Hey you guys, welcome back to the podcast. Last episode I did a little bit of a life update and shared how much stuff I have going on. I'm really excited because today is the first official podcast of the Conscious Coach Academy season. And I'm not going to go too much into Conscious Coach Academy, but this is the time of year and this is the period in my business where I really focus on helping coaches, specifically with the entrepreneurship side of coaching.
And so I will link up in my show notes a chance for you to join the waitlist to be the first one to know when Conscious Coach Academy opens. Today we are kick-starting what I'm calling the Abundant Coach Series, which is going to be a series of conversations, just you and I, about growing what I like to think of as like a word-of-mouth coaching business. So one of the things that I've helped my clients do over time is sign clients in a way that feels good, in a way that feels abundant, specifically, that isn't about high-pressure sales and talking to people that feel like they have to be there because you promised something or some weird DM strategy.
And I'm not against DM strategies even, and I'm going to talk about how I use the DMs to create and initiate relationships, but it's not a cold DM. We'll talk about that more later. But how do we do it abundantly? How do we become a coach where we have clients, we're getting renewals and referrals? Because I almost hesitate to share this, but I think it might be useful. Most, I would say 90 to 95 percent, of my one-on-one clients come from renewals and referrals now. That was not the case in the beginning of my coaching business, but I think it's a beautiful place to be as a one-on-one coach.
The other thing that's unique, as I was thinking about this conversation, and this isn't at all a dig at any coach in the industry, I don't believe in the digging. And I think there is this trend where coaches, when they start to scale their business, they stop doing one-on-one. This is actually why I really love, and I'm going to name a few of the people that I resonate with. The first one that you've heard me mention before, his name is Rich Litvin. He wrote The Prosperous Coach, a book that I sincerely believe in. He still does one-on-one coaching.
I really like Mark Butler's podcast, A Podcast for Coaches, because he still does one-on-one coaching. Many of my mentors that I have mentioned on this podcast, Kathleen Cameron, Alpha Femme, Melanie and Lair, they still do one-on-one coaching. Now it is very high ticket and expensive, but I like that they still do it. And I still do it as well. I like it because I think there's a even more popular trend where it's like when you have a group program, when you start a membership, you kind of move out of one-on-one coaching.
And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just never really felt in alignment to me. Like I really enjoy one-on-one coaching and I like that part of my business. And so as I've been thinking about this series, as I've been thinking about helping coaches sign one-on-one clients specifically, like growing a coaching business, the heart of why we became coaches was helping people and walking them through their transformation, like easing suffering, giving them tools, inspiring them, walking with them as they make decisions, helping them see their thoughts differently, challenging their thoughts, offering new thoughts.
All of these things we do as coaches, especially in the one-on-one container, which I think is the purer form of one-on-one coaching. Not that group coaching isn't awesome. I do group coaching and I believe in it. I've been in group coaching settings. It's just different than a full session, specifically like a series of full sessions with a one-on-one coach who has been with you through your life, whether that's making decisions about relationships, or money, or your body, or your career, or leadership, writing, fitness, like you name it. There's coaches for so many domains of life, which is something else I love is like you can find the coach for you.
That being said, I think there's this trend that coaches, as they scale their business, they stop doing one-on-one. And like I said, there is nothing wrong with that at all. And I'm creating this conversation today specifically for coaches who want one-on-one clients. That could be you're a new coach and you're trying to get some like reps under your belt, right? Like you're trying to have conversations, you're trying to build your practice. You want more one-on-one clients. This episode is also for people, even if you are seasoned in business, that you want to work with clients in a one-on-one capacity because you love it, because you love the art of coaching, because you love the relationship that you have with one-on-one clients.
Maybe either you want more one-on-one clients or you want to create higher level one-on-one clients. That is what this episode is for. And so this isn't going to be for everyone. Some people are very interested in scaling. Like in full transparency, I am in the process of scaling my business and have been for a few years, not scaling where I lose my one-on-one, but I have programs like the Matrix or the Quiet Wealth Collective where it's a group program and I group coach in those two programs. I still have one-on-one clients and it's still a huge part of my business.
