We know we all have the same 24 hours in a day. But when we look at highly successful people, it’s easy to think like they know something we don’t. While we’re here counting down the precious minutes we have, others seem to have all the free time in the world.
It can feel overwhelming (if not almost impossible) to make a difference, create impact, and help others as a coach with all the other responsibilities you have on your plate.
In short, it can be hard to make time for what you’d love. While you’re never fully in control of your time, you can be empowered with sound time management.
In fact, one of the most common situations we find our clients struggling with is learning how to run their coaching business on top of a full-time job.
But the good news is that most of our own coaches and faculty started their coaching businesses while they were still in their corporate roles. Eventually, they were able to transform their part-time coaching business into life-changing, multiple six-figure careers and successfully transition out of their day jobs for good!
So today we’re sharing practical, actionable insights straight from our expert faculty and most successful coaches about time management as a coach so you can achieve time and money freedom.
This will empower you to do what you love (full-time) faster, with a lot more fun and flow! Let’s get started!
Why is Time Management Important for a Coach
Effective time management as a business owner helps with critical decision-making and overcoming the distractions that prevent you from creating a life you love.
But what’s the reality for most people?
They wake up already feeling drained. There’s not much of a morning routine, just the rush of getting ready for work and heading out the door. Throughout the day, they just feel sluggish and uninspired.
Once they clock out, they’re faced with the hectic schedule of their household responsibilities. They end up not spending time with their family as often as they’d love or paying enough attention to their own personal needs. And once they find the opportunity to work on their coaching business, thoughts of dissuasion, distraction, and delay creep into their subconscious.
Dissuasion:
“You’ll never find the time to work on your business. You’re always playing catch-up and you’re just going to wake up feeling even more tired than you already are.
“Distraction: “Do you really think you’re ready for clients? Your business isn’t even ready for social media, how are you going to market yourself? Focus on that first.
“Delay: “Aren’t you exhausted? It won’t hurt to just wait until tomorrow to try this again. Or maybe even next week…”
It’s common for people to work with this contractive energy, which makes it difficult to create the coaching business of their dreams.
Succumbing to these thinking patterns can eventually lead you to question whether or not life coaching is a viable career for you in the first place. Also, you may feel increased longing and discontent in four major quadrants of your life (which we will be discussing in the next section).
Life “Before and After” Achieving Time Freedom
Full spectrum success is about creating success in every aspect of life, not just one or two. This is contrary to the popular belief that you have to sacrifice happiness or abundance in one quadrant in life in order to have greater results in another.
For example, “You can either be rich or happy, not both.
“But the truth is, full spectrum success is possible for anyone – including you! And it could look like:
1. Health and Well-Being:
Not having time for self-care vs. dedicating time for things that will serve your mental, emotional, and spiritual health and wellness.
2. Relationships:
Lacking the energy to be present with your loved ones vs. being fully present in the moment together.
3. Vocation:
Constantly feeling like you aren’t fulfilling your true purpose vs. playing full out in your calling and sharing your unique gifts with the world.
4. Time and Money Freedom:
Having to trade your time for money vs. having an abundance of money and time to spend doing what you love, with who you love, and how you’d love to do it.
However, successful time management as a coach isn’t about cramming everything into a 24-hour timeframe. Instead, it’s about building a framework of habits and skills that leads you towards tangible progress and positive change.
The key is to turn the “disadvantage” of running a business on top of a full-time job into a valuable practice of being conscious of your schedule and being proficient with your time.
Balancing out this beautiful constraint will teach you to be more efficient and achieve what you once thought was impossible!
It’s a skill you can start learning and cultivating while you’re still in a corporate environment or structure. And it will continue to serve you after you begin running your own business full time!
How Do I Find Time for Coaching?
The first step to better time management as a coach starts within yourself. Your mindset has a lot to do with your work-life balance, especially when it’s a new skill.
Let’s break this down as the difference between “common hour thinking” and “Brave Thinking™” mindsets.
