Catherine Stagg-Macey: Executive & Team Coach shares her highs and lows, with strong focus on moving out of an employed role into self-employment, while trying madly to avoid burnout!
AKS Welcome to A Listening Life, the podcast for coaches who are finding it hard work to build a sustainable, profitable business full of clients. I'm Aly King Smith, sharing stories and lessons learned from some of my successful peers and colleagues who've managed to crack the code and break through to a profitable, meaningful business. My conversation today is with the one and only Catherine Stagg Macey Catherine is an executive and team coach. She's also a creator and host of the podcast Unsaid at Work, a leadership podcast to help navigate career, leadership and workplace culture.
CSM Build that bridge for yourself, like go three days, go two days, take on an interim part time role or something. It'll take you longer than you think to build this business because you are new in this. It'll take a while for me to feel any sense of mastery. But that mastery, if I'm honest with myself, came through doing the work, not through more coach training.
AKS I'm so privileged to have Catherine Stagg Macey in my life, originally as my coach supervisor and now peer thinking partner and friend. Catherine was the first coach I remember who was really able to navigate that challenging path between leadership coaches, coaching and therapeutic coaching in the same breath. She helped me to keep my wheels on in a professional context as I negotiated personal loss while in a leadership role, a reminder of the massive impact of great coaching and supervision.
Since then I've watched and listened as she's evolved into next level Catherine, a digital presence, a podcast, a regular hilarious newsletter. This is a tiny dip into her amazing pool of wisdom as she shares some of her lessons learned and reflections that could be really useful to us all now as we build a coaching business.
Catherine, my friend, come with me in my time capsule, if you will, back to the time when you were able to think this is something, this is going to work, I can make this my business. What was going on?
CSM It's such an interesting question because there is no single point of me where I've I've felt this was going to work. So initially, financially, it was problematic.
By the time I felt on top of the finances, then my stress levels were very high, worrying about, can I maintain this? Like, yes, the money's coming in, but the cost of the business development and the sales is exhausting me. So I think it was probably seven years in.
ASK Really?
CSM It was a long time. And I joined the coaching company as a form of respite, I think, as a salaried employee. It's like, I can't, I can't. This is too much for me. I'll join as a salaried employee and COVID heads. We sort of had some values clashes and I left to start on my own again.
CSM This is 2020. And all of a sudden, all my clients just came with me and I made more money than I'd ever done in my entire life. And I'm like, Oh, so if there's a moment, it's probably, it's probably your 2019 having when I, since I started 2013. And then realising, looking back and realizing the layers that I had built in that allowed that to be possible.
CSM You know, so you have clients that you worked with before and they find you again, they follow you, not the brand that you were, they want to work with you.
AKS Yes, that's interesting.
CSM Yeah. And it just, somebody said to me very early on in my coaching career that there will come a time where you have enough goodwill amongst your client base that you probably won't be out of work.
CSM And they'll just come find you again, because they've moved on. And they're like, "Oh, we need you back in here." And you're like, "Oh, hello. I haven't spoken to you for three years." And it was kind of what happened at that point. And I'm like, "Oh, this is this." Yeah, that was like, "Oh, I can I can do this without burning myself out so that's the thing can I make the money to survive and thrive and can I do it in a way that doesn't burn me out
AKS yeah that's nice there are kind of two moments aren't there there's a it seems to be working but I'm running running really really fast and I'm really really tired and then there's a oh it's actually working and I'm okay and it's a thing yeah that's curious thank you about that I think I've had a very similar journey. Also just reflecting then, your hop into employment to get a breath coincided with me doing almost identically the same thing.
AKS I'd be intrigued to hear how you felt about it because I felt a sense of defeat to kind of, ah, I'm going into a job job. Actually, for me, it didn't last very long at all. I realised I needed to take the job to get the confidence that I didn't need the job.
AKS So I came straight back out again. But listening to other people who've done the same thing makes me realise it's not a defeat, it's just one of the things that you can do to energize yourself to go again. How do you see it now when you look back on that job?
CSM I started intense psychotherapy at the time I joined that job. So there was other things going on for me. There was no alternative, I think, in hindsight. Like there was a deep part in myself that was like you cannot do the healing that you need to do in this moment in your life and run, you know, have all the stress of running your own business, you just cannot. And so for, you know, a year, year and a half, I was in psychotherapy and, you know, crying for an hour and a half every week. And then, but able to show up because I knew my craft well enough. So it never impacted how I was coaching, but would absolutely have impacted how I was able to. able to hold the business. Had I had I still been responsible for that part of it, you know, build, innovate, create. Did I feel it as a defeat?
CSM Yeah, and it came, it was projected back on me as well. They would coach friends of mine going, "What are you doing that for?" And I'm like, "Oh God, what, what, what? No, I know why I am doing it." You know,
and I ended up having to use this metaphor of... I feel like I'm a drowning fog, just kind of coming out on the lily pad, you know, catching my breath. Catching my breath.
