Starting as a Life Coach: Coping with Overwhelm by Using To-Do Lists for Momentum
So, you’ve made the decision to either dip your toes in for a ‘look-see’ or you’ve decided to go ‘all in’ as a life coach in your chosen niche coaching area. Great! So, then you start looking at what you need to do to get your business off the ground and attract clients and you suddenly find out about things like websites, membership access, domain names, email addresses, blogs, e-books and digital products, click funnels, lead magnets, upsell, auto-respond emails, content, creating programs, hosting platforms, social media paid advertising, affiliates … AAAnd all the pieces of the jigsaw become overwhelming and you your confidence in your ability to build your dream life coach career ebbs a bit. If all that hard stuff is needed just to get your dream life coach career off the ground in the first place, maybe it’s too hard and you’re not going to be able to do it after all? You definitely won’t be the first person wanting to launch their dream life coach career whose thought that, so read on …
It’s important to think about it like this: You are going to be running the business of ‘brand you’ and no business – EVER – opened its doors one day with all its ducks in a row and became an overnight success. The adage ‘better done than perfect’ is 200% on the money: no business waits until everything is perfect to launch, even icons like Tony Robbins, Brendon Burchard, Bob Procter, all started from scratch to consistently build their careers to where they are today. So, here’s how to get past the blocks to getting started and keeping going:
Success is Making a List
Launching is crucial to keeping momentum going. In terms of what you need to do to launch, what’s important is getting stuff out of your head and onto paper so you’re not trying to remember everything you need to do: we suggest you BREAK IT DOWN INTO A LIST!
Be warned: don’t get stuck in a cycle of ‘list-itis’ and wait until you’ve everything done or it’s perfect – you’re better launching bare bones than spending months crafting the perfect back-end only to be disappointed you’re not an overnight success: what you think is important and what your customers think are entirely different things. To keep momentum going to launch, we suggest using a combination of the Pomodoro Technique and the Traffic Light System.
Pomodoro Technique
Pomodoro technique is chunking your time to solely focus on one task at a time. Turning off social media, emails, all distractions and doing deep work for 20 minutes, taking a break, then carrying on with the same task or starting another.
Traffic Light system
The Traffic Light System is putting down all your to-do tasks into a list in terms of urgent, not so urgent, can wait – using the traffic light colors as your columns. By assigning all the tasks into columns according to priority you break them down into manageable chunks that you can tick off as you go and avoid overwhelm. For example, a basic task list for someone getting started as a life coach from scratch might look like this:
- Business plan (one page!)
- Marketing plan (also one page!)
- Budgets
- Brand or business name
- Domain name
- Email provider
- Website
- Logo
- Basic content for website that can be shared on social media platforms
- Short lead magnet (free ‘instant pain-solving’ digital product to gather potential client email addresses)
- Source PLR content
- Digital e-product or online course sales platform with sales funnels
- Online course and/or podcast host platform
- Business cards
- Phone number
Looking at your task list, what are the most important tasks, semi-important tasks, and tasks that can wait? For example, getting a domain name sorted and email addresses might be in the high priority column. Use Pomodoro to spend 20 minutes setting up a pre-done template for a ‘coming soon’ website landing page and invite potential customers to subscribe for updates while you’re getting set up in the background – you can even use Google Sites for a free one in the meantime (and yes, you can connect your domain for free, too). The website development itself can wait, but you need the domain in the first instance and a landing page with contact details – including email addresses for potential customers or business opportunities. T
So go ahead, get that dream business or career started today, and please make sure you enjoy the process along the way.
Ascend Life Coach Hub 