The hullaballoo about marketing anxiety

So you’ve started coaching and you’ve had your first couple clients. The sessions were amazing! You just know you’ve really found your calling and this is the kind of work you want to do for the rest of your life. Maybe you got one client and they referred another, and maybe you picked up one more by word of mouth.

And one by one, those clients are walking away satisfied that you’ve transformed them and thinking really positive thoughts about you. That’s great from a goodwill perspective; unfortunately, they’ve taken their chequebooks with them and don’t feel the need to come back for more sessions. Not only that, but they don’t know anyone right now who’s looking for a coach.

If you want to keep coaching, that means, you have to go find new clients.

Yikes.

Here’s where things start to get a little challenging for a lot of coaches. Going out there to find new clients means you have to stick your neck out and try to attract strangers. It means going to people you might not know as well and asking them to help you with referrals. Both of these things carry the risk of rejection, of sabotaging your reputation, and of course of making you feel really disappointed. This is scary stuff and it can sour you on coaching in general since the only way you can keep doing it is to find a way past all of this. On this blog we’re going to talk all about different tricks and techniques that can help you leverage Personal Intelligence principles to find, attract and keep coaching clients for life. But before we can do that, we really need to have a frank conversation about sales and marketing anxiety.

So what I want to do today is talk about two things. First, we’re going to talk about what happens in the brain when you encounter something new and frightening. Then we’re going to talk about the kind of thinking that we need to develop if we’re going to find a way past all of this and start holding the door open for new clients.

Let’s start by taking a look at how we process information that comes to us through our senses. We can use visual information as an example. Maybe, you’re just about to step off a curb when a car zooms right by you. You look in front and see the car bearing down on the very spot where you’re about to stand. A visual signal that represents that car travels from the retina down the optic nerve, through a place called the thalamus all the way to the occipital lobe at the very back of the brain. This is where visual signals are converted into electrical impulses that your brain can use. But you’re not done. Once converted, those impulses need to travel all the way to pre-frontal cortex in the front of your skull where you can then think to yourself, “Hey, that car’s going to hit me, I should probably get out of the way.” This entire process from beginning to end takes about 250 milliseconds. In that amount of time, you’re likely pudding on the pavement.

Enter the amygdala

Fortunately, the human brain is an evolved organ that built up over top of a much more efficient processor. Deep inside the midbrain is a tiny, almond shaped structure called the amygdala. The amygdala’s role is complex but what it’s most known for is its role in fear processing. I mentioned a moment ago that visual signals travel through a place called the thalamus – which is kind of like a train station. As the visual signal travels through the thalamus, it makes two copies. It sends one copy to the occipital lobe for visual processing, but another copy it sends to the amygdala which located right below the thalamus, so it’s nice and close. This is important because this proximity means amygdala processing only takes about 80 milliseconds.

The amygdala takes a quick look at that signal and evaluates it. If it determines the signal represents a threat, it will immediately take over the body’s autonomic responses and command them to react. In the case of our speeding car, this will mean your body immediately stops its forward momentum and your feet jump back up onto the curb. It’s only after you’re standing safely on the sidewalk that you have time to think to yourself, “Hey that car almost hit me!”, while you also notice that your heart is pounding fiercely in your chest.

This is important because it means that how we respond to scary things isn't 100% within our conscious control. If the amygdala decides something you want to do is threatening, like for example, making a cold call to a potential client you've never met, it will ratchet up your fight-or-flight response to help you look for all kinds of reasons why you shouldn't do it. This can lead to procrastinating, building plans based on little more than hope, and eventually, changing how you feel towards this work that you love.

What makes certain activities more likely to set off your amygdala? Things that are big and things that are unknown. If you're like many coaches and you came from another career where you didn't have to sell to keep your job, the prospect of developing a sales and marketing plan can feel both big and unknown. If we want to bring this activity to a place where the amygdala won't react to it, we're going to have to change that.

Tips to minimize your amygdalar response

1) Do a lot of reading. There are plenty of sales and marketing websites out there. In order to tackle this beast, it makes sense to know a little bit about it. Be careful not to take too much to heart (because there are also a lot of bad sales and marketing websites out there, and it can be hard to tell the difference in the beginning).

2) Get active in discussions about sales and marketing for coaches. Ask questions. Engage. Interact with others. The more you talk about something either out loud or in writing, the more familiar it becomes. Familiar things are much less likely to set off the amygdala. When you can talk about sales and marketing without feeling panicky, you know it's working.

3) Think super, tiny baby steps. Probably the number one rule of planning any daunting task is to break it down into the smallest, tiniest buckets of work that you possibly can, and then focus on just one step at a time. If you've ever tried to learn a new language, you may have been daunted by the sheer vastness of what you haven't yet learned - when confronted with all that, it's very tempting to just give up.

4) Change the objective. Pounding the pavement looking for strangers to take notice of you can be very scary. What if strangers came to you instead? What if they already knew a little something about you and were kind of “warmed up” before you had your first conversation? If you were able to design a system that let you do that, would that change how you felt about the activity?

5) Stay in touch right here on this website. This website is devoted to supporting coaches with their business development needs. We'll be talking about sales and marketing strategies that coaches can use. When you leave questions or comments, someone will surely tag someone else who can offer advice.

In the meantime, keep doing the great work you're already doing and know that you're making a difference. The world needs more people who want to help others.