when you're pouring effort into your coaching business, but its not adding up. here's the fix
3 step system for making your time and effort count.
one of my least favorite feelings is getting to the end of a week and feeling like i wasted it. or even worse, feeling like i was busy all week, but i can’t remember what I did.
it’s not that i need to be endlessly productive. it’s that i want the things i’m spending time on and the effort i’m putting in to count.
if you’re building a coaching business to replace your clinical income and you feel like the weeks are passing by but aren’t adding up to new clients, new leads, new audience growth, this post is for you.
the nepal night that changed how i think about time
two years ago i was in nepal preparing to take two weeks fully off the grid. i was in the middle of a launch and i had one night to get everything done before going dark.
something really interesting happened that night: everything came into focus.it became so clear, what needed to be prioritized and what didn’t matter. what things i needed to focus on and what i could more easily delegate.
i got off the meeting with my VA that night feeling on a high. I had just completed 2 weeks of work in 5 hrs.
why don’t i always operate like this?
the answer? parkinson’s law aka the idea that work expands to fill the time you give it.
when i had 2 weeks to finish everything, it took the entire two weeks because it could.
but once I introduced a constraint, suddenly I had more clarity.
sometimes constraints create clarity, sometimes they create pressure.
you might hear this and struggle to relate.
you always have limited pockets of time 2 hours here, 3 hours there to work on your business, but it doesn’t bring everything into focus.
you still aren’t sure what to focus on, and what’s just wasted effort.
and here’s the difference:
when i was in that hotel room in nepal, i had 5 years of entrepreneurial discernment to draw from. i already knew what mattered and what didn’t. i’d been asking myself every single week for years: what produced an ROI this week? what actions actually moved the needle?
so when I was faced with a constraint, I could rise to meet the challenge.
but if you don’t have that discernment yet, because you are still new to business the constraint doesn’t automatically create clarity. it just adds pressure.
but discernment isn’t something you HAVE or DON’T HAVE. its something you can learn.
so i’m going to share my 3 step system to focus your efforts on what actually grows your coaching business.
step one: priority. NOT priorities.
did you know the word “priority” used to only exist as a singular word? (I read this in the book Essentialism, and it has stuck with me.)
for 100s of years “priority “ did not have a plural form. aka“priorities” was not a word. you would never speak about more than one priority because by the very definition of the word it could only be one.
wild.
but then at some point during the industrial revolution we decided we could have multiple most important things. and not only that we COULD, but we SHOULD.
and hence… hustle culture was born.
but if we want to truly be effective, we need to go back to the good old days before “priorities” was a word.
we have to stop trying to juggle 10 diff priorities in our business, and choose ONE. ONE offer we are selling. ONE platform we are growing. ONE goal we are working towards.
we overestimate our ability to multitask and deeply underestimate the power of focus. we’re unwilling to make choices, because we don’t think we need to. choices are for lazy, non ambitious people who can’t juggle 5 things at once.
we have some deranged idea we can do it all, despite all evidence to the contrary.
this picture from Essentialism illustrates the power of focused energy vs scattered energy. if we are willing to make choices. cut things away and focus on one thing, we can make SO MUCH progress in growing our business (even with limited time)
in your business right now: what is the ONE goal you're working towards?
the time horizon i love to use here is three years / one year/ one month.
what’s my 3 year goal? my one year goal? my goal this month?
then during my weekly planning sesh, I ask what is the ONE thing I’m doing to move the needle (towards my monthly goal). it forces me to think strategically and intentionally about where i’m spending my effort.
step two: identify your catalyst actions
catalyst action: a focused, high leveraged move that grows your business more than a to-do list full of scattered tasks.
catalyst actions are basically the 80/20 of your business. if you aren’t familiar, the 80/20 is a common productivity term referring to the pareto principle: the 20% of the effort that yields 80% of the results.
for years now i’ve been seeking out the 80/20 of my business. in my weekly review I answer the Q “what marketing actions produced the most ROI this week”
anytime a new client signs up with me, I ask how they found me. I’m always looking for what’s moving the needle. over time, that builds pattern recognition.
recently i was working with a client to build her weekly template aka the recurring catalyst actions specific to her business that keep it growing.
she came to me with a lot of logistical questions:
how often should i post,
which platform,
should i focus on email?
but instead of starting in the weeds, we zoomed out:
we looked at what results she could point to over the past month:
new clients, market research calls, workshop sign ups, etc.
then we asked… what actions led to those results?
one catalyst action we uncovered: posting on business share day in a paid community
she’d made one post. on one day. that brought multiple people to a paid workshop and multiple people to a market research call.
super simple action. BIG RESULTS.
now she has a catalyst action to add to her weekly template.
you don’t always know your catalyst actions when you are just starting out. you’ll need to experiment ofc. but if you make it your mission to FIND the catalyst actions and PRIORITIZE them, your business growth is SO inevitable.
step three: build a cadence of consistency you can actually sustain
i’m the first to admit that consistency is HARD. my ADHD resists consistency, my perfectionism beats me up for inconsistency. its a fun combo.
the conversation around consistency is not “you have to be perfect, you can never miss a day, you can never take time off.”
no. the conversation is:
find a baseline level of effort you can commit to in even in your busiest seasons.
and the reason I will never stop talking about how important it is to establish consistency…. the law of inertia + the compound effect.
when i talk to my entrepreneur friends who have also built six figure businesses, we always come to the same conclusion. the difference between those who quit their business and those who take their business full time is only, always consistency.
there is something that happens when you show up consistently like its your job. when you publish every single week on a podcast. when you post 4x a week on FB, IG, or LI. AND when your messaging is consistent. the momentum begins to create its own kind of magic. it adds up. it builds. it compounds.
the pattern that costs you dearly in early entrepreneurship is the start-stop cycle.
being consistent for a few weeks, then either getting frustrated, getting busy, or getting overwhelmed and then ghosting your business for weeks at a time. you come back a few weeks later with a new content plan and renewed motivation. start again. stop again.
every time you stop you break the compound effect.
your momentum never gets the chance to snowball into magic.
it’s not about never missing a week or spending all your time creating content.
its finding the cadence of consistency you can commit to.
and locking in.
and thats the 3 step system:
focus on ONE goal
take catalyst actions
find a cadence of consistency you can sustain.
that’s how you stop getting to friday feeling like you wasted the week. that’s how you make your time and effort count. that’s how you grow your business steadily, without your whole life revolving around it.
we put these 3 steps into practice inside the $100k catalyst
the $100k catalyst: your weekly touchpoint for creating sustained business growth… without wasting time and effort.