Ep 156: Steal the Game Changing. Takeaways I Learned Investing With 5 Elite Business Coaches : Business Streamlining for Work-Life Balance
Episode Summary
What really moves the needle in a business at a high level… and what’s just noise? I’ve tested it all so you can skip the fluff.
If you’ve wondered what it’s like inside the most exclusive business coaching programs and what you’d learn from them—this episode is your sneak peek behind the curtain. You’ll hear my top takeaways from working with five of the industry’s most elite business coaches so you can not only scratch the itch of curiosity, but start applying my takeaways to your business immediately (and for much less)!
In this episode you you will:
Learn what the top 1% of entrepreneurs are doing in $100K masterminds—it’s probably not what you think
Learn what one of the world’s best ads strategists said is the thing you MUST get right to be successful with digital advertising
Hear the coaching moment that finally freed Jenna from the fear of “saying the wrong thing”—and launched this very podcast
Press play to start designing the intentional workweek that lets you earn, live and enjoy summer on your terms.
Resources Mentioned:
“How Many Hours Could You Gain Back?” Quiz: Find out how many hours you could shave off your workweek and the biggest opportunity in your business for gaining hours right now. Take the quiz
Clarity Accelerator: Schedule a call with Jenna about joining the Clarity Accelerator--the same mastermind that we talk about in this episode--to unlock your inner genius, streamline your strategies and offers, and dial in the mindset that lets you work smarter, not harder.
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Power & Potency: Sign up here to get on the waitlist for Power & Potency, the new mastermind for highly accomplished women entrepreneurs, and hear all new information as it's released:
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Find Jenna on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theuncommonway/
This podcast dives into the potential of balancing a business and life without sacrificing revenue or impact. It helps women business owners and mompreneurs overcome overwhelm, decision fatigue, and the guilt of working less and stepping away from hustle culture while increasing leadership, strategic decision making, alignment and delegation / team building. Learn to build powerful habits and mindset, embrace smarter and higher vibration work methods, and master time management by streamlining tasks, implementing business systems, and even prioritizing self-care. We explore efficiency and energetics, productivity and filling your cup, automation and where to personalize your efforts … all to reduce overworking, and finally take time off—without the fear or shame—whether that is with high-ticket offers, scalable offers, or passive income. Say goodbye to imposter syndrome and people pleasing while running a small business: It's time to shift your mindset, reclaim your work-life balance, and thrive!
Full Episode Transcript:
Jenna Harrison: (0:00 - 3:34) In this episode, you'll peek behind the curtain into the most exclusive programs of five of the world's top business coaches and find out the most important and business-transforming things that I learned from each one. Welcome to the three-day workweek, helping women entrepreneurs run profitable, meaningful businesses in just three days a week if they like, without stress, guilt, or sacrificing growth. I'm your host, Jenna Harrison, sharing practical strategies, mindset hacks, and even some woo to help you work smarter, lead boldly, and find true balance. Let's dive in. Welcome, welcome back to the three-day workweek. I was on a discovery call with a new client last week, and she asked me, who are the coaches I've learned from? And I thought, that's a really good question. But also, the answer to that question and the details behind it are things that my clients have loved hearing about. So, I realized, I'm sure you will too. I am the person who takes my business very seriously, and I always want to work with the best of the best. If I perceive there's some area where I have a knowledge gap, or the business is possibly underperforming, I go find the person who really understands that subject matter, and then I work with them in their most exclusive program, because I want access not only to their knowledge, and of course, their direct assistance in applying that knowledge, but I want to be around them, and I really want to absorb the way they think, and the way they act. And sometimes, I've learned the most from a coach's completely offhand comment, something that I never would have heard otherwise. Now, I've also worked with great coaches for mindset, for energetics, for somatics. Some of you may not even know what that last one is, that's okay. But if I had included all of those people, this would have turned into an epic episode. So, I'm keeping my focus on business coaches, because I want to keep these episodes really bite-sized for you. So, in this episode, you will learn what the top 1% of entrepreneurs are doing in those $100,000 masterminds. It's probably not what you think. And you'll learn what one of the world's best ad strategists said is the thing you must get right to be successful with digital advertising.
And you'll hear the coaching moment that finally freed me from the fear of doing the wrong thing, and is responsible for me launching this very podcast. But before we dive in, thank you to everyone who participated in our Summer Days of Deals. I hope that you had as much fun as I did.
I'm so excited to work with you and to see the results you create. If you missed it, or are listening to this episode at some future date, you can go to theuncommonway.com forward slash D-O-D bonus, that's Days of Deals bonus, to be notified about our next round of really fun 24-hour-only offers that are often one-of-a-kind, may never be released again, or there's just some really cool deal or bonus for one of our other offers. You just never know.