And so I feel an integrity talking about one-on-one client creation and that's what we're going to be doing in the Abundant Coach Series. So welcome. Welcome to the Abundant Coach series. Today's conversation is what I'm calling the art of one-on-one conversations. I'm sitting at my desk writing notes, thinking like what are the most important pieces of building a coaching practice where one-on-one becomes like your bread and butter? That's how it feels to me. I don't really think about one-on-one client creation. Now I think a lot about my one-on-one clients.
I work very closely with them. We have very deep, long-term relationships, whether that's me mentoring them, coaching them, advising them, or just holding space for them in their life and business. And the word that comes to me is like intimate container where they have my Voxer. We have frequent calls. It's a very different experience and group. Like I said, I don't think a ton about creating one-on-one clients anymore because most of my clients come from renewals and referrals, which I'm very grateful for.
I would say a large part of my work week is working with my one-on-one clients. And so it's interesting that I haven't talked about it in a while. And I was like, okay, what are the most important facets of building a word of mouth coaching practice where you're working with clients? I think that's the coolest career. Like I still think about it as such a cool opportunity.
When I first started getting coaching, I joke that I went about it all wrong. I found this course that was teaching me like how to build a blog, basically a website where I could host ads on my blog and like get paid per click. That was like my whole monetization strategy. That was truly how I got started online. My blog was called growingandgrace.com. And it was about like the balance of personal development with loving where you're at, which is so funny because that's exactly what I teach now. It's just in a very different level of experience and exposure.
And I call that quiet wealth, right? Like creating what you want without sacrificing what you already have. And it's funny that my original idea growing in grace was like the seed of what I would now teach from a very different place. I think I'm much more embodied and masterful at how I teach that and the way that it looks in my life as I've been like a more seasoned entrepreneur and business owner. That being said, my monetization strategy sucked. I didn't know any better. So I don't have any judgment of myself at that time.
But my whole plan was to like get traffic on my blog, have people click on ads, and I would make, I don't even know, cents per click because I didn't have that many people. And then I started reading books and I started having these conversations that led me to coaching. And that's a story for another day. But when I made the transition to coaching, I found it a lot easier to make money because I was really good at having conversations with people. And I was thinking about this. I joke that like when people ask me, you know, what do you do for living?
And I'm like, well, people talk to me and their life changes. And I say that lightheartedly because that's not my sales pitch. But from a very zoomed out, oversimplified frame of mind, like that is what I do. I have conversations with people and their life changes. And I don't take that for granted. I think that's why if you resonate with this episode and you're still listening, my guess is that speaks to you on some level, that that's what you want to do with your life. From a very young age, I remember watching Freaky Friday with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan.
And I watched Jamie Lee Curtis as a therapist. And she had an office and she had clients and she seemed to be well off. She was still a mom. She wrote a book. I remember just being like, I want to be her. It's funny because I watched that movie and I didn't really resonate with Lindsay Lohan. I wasn't like an angsty teen. It's so funny, like as my little self, I always was told I was an old soul. I really resonated with Jamie Lee Curtis even before I was a mom, even before I was in high school. Like, it's just funny.
And I remember thinking like, I want a career like that. Now, at the time, I didn't know life coaching was a thing. And so I had made plans to become a therapist. And this is also another story for another day. If you've been in my podcast for a while, you might have heard me talk about how I dropped out of my master's program to become mom. So when I found coaching, it felt like such a gift to me. And it still does. It was something that I was always really good at, which was having conversations with people.
I know how to hold space and I know how to hold the nuance of hard conversations. I see people in their power, and I ask good questions. That was something that I always wanted to do as a therapist. So when I found coaching, it was like, this is even better for a lot of reasons. But one of the themes, the golden thread that I want to pull out for you in this episode is conversations. Whenever I have clients ask me like, what should I do to sign clients? I'm like, have more conversations, especially for one-on-one. And I wrote this down as I was preparing for today, the art of one-on-one conversations as part of the Abundant Coach series.
I said, if conversations are what you're selling, having conversations is how you sell it. So I'll give you an example. Let's say you have a package for 12 life coaching sessions. In those 12 sessions, you might do a little bit of teaching, but most of it is conversational, right? You are having a conversation with a client where they're having breakthroughs, insights, ahas, where they're seeing themselves differently. Maybe they're seeing their thoughts differently about their partner, about their business, or about their body, about their kids, about their finances, whatever.