CSM Finding, you know, like, oh, the lily pad at least feel stable under my little amphibian feet. And people really struggled to understand that people are quite close to me, struggled to understand that. So it was this internally, I don't know, I cared that much because I was so in need of deeper healing, but I struggled with the implied judgment, implied and explicit judgment from others.
AKS This is so helpful to think about because it's the first time I've really thought about my own sense of that, everybody else's story when I made that decision to go into that job for a little while. So the reason it's coming up for me a lot now is when I did the research for a listening life, and I spoke to quite a lot of people about what would be helpful, many, many of them were talking about, I think I'm going to have to go into a job for a while. And the story behind that, now I think about it was, and that means I'm not doing a great job at this, in self -employment thing, I've failed.
AKS So thinking how interesting it could be for someone listening to this, if they've got, this often happens when someone has a back background, like an HR background or a consulting background, which could serve them. I could go into that little job, get a bit of cash, have a rest, and then come back to the coaching again. It's really different from, I've failed at being an entrepreneur and now I'm going to have to take a job job. Is that what I'm hearing?
CSM Well, I had that same dilemma in, I don't know, year one or year two, I think, of starting out, and I had blown through my... savings completely, and I had an ulcer, I had an unsupported boyfriend, and I'm really thinking like, what the actual have I done? Because it doesn't feel, it feels like a wildly idiotic decision of mine to do this.
CSM And at that point, somebody offered me some consulting work. So part -time like five days a month, in my old job. So like a part -time job, job job.
CSM Yes. I completely resented it. It was like, oh my God, I'm so, this is like, why am I doing this? I hated it. I left it for a reason and somebody gave me the mindset shift of,
why don't you see this as bootstrapping the other side of business? So you, yeah, you sack it up at the coal mine again for the sake of spending 15 days a month building the business that you want to grow. And you like, yeah. gave me so much freedom, that mindset shift of, there is some coal mine, should I got to do, but it's okay, because it serves a bigger picture. So yeah, I think there is a framing that's helpful.
CSM You can find your own mindset here of how can I hold this thing in a way that feels possible? Yes, to do the thing that I said I'd never do I wouldn't do, but serves a bigger vision.
AKS And with gratitude for it, you know, here's a skill skill I can use to restruct the other side of my business. Yes, because I I hear a lot of people at the end of their coach training You know, they've had a big career in something with a great big salary And now I'm going to be a coach and I'm going to stop all of that work And I'm going to become a coach and it scares me to death when people are talking that way thinking you need some kind of Bridge over from one to the other unless you've got a lot of cash in a pot somewhere in which case that might work
CSM Or doesn't matter, you know, you have, as is sometimes the case, you have a dual income household and your salary doesn't make a difference in the short to medium term.
CSM Yeah, if there was advice I would give myself was to not just jump out the plane without a parachute in that first year. I was like, what were you? I can see, I mean, in kindness to myself, I can see what was. was because I was in IT consulting. There was, I couldn't see a path to consult or even try and sell that into the tech industry because the tech industry was just not ready in the UK. It was not ready for coaching. They thought it was a bunch of woo -woo naval -gazing nonsense. And I'd sort of predicated some of my sales forecasts on, well, I know a bunch of people because I head out and a sort of personal brand in the consulting industry. And then they took the coffee meeting, initial coffee meeting and then blanked me from then on. - So it made you feel like it might work. - Yeah, and I think that's why I'd ask it as you know, twintly the whole of that year. - Yes. - All these little moments of hope. - Possibilities, yes. - But I completely agree with you. I think it's build that bridge for yourself,
like I said. three days, go two days, take on an interim part time role or something. It'll take you longer than you think to build this business because you are new in this.
CSM And you don't have the network for this. Well, maybe if you're an HR person, you do, but you don't know the right people who will buy this stuff yet. And that takes time.
AKS Yes, and I think probably even if you were to... to have a great network of buyers, it still takes longer than you think to deliver the great program, to do the reflection, to make the notes, to keep doing CPD, to work out how to do bookkeeping. It's all of the staff, isn't it? So all of those things have got to happen.
CSM Well, that's a good, that's another good point is there is a learning curve that I think a lot of people underestimate around how to run a business. So even as a consultant in my role, I had built businesses on someone else's dime. There was a sort of large B2B type business. So we had a marketing department and we had a sales department.
And so that particularly sales and marketing, I had to learn on the fly. And I think with part of the reason why I kind of burnt myself out, I didn't know the right skills and resources to tap into to build a personal branded coaching business, because that's different from building a global corporate IT consulting business. And I didn't understand that. And I had more skills than most coaches have coming out of it.
