6 Ways to Honor Your Time Freedom as a Life Coach

Are there cracks in your life coaching business?

In the same way that water seeps through a cracked cup, beginner life coaches often pour time and energy into their business only to see their results leak out.

But it can be a beautiful opportunity with the right mindset. For instance, a Japanese tradition known as Kintsugi mends broken pottery with gold!

Your dream of time freedom as a life coach isn’t far off from that concept. If you’re feeling overworked, overwhelmed, or overstressed, there’s a way to fill in the cracks with gold.

In today’s post, we’ll focus on the areas where coaching businesses lose the most time and give you 6 simple ways to honor your time freedom as a life coach!

What is Time Freedom, Really?

While everyone’s idea of time freedom is different, there are certain desires that we all share. 

For instance, our life coaches share a few of the desires they’ve manifested:

• “Spending quality time with family and friends as often as I’d love.”
• “Making time for creativity, hobbies, and passion projects that I’ve put on the backburner.”
• “Finding time to give back to the community.”
• “Being there for my kids as they grow up.”
• “Dedicating time to my physical, mental, and spiritual health and wellbeing.”
• “Traveling without constraint.”
• “Making time for self-care.”

These desires are likely what brought you into life coaching in the first place.

Jennifer, the Founder of our Health and Wellbeing division, quit her full-time, corporate job for all those reasons and more.

Specifically, she experienced a lack of time freedom in 4 main quadrants:

1. Health and Wellbeing: 

“As a busy mom, and corporate executive in my 30’s, I was skipping breakfast. I wasn’t exercising, and I would get up at 5:00 AM and rush to the office before the kids would wake up and get home often after dark.”

2. Relationships: “Even though I was seeing some success at work, I felt like I was sacrificing time with my kids and my connection, closeness and romance with my husband.”

3. Career (Vocation): “As a mother of three and the primary breadwinner for the family, I felt a tremendous amount of pressure to just put my head down and work to put food on the table.”

4. Time & Money Freedom: “I just couldn’t figure out how to do what I loved and make enough money doing it. I felt really deep sadness in my heart that I didn’t think that I could ever live my purpose.”

Jennifer’s breakthrough story goes into how she overcame each one of her challenges, silenced her inner critic, and created a life she loves through her coaching business.

The same is possible for you. But the journey towards freedom starts with a decision.

A decision to face your current challenges with an open mind and look at the cracks as opportunities. So let’s start with identifying the most common challenges that prevent coaches from experiencing full time freedom.

What are the Challenges of Achieving Time Freedom as a Life Coach?

There’s an easy way to show up as the best version of yourself to your clients:

Create a business structure that supports your desired results. 

With that said, if you would love more time freedom as a life coach, first check that you’re avoiding the following pitfalls:

• Only coaching one-on-one coaching sessions.
• Not setting healthy communication boundaries.
• Charging by time versus results.
• Not having automated systems to leverage your time.
• Staying past the agreed length of the coaching session.
• Over-delivering out of fear.
• Not getting help or delegating tasks and doing everything yourself.
• Deciding that someone “can’t pay” and not charging enough or at all.
• Not qualifying your clients.
• Deciding they are not deserving of more pay.
• Not setting office hours.

You can look at this list as opportunities for growth, rather than mistakes. These are common things we see in early coaching businesses, which also means they have simple solutions.

So let’s get right into the 6 ways to honor your time freedom as a life coach and build the business of your dreams!

1. Write Down All the Reasons Why Time Freedom is Important to You (Your Vision)

Writing down your thoughts helps you create a spiritual and emotional connection with your physical reality.

For instance, at Brave Thinking Institute, we talk about writing down our dreams all the time. It’s scientifically proven that we are 42% more likely to achieve our dreams and goals by writing them down on a regular basis.

When you make writing down your vision a daily practice, you’ll be reminded of what’s really important in life and create a habit of self-reflection and goal-tracking.

What words are related to freedom in a life you love?

If you don’t have a clear picture of why you would love more time freedom in your life, start with word association.

Let’s use these testimonials as an example:

“I put my personal life first — my self care, my golf, my family and friends, my vacation. I put all of that in first, for the first time ever.” — Maria Miyashiro, DreamBuilder Graduate

Notice the positive keywords here: self-care, golf, family, friends, and vacation. Maybe some of these things resonate with you too. Write down those positive associations as you build your “why” and your vision.

Writing down the things you would love to release from your life can be helpful too:

“For 20 years prior to me working with Mary, I had systematically given away my life to my job. I felt undervalued and definitely was overworked. I was mentally and physically exhausted.” – Anne Prinz, Life Mastery Consultant

With this simple exercise, you’ll be taking the first step to aligning yourself with the time freedom you dream of.

2. Imagine what Time Freedom Looks Like in your Life (Your Experience) 

Writing is only one dimension of change.

Next, ask yourself what life would be like once you achieve the results you want.

One exercise you can use is to imagine what life looks, feels, hears, smells, and tastes like with time freedom. Be as detailed and specific as possible.

For example, think about how you would feel being at home with your loved ones.

What is the atmosphere like in your home? Do you hear laughter from your kids playing around? 

Maybe you’re cooking something on the stovetop and the aroma is wafting through the air!

You look at the clock and realize you have nowhere to be. You can enjoy your clean home, happy kids, and good food in peace.

Step into the version of yourself that has all the time you’d love with your kids, your passion, your travel, and everything else in your vision.

