in and I could tell from her body language that she was off and I asked her how she was feeling. She ⁓ confirmed that she had not had a great week and she was feeling off. We had a conversation about that. And I said to her, look, we were gonna talk about the values thing again this week. We had a plan to do this particular exercise, but maybe that's not the best thing for today. Is there something else that feels more important to you?
more pressing, or you feel like it would be more valuable or serve you better to talk about today. That led to this conversation about relationships. And she left feeling like she got value, but she also had some ownership in that, right? So start with how are you feeling and then establish what the thing is that feels like the right thing to be talking about. Do a great coaching session and then at the end of the coaching call, ask them how they're feeling now. Note the shift from the beginning of the call to now, and then ask them what their...
takeaways and what the value is from the session and get them to say it in their own words. That's it. Do it every single time. It is an absolute game changer. Okay, so that's how you over time start to really build your confidence and your clients confidence in the fact that the value comes from the hour or whatever it is that they spend with you and that the value there is incredible. Let's talk about why the over giving and the over delivering leads to burnout even when you don't have
you know, a really full roster of clients, it can happen. It can feel sustainable for a short period of time when you only have a few clients because you've got lots of time and because you're still really excited and there's lots of energy there. But as you grow, ⁓ it becomes, you know, it starts to feel like you're constantly on demand, constantly on call.
constantly getting notifications on your phone and everywhere else. You're, you know, worried about missing and not remembering to respond to things and you're, you know, it feels like you don't really have any boundaries between work and life and you've got no real way to, you know, turn your brain off and just kind of separate work and your personal life. And it's just exhausting. And I'm guessing that if you're like me, you did not leave your previous career to be on call 24 seven.
You didn't start a business so that you could work constantly and have no work-life balance. And you didn't start a business so that you could create another super demanding job and have a boss who never gave you a break. You probably started coaching like I did and like most of the coaches I support did to create some more autonomy and some flexibility and some more freedom and some better life balance for yourself.
In order to do that, in order to create that freedom and balance, you have to create structure. And Newsflash, as your own boss, you are the only person who can do that. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about what that structure might look like. I'm gonna give you some examples of what I do in my own coaching practice and have done for a very, very long time. And some of them might surprise you. But it all comes back to this idea of creating value in the actual hours that I am with my clients.
Wendy McCallum (23:57)
Ooh, one more little thing I forgot. If you are listening to this in March when the episode comes out, there is an upcoming open house for the BBB, my business building bootcamp that's happening on March 19th at noon Eastern. I would love to see you there. It is a no strings opportunity for you to meet me. I mean, in person I say, but really it's all virtual on Zoom, but we'll be in the same room. I'll get to meet you, learn a little bit about your coaching business and you can ask me anything about the BBB. You'll also get the opportunity to meet some of my
current members of the BBB in a regular kind of office hours setting where they and you can ask me anything about your business. So that is coming up March 19th. I'll put the link for that in the show notes as well. I would love to see you there.
Wendy McCallum (24:43)
Okay.
Here's one thing I don't do. Now, whether you take or leave these, you don't have to do all of these things or not do all of these things. I wanna be really clear. There's no one right way to structure a coaching practice, but you do need clarity. You need to know what is included and what's not included. And as I said upfront, you need to make sure you're charging for that. Because if you're not charging for the time that you're spending on these clients, it starts to feel like your time is leaking out everywhere. And you realize, ⁓ I am actually not getting paid nearly what I thought I was getting paid an hour because I'm actually spending.
countless hours that I actually can't measure because I'm not tracking it, supporting these clients outside of that one client session because I have promised them the moon and I'm always available to them, right? So ⁓ I don't want you to do that. So you need to create some structure. You need to know with clarity what that structure is and what the boundaries are and what is and what isn't included in any of your offers. I'm going to tell you some of the things I don't include in my offers. I do not send session notes.
I have never sent session notes. So that would be like a summary after the session where I summarize what happened in the session, the big takeaway points and maybe any like homework type stuff that the client's gonna be working on before the next session. I don't do that. I've never done it. One of the reasons I don't do it is because I see clients with 15 minute buffer in between. So if I have a full day of clients, it looks like usually there's a 15 minute break in between clients. And I take a lunch break, of course.
but my clients are pretty much back to back. That 15 minutes gives me time to get up, get a cup of coffee, go to the bathroom, grab a snack, stretch my legs, breathe, reset myself for the next client appointment. It doesn't give me time to do session notes. And if I don't do them between my clients, then it's something else that I have to do at the end of the day. And I don't really want to do that, to be honest. So what I have always done is set expectations. And this is really the key to not over delivering and to...
feeling good about it, frankly, is to set appropriate expectations with your clients. So I always say to my clients when I first start working with them in the first session, actually even before the first session, I ask them to bring, like I say, get a fresh notebook, get a new journal and bring it to every session with you because I'm going to ⁓ give you time and space to take note of anything that you think is noteworthy in our sessions.