CSM I had run a PNL, I had hired and fired people, I knew how to build a business, I could sit and sales meetings. Like there was already several steps up from most of my coaching peers out of my coaching program.
AKS Yeah. So I'm hearing a strong story of no matter how great you are at all of the things that's going to take time and energy and find a way to resource that without doing yourself in and falling in a heap. So there was burnout in your story at the beginning.
I've heard you talk about that. Okay. Catherine, your podcast is superb. I've been listening about burnout recently. I'll definitely put the links to your podcast in the show notes and people should definitely find that it's very different from a listening life.
It's very much about talking to different people. different topics for all sorts of things. This burnout story, which you're so open about sharing, is there anything else you reflect on?
ASK Think if I were talking now, as you are to coaches at home, curious about building their business with more ease with a small e, what kind of things would you share with them about that?
And of course, maybe that's too big an ask, but to build to avoid burnout
CSM I suppose it in a slightly secured as answer to that I would like what would I do differently to avoid the burnout one is? Not give up the day job a hundred percent do some form of bridging Because I think the financial insecurity is a huge derailleur for most of us.
Yes, so avoid terrifying yourself Yes having that big salary coming in every month, just don't do that to yourself. 'Cause when your nervous system is dysregulated, then everything becomes hard. - Yes. - So yeah, that's like a basic safety, like how do you maintain safety for yourself? And so for me, that's a lot of our finances 'cause I am the breadwinner.
CSM I think there's also something about expectation of the speed at which this happens, which we've touched on already. - Yeah. - You're probably looking at a three to five. year timeline to get to the way you're like, yeah, okay, this feels viable.
AKS It's a thing. It's a thing.
CSM And if you've come out of corporate with all the security of that, that's a very, that feels very long.
AKS Absolutely, it does. And I'm thinking as well now, lots of thoughts coming about the scripts that we hold about our expectations, about our ability to be an entrepreneur, entrepreneur, about how scary it all is. I had all sorts of childhood stories of how unsafe the world would be as an entrepreneur and that jobs were safer and job for life. I had to really break some of that down. Did you have entrepreneurial background or a sense that it was safe or unsafe? What were your stories about going solo?
CSM It's a sort of mix of quite an entrepreneur, quite an adventurous side of one side of the family, you know, so grandpa in the 1920s getting on a boat and going to,
from England to Australia to build rabbit fences with his bestie and not liking it coming back to Africa and then staying in Africa. He's like, wow. In 1920, I mean, and my gran had a similar story from Northern Scotland. Scotland. It's like, for me, it's like such an adventurous spirit, but always done with my grandfather paid for, always waiting for the British government in various forms. So not entrepreneurial, but very adventurous. -
AKS Yes, brave.
CSM Very brave. And then a much more traditional laborer, farm laborer side on my other side of the family.
- Yeah. - And so left with some, and I think this is an important part of money mindset and entrepreneurial. entrepreneurial narratives that you have. So the thing that got what derailed me was you don't stick your head above a parapet.
CSM That's my family. That's one of my family stories. That's the rule. Yes. So to do that, as we understand the coaching world, is to be disloyal to your very family system. And so for me, the being an entrepreneur, being a personal brand, being out there is that sticking your head above the parapet, and I had to work. quite hard on. -
AKS To rein that in. -
CSM Yeah, to rein that in. Because I think people will come to you, like we are personal brands as coaches, and people will come to you because you are, you know, interesting in some way that they find. - Yes,
CSM you catch their attention. - Yeah, and for me, you know, I swear a lot, I'm a bit wacky, I like Kermit the Frog is my best friend. It's a very, but that took me years to allow that out, because it felt so risky to stand up in that sort of way. What if everyone thought I was an idiot? What if people didn't want to work with me because I swear? But finding that sort of authentic voice with a family story that says don't stand out.
CSM The other family story that still has some hold in me is around money. It's all covert but earning more than that is greedy. What are you going to do with all that amount of money? Just earn what you need. Don't take risks. Don't take debt. So there's that, and I think it's contrary to the entrepreneurial spirit, where you have to take, you take a risk, you hire a VA. That's an expense, but if you frame it as an expansive expense because it frees you up to do other things, like to do more coaching or more selling, that's a good, but in my family story of don't take risks, you know, there's a push against that the whole time. It's like, no, I have to tell myself, this is an expansive expense, we're gonna do that. - Yes. -
CSM You know, I've paid for Facebook ads, I've paid for a business coach, like large amounts of money. And it was a huge, terrified myself. The first Facebook ads I was gonna do was like five grand and I had to take it to therapy going like I said to him like what the actual am I, am I doing and he's, uh, and we had to work it through in therapy and he said, well, so if it goes wrong, what's, what's the downside? I'm like, well, I have 5 ,000 pounds less. He's like, well, then what? So what? Like you have loads of other business coming in. Like, yeah, it's true.
