Ep. 43: What Happens When Coaching Doesn’t Work

Coaching is all great and helpful and worth it...until it doesn't work. You have a goal, you hire a coach, and then you don't get there. So what does that mean? That coaching is useless? Or that your coach was bad? Or that you're just not one of those people who things work out for no matter how hard you try? And what do you do now? In this episode we look at what happens when coaching "fails" - and where to go from there.

Hey there, welcome back to another episode of the I'm The Problem podcast. My name is Stephanie Finigan and this episode is about what happens when you invest in coaching - you invest money, you invest time, you do all of that and you don't see the results you wanted.

I actually just got off a call today with an entrepreneur who I coach and this was happening for her. Recently, I had this moment with my own coach. I've had moments of that in the past and certainly have had experiences where I'm like, okay, I've invested money. I've invested sometimes a lot of money. I've invested time in coaching and in personal development work and in my own growth. I've done all the things that I'm supposed to do and I don't see the tangible result that I want. And yeah, yeah, yeah, it's all nice that like, well, my attitude is better or whatever, right? I'm handling the stress better. Yeah, sure. But at the end of the day, I wanted to make X dollars. I wanted to grow my business this way. I wanted to lose the weight. I wanted to hit a certain time in the marathon. I wanted to grow my family by this time. I had all these financial goals, personal goals, fitness goals, all of it. And in a lot of cases, I've hired a coach, or I've been working with a coach already. And then I've incorporated this goal and said, Okay, I want to focus our coaching on this goal, or I want to focus on, you know, this other particular area. And so again, I've invested the time I've invested the money, and sometimes I've gotten the result that I wanted.

And sometimes I haven't.

And so in those times when you don't get the results that you want, it's super easy to sort of say, well, coaching doesn't work or whatever the medium is for you. Maybe it's not coaching. Maybe it's therapy. Maybe it's a personal journey. Maybe it's a financial advisor. Maybe it's whatever it is. Any expert, any person that you go to lean on, look for advice from, seek guidance from, particularly when you hire that person and pay money and spend time, you expect a return. And when you don't get that return, it can be really frustrating and really disappointing. And we all have all our feelings about that.

So we either point the finger outward and say, well, this person wasn't able to get me to where I wanted to go. Or we point the finger inward and say something super helpful, like, well, it's just not going to work out for me. See, I've hired people, and I've invested money, and I've tried. It's just not going to happen for me, and then kind of give up. That happens a lot to people, which is a super disappointing. thing to hear when I hear people talking like that about themselves, because it's never the case. Those are just thoughts. But at any rate, this is why we hire coaches.

But the point is, it's very easy for us just assume that because we didn't get the result we wanted, that all was lost. It was a wasted time, wasted effort, wasted investment, wasted everything. And either it's that person's fault, or I'm inherently just fucked up and never going to get the thing I want. And so therefore, it's my fault.

What we don't tend to do is to lean in and embrace or recognize even the power that comes from the shifts that we aren't easily able to quantify. So again, back to where I was mocking earlier, the mindset shift or the like, I handled this dress better, my confidence. It's like, yeah, okay. We can roll our eyes at those things. I certainly have. And I was like, well, that was a waste. Like so much for that.

The reality is it was not a waste. Did I come out of those things with more confidence and more skills and more knowledge and more ways to approach things and better skills at handling stress? Yeah, I did. Did it seem to matter to me in the moment? No, it didn't. But that's what we have to do. So if you're in this position, whether you've hired a coach or whether you've just invested time and energy and money in a new habit or in changing your habit or in up -leveling yourself at work, but then you didn't get the promotion or whatever it is you might've invested in and it didn't work out the way you wanted, the reality is this, you have invested time. You have invested money and you have invested energy. You have invested those things. Something has changed.

It's not possible for you to have invested some amount of time and money and effort into something for you to not experience change of some kind. And so it's important to stop before we completely say like, fuck it's not meant for me or this person was a waste or this method is a waste or whatever. It's important to sort of say like, okay, well, What did shift? When you put the lens of assuming that change happened onto anything, then you ask yourself, what did shift? Your brain will start to search for that. So remember, your brain is, it's very, it's like a toddler that often needs to be like redirected and just say, okay, coming from a place of, yep, something changed. What did change? Something improved, something grew, something expanded, something shifted. What was that? When you ask your brain to start looking through that lens, your brain will come up with answers because that's what your brain is designed to do. It's a smart machine that will come up with answers to questions that you ask it. So ask it good questions.

