Here it is:

“I find myself stuck in comparison whenever I try to create workshops or offers. I’m always wondering if I’m giving enough, as I don’t want people to ever feel like they didn’t get anything new. And then it leads to ‘okay well maybe I don’t know enough’ — then I don’t take action.”

I’m going to talk you through this as if I was coaching this person in front of me — and I coach using the IMPACT Method. If you don’t know the IMPACT Method, I have a free masterclass for that which I’ll link here. If you want to understand how I coach and why I’m approaching the session this way, that masterclass is worth a watch.

So. There is a lot of great information in this question already, which gives me a lot of different areas I’m instantly curious about.

This is a paid episode. Below I coach through this question in full — including:

• The specific payoff I think is underneath this particular flavour of inaction

• Why solving the strategy problem first would be a waste of both our time, and what I’d ask first instead

• The belief about offer creation that I’d challenge directly, and the reframe that changes how you think about what people are actually buying from you

• What thought leadership actually is — and the examples I use from my own business

• How to know whether your “I don’t know enough” is a thought worth listening to, or a voice in your head worth ignoring, and how to approach each of these

• What I’d want you walking away from the session with, if you were my client

Read more

You know it. You probably saw it happen, like I did. March arrived, our world got thrown into turmoil and grief and isolation all at once. People lost their jobs. They saw others making serious money online — the laptop lifestyle, the freedom, the income screenshots — and they came flooding into the online business world.

Coaching looked like the fastest path to all of your dreams coming true at once. Maybe faster than most people even expected. You could call yourself a coach, hire a coach, make a lot of money, rinse and repeat. Voila. And for a while, there were so many people doing exactly that, that it seemed like a legitimate choice.

The problem — as we all have lived — was that a whole lot of those people were untrained. And untrained coaches working with real humans in real pain created real damage. Those bad experiences stacked up — some genuinely terrible, and others a result of wrong investments at the wrong time. But regardless, trust eroded. And then, when the tide went out, most of them were nowhere to be found. Or they’re still here, still going despite the relentless Reddit threads, busy trying to rebuild their own reputations.

But for every one of them, there are 100 great coaches who watched others get torn down, and are now scared to really own their power — like avoiding sharing the incredible results your clients get that you're hesitant to talk about publicly in case it sounds like a promise you can't keep. Sound familiar?

Every legit coach in this industry is paying the credibility tax that has been imposed on them, usually, unfairly. We’re seeing discovery calls and acquisition cycles taking longer, warier clients, or people quick to blame or pull out the second they get triggered or wonder if you’ll finally be different. You’re holding the extra work of proving you’re one of the ‘good ones’ who actually knows what they’re doing.

Whether you deserve that burden or not, you’re carrying it. And probably, to an extent, you’re playing down your work in case you attract in a client who pedestalises you, doesn’t do the work and then blames you (calling myself out here, just as much as you).

While all of this is true, another truth also coexists.

The standard of the industry, across the board, even for the most well intentioned coaches, is incredibly low.

Well intentioned does not equal well equipped.

This is not a dig at you. This is a dig at the severe lack of options for quality training that you can trust. This is a dig at the low standards that are held even by the institutions set up to BE the standard.

Most coaches are still operating based on trainings they did years ago, because sadly… it’s rare to find professional development options for advanced coaches. But the shocking thing is also that many of those trainings are built on pseudoscience, or shaky theories that have since been proven wrong by advances in behavioural psychology and affective neuroscience.

It’s no wonder we have issues with trust and transformation.

And every great coach knows — marketing and client results are only one part of building a strong reputation and brand. If we truly want to be in integrity, we need to make sure we are highly trained and safely equipped to hold the sacred space that we sell.

Otherwise we risk being another example of where trust was given incorrectly.

And to call a spade a spade — the risk is actually real. Humans are complex creatures who all respond differently to different approaches. I still have clients sometimes where I really have to sit down, create a case conceptualisation and figure out what they really need.

The coaches who can hold the most complex clients, who facilitate the changes that actually stick, who can charge $10k or $15k or $50k for a package and have clients say yes without hesitation — they aren’t trained in strategies or scripts, they’re trained in psychology.

And because of this —

They don’t push through sessions that feel clunky; they proactively create momentum from the start.

They don’t see clients as humans who just need ‘more discipline’ or ‘a five step plan.’ They know how to read what’s actually driving the behaviour in front of them, and coach that.

They don’t blame the client when they start strong and then taper off.

They don’t raise their prices without a commensurate increase in their own skills.

They’re able to charge seriously high ticket, and do it confidently AND in integrity, because they’ve developed the psychological sophistication to meet the need of what they’re offering.

After years of being asked by my clients, ‘please can you teach me how to coach like you do?’ I finally caved in 2022 and built the program that is slowly changing the industry, coach by coach.

I built The Midas Coach to take these great coaches, and make them exceptional.

Every coach who becomes a Midas Coach tells me one thing —

“THIS is the standard. EVERY coach needs this.”

I can’t help but agree.

The Midas Coach is a psychology-based professional development program for established coaches who feel the weight and the privilege of this work, and want to become genuinely equipped to deliver on it.

TMC teaches you psychology that’s taught only in the later years of a Masters degree. It teaches you the art of applying that to each unique human in front of you. It perfects your ability to read patterns, to test patterns, and to change patterns.

Our Midas Coaches routinely raise, double or triple their prices. They start working with far more complex clients who hold positions of influence, facilitate larger group transformations and find a new passion for the work they do.

