A coach, a little bit like therapy, but not quite therapy. We
do our best work when we're out of our comfort zone. As a mentor,
I'm not going to waste your time suggesting that you
explore or scope out something that I know from personal experience
does not work.
At the moment, I'm speaking to a lot of website designers who
are saying to me, I've recently had coaching, or I've had coaching
in the last year. I know I needed to do something in my business and
the coaching didn't work. And I feel like I'm burnt out.
And I feel like I've kind of lost faith in
how to run my business in a model where I can scale it,
where I can take some more time out of it, and where I can actually
really enjoy it again. And I really
hear you. I really feel for you. And so, so
many people have been there. And I wanted to record this
podcast episode for you because I wanted to say, don't
give up. Please don't give up, because there is the
right solution for you out there. And I thought I would use this
episode to walk through a few of the
points in why this possibly hasn't worked for you
and how we can turn that around.
Hi, for anyone who doesn't know me, I am Holly Christie. I am the host
of this podcast, Websites Made simple, and I am a
website designer, a website designer's mentor, and
developers. I mentor you too, and I am here to help
you have the best career that you can
have doing what you love. So let's get
started.
So the one thing that has come up is that people
say about, you know, I went to work with a coach, and
I get it. There are coaches everywhere. I build so
many websites for coaches. I really do know,
like, how that message is being put to us, particularly freelancers,
all the time. You need coaching for this, you need coaching for that. And it's
really easy to fall down the spiral of someone's content and think, oh, yeah,
I really like them. I feel like I've got to know them. It's time to
go and work with them. And one of the things that I would
say people are probably in our industry making
the first mistake with is that they're working with a coach instead of a
mentor. And the difference between this is that
coaching is very much you have your own
answers and the coach is there to help you
unlock them. And in doing that, they can help you
overcome obstacles, they can help you do some brilliant
things and increase your confidence and find these answers. And it's
Fantastic. But when you're a website designer, the chances
are that what you need is mentoring. Where someone says,
I've been where you are, I know what the industry
is like, I know the problems that you're facing and whether that's growing
your business or whether that's with a really sticky layout that you just
can't quite get right, or everything that comes in between with
that. And that is what mentoring is. Coaching. They're not meant to give
advice. They are meant to just listen and ask
questions. And they sometimes will use work models and worksheets and stuff which
will help to kind of challenge you and stretch you and help you to really
explore those answers. But they can't give you advice.
If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you will
know that I give a lot of advice. And one of those
things is because I am a mentor, so I can and I've been you and
I've lived you. And I don't want you to have to do
that all by yourself and feel really at lost of it. Or I also
don't want you to have the hideous experiences that I had along the way that
kind of formulates that basis of this advice as
well.
What you won't know about me because it's from qualification
from even before my website designing days is that I trained in
counseling so skills as well. And so I also
know how to really listen and use those guided questions as well to
support you in being heard,
in finding those answers and having the confidence that it's not
just about saying this is what you need to do now go off and do
it. It's about really supporting you in the best way that that works
for you as well. I always say, like, no two websites.
If I went and built a website and you went and built a website and
we were using all the same materials, we would not build
the same website. And that's the case with mentoring
and coaching as well, is that you won't be getting the same advice. So when
you work with me, you'd be getting the advice that really works for
you and helps support you in getting to the next level.
