Of course, in many ways I was crazy.  Now here she is asking me about it and after some text exchanges (we haven’t connected to talk yet) I am soooo glad she reached out!  I am looking forward to speaking with her and giving her the straight truth that she is so famous for giving me over the years. 

You see, it seems she has stumbled upon what seems like milllions of coaching programs out there.  She mentioned two and that one was $5,000 and the other is $10,000.  I am not AT ALL surprised at those numbers but she was.  To be candid, I spent that and waaaaaay more in pursuing my coaching career a few years back.  Even just recently, I spent $2,400 for a program to teach people how to create programs.  Ha!  Isn’t that amazing?  Jury is out on whether it will be worth it but I suspect this one is actually providing more value than many of the others I have bought.  Not yet, because I realize that I am still far from creating a program.  But back to my friend. 

She was asking me about it because she is practical.  Yay for her!   She is not thrilled with her current job and I strongly suspect that she stumbled upon this idea, this promise, that you can replace your full time professional income with coaching.  I suspect she is thinking, like I did – I like to help; I know a lot of things; I could do this!  Certainly that was my thinking back when I quit my job and went all in spending tens of thousands of dollars to do the coaching thing.  What I didn’t know could fill a book.  Several books. 

But it ain’t that easy.  It ain’t that quick.  And for the vaaaaaast majority of folks, it ain’t gonna happen the way the sales page promises or at all.  I do not mean to down it.  I think coaching is an excellent service.  I believe strongly that receiving coaching can change your life for the better and that coaching, for people like me and my friend, I believe, can be very rewarding.   

It is just that there is so. Much. BS in the online space.  There is so much circular logic and “limiting beliefs”, “money story” and “possibility” vs real logic, soundness of thinking, straight talk and speaking in terms of probability.  But that is how the circle grows.  I simply cannot play that game.  I am not going to get on some high horse and say that I would never!  Because I tried.  I drank so much koolaid that I actually did try it that way.  It was a disaster. 

So I am super excited to speak with my friend and help her on her path with the wealth of wisdom I acquired.  She will not be duped the way that I was. 

Photo by delfi de la Rua on Unsplash

We will be getting it this afternoon so that means I gotta get my act together to get everything done this morning before I head over. I better make a list of things I need to accomplish or this morning will be gone before I know it. Planning is my friend. Even though my version of planning is really more like a framework and not a step by step do this at this time type of plan. I have tried the calendar thing. It hasn’t really worked for me in my business. It kinda works for me at my day job “real” work but not completely.

What works is a deadline. What works is doing a little every day. I don’t like to be rushed at the end and I do best in short sprints so that tends to work best for me. I really like to have the big calendar, meaning the entire month or even year, to be sketched in. When I have that framework, I guess they are deadlines of a sort, I can relax AND produce in my spurts. Of course, as the deadline nears, I will do more sprints in a day or week. But I don’t mind that. It still isn’t a marathon.

That is how this blog is coming together. I only really have time to work on it on the weekends, aside from the writing, which I am now doing every day, like it or not, whether I have some brilliance or not. Some good will come out of it as I get back to writing and blow out some of the cobwebs and start using my writing muscle again. A lot of it is pure shit. And that is okay. I expect that now! I also know it will get better and I am gonna share most of it anyway. Because maybe even if the writing isn’t so great, something within it will help someone.

This weekend I will not have as much time as I have had the last few, when I have been immersing myself in learning CSS and building out the website – customizing the theme is a more accurate description of what I am working on. I have to get myself in the right mindset because doing this work at the house is just as much what it is all about than doing the website. It also MOVES US FORWARD toward this thing we are building! What the heck? That is exciting, even if it seems somewhat surreal and perhaps not even true. We have had so many starts and stops, I guess I am getting numb to it.

Big thing today, though. Last night my hubby told me that our contractor had called yesterday and wanted to stop by to talk about getting started. What?!!! That is awesome news! And a bit scary/premature. We still don’t have all of the bids. We just got the initial architectural drawings two days ago, and they are not right. Our architect is out of town this weekend (of course) and can’t meet until next weekend, so it will likely be a couple of weeks before we get the next revision. We have got to go through it carefully to make all the changes on this first request for revision. If we miss something or are not clear, there goes a few more weeks and it will be Christmas.

And meeting with the contractor to discuss actually starting makes it that much more real.  Once we do, there is no going back.  It is a gut job.  Once the old is gone, there is only forward.