It's just always fun surprises, because I always just lean into my intuition and what I've been hearing from my people, and I just roll with it. All right, that link will be in the show notes. And so now, let's get down to it.
(3:35 - 5:07) Okay, the first coach that I'll talk about is actually my current coach, but she was my first business coach as well. Her name is Louisa Zhou, that's Z-H-O-U. And I came to her after a couple of years in my business.
I had been trying to DIY everything myself. I'd been taking a bunch of different courses and treating them as if they were my full-time job, rather than actually doing client-getting activities. I was really in the consumption and the studying mode.
But then I had my child, and all of a sudden, I realized that I had recreated the life of my mom, because I really wasn't bringing in income, and I'd eaten through all the savings I had from my years in corporate, so I was completely dependent on my husband. And that sent all sorts of alarm bells ringing in my head. I'm sure that many of you independent women can relate to this.
And that was the turning point when I decided everything had to change, and that I was going to hire myself a top-notch business coach. And it was from her that I learned how important mindset was, but also your energy and the energetics behind your business, which is not what I thought I was getting myself into. I sought her out because she was a Princeton-trained engineer, she was very left-brained, and I thought that would be the perfect counterpoint to the way my brain worked.
(5:07 - 9:50) I wanted someone who would really help me be disciplined, be able to do the math and tweak the funnel numbers and really analyze everything down to the T and the I, because at the time, I felt really insecure in those areas, which I now understand is completely part of our conditioning rather than true fact. I have an episode about why only 2% of women entrepreneurs hit the seven figure mark, I'll link to it in the show notes, and it goes into a lot more detail on this. But what happened as we were working together is that there came a point, finally, where I had all of the systems in place, all of the messaging in place, I was doing, taking all the action, doing all the things I was supposed to be doing, and yet I wasn't bringing in clients.
And finally, she's the one that said to me, Jen, I think this might be a mindset issue. And because I'd built that trust with her by that point, I could actually hear what she was saying to me. And I decided to try it out.
I hired a mindset coach, and immediately started seeing changes in my business, that combination of the strategy side, and then the mindset side was so powerful. And so obviously, once I saw how important those both were, I always wanted to bring that to my clients as well. Once she saw that I was really open and really coachable and doing the work, she also started to open up to me about the energetics.
And she was able to tell me, this is one of the great things about working with the best of the best. She was in masterminds that would even cost $100,000 with these top, top earners. And the entire thing would be about energetics, would be about attraction, would be about the energy that you're in as you're doing the work that you're doing.
And I started seeing it for myself. Even though I was the biggest skeptic and never would have believed it, I would see how I would clear a block. And then before I would even take action, I there was no time to take action.
There were already people coming in booking in that were either a different caliber of client or a different quantity of clients. Somehow there was a change just through the inner work that I was doing. So I have an episode on that as well, called How Entrepreneurship Made Me Woo.
And it's talking about this time in my career. And it ended up changing everything for me because back then I was a performance coach. I was not a business coach.
But I was investing in my business in a way that the people around me were not. And so even when I was working with my clients on performance coaching, because of the circles I was moving in tended to mostly be entrepreneurs, of course, I wanted to help them succeed. Of course, I was passing on everything that I was learning.
And then they were starting to get amazing results. When you brought this performance coaching aspect together with the strategy and the mindset and the energetics, it was really explosive. But I still felt a lot of shame about it.
Honestly, I would only talk about energetics with my closest clients. And I did not talk about it publicly until I launched this podcast. Actually, it was kind of a big coming out a big vulnerability moment for me to declare that side of my work.
But anyway, we had a mastermind program and we would meet every two weeks. It was a large mastermind, probably 30 plus people, I think, and we would meet every two weeks. And she would answer everybody's questions on these calls.
So they would be two and a half hours long. Quite honestly, I hated it. I was the mom of a newborn, I felt completely exhausted.
I was working nap times and evening seven days a week. And so I only wanted information tailored to me and I didn't yet understand the power of group coaching, which is a shame because I would turn I would mute the volume of these calls until it was my turn to get called. And so I was missing out on so much great coaching and great ideas from other people in the group.
Now, ironically, I do work with her one to one, of course, for a lot more money. But now that I've seen the power of group work, I wish she had a mastermind. I would love to be in a mastermind now.
But obviously still happy to have her as my coach. We meet once a month for 45 minutes, and then the rest of our work is all through WhatsApp. All right, let's talk about another high end coach that I've worked with Brooke Castillo.
(9:51 - 10:21)
For those who don't know, she is the founder of the Life Coach School, from which I have a coaching certification. And because she has so many thousands of people as clients, she holds these high end, much more private, get togethers and coaching experiences that I've been able to be a part of. The most impactful thing that she really helped me understand is about how much power we have to create who we are to really reinvent ourselves.
