Worried people will hate your new business?
But first, a question: Selling coaching, or selling shoes – which is harder?
I’m going to say COACHING every single time.
Why?
Because as a coach, you are ultimately selling yourself. Your skills and unique approach are what you are offering, and that’s a very personal thing.
Which makes it easy to *not* want to promote yourself.
Especially where there are people out there just waiting to be mean.
Nasty people are something I deal with more often than you might think.
The internet has made it easy for people to hide behind their snarky comments, or bad days, or general life grumpiness, and take it out on me, on you, on anyone who puts themselves out there.
It’s fun sitting on your high horse and judging others (we’ve all been guilty of it), but some people take it further, and write really odd, mean, or just random and crazy things.
For instance – here’s a fun message I got in response to a Revolutionary Club blog on passion and networking. In that post, I mentioned grocery shopping and misspelled the word marshmallow.
Random? Yes.
Is it an attempt to be funny? No idea.
Usually emails like these go to a team address, and my team protects me from any extra weirdness or meanness out there.
But this one came to my personal address.
However, it didn’t bother me.
When I saw it, it made me laugh.
Here’s why: Because YAY!!
If this person wasn’t making a weird and bad joke, and was truly offended by the fact that I’m more worried about good content than perfect spelling, then she wasn’t ever going to buy anything from me anyway.
It’s MUCH BETTER that she’s out of my community.
I don’t want to work with people who miss the point of what was an uplifting and helpful blog, and instead focus on something completely irrelevant.
I don’t want someone hanging out on my email list, adding to my cost each month when I send out emails, instead of adding any value.
I’d rather people who aren’t a fit leave my community on their own, so I’m left with the ones who want to be there because what I have to say and how I say it resonates with them.
Ultimately it’s better for me, cheaper for my business, and much much better for my community.
So embrace the nastiness out there, knowing that it means you have a strong point of view.
You have a flavor.
And if it sparks dislike, that means it can also spark love.
And you want to work with clients who love you.
Here’s another email I got about the same post:
So this is me telling you please be yourself.
Do your thing.
Don’t be afraid.
If you try to appeal to everyone, or keep yourself so constrained and uptight, you won’t appeal to anyone.
So do you.
And just hit delete on the folks who don’t get it.
Want to get away from the haters and meet people who love you?
Awesome!
Let’s build your business full of people who can’t wait to work with you!
First, sign up for Couch School and join 20,000+ other amazing coaches. It’s free weekly training delivered right to your inbox every Sunday and will give you one insight + one action per week to help you grow.
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