And you can always like stop me if we're talking and you wanna make sure you get something down. I'll pay attention to your body language. I'm cool with you writing while we're talking, whatever that is. ⁓ You won't need to take a ton of notes, but ⁓ you're the note taker. What I don't do is I do not send summaries after the sessions. ⁓ So they know that. They know they're responsible for taking the notes. ⁓ And that works better for both of us because they are paying attention, they're listening, they take some ownership.
⁓ and they write things down in their own words, which is helpful to them. And I just find that that works really, really well. And there's zero expectation I'm gonna send them anything afterwards. So again, setting the expectations is helpful. What I wanna remind you of, and I think this is a really important reframe, is that they don't know what they didn't get. So if you never set the precedent that they're gonna get a summary after every session, then they're not going to miss it, right? ⁓ You create the value in the hour,
not after the hour. Okay? The other thing that I don't do is I don't do a lot. There's not a lot happening between sessions for my clients. Always at the end of every session, we have like, we set some accountability for the next week. We have a conversation about what they're gonna be working on or thinking about during the week. And it can be different depending on the client. Sometimes they're gonna be journaling about some things. For example, with this whole, ⁓ you know, what would like confidence equity look like versus like financial equity.
in a relationship, my client's gonna go away and journal around that. She's also gonna journal around what the value of focusing on herself right now might be to her future relationship. So those can sometimes be like bigger inquiries like that. Sometimes it's really specific. They're gonna go away and they're gonna try meditation for 15 minutes, five mornings a week right after they have their coffee, right? So it's different, but we do have a conversation around what they're gonna do between the sessions, but then it's up to them.
And I say that to them, okay, so you're clear on what it is you're gonna do? Yeah, okay. Great, next week when we meet, we'll check in on that. That's what I say to them. And they get accustomed to that. So they know very clearly what it is they're undertaking to do. They know what success would look like with that. And they know we're gonna check in on it next week. That is usually the only thing that happens.
between sessions. So my client is out working on their thing and I'm not involved in that. I'm not checking in, they're not checking in with me, we check in at the next session. I don't send them big giant workbooks, I don't send them like coaching exercise, PDF sheets, I don't send them anything really between the sessions and that is totally fine because they are not expecting it because I have set, you know, have set expectations. Okay. ⁓
I think that it's important again to remember that the way you establish value isn't how you use that hour of time that you have with your client. It's not in the five follow-up emails that you send or the worksheets or the journal prompts. And remember that when you give your client the opportunity to like establish that value themselves by asking them the questions about what the value is and what the takeaway is and what they're working on this week, you...
give them the opportunity, you reinforce that both for them and for yourself. Okay. The structure that I'm talking about where I don't do follow ups and I don't do a lot of check-ins between appointments, that protects a lot of things for me. It protects my time because I know exactly how much time I'm committing to a client when I take them on. And it is really not much more than the six hours, let's say that they're paying for, right? ⁓ Obviously there's prep work that happens, you know, to...
administration of clients and all of that stuff. But generally speaking, now as an experienced coach, I show up for a session and make sure that I am ready for that session, that I have cleared my mind, that I left all the things that I was thinking about outside of my office and I am here for that client with my listening ears on. And I provide value in that one hour session. So it protects my time. It also protects my brain because
there's not a lot happening for me outside of the office hours. So when I'm finished coaching for the day and I've wrapped up whatever the little admin tasks are that I have to do that day, and I go to my kitchen and start making dinner or make plans to go out with a friend or whatever, work is done. And I love that. there's, you know, and there's no expectation, frankly, that I should be on call for anybody. So that helps to protect my brain. And obviously it's really helpful when it comes to ⁓
scheduling, planning, ⁓ like on the business side of things too, right? Like I can easily plan. I know what my capacity is, I guess is a better way to put it. Like I know that I can take on, you know, I can see a maximum of five clients a day with those breaks in between the clients. And then after that, it's too much for my brain.
But if my max MIM is five clients a day that I'm gonna work with, I know that and I know that they're only going to take up the five hours of that day, that there isn't a bunch of additional stuff that's gonna be happening that I'm gonna be like fighting for time with. So I love it for all of those reasons. You can absolutely offer access between sessions, I wanna be clear. But if you're gonna do that, if you're gonna give them more access, you need to be really, really precise and clear about what that entails.
I have done this, I still do this sometimes. It depends on the coaching offer and the client. Sometimes the coaching package will include access to me between sessions. Here's what I do when that happens. And this usually happens to me if I'm working with a client who's trying to change their relationship with alcohol, this can be critically important and very valuable to them. So sometimes this is part of the coaching engagement. But what I do is I use a separate platform for that that I only use for clients.
