Coach Ajit (01:23):
Maybe you have the perfect job that you always wanted, but you wanna transition into a more meaningful career of coaching. Maybe you're a seasoned coach like this friend of mine, you've been coaching for 10 years, 15 years, and now you want to find the next layer, the next level of success in your career. If that is you, this episode might be perfect for you. You see, when I sat down with this friend of mine, I recognized like her, most of the coaches are at some version of transition in their coaching businesses. They're either trying to grow their business from a novice to something that is a little bit more successful. They're trying to transition from one-on-one coaching to group coaching or integrate different business models into their coaching. Sometimes they are new coach and so they're trying to transition between a job or another business to a coaching business.

Coach Ajit (02:13):
Sometimes when they're really, really successful, they're looking for the next level of success for themselves. And so they're transitioning from a business model that has worked for them forever now to finding a new business model. And with transition comes anxiety, with transition comes fear, with transition comes opportunity. So as our brain will always try to protect us, it leans into the anxiety, the fear, the concern of what this transition brings. And with this anxiety, this fear, this concern, we look out outwards of ourselves and say, okay, what is it that I can do right now? That can move me to this new transitionary career? How can I create this certainty of income? How can I create the certainty of clients? How can I create the certainty of my lifestyle? So I can transition into this new thing. And that is a fundamental problem with coaching businesses.

Coach Ajit (03:08):
You see, if you are a coaching business or a business, period, that is looking for creating a new future for yourself, you cannot start creating that future from where you are today. You almost have to take three steps back and look out into the future. Look out through the horizon and ask yourself a better question. Let me guide you through this exercise that I supported my friend with. So you can look at your transition in a better, more long term, more meaningful way for yourself. You see when we are trying to transition. And if we look at the immediate future as if tomorrow, next week, even next year, what tends to happen is we only look at the pieces that we have. What tends to happen is when we are transitioning our careers, when we are trying to create a bigger future for ourselves, we tend to look at what do we have today?

Coach Ajit (03:58):
And we start building from it. We say, I have an email list, for example, or I know these 10 people, or I know about this particular field. And we start creating from it, which may seem right. But if you are trying to create a long term sustained future for yourself, a long term sustained career for yourself in coaching, you may wanna look at the career slightly differently. Here is what I recommend for anybody that is trying to find what is the next thing for them. This is applicable to you as a coach. This is also applicable to any of your coaching clients. The first question that you wanna ask is if in three years from now, I sat down with you. What will your ideal future look like? Now there's a caveat to this question. When we ask a question around, how will your future look like in three years, most of us immediately respond with how our career looks like three years from now.

Coach Ajit (04:53):
When I ask for your future, I'm asking for your future, it involves your relationships. It involves your lifestyle. It involves your spiritual lifestyle. It involves your holistic being your health, your career as one of the options, but also your society, your, your friendships. It also includes if you are somebody who likes to travel, how does all of it look together? You see, we cannot create a future, or we cannot set the intention of creating the future to the universe until we know what that future looks like. Now it doesn't have to be perfect. You don't need to know exactly how everything is gonna look, because future is in the future. It's very hard to really exactly know where you're going, but do you tentatively know where you're going across all domains? When you ask that question, suddenly things start to reveal to you that otherwise would never be present.

Coach Ajit (05:45):
Let me give you an example for my personal life. So until I started defining all the different areas of life that I want success in and started saying, what would it mean for me to have that ideal life? How would my life look like? How would my lifestyle look like? How would my relationships, my parenting, my friendships look like until I started to holistically, look at my life. I just became a workhorse. I found myself constantly in the chase for career growth, constantly in chase of business growth, taking away the joy of living, taking away the joy of creation. And here's the secret because I was always chasing money. Money seemed to be so, so far away, it seemed like making money so hard. What I learned at that time is money is like any partner, right? So if you have a partner, if you love someone and you just chase them with a single particular agenda, you just keep needing them.

Coach Ajit (06:42):
You keep wanting them and you keep revolving around that. At all times, you don't create a love relationship. You create a needy codependent relationship, which never is joyous, which always feels like it's unfulfilled. Like the work needs to be done even more and more so. And that has less to do with the relationship itself, but the neediness in the relationship and I found money to be similar. The more you chased money, the more I chased money, more elusive. It became the harder it became to make more money. And so I realized, Hey, listen, maybe I've got this all wrong. Maybe this is not about money. Maybe it is about life. Maybe it is about all of it coming together and maybe I can have it all. And that started my social experiment, which is now almost eight years ago where I said, what if I stopped chasing money?

Coach Ajit (07:32):
What if I stopped chasing anything, but started chasing one big vision of mine that pushes me forward, but really started enjoying every single moment of mine as a process of creativity, as a journey of creativity, as a journey of joy as a being of joy. And that really unlocked a lot of things that I wanna discuss with you today to invite you to a different dialogue than you may be in right now, as you're trying to transition your business, as you're trying to create a coaching business, you see most people will tell you, Hey, build a coaching business. And these are the tools that work right now. These are the strategies that work right now and do these. And that's how you wanna build your coaching business. I would argue that you wanna build a coaching business that supports your life, not your life that supports your coaching business.