CSM But that thing of like, who am I to take a risk? Yes. Yes, to risk that money. Yeah.
AKS That's really funny. Listening to that, those chunks of money that we have to spend. For me, I had to learn a technique of comparing it to what else other people wasted money on.
So my friend's husband bought a very, very light bicycle that you could pick up with your little finger and spend a ridiculous amount of money on it in my line of how much a bike costs.
AKS And occasionally, if I had to spend lots of money, I'd be thinking, well, this guy spent this much money on a bike. So I could definitely spend this much money on adverts or whatever it was. But whatever it takes, I think, to bash those stories into submission is helpful. I was talking the other day about the skills we have as coaches to help ourselves build that work. And there's a book-- I'm sure lots of coaches will know Sarah Hill's book, Where Did You Learn to Behave Like That? And I think that's a really nice question to ask one such question. when we're building business, where did I learn to be scared of building business? Where did I learn that I had to keep my head down?
AKS Where are those things coming from? That mindset work is so under -talked about, I think, in starting the early days of running a business, the crap that we take with ourselves to make it harder.
CSM Well, I think it's a great question. And I think it's not just the early days. - Sure. - There's work that my business coach has done. in our mastermind container around the level of financial wealth that you have a block against. And she sort of takes us through this visualization of, how would you feel if you earned $100 ,000 a year? $250 ,000. And then at one point, your body gets like, oh, that's so strange about for me. Yes. Yeah. And mine is around $500 ,000. ,000 a year. She's in dollars.
CSM And I haven't cracked that. So, but there's, you know, I think we can overindex on what we need in the early parts of years, but when you get to a degree of success and you want to ramp it up, as I do, there's next levels of story and narrative that get in the way again.
AKS Absolutely.
CSM And at the 500K, for my family, stuff is, well, that's what rich people learn and rich people, there's a morality judgment of like, well, that's a stupid amount of money. And no one ever does anything good with that. Yeah, who needs that? He needs that. That's obscene. And we don't do obscene things in our family. Right. So yeah, just a heads up for those of it all further down the line. It comes back in a different form.
AKS Yeah. And sometimes the same form. I wear myself out with my same old stories coming back someone said to me the other day well you can probably relax it's been working for 11 years now so everything you're all the science suggests it's gonna be fine and my gut was telling me no no definitely not because it there's a recession coming and all the wars and all the reasons for it not to work this time I have to really keep on doing that work constantly I don't think it goes away so So if somebody's feeling really exhausted with that work, they need to remember it's gonna be like that for a really long time and decide if that's what they want. So I'm intrigued to now bring our lovely listeners to today because you feel as if you've gone on such a transformational journey from the executive coach, team coach, coach to co -founders, I think, when I first met you. And now such a digital presence, such a difference in the way that you're operating and presenting yourself online. And so can you catch us up to what the journey has been and where you are?
CSM So I rebooted, as I said, end of 2020. So the first iteration was called Bellgrove Street.
The second iteration is conversations of the edge. And I had a firm talk with myself if I'm going to do this. So I had had an 18 -month break at this other coaching company and coming out of it. If I'm going to start this again, the very reason why I went and found employment was I wasn't coping. So we have to flip everything on its head. Like, I'm not creating the same business model. There has to be another way to do this. And so that started a journey around, not around coaching skills, but really around business skills for me. I've got to say, I remember the darkness of December in 2020 and just spending a lot of time on things like Pinterest of all places and finding a whole world of business, of sort of US business coaches for coaches. coaches, and the US tends to use the term coaching for everything, like you can be a Facebook ads coach, you can be a brand coach. And so there's this whole industry of how do you help these coaches in the broader sense build a business. And so I found this thing, you know, oh, you need to have this, there is this idea of a personal on brand online presence, you can build it. So I call it the beta C side of the business, I still have a beta B2B, you know, corporates come to me and that's, that's off years of work and they come when they want to. Sure. And what frustrated me was I have no way of dialing that up when I need the cash. It's, and it's very, it's very unpredictable, and which is what got me in the pickle the last time round.
CSM So yeah, the idea was can I build? Can I maintain the B2B side and can I build the B2C side and therefore have more control of a revenue coming in that way nice So that's been a three -year project Which is not flying. I wouldn't say it was flying, but I've been learning an awful lot. So You have a personal brand on LinkedIn and Instagram whatever platforms you're choosing You have a way of bringing people in your ecosystem, something with freebie, that's a lot of value. I have a leadership style quiz. They come into your ecosystem, which is in my world, a newsletter, which you then provide loads of value.
CSM Every week you're not selling, you're providing tools, tips, tricks, mindset shifts, hope, whatever the value is. You then have a warmed up order. to say, "Oh, my coaching, I have coaching spots opening up in January." Hit reply if you want to come into that. I started the podcast in the similar vein.