And as they're starting to see themselves differently in this conversation, their life begins to change. But at the heart of it, like if we zoomed out and I was just watching what you were doing, what you're doing is actually just having conversations. Like I said, this isn't how I would necessarily sell one-on-one, as in how I would talk about it to a client. But when you give your client the experience of a coaching conversation, it is so much easier to sell more coaching conversations in the future. I'll give you an example. When people experience you as a coach, where you are asking them powerful questions, holding space, asking them to live into a new possibility, challenging their thoughts, you're not selling the idea of coaching.
I'm doing what I love. I learned this from Steve Chandler. Like you're giving them the experience of coaching. When you go and say, would you like to learn more about what it's like to work with me? This is more of a continuation than a conceptual idea. And I think this is where a lot of coaches get stuck. It's hard to talk about what you do because it sounds like I have conversations with people and their life changes. And people from the outside are like, okay. Especially like, I love one of my clients calls non-coaches, right? So people who are outside of the coaching industry, like muggles. Another way I've heard it described is like a civilian.
Like people who aren't in our little bubble of coaching don't get it until they've experienced it. So if you want to sell more one-on-one coaching, give more people the experience of coaching with you. This sounds oversimplified, but it is the way we do it. So what this can look like, I teach a concept to my clients called the Coaches Core Four. And there's four things that I still do every day to build up my clientele. And the first one is serve one person. The second one is initiate 10 conversations online. The third one is publish valuable content.
This lines up with something else that we'll talk about, which I refer to as lighthouse marketing that will come in a future abundant coach series. So you're publishing on Instagram, on LinkedIn, on a podcast, something where people can find you who are looking for the solutions that you are providing the world. And then the fourth one is one called the action. So that could be booking a consult, sign up for my email list, download this freebie, come to my free call, whatever. You're giving them an action to do.
And when you do those four things every day, and those things start to compound over time, you will have a full coaching practice. The problem is, is that a lot of people overlook the simplicity of the four things that I just shared because they're like, that can't be it. And where they miss is the gold mine of compound effect. So I look back, I started doing this in 2018. And this started because I had a newborn that I was nursing and a two year old. So I was super busy, I did not have a lot of time to market.
And what I learned was, is like, I could initiate conversations in the DMs, I could publish content, even if it was just like a quote, or sharing a book that I was reading, I could make a call to action. And so these four things, like I started to do them consistently. And I didn't realize those are the things that actually led me to success until I started reflecting on like, how am I signing clients? One of the transition periods in my business was when I started coaching entrepreneurs. And I remember the first coach that hired me to coach her.
And the question that she had, because she got on a call with me. And she's like, do you coach entrepreneurs? And I was like, no, I coach stay at home moms, I'm coaching a college student right now on her career choice, coaching someone else on getting a new job and coaching someone else on their motherhood that I was doing all sorts of coaching. And she was like, how did you create them as clients? I'm getting really stuck. And I remember just being like, I just have conversations. And then if it feels right, I invite them to just chat with me on a phone call.
And she's like, oh, how are you finding people to chat with online? I was like, well, I just messaged them or like, I just comment on their post or I just asked them a question, just like I would a friend. And this is something that years later, I'm at a conference with Rich Living, who said coaches always show up first, like a peer. So all these dots started connecting for me, like that is how we build a coaching business is first showing up like a peer. It's a, hey, I really like the shirt you're wearing in this picture.
It's like if someone's posting about a movie they saw, you're just commenting on the movie. You're showing up like a normal human, and you're serving. So the Coaches Core Four: serve one person, initiate ten conversations a day, post a call to action, post something valuable. When you do those things over time, like I can look back on my career as a coach, and I've had thousands of conversations. I've published thousands of pieces of content. I've made thousands of calls to action. So I have developed this compound effect in my business where I have a full client load.
So don't underestimate the simplicity of it. It's the compound effect that we're after. So it's like, yeah, you might skip a day. But don't make that a habit, right? The habit is I do these four things every single day. And they're all geared towards having a conversation, which is the focus of our episode today. Because like I said earlier, if conversations are what you're selling, having conversations is how you sell it. And so I made a little list and I won't go too deep into each one of these. But the art of one on one conversations isn't just something that's reserved for your paying clients. It's also how you create clients.