In short, lean into “living as if.”

3. Get Clear on your Ideal Clients (The Easier They are to Work With, the More Time You’ll Save)

Early on, it can be easy to have a “scarcity” approach to life coaching.

This can manifest when coaches accept clients without vetting them. As a result, they end up with clients who don’t align with their ideal avatar, demand more follow-up, and require additional tasks that eat into their time.

In addition, you’ll feel drained after each session and will need more time to reset your energy.

But with heart-centered enrollment, you can attract aligned clients who value your worth and treat your time with respect!

Ideal clients who will:

• Show up on time.
• Respect your office hours.
• Pay for your service with little to no back-and-forth.

Refuse to Trade Money for your Time

The last one on the list is vital. If you’re not charging enough for your services, your soul will feel it. You may find yourself discounting yourself over and over again, thinking you’re doing your clients a service. Instead, you’re doing yourself – and them – a disservice.

As a life coach, you get paid for the value you bring, not the time you put in. 

Lean into that blessing. 

Create a process (such as a questionnaire) to qualify potential customers and be bold with your price points. In exchange, you’ll be rewarded with “time saved” from dealing with unaligned clients. And your clients will benefit from finding a life coach that aligns with them as well!

4. Set Healthy Communication Boundaries with Your Clients

One of the easiest ways to lose track of time is by being fully accessible to your clients 24/7.

You might feel as if you’re extending love and care, but it’s at the expense of your own self-love and self-care.

Consequently, you’ll feel scattered, stressed, and stretched out in many directions.

This will affect your current and future coaching session.

In a great coaching session, both the coach and the client generate a state that can connect them to the Infinite. This results in natural flow and inspired conversation.

On the flip side, this could go on after office hours.

To honor your time, set office hours and let your clients know about them even before they enroll with you.

Tell them they can expect “x” amount of time for a response if they send a message outside of office hours.

Make it clear.

Imagine how much easier it would be if all your clients communicated on the same channels. Focus on one channel, instead of having a few in Slack, a few via Asana, and a few through Basecamp.

In short, set boundaries and clear expectations so both you and your client can benefit.

5. Learn to Delegate as your Coaching Business Grows

Let go and let grow.

It took me a while to get that.

I used to have a serious case of “lone ranger” syndrome. I felt like if I asked for help, I didn’t really earn the result.

Eventually, I learned the truth:

Every successful person on the planet is a master at asking for help.

Oftentimes, we experience overwhelm because we aren’t finding the time to focus on what matters. Instead, we try to save money by wearing all the hats. 

But it doesn’t turn out the way we expect.

Sure, you might save money – but it’s at the cost of your time and sanity. It’ll also prevent you from making the difference you’d love to make!

If doing things solo has worked for you so far, remember that we all have 24 hours in a day. 

And once you max out the hours you can work in a day, your business growth stagnates.

Delegation helps you grow your business without working yourself to the ground or giving up more personal time. So, instead of spending hours working on something you dread (like accounting, perhaps), find someone who loves that work instead.

Even if you’re great at accounting and enjoy doing it, consider delegating if it gets in the way of tapping into your full potential.

Ultimately, when you delegate, you free up time for what matters most to you.

6. Get Trained in a Proven, Repeatable System of Transformation

The biggest time drain is working with clients while you’re still trying to figure things out yourself.

The level of confidence you have in your ability to deliver the transformation your clients desire has a lot to do with how much time you spend preparing and planning for your coaching sessions.

To illustrate this point, imagine 2 hiking guides.

One of them is equipped with a GPS and a full toolkit assembled by experienced guides who have successfully led people up the mountain.

The other carries multiple road maps and a bag of items they think they’ll need on the trip.

Let’s say someone comes up to them and asks “Hey, I’ve wanted to climb this mountain for a long time. What’s the fastest way to get there?”

Obviously, the guide with the GPS and toolkit will have the solution he’s looking for as well as the quickest path to success.

In the same way, your clients have a short amount of time to work with you on their journey. 

At the Brave Thinking Institute, we know how important it is for you to deliver what you promise to your clients.

That’s why we provide our coaches with the coordinates, toolkit, and everything else they need to make success inevitable as a life coach. 

We know that having a proven, repeatable system will get your clients to their desired transformation faster and save you time and energy. 

And make any mountain into a molehill. 

Decide on Your Dream from Where You Are, With What You Have

Let me close with a story about Mary Manin Morrissey, Founder of Brave Thinking Institute. She went from full time employee to teaching transformation by investing what she could: 4 hours a week!

Mary structured “block time” to work on her business. Every Saturday, she would dedicate four hours to her business and hire a babysitter to watch her kids. 

Each night, she would visualize what she could accomplish in those four hours. Slowly, but surely, things began to move forward. 

In the 50 years since that point, Mary Morrissey has helped millions of people create lives they love and bring their dreams into reality.

In short, it’s all about doing what you can, with what you have, with where you are.

You can start by implementing the 6 golden, simple steps to seal whatever is leaking time from your coaching business. 

At the end of the day, you probably became a life coach to fulfill one of the most essential human desires: to take control of your time. 

For more information on how to build a profitable coaching business without sacrificing your time freedom as a life coach, download our free Thriving Coaching Business Checklist.

Inside, you’ll discover how to create a business that runs on auto-pilot so you can work when you want, where you want. Most importantly, you’ll avoid the mistakes most beginner life coaches make and short-cut your way to success!

To golden opportunities,

Mat Boggs