We offer you the chance to become truly exceptional. To become the coach who can transform through one question, one conversation, one well timed look.

We work with the potential of our clients every day — and our ability to stretch their potential, depends on the extent to which we stretch our own.

The Midas Coach opens a couple of times a year. On April 13th, we open briefly to the waitlist with a special price.

Read all the details, the success stories and enrolment options here, and if you want to join us and become the most exceptional coach you can be — you know what to do.

Carly x

I mean — who doesn’t want a client list full of humans operating at this standard? But is it realistic, or helpful to refuse any client who isn’t?

Of course, these clients, and these ‘self led’ attributes are generally really helpful when it comes to coaching. Coaching is about taking clients who are operating at baseline or above, and helping them achieve pretty extraordinary things in their careers, businesses, health, sports, etc. That does ask clients to hold themselves to high standards of self-responsibility, self-awareness and execution.

Somehow, this idea has permeated the industry to the point where it’s now seen as a red flag to not arrive with these skills already intact.

But wait… isn’t that what coaching is FOR?

Coaching is about seeing our blind spots, realising we’re human, learning to take responsibility for hard things when we want to put our heads in the sand, and showing up despite fear.

Sure — there are some clients who have learned these skills — likely through years of BEING coached (or being the eldest daughter, IYKYK). And we need to be honest about this — that’s a tiny percentage of most niches.

If you keep screening out everyone who doesn’t arrive ‘self-led’, or treating them as a lost cause when they need to ask the same question twice, or need support to execute on hard things — you’re eliminating most of your potential clients. And — even more than that, you’re selling yourself short as a coach. Building your coaching skills to help a client develop these skills is what then ensures your success rate with clients is much higher — and if you’re really focused on building a great reputation and high referral rate, it goes without saying that this is a prerequisite. Not to mention… pretty gratifying when a client changes a pattern they’ve held onto for decades.

Self-led is not always the healthiest standard.

To take this a layer deeper — ‘self led’ is not always a helpful, healthy standard — especially in clients who are ambitious, high performing and high achieving. For these clients, learning to be self led is actually part of their journey. They need to learn how and when to ask for help instead of leaning on hyper-responsibility. They need to learn how to slow down and listen to their intuition instead of operating on a never ending to-do list of box ticking and being a ‘good client.’ They need to learn how to rely on their teams, partners, support systems instead of pretending they can hold it all. Our coaching spaces are meant to be a safe practise ground for skills they’ll take out into the world. Are we creating safe space for them to be vulnerable enough to learn, or are we expecting perfection?

In my experience — highly self led clients will often at some point, crash and burnout because they are so tired from holding it all. Because their entire sense of self is built upon being the one who has it all together. I’ve had many clients operating with large teams, yet being the bottleneck to growth because they didn’t trust their team to have their back. I’ve seen clients build complex launch strategies because their overachiever mentality wanted to go the extra mile and prove what they were capable of.

If our job as coaches is to help our clients thrive, it’s also our job to help them see where behaviours are dysfunctional in the context of the lives they say they want to live. Labelling certain behaviours as ‘green flag’ and others as ‘red flag’ doesn’t help our clients to develop behavioural flexibility — to do what the moment really needs from them. If we want to work with ‘premium’ clients and charge high ticket — we need to be operating at the standard of seeing each behaviour and each client as individual — not tarring them all with the brush of perfection.

The Gold Standard of Coaching

The gold standard has been touted as finding clients so self led that they really don’t need coaching — but this isn’t real life, and it’s the fastest track to stalling your business. The goal is to become the kind of coach who can coach almost anyone — and charge accordingly for that capability.

But it requires understanding people at a level most coach training doesn’t touch.

If you want to start building that — the IMPACT Method Masterclass is where I’d begin, and The Midas Coach waitlist is open for those who already know they want to operate from these standards. Enrolments open briefly in April.

Carly x

“I’ve “burned” my previous business to the ground and the new one is taking longer to take shape and I’m struggling with keeping positive and to keep going. I know you’ve done intentional income dips before and was wondering if you had any advice on the mindset part of it and maybe a bit of the strategy to get clarity on next steps.”

I could answer this with some advice, but what I think will make it really land for this person AND for the wider audience, is if I walk through exactly how I would coach it in a real session. So, that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m using the IMPACT Method, my coaching framework — so you get to see how I think, what I’m listening for, and why I go where I go. If you don’t know the IMPACT Method yet, or you want a refresher, you can learn it for free here.

You’re about to hear:

• The IMPACT Method applied to a real coaching scenario

• Why the presenting question is rarely the real one

• Moving away vs moving towards motivation — and what it takes to produce extraordinary results

• The five levels I probe when working with a client (the problem and solution always exists at one of these levels)

• How to scramble a belief until it stops sticking — specific questions I ask clients

• How to make your self worth stable no matter what your business results are

• Why strategic clarity is almost always a downstream problem

• The truth about income dips (and what I wish someone had said to me years ago)

• How to keep integrating a session shift between coaching calls

Resources mentioned:

• IMPACT Method Masterclass (free)

• The Seven Transformations & The Collective (we’re covering Impact and Sales live in April and May)

• The Midas Coach waitlist (opening in April, waitlisters save $$$)

• Referenced Substack article on talking to your new ideal client

• Submit a question for a future episode

This episode is for our paid subscribers only — so if you’d like to listen and learn, upgrade your subscription now. (FYI — the pricing will continue to increase every month, so if you’re thinking of joining, lock in your pricing now).

Read more