I'm always creating clients through conversations. I'm enrolling my current clients into renewals and referrals. I'm enrolling my group coaching clients and planting seeds that like some of them will become my one on one client. I have that happen a lot. People are in my group and then they're like, I see the potential of one on one and then we start working together on one on one. If I'm at a networking event or speaking at a retreat or at someone else's event and I'm meeting new people, I show up friendly and like a normal human.
I'm not trying to sell. The conversations are not transactional. I'm just there in service. And so I wrote down some of these things and it feels a little sciency, but remember that this is an art. So you're not going to do it like me. You're going to do it like you. But there's some principles that will help you create clients from conversations that I think are worth considering. The first one is deep listening. This is a great example. So I went to an event called Fearless Business Workshop and I didn't speak on stage or anything, but I hosted like a workshop of my own.
After the workshop, people would come up and talk to me and that was fine. I'm very introverted, so it's kind of intimidating for me on the inside, but like I was there to serve and so I would ask them questions and try my best to help them. One of things that I noticed is that I would watch other people try to network and they talked too much. They were talking about themselves. They were talking about what they're up to. But when you want to position yourself as a coach, the best thing you can do is ask really good questions and do deep listening.
You are holding space for people and that will send the message clearer than you trying to explain what you do. You should go back ten seconds and listen to that again because it's hard to explain this, but like if you're going to a networking event or you're going to a workshop or you're like at a lunch and learn or maybe your city is hosting a business event and you're like, I'm gonna go network as a coach. The best way you can show up as a coach is not by trying to explain what you do as a coach.
It is by giving the people an experience of what it's like to work with you, which looks like deep listening and great questions. The second piece is being non-transactional. So this is something that I really believe in. When we show up non-transactional, we're not secretly hoping people become clients. Doesn't mean that you don't want clients. It just means that you are not attached to the people in that room becoming clients. This is very magnetizing in a world that wants to promote themselves and sell and tell people how great they are. And this is not a diss.
If you do these things, open your mind. If this is creating the clients you want, keep doing it. This is an observation that I've seen of people who don't have as many clients as they want. So when we show up non-transactional, we ask really good questions. We're not trying to sign this particular person as a client. I can tell you another example that actually like I'm working with her in a one on one capacity now, but how I met her was I was speaking at someone's retreat. We had a great conversation one night. We talked for like an hour about her life, her business, what she wanted. And then we just left the retreat.
I don't even have business cards, but I didn't try to like follow up with her. I wasn't like, hey, we should have a console. I didn't say any of that. I served her. After the retreat, she found me. She joined my group and now we're working together one-on-one. That's actually how it looks. When we are non-transactional, we're not pushing the sale right away, especially, especially, especially if you work with people at a very high level. And you can read that however you want. High ticket, long term.
I'm thinking like if you're working with a client for 6 to 12 to 18 months in a coaching package, it takes longer to build that relationship up the way that you want to, so that you can start off on a good foot. And so I'm never in a rush to sign one-on-one clients because I want to make sure that they're in a good spot, that we're a good fit, that they're ready for the level of commitment. And so a lot of times onboarding looks slower and this is counterintuitive because coaches want clients now. But the abundant coach who understands how limitless she is and how limitless her clients are, they detach from time.
And I don't mean that you like don't pay your rent or like don't care about your bills or like not care about making money. I think that it's this energy that you bring where you are good either way. You're excited if they become a client, but you know deep down you're okay if they don't. That non-transactional energy is very appealing to clients in a world where everyone wants to sell them something. So I think it is an advantage to show up in a relationship where you are totally in service. You're not trying to secretly get something from them. You are really here to serve. One of the things that I love to think about and I was just telling my clients in The Matrix this is like I want to be a resource for my clients, like an asset in their life.
And that starts long before they ever pay me. I want to be the kind of relationship where they see me as someone who is a valuable part of their life, non-transactional. And I think that speaks to the next piece which is just service. I am here to serve. And this kind of goes back to the coaches core four where that's like me sharing resources. Many of you listening to this podcast have like probably gotten a podcast episode from me or like oh I think you'd love this book or like hey have you seen this post.