So I don't, my clients are not getting mixed up with my personal texts or my personal DMs or any of that stuff. I use WhatsApp and I generally only use WhatsApp for clients. You can pick your platform, maybe it's Vox or maybe it's, know, ⁓ something else. But for me, it's WhatsApp. I very clearly define what that access looks like. So I say you have reasonable access to me during my business hours and I tell them what my business hours are during the day, Monday to Friday.
and then I say reasonable access is one to two texts a day.
I've set it out. It's very clear. I know that one to two texts a day is not going to take up more than five minutes of my time and I'm okay with that, right? But when you don't say one to two texts a day, then there are no limits on that and you run the risk of having a client texting you constantly all day. So you have to be very clear about what the parameters are of that if you're going to offer it. Now, if you are offering true unlimited access, you need to be charging for that.
And this is something that a lot of coaches do not do, obviously. So I've done this before. I've paid for like a half day of Voxer or a day of Voxer support from, for example, like an executive coach or business coach. I have paid for that. I know what that level of proximity to a coach is worth. And I guarantee you, whatever you're charging for it, it's too low because that unlimited access is actually premium.
So if you're not charging for it, then you are leaking profit and you're leaking energy. So you really need to be thinking about what do I actually want to be offering here? What is actually, what am I actually gonna get paid for in this coaching package? And how do I set really clear boundaries on that and expectations around that for my client? So again, it's not that you can't offer access between sessions, you absolutely can. You can do whatever you want. It's your business, that's the beauty of it. But if you're gonna do it, define it really precisely.
and make sure that it works for you, both from an energy perspective, a time perspective, and a money perspective.
There's also an important conversation that we need to have around defining boundaries when it comes to community support, which is often something that coaches will offer as part of, for example, a group program, or maybe they're running a circle community because that's their top of funnel and they pull people in there to this free community that they run and from there they sell their offers. You have to be really clear in communities as well as to what...
you are actually going to be providing and what the community is about and what it's not about. So for example, if you are running a group program community of some sort, some kind of community, you wanna probably make it pretty clear that the community is about connection. It's a place for the individual members to connect and commune and that you just admin the space, but you don't coach there.
⁓ And your client is really clear to the group members that if they have coaching questions that they bring those to the coaching calls if they're part of a paid coaching group, for example. ⁓ I think that's really important. I always do that if I'm running a community. ⁓ The BBB community, for example, is not a place where I'm doing a lot of coaching. That's not happening in there. If there are quick, easy questions, I tell people they can tag me in there and I'll answer them. If I can answer them really quickly, I'll do it there. If not, I ask them to submit the question for the next office hours call.
So you have to set some boundaries and define that because communities are one of the places that are just where the biggest energy leakage and frankly, revenue leakage happens because people feel like they have to be doing all the things in there all the time. The other problem that that causes often for coaches is that it's hard to distinguish community with group coaching. If you're doing the coaching in the community all the time, but you're also trying to upsell them on like a group coaching offer that should cost a whole lot more than the community.
it can be difficult to distinguish the value there. Your people who are already in your community and getting coaching and connection and conversation with you constantly are gonna think, well, why do I need that? I'm already getting that in the community. I wanted to talk really briefly about the place that bonuses do have. Because I talked about how giving bonuses, like a bajillion bonuses is often how we end up over delivering and exhausting ourselves.
I'm really talking about the types of bonuses that take a lot of time away from us. So bonuses that involve our time. There is absolutely a place for bonuses in marketing and selling. I use them all the time. And there's a place for bonus content in program packages and offers. In fact, one of the things you probably heard me talk about on this podcast, certainly if you've worked with me before, you've heard me say this, is that it can be really helpful to have something that's online.
⁓ that you can offer people as part of a one-on-one coaching offer. It makes it a lot easier to up your rates. It's not just about your hourly rate that you're charging. You also get access to this amazing 12-week program that I've designed that you can go through at your own pace, for example, or that we're gonna use as the basis for some of our coaching discussions and our live calls, or that includes this really fantastic workbook that you can work through between sessions or whatever it is.
The main thing that you want to be thinking about is does that other thing that I'm offering take time away from me? Does it drain me? And also, what's the value of that as a standalone? And how do I make sure that I am getting paid for that? So there is a place for these things, but I like to use the more as a way to increase the price on an offer.
So to actually increase the value of an offer as opposed to justify the value of an already existing valuable offer. ⁓ Hopefully that makes sense. The last little thing I really wanna spend some time on is this misconception that somehow over delivering and over supporting is actually helping your clients. Because I think this is where the real shift is gonna happen for you. Over giving and over delivering to your clients doesn't serve them.