Common hour thinking focuses on your current circumstances, situations, and conditions. It relies on your own memories, paradigms, and internal programming to find answers. This is also called contractive thinking.
Ex: There are never enough hours in a day. I have to find time to work on my coaching business so I can finally quit my job.
Brave Thinking™, on the other hand, is expansive thinking. It concentrates on what’s possible, positive, and works beyond your circumstances, situations, and conditions.
Ex: I get to work on my coaching business and do what I love!
To bring your dream of becoming a professional coach and running a successful business into reality, start with how you think about your business and the time you invest in it. Envision what you would love to do in your coaching practice from where you are, with what you have.
Kirsten Welles, our Master Coach, shares how to create this vibrational shift during the bridging process of full-time job to full-time coach:
“There may be a period of time when [you’re] not full on in the coaching…This often will create this kind of push-pull energy.
And in order to really eliminate that and recalibrate that as an energy and create more coherence, what I invite our coaches to do is to make a decision that from this day forward you’re doing one thing and one thing only, and that is you are building a highly successful coaching business. And everything you do now falls under that umbrella, including every conversation you have, everywhere you go, including when you go to the J-O-B during the day, if that’s required.”
In other words, instead of feeling like you only have a limited time to work on your business, infuse your coaching into what you do throughout the day.
It’s about stepping into the version of yourself that already has everything you desire and living out your vision. The bottom line is to choose thoughts that create pleasure rather than pressure and write affirmations around specific objectives for your business. Remember to avoid the pitfall of perfection and focus on practicing better time management on a daily basis.
Now let’s begin exploring basic time management techniques that have worked for our students and expert faculty.
The Fundamentals of Time Management as a Coach
Time can be seen as an obstacle. But obstacles are not stop signs, they’re qualifiers. They’re opportunities to prove how much you would really love your dream and whether or not you’re willing to do everything it takes to make it your reality.
With that in mind, let’s transform time from an obstacle to an opportunity by learning a few easy strategies to manage your time and get more done.
The first step is breaking down the three types of time and how to use them effectively: Peak Time, Block Time, and Einstein Time.
1) Peak Time follows our biological clock (our circadian rhythm) and represents the time of day where you’re able to work at your best.
You could have the highest productive output in the morning, in the dead of night, or sometime in between.
When possible, schedule work you’d love to get done in your coaching business during peak times. If you can’t dedicate a long period of time, break it up into shorter sessions.
Write out a short to-do list so you can decide on what to focus on at a glance. You’ll find that your productivity shoots up without extra effort simply because you scheduled work during your peak time frame.
2) Block time isn’t a new strategy by any means.
It’s what most people talk about when they suggest turning off all distractions and focusing on one important thing at a time.
This is the time management strategy our Founder, Mary Morrissey, used to build the business of her dreams:
“What I learned about building the business was that I structured block time. I would hire people to watch my kids for four hours every Saturday. I would find someone or watch other kids during different times and then they would play at those houses during another.
And at night I would imagine what I might accomplish in that block time. Things began to move forward for me.
So, you do what you can do with what you have, and you stop thinking that there’s a scarcity of it. You can make in your mind that you can accomplish with spirit within those hours (or minutes) what other people might be able to accomplish on their own power in forty hours.”
3) Einstein Time is a concept shared by Gay Hendricks that centers around the importance of relativity. The concept works like this:
You could be at your desk job and feel like an hour has passed by while sitting down and working with a coaching client you love can feel like a minute. It’s all about the relationship you have with time and how it can flow when you’re doing what you love.
(You can learn more about how we relate to time by clicking here).The best way to expand your time and make you feel that you have more of it is to frame your thinking towards having “plenty of time” to do what you love.
By implementing these three fundamentals of time management as a coach, you’ll find yourself getting more done in the same amount of time and creating more results.
How to Create Greater Work-Life Balance
Work-life balance is possible for any life coach, even in the most high-stress environments. The key is to make a greater use of time by taking care of the little things that will create more room for focus and progress.