(10:22 - 16:30)
There are so many ways of thinking that we adopt and we don't even realize that they're optional thoughts or optional beliefs or that we could be different. We just assume this is the way we are. This is the way we've always been.
These are the kinds of colors I like. These are the kinds of situations that I excel in. What if so much of that is not true? What if you could question all of that and then decide intentionally how you want to be and then step in to creating that? Not just overnight acting as if and not really believing it, but truly becoming that kind of person, that kind of woman.
What would be possible for you? This is some of the deeper transformational work that I do with my private clients. And it's what's helped me personally go from a person who felt very much like a victim to circumstances, had a very strong inner critic, I was a huge perfectionist, really believed that I was not good at math, was not good at business. What else? Oh my gosh.
Well, I had a lot of money issues. And looking back now, I really didn't trust myself. I really didn't trust that I was supported in any way.
I kind of felt like I was out there slugging through all the hardships of life. And this is sounding dramatic, but only I could take care of myself. No one was going to do anything for me.
I had to make it all happen. And it was exhausting, just an exhausting way to live. Such high standards that had really gotten me far in life, but they weren't going to get me where I needed to go.
And they weren't sustainable because I was going to burn out. In fact, I did burn out several times. We had a few group calls, and then we had a live in-person event that was a day or two.
When it was my turn to get coached by her, I talked about my fears about starting a podcast, actually, funny enough, and specifically this fear about getting it wrong, doing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, and maybe then getting called out for it. Somehow, I guess it had felt safe for me to do that with my clients because they had chosen to work with me. They'd kind of adopted this philosophy.
But somehow, if I was out there on the public record saying, Hey, alignment is really the way to go. It will accelerate your results and make your life so much easier. But what if I were wrong? What if somehow there were some way of knowing for sure that I was wrong, and I had in some way defrauded all of these listeners? And I remember she said, Well, if that turns out to be, then just tell them you were wrong.
Isn't it funny how sometimes it's just so easy for someone outside of your head to see the things you just never even considered? All right, let's talk about Tara Zerker. She had a program called Successful Ads Club, and I was in the highest tier of that with the most personalized interaction. She's a very successful Facebook ad strategist.
She had an agency managing millions and millions in ad spend. And then she also had this program teaching people to run ads for themselves, or with the support of her program coaches. And what she taught me is that all of the things that you think are difficult about ads, like the targeting and the pixels and the funnel strategies and retargeting strategies, are actually not the hard part.
They're not rocket science in her language. What is rocket science is figuring out what do your people really want? How do they really talk? How do they really think? And how do you create resonance with them? That was huge for me, because guess what, those were the things I was doing. And that really helped me see I am helping people with the rocket science.
This work that I'm doing is so valuable, but I really struggled with that. Beforehand, it was challenging. When I was first doing business coaching, it was a done-for-you service as well.
So I was writing people's copy. And when I stopped doing that, I had a lot of hang-ups, thinking that what I was doing might not actually be that worth it, might not really be that valuable. Now I had built, I was building up from that, but when I heard her say that, something just clicked for me.
And I was so grateful, because I really saw it in a new light. I'm sure you've had those moments yourself as well, where someone else outside of you can say something about you that feels a little bit like, aw shucks, me? Really? But at the same time, you can see they're sincere about it. She wasn't saying this just to help my ego.
She was just saying it to the group at large. I just overheard her and was able to recognize it in myself. A huge turning point for me.
I don't remember how much I paid for this, but the way the container looked was that there was a curriculum that you studied, and then there was also, there were like five different program coaches, and they would have a call, each of them would have a call on a subsequent day. And so any day of the week, you would be able to hop on and be on a call with a copywriting coach or with a tech coach. And so another reason that was helpful is that I saw how a highly large-scaled program could still be giving people that personal touch, that high touch.
So that was really inspiring for me, because I've always first and foremost, cared about client results. To the point, sometimes even in the beginning when I, where I just wouldn't sell, because I was so afraid of being out of integrity in some way. Okay, let's talk about Stacey Bayman, the sales coach.
(16:30 - 18:48)
I was in her program called the 200k Mastermind for two rounds, I believe. And I have to say, out of all the masterminds I've been to, this, except for my own, of course, but this was the most fun, because at the time, it always started off with an in-person retreat at a really swanky hotel. One year, we were at Cabo in Mexico, and the rooms cost, at that time, some of the highest hotel rooms I'd ever paid for in my life.
But they were beautiful, and the food was amazing. And it just helped you see yourself in a different way, to think, I am a business owner, traveling for business to a business conference in this way, and I can start to see this as part of my life. I can start to normalize this.