It just doesn't. And this is really like the powerful flip side of this whole conversation. Your goal as a coach is not to make your clients dependent. It is not to be their emotional crutch. It is not to solve all their problems for them in real time. It's none of those things. And if you've been listening to what I've been saying in this season's episodes about your role as a coach and the really the, the. ⁓
problem that happens when we are doing agenda-based coaching and trying to provide solutions and trying to provide advice and how that is really not what coaching is all about, then you know what I'm talking about here. Our goal is not obviously to do any of those things. Even when our clients become dependent on us or to need us as a crutch and to like never be able to leave us, my goal when I'm working with clients is always to help my clients stand on their own. It's to help them get clarity and insight and stand in a place of power and stand in a place of confidence and feel like they are ready to take on this thing.
And I want them to become self-sufficient around whatever the particular area of challenges that we've been working on. I want them to go out and I want them to test it in the real world. And I want them to feel confident around it. And the only way for them to feel confident around it is to get out there and practice it without me. And that's what happens between sessions. That is the opportunity for them to feel some discomfort, to tolerate the discomfort, to problem solve and work through things on their own, to process emotion.
you know, to learn all of the hard pieces that need to happen without my support, to make decisions for themselves without my reassurance, to learn to trust themselves. If they can text me every single time they wobble, every single time they have a question, they're never gonna build that internal stability. They're never gonna build that confidence. And so for me, when I'm talking to clients and I'm explaining to them why we are not gonna be having communication between sessions, although I don't say it that way, I just...
let them know that we won't, that the way it works is I'll see them next week and in between they're gonna be working on these things. I talk to them about the value of that in those terms. I talk to them about how this is the time they're gonna practice and they're gonna test and they're gonna integrate the things that we learn and talk about in the coaching sessions and they're gonna probably fall down a little bit but they're gonna learn how to stand back up and eventually at the end of all of this, my goal for them is for the coaching to end.
My goal is for my clients to be able to fly the coop. And I say that a lot to my clients. I want you to be able to fly the coop. I want them to ⁓ be able to stand on their own two feet. I'm not gonna be there forever. And so I don't want to train my clients to rely on me as though I will be. And that is often what happens when we were doing this over-supporting, this over-delivering. So I want you to think about that. It's a whole different way of looking at this, but how does it serve your clients?
for you to over deliver? Short answer, probably not very much. So here's what healthy support actually looks like. These are the things to focus on. Supportive coaching is being deeply present in the session itself. It's all about that session and the value you create in that session. And I've given you a little hack for how to start establishing that yourself ⁓ through every single session in your client's own words. So establishing it for them and establishing it for you. So healthy.
really good support looks like being very present in a coaching session. It looks like a high degree of accountability. So holding people accountable, I think that's an important piece of it. Making sure that you actually are as a coach remembering what you talked about last time, making notes around what they were gonna work on when they went away and then the next time calling them to the carpet and asking them how that went. Not in a shameful or judgmental way, but in a really...
⁓ supportive and positive way. What did we learn from this? What went well? What didn't go well? What could we tweak next time? How can we set you up for better success? Having those conversations in the next call, keeping that accountability there and that through line between sessions, that's really important. And it's really about empowering people instead of rescuing them. We are as coaches here to help people stand in a place of personal responsibility and power and really feeling confident and positive.
that they can change their lives if their lives are not going the way they want them to go. We are not in the business of rescuing. That's not what coaches do. Coaching is responsive. It is not on demand. ⁓ So hopefully that conversation helped. I wanna leave you with a couple of little things you can think about. I want you to audit your offers this week. I want you to...
Take a look at what you're doing. And if you need to recalibrate because you are over giving, here are some ways that you can start doing that. So look at your offers. What are you actually promising? What are you doing that is not written anywhere? What things are you giving people that you haven't actually told them you were going to give them, but you're just doing it because it's the way you roll? Look at those things. Is that a place where you're leaking time? Is that a place where you're leaking money? Have a think about that. And then I want you to start tightening expectations for new clients.
I want you to change the way you do things when you bring, when you onboard your next client. want you to be, experiment with it. The places where you're leaking time and money, I want you to rein back on those things. And I want you to work really hard at establishing value in every single coaching session using that little technique that I talked to you about. I really want you to practice that. ⁓ Remember, you don't get any bonus points for being exhausted. It's actually not a very valuable badge of honor.
It is what leads to burnout. You can absolutely burn out doing something you love. That is the last thing I want to see for any of you who are in the business of coaching because you feel called to it because you love it. I am here to help you create a reliable, sustainable, profitable business model. And in order to do that, you need structure. You need boundaries and you need to stop the over giving.
So I hope that's given you lots to think about this week. I'd love to hear your feedback as always. You can send me a note at wendymcallum.com or you can connect with me in the DMs on Instagram. I'm at wendymcallumcoach. You got ideas for future episodes, send those my way as well. And I'll see you next week on The Coaching Edge. Thanks for listening.