Doing it, I would say within your comfort zone. But we do our best
work when we're out of our comfort zone. What I will say is that I
can absolutely support you every step of the way with that as
well. So a coach also doesn't
have an industry specific experience, so they're
not able to really take some of the issues that we face
within the industry and really advise you on how to deal with that
as well. And that's quite a big one because when you get a client, come
back and say, I don't like the draft of this website,
sorry, or, you know, I don't want to stick to your terms of service,
or I date this, that or the other. What you need is on the ground
help then and there. You don't need someone saying, well,
what do you feel your answer should be for that? Or how did that make
you feel? You need someone who can say, right, okay, what would you like the
outcome of this to be? And for us to be able to go through and
work on that outcome and get that outcome, achieve it together. As
a mentor, I will support you to working to best
practices all of the time. I am absolutely known
for not cutting corners. And that doesn't mean that we do
everything longhand all of the way. There are lots of tips
and tricks that I can teach you and, you know, whether that's
kind of cloning pages and saving containers and sending stuff up
to the cloud and drawing it back down from the cloud and really kind of
honing those practices. But it means that when you are
working to best practices all of the time, you know that
you can be confident in, in not only what you are delivering to your
clients, but to the skills that you're learning and you're
embedding as well. You know, once you start doing something really well one way, you
will continue to do that really well all the way
through. So I will support you in doing that as well.
And going back to that point where I said about we all do things differently,
we all run our businesses slightly differently as well. And as a mentor, I'm
not here to say to you, you've got to do this like the way I
do it, or you've got to use the tools I use, or you've got to
do this, that, and the other, I can, of course, make recommendations as
to what tools I use. I think there's a podcast episode back in
the backlogs which talk to you about what tools I use, what the essential
ones I feel are. But what I'm looking to do when I'm working
with you is, is look at building on the stuff
that's really worked for you. So you might think, right, I've got this
set up nailed. This is what I want to work in. And then we're going
to go and develop that and say, okay, that's brilliant. You know, how can
we then bring that to the market in a way that's going to get you
more business, that's going to keep your clients happy, that's going to feel very productive
for you. And we all, especially because we work in
such a creative industry, we have so many ideas and that
can be for running our businesses as well as projects
and things like that. And I'm going to
encourage you to scope out those ideas as well. I work
with coaches. I had a coach a few years ago when I really wanted
to level up. She was absolutely amazing. Every time I came up with an
idea, she would say, go and scope it out. And I would go and scope
it out and I would know which ones were worth pursuing because
I would action them, I would take action on them. So we
will look at doing that as well and some of them will naturally
fall by the wayside. So when you've had coaching in the
past and you've said, I feel like I've been burned, I feel like it hasn't
worked, all that sort of stuff, you're not going to get that when
you're working with me because we're not going to get to a point where you
feel like none of this is working and it is just hopeless.
I'm going to really support you with some really industry specific stuff that's
going to get you to the next level and it works. Not only have I
done this for myself, but I mentor handfuls of
website designers and developers every year and they've all
gone on to grow their business, they've gone on to niche, they've gone on to
get specific skill sets and they are all thriving. And you
can thrive too.
Finally with coaching, and you've probably had this, and it's just following
on from the last point is that coaches can sometimes gloss over when there's been
something that's not worked well because they don't know how to fix it.
And again, with mentoring, we can fix it. Because we're
not going to gloss over if something hasn't worked. We'll look at why it hasn't
worked. If we're scoping something else and I'm telling you that's
not going to work, I will also tell you why it's not going to work.
And then of course, if you want to then push forward and say, no, I
really want to try and develop this, then we will look at the most viable
and practical way of developing it together. So if you feel
that you would like to give it another go, you would like to get back
in the saddle and really develop your website design
business, but you'd like to do it with some industry specific support.
You could look at my Phoenix program. That is a nine month program
for websites, developers and designers. It is there to
support them in leveling up, growing their business, making a name for themselves
and loving what they do. It's also designed to help you to
be able to step away from your business a little bit so that you can
make more money but also have some more free time. If you're a
little bit nervous of going into a nine month program right
now, I hear you. I totally understand why that would be the case
and you can book one to one mentoring with me through my websites as well.
And you just go to websitesmadesimple.co.uk you'll find
everything you need there and I would love to hear from you. If
you've liked what you've heard today and you would like to explore this more,
come to the website or get in touch. You can find me at
helloebsitesmadesimple.co.uk. i would
love to hear from you. Until then, happy
designing.