This idea of can, because the email list wasn't converting, but can we get people a different experience? If I hang out in their ears, my business coach is suggestion was they will have a better understanding of who they are who you are rather than whether they like your style and that kind of stuff which i think is smart.
CSM the podcast became another tool of nurturing people in my ecosystem. It's a very different model the personal brand model
ASK 25:04 it'll be interesting to see beacause you've done it for the first time and it's about three years you say you've been doing it and we don't know yet the timeline of when that goes boom.
I would be very interested, because we've just said a few minutes ago, it took three to five years to build the other way. So it wouldn't be surprising if it suddenly goes woo. So this, this idea from inside your world that it's not flying yet,
from the outside, it looks as if it flies, you know, it looks great, sounds great, the podcast is great. I, I know you already, and I see you reflected in the work that you're producing, so it feels authentic and it feels impossible for it to not serve you, even I imagine if one of the reasons for doing it was to be able to dial up work even for your peers to see you and experience you will be interesting to see if you get more referrals and recommendations from other coaches who experience you online.
CSM It could be yeah my business coach is always saying to me all right her senses it'll it'll kind of go boom sometimes soon. She said, "You have all the foundations in place, you know,
that can see the messaging, the visibility in place." You're right. I hadn't kind of made that link. It's, you know, I said three to five years, which I do believe. You're right. There's, there's, you know, we're at the beginning of when this might go. This might do. I have made money, you know, clients have found me that way, but not at the scale that I would. like.
AKS But they are finding you. Yeah, and I mean, the three years isn't a solid three years of the same speed all the time, is it? It starts slower and then you look as if you're gaining momentum and getting your courage.
CSM Well, there's lots of learning in there. It's like, how do you build a newsletter list and how do you write? You know, how do you write in a way that's compelling for yours to be the one letter they get every week that they might actually read? Yeah, so I've done fantastic copywriting course. It really helped that What else? Understanding messaging and hooks and how do you show up and LinkedIn and Instagram like what are the what kind of content do you put in the social space? Which is very bite -sized versus slightly longer content on the email versus longer content on the podcast sure They can be similar but they're and I'm still a long way off.
They're fine -tuned, they're fine -tuned for the medium in which they're in. Without shaming, it's quite easy to shame people into feeling they should do something or need your services, which I feel quite strongly against not doing.
AKS Yes, I love how you do that. You've created a dear reader. This is what I tried. and maybe it didn't work in different ways there's something very authentic about your stories which is very different from I'm a coach online and I'm going to teach you how to live life because I know all the things it's the opposite of that isn't it what you're creating it's lovely I love it and your newsletter is hilarious I think it's fantastic I don't know how I just sit in wonder thinking how does she be so funny just on demand we can all find a funny moment, but actually producing funny repeatedly is awesome.
CSM Well, that's part of the structure. Like you say, that's part of the three year build of how do you put in structures and processes that allow that to happen to to be possible? Yeah. So I have, you know, I mean, little, little ideas. I have one day a week that is my CEO day. And it's Tuesdays. And I love it. And I see no one, I speak to no one. And it's just, it's my creative day. Maybe I'll write next month's emails or social content while edit a podcast or, but it's, it's very space.
CSM I don't have you. Yeah, I could work from seven to seven if I want. I mean, I usually do something, I usually take a walk or something, but that's leveraging your, your ways in which you work best in those sort of little hacks is incredibly helpful.I have a swipe file where I dump all my ideas of, "Oh, that would be a funny story." Right. And then when it comes to sitting on the Tuesday, going, "Oh, God, I've got to write four emails for next month." You go through that. You're like, "Oh, yeah. Yeah." I feel, "Yes. I've got to write about my dog terrorizing the hedgehog. That's funny. Let's do that one."
AKS Lovely. So, yeah, you talked about support and I would love to come to that because I think of all the coaches I know, you are... the best. And I'm going to use that as a judgy word on purpose that really, you model a really aspirational way of seeking out the development that you need and that you would love to do. So some of it just sounds like it's resourcing you as a human all around. Other is skill based. I want to learn how to do copywriting. You know, how do you, what do you do across a year, across a career to keep finding that? that stuff and to keep planning it in? Have you got a kind of self -development planning strategy or just see something and go, "Oh, I want to do that?"
CSM Yeah, no, I don't have a strategy. That's why the one error I don't have a strategy, it's much more organic. I take supervision, coaching supervision very seriously, so I have three forms of coaching supervision. I have a one -on -one, I have a supervisor that I work with individually. I have a triad. So there's three of us held by another supervisor. We get to sit in a hot seat between the three of us. And so you learn, you know, it's ingenious because you get to see other people's, inside other people's coaching practices, which is a privilege, you know, in the kind of business that we do. And the third one is team coaching. So a place where I take for a day with other people, my teams, to be supervised on the team dynamic by a trained team coaching supervisor, which is a whole new, very new field. And then even using dynamics in the room of us team coaches to reflect how that might be showing up on our team coaching work. It's profound stuff.