I'm always trying to distribute value even if it's not my own podcast or my own thought. Like connecting people with podcasts and ideas that would help them is something that I love to do. Or like I've sent people books in the mail before. Or I've just like recommended books or shared articles. It doesn't really matter what it is. Being of service can look like deep listening, non-transactional listening and conversations. But it can also just be like sharing resources and getting people in touch with other ideas or even people who can help them. You have to let go of your own ego and you have to let go of your own timeline.
Because real talk, I've had people in my sphere where they were interested in one-on-one for like 18 months before we ever worked together. And some of you are hearing that and you're like I can't wait 18 months. I say this with so much love. This will be a hard career for you. One of the quotes in the book The Prosperous Coach that I think about all the time is, the bar for entry to this career is very low, but the bar for success is very high. What that means to me is that you can make it. And part of that is patience. Part of that is skill in listening and coaching and client creation. Maybe that includes content creation and marketing. But the idea is it's not easy to make it as a coach despite what other people say.
It does take work. It does take time. Because great relationships are not built overnight. And that was a sobering reality for me but I had as aha I was like of course. It's not like I'm meeting a stranger on the internet and giving them $20,000 the next day. It takes time to build the trust. It takes time to see how you fit with a coach. It takes time for your clients to see how they fit with you and like the possibilities of working with you. If you can be so committed to the bigger vision of your coaching business, you will not have a problem as a coach. I think where we get into trouble, and I've been here. This isn't coming from judgment.
This is coming from observing myself and others. When I feel scarcity I want to rush signing clients. I want to like make it happen faster. But when I detach and let go of my timeline, and I trust my clients timeline, and I be the abundant coach that I know I am in my soul. I show up with love and detachment and trust. I give them space to make decisions and a lot of them are ready to work with me and some of them aren't. And that's okay. It doesn't bother me because I'm on a mission. I'm bigger than any individual client. Now here's the paradox. I love all my individual clients a lot and I want to be in their corner and I want to support them and be there for them as they create in their life and business.
But the idea is is like my energy is abundance, and I feel the worst when it's not that way. So it's like when I feel like, this was the one client or it was a fluke. I've heard that too. It's like well one client paid me this but like I don't know if I can ever sign another client again. That story and theme is one that we have to transcend over and over again. What I like to think of is like calibrate back to the abundance of clients that are available. There are billions of people in the world. One of the little things that I used to tell myself when I was newer was like, if there's one client there's two and if there's two there's four and if there's four there's like a hundred.
It helped me remember there was more than just one person that was looking for what I do in the world. So we've done deep listening, being non-transactional, showing up in service. The next one is pure intent. People can feel that. You know what I'm saying? I think people can feel if you're really there because you care and that you want them to succeed or if you're trying to make a quick buck. Now here's the paradigm. I do believe in coaches making money. That is why we are in business. That's not to say that you shouldn't care about money. I believe you should care about money. It's not to say that you shouldn't charge for your coaching because I believe you should.
But the pure intent piece is that you are here to serve that person. The person that is your client, you are here to serve them. And part of that is enrolling them and getting paid by them. But the pure intent piece for me is like, I want what's best for you. If this isn't what's best for you, I trust that that's okay. It doesn't mean that I'm a bad person. It doesn't mean that I need to coerce you. That it is the right thing. I want what's best for you and sometimes what's best for you is working with me. And I'm willing to say that too. So deep listening, being non-transactional, showing up in service, having pure intent. And the last distinction I'll share is to develop a relationship with people versus closing a deal.
I think that this is how sales works for me. On sales calls, my intention isn't necessarily to close a deal. It is to open and develop a relationship because I'm in this for the long haul. I know that long-term thinking serves my business very well because now I've had clients who have been my clients for years. I pay attention to that. And that's the kind of relationship that I want with my clients. Not because I think that I have to keep them, you know, you have to stay in my world or else. But it's like, I want that kind of relationship. Many of my clients, it's almost like a mentorship experience where like I'm seeing them cross milestones and I'm seeing them expand as I am also expanding and reaching my own milestones.