If you ask it that question, you start to come back with responses that are maybe not what you wanted or don't seem important or don't seem significant, but at least come up with those first. So for me, for example, I invested in a coach to help me grow my business and my business did not grow to the number or size that I wanted when it came time to like wrap up my package with that coach and I was frustrated and so I thought about that I could just decide you know what that coach wasn't for me and I'm not gonna sign up with that coach again or Or I could be like, you know what? I wasn't meant to have a fucking business and it's just never going to work for me anyway, so why bother? Or I could go option three. Let's assume something shifted. Let's take a look at what that is.

And tangibly, what I did was I started to look at numbers. So my numbers didn't grow in terms of clients or sales to the extent that I wanted them to, but they did grow. There was improvement, wasn't the amount that I wanted, but I did see growth. I also saw growth on my social media, which means I had more eyeballs on my brand. I did increase followers, again, not as many as I wanted, but I did increase those. And so, okay, well, there's some change. What else changed? Well, Let's see. My confidence, and which is why I sort of keep mocking confidence, but it did. My confidence shifted in terms of my ability to show up and pitch myself as a coach. My confidence in my own coaching increased as a result of working with this coach.

Other things changed. Like I realized that I was spending way too much time focusing on my business and not enough time focusing on my life. And if you're a life coach, it's hard to actually help people with their lives if you are not living yours. So I actually was like, holy shit, I had a real realization that like I've been spending so much time really hyper focused and stressing about my business and focused on my business that I wasn't actually living my life. And so I pulled back on my business a bit and I increased living my life a little bit. And yeah, my numbers didn't increase in my businesses. much as I wanted, but oh my God, other stuff did. I realized like, oh, I was reaching out to friends I hadn't reached out to in a while. I was more responsive on texts to people. I was spending more time with my family and a few people that I hadn't spent a lot of time with lately because I was leaning back into my life.

I also realized I'm chronically exhausted and chronically dehydrated. And I logically probably knew that, but until someone pointed out to me that like part of the reason I wasn't growing my business and being as efficient in my business when I worked as I wanted was because I was exhausted all the time. And I started looking at like the factors of my exhaustion and part of it was sleep and part of it was water. It's crazy to have to hire someone to point that out for you, but most people maybe don't. But I did, I just have been existing very sleepy and parched at all times. And It's very hard to be efficient and productive and get done the things you want to get done or be creative or be open to new ideas or do any of those things when your body is quite literally struggling from not enough water and not enough sleep. These things all opened up for me as a result of coaching and as a result of my coach who I hired to help me work on my business. All this other stuff opened up.

And so no, I didn't see the growth I wanted in my numbers, but oh my God, I saw the growth in so many other areas. areas. And two things. One, just stopping and recognizing and appreciating that made me really recognize how valuable the investment in my coaching had been, as well as how valuable the work that I put in had been and it also made me stop pointing fingers either at anybody else or at myself or blaming anybody else or assuming that this just wasn't going to work for me like no no that's not they actually did like look at all the stuff that changed even if it's not the way that I thought or that I desired for it to the other thing that it did was made me realize what if I'm just planting the seeds for growth that's beyond what I could imagine?

And I think about that and I'm like, well, when I think about the version of me whose business is as big as I want it to be and who's met all of the business goals that I have and the money goals and the impact goals and all those things, that version of me is not chronically dehydrated and is not chronically exhausted. That version of me does have a nice balance and doesn't sacrifice her life for her life coaching business. That version of me is definitely confident. That version of me is doing all of the things that I've started to or remembered to go back to doing and leaned back into thanks to this coaching. And that is one of the biggest things you can take from coaching is identifying what your future self is, who has all the things that you want, and you start living as that person. That's what gets you to the results that you want. You can't get the results you want until you become her. You become her before you have the result. That's how that works.

And so what I realized was like, holy shit, I paid for a business coach to meet business metrics. I actually ended up not meeting the metrics I wanted in my business, but I met a whole bunch of other metrics I didn't even know that I needed. And those are the seeds that needed to be planted so that I can grow my business to where I want it to be and probably beyond that. So now I'm leaning in and at least in those areas, I'm living as the version of myself who has what I want. And that's how I get what I want. That's how that happens.

So I just, felt like this was an important aha that I had after a moment of frustration and I just wanted to share it here because I know it can feel sometimes like the non -tangible things or the more subjective things that can be gained from coaching or therapy or any other form of personal development those can be not necessarily worth the price of admission or worth the time spent development. It's preparing me for everything that's coming, and that can be even bigger than I ever would have imagined, simply because I've had realizations now that I never would have had without coaching. Anyway, I just found this aha moment very helpful for me recently, and I'm hoping that it does the same for you.

All right, I hope that was helpful, and I will talk to you guys on the next episode.