CSM So that's sort of the taking care of me as the coach practitioner. and then me as the business owner is I'm part of a business coaching mastermind run by my business coach and I also have a one call with her every month that she works through. It's a bit of a hot seat coaching method. It's a bit of structured, you know, she talks about money, we do a lot of money mindset work. We do content marketing ideas, you know, for your money finance. I've gone blank at the other areas, but you're going to get a sense it's very business focused. And with people, no one else is a coach like you and I, but everyone else is a brand person. There's a social media marketing person. So we're all sort of sole entrepreneurs trying to build our business in the way that we've talked about the B2C model. The rest is more organic. I've done quite a lot of work on it's not even skill building, but I'm very curious about the nervous system at the moment. Both for myself, but also understanding it more to hold my clients better. So I've done two courses in the last year on nervous system mastery. And then from a personal development side, I'm quite into breath work and psychedelics as a way of tapping into my unconscious in a way that I'm just wildly curious about.
CSM So all of that forms a sort of matrix for me of support. -
AKS Huge learning value, yes. In the cycle of getting to a point where you can afford to develop yourself and doing the work that develops yourself, how brave did you, when did you start getting the coaching that helps you grow? I'm asking in terms of if someone's income is scary, not quite there yet, would you, recommend that they jump in bravely to some of that business development at that stage, self -development about the skills of business growth at that stage?
CSM Yeah. It's a difficult decision to make if your income is that precarious. From what I see, I think coaches over index on, oh, I need to know another coach, I need another coaching drone. Another thing,
AKS yes. If I have one more psychometric, I can just get get this business.
CSM Put your hand up, I know that place. So if I look back on the 10 years, I would think the, had I done more of the business training support that might have changed things sooner. I mean, I don't have any regret, it is what it is. - Yeah. - But the question comes, what's gonna change the dial? And that five grand investment in the Facebook ads at that point, for me, felt like it was going to change the dial. Sure. You make the ship go faster. And it has, and it did. So I think that's the question to ask is, what feels affordable? I mean, if income is precarious, maybe it's not £5 ,000, maybe it's £500, I don't know. Sure. But we know what takes you to the edge of like, oh, it feels uncomfortable. but not fucking terrifying. Yes Like that, you know, I think our you have to take care of your nervous system as an as an entrepreneur It's getting yourself to the place why I did what I had to check out. It's just unhelpful. We don't go there so you're titrating your capacity for Investment and risk all the time And what might feel good in January might not feel good in August and that's okay
AKS Yes, but it's a nice nudge I think to that coach who's sitting thinking I haven't got enough yet to be a great coach if I just had this other psychometric I would break through to challenge that thinking of maybe the cost it would take to get another psychometric to invest that somehow in business growth to either advertising or branding or business skills or business culture just to think differently about that I do hear a lot of coaches step away from sales and marketing and the skills thereof and prefer to go back to coaching growth because it's more comfortable. I think perhaps that's the message.
CSM Yeah, and I can I can relate to that. I there was a very early on the day I only on this journey, I would call myself a baby coach because that's how I felt I'd come out of a career that I was very skilled at and got a lot of accommodation for and then had to feel like I was gonna back to some beginning. And then somebody told me off like, "Stop courting yourself a baby coach." I could say this to be unhelpful, but it did take a while for me to feel any sense of mastery. But that mastery, if I'm honest with myself, came through doing the work, not through more coach training.
AKS Yes, from coaching more people.
CSM Yeah. And then coach...you know, I did I did things which in hindsight work were smart, which was have some collaborations where I was coaching for free. Yeah, so I worked with a startup accelerator in London and I was part of the free resources that the founders had access to they had other mentors that had access to, you know, I got to coach three or four people in three rounds, I think three founders, They never paid. Some of it has. brought fruit later, but there was the hours, different contexts, different kind of person. And I think that's what gives you the confidence in the early on. It's not, I promise you that another coaching certification is not gonna help, give you confidence.
AKS Yes, it's a nice thing to think about as well because I think over the years, I've really talked against free coaching, giving too much free coaching away, and whether or not people have are committed to it and all of that sort of concern but actually knowing if I coach more I'll get better at coaching and therefore more confident and therefore more able to win more coaching is a lovely way to reframe that for me
CSM and I agree with you don't mean don't give it away to your core customer so I never saw so the people in the in the accelerator had zero money right they were there betting their future on some crazy idea that they were going to boot up. up and this was a like a fast track eight week container where they were getting a lot of resources nice if they were going to come my client it would have been five years off. So I wasn't undermining and the people at the time were sort of mid to senior leaders that I was coping in corporate like I wasn't undermining my own.