Coach Ajit (08:19):
You see, we could be all purposeful about what we are creating in the future. We could chase one big thing that we are creating the future impact in society or the amount of money we make or whatever that might be. But we could also chase living in this moment in the fullest expression of ourselves. And if we chase that, if we commit to that, it becomes easy to be able to create the abundance that we wanna create in our lives. So my invitation for you is the invitation that I made to my friend is the invitation I made to myself several years ago. I said, let me write down things that are important to me. Things that I value the most, and it involve things like relationship, parenting, learning, growth experiences, travel at the time, money, career, and leadership in some degree and writing, which is what I love.

Coach Ajit (09:08):
So I said, these are all the things that I truly truly enjoy, and I wanna have all of it in my life. And I wrote down in three years from now, my life's gonna look like this. It was a free journaling exercise, a free writing exercise in the journal where I said, I just wanna find out what do I even want? And once I started to discover, what do I really want? I started to write them down in different categories and see, and make sure that everything that gives me joy in this moment. So right now we're all right now were also in my vision of three years from now. And then once I knew where I wanted to be in three years from now, I first asked what is the person that will have all of these? What is the kind of person that would have all of these?

Coach Ajit (09:45):
And there were certain skills that I clearly lacked. And I said, okay, these are the skills that this person were having, so I need to acquire these skills. These are some of the responsibilities. These are some of the support systems that this person would have for me to have that life in three years from now. And once I defined that, it became easy for me to define my action today, based on that three year outcome, instead of trying to figure out how can I fit my current life to create bigger future for myself financially or career wise, I asked myself to say, what is it that I need to be, who do I need to invite into my life? What are the product services that I need to engage in? What are the things that I need to create for me to have this life? And based on that, I started to take actions.

Coach Ajit (10:27):
You see, the actions are gonna change dramatically for this particular friend of mine. She, like I said, is wildly successful already. And she was thinking about, oh, I can make some little money here and a little money there. And I said, well, what's the life that you're trying to create. Don't ask yourself how you'll make the money. Making money becomes so easy when you're choosing to live the life that you always wanted to live, because you are at ease and in flow with the life force. And because you are in ease and in flow with life force, because you are in ease and in flow with the universe, money just becomes one of the outcomes that you get from that experience of life. So I asked myself and I asked my friend now, how is it that you can do or what is it that you would like to do in three years from now that you can start doing today?

Coach Ajit (11:12):
Let's start doing that today. And let's start building systems and the skills that you may not have today, but you can build. But first let's define what is that vision of you that you're working towards and then work on what needs to be the action steps from today in coaching or in building coaching businesses. It's about inquiry. Are we asking a more meaningful question of ourselves as we define our coaching businesses? So what is more meaningful? How do I hack this reality together based on what I have, or is it more meaningful to ask ourselves of what is the future I wanna create and what are the actions I need to take today to create that future? And how do I commit myself to consistently take action towards that future that I imagine today. And I also know that it is unknown if I will ever have that future.

Coach Ajit (11:59):
But what I do know is because I'm creating that future and I'm living some version of that future right now, I'm enjoying this particular moment. I am enjoying and in joy of, in alignment with the universe of making sure that every moment is truly cherished. Every moment is truly joyous. Every moment is in place of creativity, every moment in, in place of where it is that I see the greatest expression of my life. So if you are in transition today, if you are trying to build a coaching business today, stop freaking out about how you will make the next thousand, $5,000, $10,000, $50,000 start wondering on how you can live the version of you that will have all of that, all of that lifestyle, including the money, all of that lifestyle. How will you start living that version of you, or start building that version of you and how to have the greatest joy as that version is being built?

Coach Ajit (12:55):
I think one of the greatest truths and the greatest awareness is that we can bring to our clients and to ourselves is now this moment, this present moment has all the power. This is the moment when we can start to reengineer all of our past. And this is the moment when we can start creating the future, because this moment is the only moment when we are completely free to make a choice, to make a choice, to create the future we want or not create the future that we want to be anxious right now, or to be excited right now, everything leans into this moment. And my invitation, my friend today is that you lean into this moment. And on that note, I wanna thank you. I wanna thank you to supporting this podcast. I wanna thank you for the encouragement that I constantly receive for individuals that are listening to this podcast, and they're tagging me and they're tagging the podcast, and they're sending me personal notes on how this podcast has become the default for them as coaches.

Coach Ajit (13:53):
I really, really appreciate each of these comments coming through. I'm so excited to bring future episodes on this podcast for you. If there is a special request of something that you would want me to tackle on this podcast, send me a note on Instagram. At @officiallyajit. I'll love to hear from you. If you enjoyed this episode, share this episode with a friend, share it on social media, so we can hear from you on how this podcast has been impacting your coaching career. Thank you so much for tuning in. This is Coach Ajit and you're listening to Master Coaching with Ajit.