Getting my sea legs: year 1 of indie coaching & consulting
My "indie journey" doesn't have a clear start date so let's make it today, April 29.
I'm going to keep this short, more postcard than post. Don't let the brevity fool you, or future me: this was a dense year.
Around this time last year I was in the unusual position of winding down a nonprofit, a process that took some time but also afforded me the runway to figure out what it was I wanted to do next.
I'd benefitted from the coaching of Johnny LaLonde and Jay Wilson during that time, and the work with them sparked the idea that coaching might be an avenue for me to explore.
This year a bunch of destabilizing family stuff came up, so my professional development merged completely with my psychospiritual path. I re-entered therapy, took up coaching with the excellent Toku McCree, and signed up for training with Upbuild, which is an absolutely amazing program full of generous people. I highly recommend it. I deepened my spiritual practice by attending retreats, receiving further guidance from my teacher Kenneth Folk, enrolling in Michael Taft's tantra course, taking breathwork courses, and beginning Iyengar yoga with the wonderful Dan Shuman. I supported Ken McLeod with some of his projects and he invited me to join the board of his organization Unfettered Mind, which I was honored to do.
I read a ton of books and spent a lot of time curled up in various vulnerable states of healing. The audiobooks of Clarissa Pinkola Estés gave me the profound gift of self-understanding.
Here's what I mean by sea legs: gradually, things just got easier. When I started this journey, I was: preoccupied by the coaching vs consulting distinction; swinging between fear of not being able to do this and fantasy of being one of the best to ever do it; disconnected from what I really wanted; somewhat skeptical about the coaching modality; thinking about my career like a startup.
A year later I am: less worried about how legible I am to the market; realistic and practical about income; coming from a deeper place in my body; all-in on the coaching modality; thinking about my career like an art project.
I still have a ton to learn but I feel the beginnings of a basic everyday stability that has nothing to do with external factors. In other words I have my sea legs under me.
Here's what I would tell myself a year ago:
1/ Be prepared to invest a year of time and significant money into healing, integration, and development. By all means try to spin up your coaching business in parallel, but make it a secondary focus. Open yourself up fully to inner work and reinvention. You will go through some seriously hard material and your life will be upended. But isn't this what you signed up for? What did you expect?
2/ Distraction is a symptom, not a problem to solve. Your distraction comes from not knowing what you want. Not knowing what you want comes from being a broken wanter (credit to my coach Gina Kellogg for this phrase). Being a broken wanter comes from deep, early wounds. Healing those takes time. So be patient.
3/ You have a ton of people who love you and want to support you. You don't need more supporters, you need to lean more on the supporters you already have. Asking for help will drain you until (1) you get used to it and (2) you start treating yourself better.
4/ You are not building a startup. To get to a solid place you need about 2-3 consulting gigs and 4-5 coaching clients. These are not big numbers. Don't think in funnels, think in relationships.
5/ Your new unit of business is not a signup or a click. It is a conversation. So just start having conversations. Going from 0 conversations/week to many conversations/week is the biggest leap you need to take. Talk to other coaches to help you discover whether you think this is for you.
6/ You might be worried now about "if I take path X I am pursuing my dream; if I take path Y I am abandoning my dream." Be suspicious of that framing. Don’t spend too much time getting hung up in those seemingly major forks in the road.
As I enter Year 2 of the indie journey the operative word is thrill, as in: what's thrilling? For me that word invites in excitement, possibility, terror. I intend to make this strange set of sensations my compass.
I'm relieved to rediscover that there's so much that's thrilling to me. What a chore life would be if knowing had the upper hand over not-knowing!
Love,
Nick