AKS Yeah, you weren't giving free things to people that could pay exactly
CSM So for that I completely agree don't give free things to people who can pay. The other scenario that I did was, there was a members club that I got introduced to for sort of, again, sort of entrepreneur startup people. They put networking events on for these folk and you had access to one of the clubs in London, in Soho. And the person who was running it said, could we offer you up as our coach in residence and everyone gets like a one -off session. session with you as part of the onboarding process. And again, I'm like, these are people I would never work with the chance of them ever having money for coaching is probably pretty slim. And I said, yes. Nice. And so same thing, not undermining your current thing.
AD: AKS Season two of A Listening Life has the support of Psysoft. I'm pleased to share a discount code with you for their emotional intelligence assessments. Certification, EQi 2 .0 and the EQi Extra video series.
I'm a big advocate of Psysoft's tools. This is an affiliate link, but I would never recommend anything that I don't use regularly myself. Tim and his team at Psysoft have looked after all aspects of EQi 2.0 for my own business and now they've launched EQi Extra video tools for clients.
Email query@psysoft .com to claim a 10 % discount. discount code for the EQI certification and EQiExtra. Use discount code LISTENING10 and find all the spellings and contacts in the show notes.
AKS Catherine, let me pick your brains now for our lovely coaches wanting to grow their businesses. If you were to look back over your career and really think about things that you would pass on now to the people listening.
to this show. What kinds of things would you like to share with someone who's perhaps in that crunchy moment of I don't know if I can do this I'm really tired or it's working but it's not working well enough to feel as if I can keep going. Anything you can share on that?
CSM I mean that the answers to that would be varied right so if we'd bring it up to what's going to make, you know, what's going to make the ship go faster or sell more smoothly, the chances are it's probably in the business, it's probably mindset, your own mindset, And skills around building a business would be my bet.
AKS Yeah, so the mindset piece, I think I massively underestimated that in myself. I think I knew mindset mattered. Obviously, I knew mindset matters. There wouldn't be a coach, but I don't think I gave it much attention. Did you purposely think, right, I'm going to work on a thing. I've got something in my mindset and take it on. How did you alter your mindset or develop your mindset shifts?
CSM I think the biggest shift came when I rebooted. I mean, I didn't get this right the first time. around at all. I recently created with a sense of humor, a little skit on Instagram, which is a video with me going, "Meet the team." And there's me as the podcast producer in different outfits, podcast producer, the marketing head of IT, head of sales, the product, and the CEO. And this is me in a bunch of different outfits and i wish i'd more fully appreciated that and what the cost of that was so you know we train as a coach so essentially you've got one of those six rolls covered off. Yes if you're heading for burnout. Feeling exhausted it's probably because you are massively under resourced in the other areas either you don't have the support maybe you can't afford to have the support then you haven't then you need to build the skills in yourself to do some of that. And what does it mean to do sales and marketing in your world? Like, that's what's going to make this go easier. And I don't want to ever index and fast because that isn't what everyone wants, but we're looking at ease as your key work here, right? How do we make it more ease -filled? Less stressful. Yeah, there's probably something in sales and marketing that you need to explore about your level of skill, your level of company. your attitude around selling. A lot of us have like, "Ew, selling is icky." I get that. Yeah, so again, mindset in the sales and marketing as well as actual physical skills that you might need.
AKS Yes. You're making me think of a model I saw quite early in my self -employed career that was in the EMYTH manager, the book, which is really old now. But it was an organogram that resonated with me because I was from an organisational back. So it had the CEO at the top, a pyramid shape across all the jobs, FD, to include on the bottom level, the utilities manager, the cleaner, basically. And you had to write this whole organogram with your own name in every single box and then think about which boxes would you love to give away.
And the thought that we often fill the box at the bottom, so we tend to get rid of the cheap jobs because we're scared. cats and we don't want to spend too much money. But actually, if we bought in some oomph a bit higher up, we might not build that pyramid so weighty for us to be doing all the hard stuff at the top. Made me really think about how to do that and not knowing quite when to get the right help in. For you getting help in, how did you know where to go or who to start with?
CSM I'm not a great model for getting help. help in. I have to confess, in part because I'm pretty good at doing a lot of things, which is incredibly frustrating 'cause then I recently had an experience with a VA and it was very disappointing. And you have to go through these things like I could have done this in less time than I, and it wasn't about the money. I mean, the day rate for a VA is not the problem. problem It's just the onboarding and they having to explain seven times something you think is quite clear It's very frustrating. So your question is Remind me your question.
AKS Well it was about that the question originally was about those signs that we might See or feel in our business of I could I could now afford to and would benefit from getting help in with this thing But you have just moved my brain now, my experience of bringing VA's on board. That difficulty, I find it incredibly difficult to get the right people to do the right things in a way that did keep improving. Finally, I have someone now who's with me, who's really cracking it, but it's still very, very time consuming. I think that it's resonating back to what we were saying about everything taking longer, actually bringing someone in to help you takes longer than you think it's gonna take, doesn't it, to get them up to. to what you need?