One of the best ways you can honor your time freedom is by being open and communicative with those around you.
Have honest conversations with those impacted by your new schedule like your partner, family, and friends. By sharing your intention, the time you’d love to set aside, and being transparent about your feelings, you’re giving others an opportunity to understand your intentions.
Secondly, start shifting your attention away from surface-level tasks (like spending hours learning WordPress to get your website set up) and focus on things that will make tangible, forward progress as an entrepreneur. This includes networking and investing in the right people to help you get to where you want to be faster.
The final piece is to believe in baby steps. Beginner life coaches can sabotage their results by focusing on perfection (which is unattainable), or by planning big leaps when the most productive thing they can do for themselves is take a small step in the right direction. Instead of overwhelming yourself with “everything” you have to do, choose “something.”
By having attainable goals, like working on your business for ten minutes a day, you’ll gain momentum.
As Mary Morrissey says, “Even baby steps will take you all the way up to Mt. Everest if taken consistently.”
When Should I Transition from my Full-Time Job to My Coaching Business?
At the end of the day, there is no “should”. Instead, you are the ultimate authority for deciding when the best time is to transition out of your full-time job.
But you have the power to start making change right where you are.
When we asked Lauren Brollier, one of our award-winning alumni coaches, for strategies for making a career pivot, she shared the following key points (you can read her full testimonial here):
- When I went to work with resentment in my heart, I realized that I was showing up as someone I didn’t want to be in the world: a person waiting for something to change. Be aware of your energy and what version of yourself you step into each day.
- Practice walking into work with the mindset of “already being a highly successful coach.” For me, I imagined that I was coming to work as a visitor, ready to inspire everyone around me! Use whatever image works best for you.
- By “BE-ing” who you want to be right where you are, you’ll find that you end up doing the best work possible! That was freeing to me because I was able to end my time there on a high note and within 6 months, I had enough income to fully transition into my coaching business.
Practice stepping into the version of yourself that has everything you desire, connect your vision to emotion, and witness the transformation that unfolds.
In fact, one of the core values we hold at Brave Thinking Institute is that we believe in people. “We believe that each and every one of us is far more powerful and contains more potential than any circumstance, situation, or condition.”
So tune into your inner wisdom to decide for yourself when you’re ready.
Ultimately, the answers lie within you alone!
Conclusion: Save Time (and Money) with Expert Mentorship
Every step you take as an entrepreneur that helps you save time and grow your life coaching business leads you closer to the freedom you desire:
Freedom to do what you love, serve others, and live a life of abundance without sacrificing any other area in life.
And by mastering time management as a life coach, you’ll be able to pursue your passion and break free from what’s expected of you to do what excites you!
But it’s hard to feel free when you’re overwhelmed, overworked, and stressed out trying to run a business without a proven plan or the tools required to succeed.
This is where mentorship comes in and accelerates the process of building the life coaching business of your dreams!
Jennifer Joy Jiménez, Co-Founder of Brave Thinking Institute and Founder of our Health & Well-Being Division, shares the following tips for life coaches making a career pivot (find her full message here):
- Follow your inner guidance.
- Find a mentor who has created the results you seek.
- Stick to a tested and proven coaching system.
- Fail your way forward.
- Do the work on yourself to shift limiting beliefs.
- Focus on serving, you will succeed.
The feeling of juggling between your full-time job and your coaching business has an end in sight. There are ways to collapse the time it takes for you to feel confident making the full transition into running your coaching business.
If you would love a deeper dive in building a profitable, sustainable coaching business, I encourage you to enroll in a free strategy session with us!
You’ll be connected to one of our highly trained team members who will help you make a quantum leap into the dream life you’re meant to create!
You deserve to make more of an impact, and that includes generating more money and time freedom in your own life. Book a strategy session with us today to start creating a life you love.
Think bravely and act boldly.
Mat Boggs
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