And it's a really cool, cool relationship that starts before they ever work with me. So that's something for you to consider too, is on your sales call, if you show up not trying to close a deal, but you are trying to develop a relationship, how different would that be? I think it's worth considering because like I said, if conversations are what you're selling, having conversations is how you sell it. And the relationship is the thread that keeps that all together. I believe in having one-on-one conversations, obviously. I think the abundant coach knows that conversations is an art and a science. There's a time to sell. There's a time to listen. There's a time to invite. There's a time to create. There's a time to say, I'm not a good fit for you.
There's a time to say, I think you're ready. Let's go. I think there's a time to invite clients to renew or refer. There's a time to invite people in your audience to have a chat with you about one-on-one. Like I said, this whole podcast episode is about one-on-one. I think there's also a time in your content. So this is the next segment of what I wanted to share is, how does content fit into our business as a one-on-one coach? And the way that I've always used content, especially for one-on-one, is to generate and spark conversations. I have never signed a one-on-one client without a conversation first.
Whether that's a DM conversation or a Zoom conversation or a phone call, I see that as a leading indicator in my business. If I have conversations going, I have clients. This is the sobering reality. If you are looking at your calendar and you don't have conversations with people booked, you probably don't have as many clients as you want. Now, this is what's interesting. In the beginning of your coaching business, that looks like potential clients. You're filling your calendar with coffee chats, consults, networking calls, connection calls, catch-up calls, whatever.
You are having conversations with realized people and you are serving them. Deep listening, non-transactional service, pure intent, developing the relationship, not closing a deal. Those are the types of conversations that you're having. As you grow your coaching business, and this is where I don't have a ton of consults on my calendar anymore, but I have a lot of client calls on my calendar. And like I said, when you get to the phase in your business where renewals and referrals become mostly how you generate one-on-ones, those conversations serve the same purpose of creating clients.
And so the game never changes. I'm still having powerful conversations with people. I'm still enrolling clients in what I do. I'm still prioritizing conversations as a way to create more clients. That never ends as a one-on-one coach because one-on-one coaching is conversations, period. When I hear people not know what to do, it's because it's the uncomfortable work to grow their business. It is a lot easier to, let's say, post in a Facebook group, scroll Instagram, listen to a podcast, wink wink, read a book, read a blog article, watch a course on client creation. I get it. I have a course on client creation.
And I say this throughout the modules. It's like, this is not your work today. This is helping inform your work today. And I would make the same case about this podcast. This podcast won't change your life. I wish it could. I wish it could just like instantly give you clients. But what will give you clients is listening to this podcast, going out, prioritizing conversations with real humans, serving them, and then inviting them to learn more about what you do together. And there's no way around that. So when I notice that coaches are kind of get squirmy about conversations, it's like, no, no, this is your career, is conversations. Now, we don't have to be weird about it.
I don't do cold DMs. I happen to not do like random connection chats. Mine feels much more organic because it starts as a friendship. It starts like a pure relationship or a colleague relationship where it's just like, I'm being a normal human. That's what I used to say in my marketing a lot. It's just like you show up like a normal human. You're making comments on Instagram. You're responding to emails. You're going to the book club or like the yoga class. You're just showing up like a normal human having great conversations because this is what's unique is that coaches are uniquely good at powerful conversations. That's why we became coaches in the first place.
And so you don't have to try. You just have to be you. I think we have a lot of mind drama that prevents us from the simplicity of our business model. I shared a story on my friend Mark Butler's podcast about I signed this client at a t-ball game. And it's such a good example because she was my peer, right? Like she was just a friend. Our kids were playing t-ball together. I didn't go there with the intention to sign clients, but she was a real estate agent. She had a business. She asked me what I did. I said I was a coach. And we just had this genuine organic conversation.
And over time, she saw the use and the value that I bring in a conversation. We had a consult and we ended up working together. And I share that not to be like, see, anyone can do it. It's so easy. It's not easy, but it's available right in front of your nose. So many coaches are missing opportunities because they think client creation has to be hard when really they just have to do what they do best, which is having amazing conversations with people, asking really good questions, showing up, not needing anything. You're just here to serve. You're here to offer space of deep listening. You're here to ask really good, insightful questions. You're here to challenge their thinking in an inspiring way.