CSM It does, yeah. And I remember back to you and I having a conversation, and I think we did a sort of Boston grade about zone of competence. So a zone of genius, zone of competence, zone of incompetence, and I forget the fourth one. And you made me map out where I wanted to do, because I think at the time I was building the website, I was writing, you know, because there's lots of things I really enjoy doing. I actually like, I have a BSc in computer science. I like programming. So I, you know, I was at the time spending quite a bit of time on the website. Like it's not a zone of genius, but it is in a competence. Yes. And that's the collapse I think we can make, especially if you are sort of a generalist and have high standards to which you think no one else can meet. So I think off the back of that conversation, I started getting help for the website. You know, some young kid in the US who cracks it out in no time. you know, and has a visual back, has a designer background, so she could make it look better than I could ever even. So that was one of them. And, you know, how do you free, if whatever's in your zone of genius, when I think most of us would put our coaching and our coaching, this is a coach in our zone of genius, how do you, how do you create more space for that? I mean, I've got a, it surprises me, but I have an online account. package, which a lot of people don't seem to have. They seem to rely on the local person down the high street. It's a strange, you know, for like 70 pounds a month, I have a fully automated accounting system that reconciles automatically with my bank account. The only thing I have to do is issue invoices for 70 pounds a month. It's like that's a no brainer. It's a complete no brainer for me, but it doesn't, it feels like a harder decision for some others to make. And then end of year becomes traumatic as you squirrel up your, your printed out expenses and stuff like that.
I'm not even, there's no ways I'm going there.
AKS You carry a bag full of paper receipts.
CSM Yeah, I have no paper receipts. No, me neither.
AKS Oh, gosh, getting a bookkeeper was my absolute life transformer. I just think it genuinely was the difference between success and failure in my business.
CSM I think it's vastly underestimated.
ASK Yes. Your description there of the zone of genius is also making me think of the strengths profile. And I think it's about 20 quid to get your strengths done on thestrengthsprofile .com. Their language around strengths, true strengths, realise strengths, things that you're good at and you love doing, as opposed to learned behaviours. So you're still good at them, but you don't love them. They steal your energy away. I think that's really helpful in terms of growing a business because yeah, we can probably do loads of the things if we're over the age of 35 and some of us are way over 35. There are lots of things that we could be tempted to do and actually working out which ones bring us energy and which ones steal our energy. I think that's also been breakthrough work for me to do.
CSM I think there was part of our conversation that you and I had that you helped me really realize that as well of that, and I haven't I haven't a density that prides myself in being able to do lots of things doing it all yeah if I put my mind to it I can do everything and I you know rock climbing hundred kilometer race cycle races building a business I can do all of it like should I be doing all of it absolutely not is it a good idea yeah and so there's that refinement I think as the entrepreneur only entrepreneurial journey of and I think that that make that brings the ease back yeah
AKS Yeah. Oh, Catherine, I would love to talk all day and knowing you as I do, it's harder to stop because there's so many other pages I'd like to turn, so I have to come back for you another time. But massive appreciation for your enormous talent as a coach and also having been my supervisor and I cannot recommend Catherine enough in supervision. Are you still offering supervision? I might be telling people about something you don't want to be doing.
CSM I am on the quiet. quiet. Part of the personal brand is to be very clear to the outside world what you do and be for a very kind of singularly focus. So people go, "Oh, she's the exec coach." So I don't talk about it because it just confuses it. But if someone was interested and we had a connection, I'd be up for it.
AKS Wonderful. So I'll put all the links to where people can actually find you for the things that you do really want to be doing. about, not leading you astray in the show notes and huge gratitude and look forward to talking to you again soon.
CSM Bye bye. It's been a delight. Thank you for the honour of bringing me on here.
A massive thank you to you, Catherine. A woman in leadership in the tech sector for 20 years, a certified executive team coach for more than 10. It's so inspiring to talk to someone so firmly attached to the benefit of learning. growth, experimentation and fun.
I'm only sorry that you can't see her gorgeous backdrop, enough to cause podcast envy in many a podcast host. The colors, the plants, the pictures, the creativity, all part of the authentic story of Catherine Stagg-Macey as she continues to grow,
shift and change as she provides superb coaching services to leaders. Find her on Instagram @staggmacey. Spellings and all the info about her website in the show notes. Thank you so much, my friend. I hope to see you in the real world very soon.
My huge thanks to producer Steve Folland and to Lauren Hills at HQ. A Listening Life is built especially for coaches who are tired of trying to grow their business into something that makes them happy and brings in the money.
For tools and inspiration, find us on Instagram @alisteninglife. A Listening Life and through the website https://www.listening-life.co.uk
Comments