From Stacey, I really learned the importance of believing in your offer with so much conviction, and really being vigilant about rooting out any doubts and fears that are lingering in your mind about it, because they will always affect how you speak about the offer, your body language as you show up and talk about your offer, your presence on a sales call. So how you think about your offer, how you think about your people, and how you think about yourself, all the time affect what you're doing. And you can really start to pick it apart and see it with such precision.
Like, when I'm thinking this, I end up doing this, I end up not doing this. And the beauty is just liberating yourself from all of that gunk that's been swirling up in your head, recognizing that the brain will always skew towards the negative. Just because it's having those thoughts, it doesn't mean those thoughts are real.
And it's your job, and nobody else's job, to go out and gather the evidence for the thoughts that really support you, and to practice the thoughts that really support you, and to build your reasoning and your rationale around those thoughts until they become rock solid. And lastly, let's talk about Vicky Louise. I went to her specifically to unravel the thoughts that I had about time.
(18:49 - 22:09)
This was at a point where I'd seen the benefits of not working as much and being more in alignment, but my nervous system and my old mindset would still have me kind of ping-pong back and forth into my old ways. And as I've mentioned before, I did all the things. I did therapy, I did coaching, and one of those things was this work, which was hugely impactful and important to me, because we questioned everything that we had come to believe about time.
And I still have clients asking me to this day, like, but really, do some things just take time? You know, where is that line between it can happen in an instant, and you just got to put in the work? But what's interesting is that we substitute time for work so often. We say, this is just going to take time, when really what it means is this is just going to take work, or this is going to take practice, or this is going to take anything else other than time. Yes, you may need to put in some reps on some things, but also time is not what creates our results, especially as entrepreneurs.
Many other things create our results, such as the value that we're creating, such as the resonance we're creating with people. But when we put time front and center, rather than those things that really count front and center, we're not only delaying our progress, we're really disempowering ourselves. It's almost like they talk about smoke and mirrors.
And so you keep kind of chasing the wrong thing. You know, you keep trying to work more, or work longer, or do harder. But that's a mirage.
That's not the real thing. The real thing is right over here. And you can't see it, because you're so busy chasing this other thing that you've been told is what will create results for you.
So hugely grateful to Vicki for just providing the container for me to do this kind of deep work. And of course, for her leadership and guidance, as we were all working through it. Okay, I hope it was helpful to get that little behind the scenes sneak peek.
I know I always love hearing about other people's experiences, and what their biggest takeaways are, and what it's really like behind the glitzy facade of all those nice sales pages. And just as kind of an overall summary from everything we've talked about, these programs all looked so different. And it's just a testament about how there's no one right way to do anything.
What really counts is what is right for you and right for your customers. And I just want to point out here that I love all of these people. I hear some stories about people that have had negative experiences with coaching.
I haven't seen it. Sometimes I've acted very quickly to move forward with coaches. Other times I've watched and waited for a bit.
But every coach that I've worked with has really cared very deeply about their client's journey and their client's results. And also, I've been the one to step up and get the great results. I've decided beforehand that I was going to get great results, and I've done the things to get the great results.
(22:09 - 23:59)
I've been on many of the people I'm talking about here. I've been on their podcasts as their testimonial client, talking about the wins I was able to get within their programs. Actually, that's a really good point that I didn't talk about.
Tara Zerger, the Facebook ads. I actually did not apply myself in that one. It was at a time when I was involved in other coaching programs, and I kind of didn't really think clearly about what my availability was going to be during that time frame.
And it really helped me see, you can be working with the best of the best, but if you aren't doing the work, nothing happens. It's like a professor in the university, teaching exactly the same thing, has the exact same office hours for everyone, and yet some people get the A's, and some people get the C's or D's. So my advice after all of this coaching that I've done, is just decide in advance that if you want the transformation badly enough that this person is talking about, decide that you're going to be the one to get the A. Because then it's never about trusting the coach, or trusting the process, or trusting, well, will I get my ROI? Because all of the trust is on you.
Do you trust yourself to get your ROI? I hope the answer is yes. If not, then you probably really need a coach. It's like if you don't have time to meditate, you probably need to meditate.
If you don't quite trust that you can get results, you probably really need to work with a coach to learn how to get results. But there you have it, my top five takeaways behind the scenes for five high-end coaching programs. I hope you have a wonderful week, and let's talk again on Tuesday.
(24:03 - 24:18)
Thanks for joining us here at The Uncommon Way. If you want more tips and resources for developing clarity in your business and life, including the Clarity First strategy for growing and scaling your business, visit theuncommonway.com. See you next time.