But at the root of everything, it's still a conversation. The foundation of what we do as coaches is conversations. It is. You can try to like say in a very flowery way, but at the heart of what we do, it is powerful conversations with people. And so the best way to create a business that involves powerful conversations with clients is to begin that with powerful conversations with people. I teach a concept called meaningful milestones because I don't like milestones that aren't meaningful to you. So when I say words like fully booked or hit six figures or whatever, if that doesn't resonate, find what resonates for you.
But if you aren't a fully booked coach and you want more clients, have more conversations, start more conversations, look for ways you can make your current conversations even better. And I know that that sounds trivial or like almost annoying. It's like, oh, yeah, whatever. But truly, that is the way to create one-on-one clients. One-on-one clients, one of the unique things about one-on-one coaching is how seen the person on the other end receiving the coaching feels because the whole hour or the whole 45 minutes or the whole 30 minutes, however long your sessions are, is dedicated and focused on them, on the client.
And so how can you give people an experience of that before they ever pay you? You can get creative. I've shared lots of my own stories of like DMs to a phone call or I'm at an event and I just spend time with people. That is the missing piece. It isn't sexy. It's not like a silver bullet. It's not this shiny object. It is just doing what you do in the world with the intention and the knowing that that is enough to sign clients. I think there's an energy when you know that your conversations are enough to sign clients, magic starts to happen because you're not trying to compensate in the conversation.
You're not trying to overcome something like, am I enough? Did they get enough value? It's like, you know, your conversations are valuable. You show up different. And those are the kinds of conversations that sign clients. So I wanted to share that with you because the art of one-on-one conversations is a foundation of building a fully booked practice, if that's your goal. And fully booked, just to answer this question, I get this question a lot, like, how do you know you're fully booked? And I always say fully booked isn't a number. It is absolutely an energetic thing.
So I'll give you an example. I use Voxer with my one-on-one clients. Some of my clients use Voxer a lot and some of them don't. But depending on the type of clients that I have at any given point, sometimes my Voxer is very full. And so my energetic set point for fully booked is less than when I have clients that don't use Voxer as much, as an example. The other thing that I'll add is you only find out you're fully booked when you're one over. That's often been my client's experience. It's like, oh, I thought eight was fully booked, but I have nine and I actually want more. Oh, now I have 12 and that's too many. I would have liked 10 or whatever.
And so it is a big experiment. I don't think it's something that we decide with our brains. I think you start to experience the fullness of a calendar, holding space for your clients, the kinds of people that you're working with, how much support they want, how much support you offer, the mental toll, the emotional toll of clients. Like these are all real life conversations that you should be having with your coach, because I think it is something that I know for me, I get coached on this and I have been coached on this. And this is why I love, I can't remember which book, but Steve Chandler's basically like, if you don't have a coach, it's like a doctor that won't see a doctor.
It doesn't really make sense. And so as you explore what feels good to you and what makes sense and how things are going and what you really want and what's not working and what is working and what you want to do different in the future, like all these kinds of questions, as you're exploring it with your coach, like you will find what feels good to you, and what resonates with your season of life, and how much time you want to work, and the business model that you ultimately want. All of those things come into consideration. Either way, whether you want two clients or 20 clients, conversations are a foundational part of what we do as coaches.
And so that's why they wanted to kick it off with the art of one-on-one conversations, because this, I promise if you are a one-on-one coach, this is key forever to creating the coaching practice that you want, no matter what level you're at, whether you're brand new or whether you're a seasoned coach moving into like maybe a different level of client, whether you're raising your prices. Even if you're like, I'm exploring group coaching and one-on-one coaching, it's still conversations. It is a skill. It is like the bread and butter of our business.
It is so different than like building a funnel or getting the sales page right. It goes so far beyond that because it is very personal, but that's what makes coaching so cool. It's why we all decided to do it is because it's so unique. I can't go to Amazon and find a one-on-one coach. It's all about relationships and relationships are built with conversation. So that being said, I hope this conversation was helpful for you. Go out and have your own conversations and I will see you in another episode and another part of the series of The Abundant Coach. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.
