What’s the payoff?

This post will push a few buttons, but it is unbelievably important…

I’m just going to jump right in…

If you are struggling with something consistently over a decent period of time (3 months or more…) then I want to ask you 1 question…

What’s the payoff?

I know you hate whatever it is you are struggling with and you want nothing more than for it to stop and be a thing of the past…

But I’ll ask you 1 more time…

What’s the payoff?

If I’ve hit a nerve here and you want to jump through the computer and tell me I’m crazy…stick with me while I explain…

Let me do this by giving an example…

A friend of mine had been in theatre for years…

He was very successful and went from one tour to the next…

He never stopped working…but the one thing that kept eluding him was a Broadway Show…

He was more than talented enough…

He worked harder than most people in the business…

But it just kept not happening and it was driving him crazy!

One night we were sitting and talking and he was telling me how frustrated he was, how he was having trouble watching people who weren’t as talented and who didn’t work as hard get Broadway Shows while he didn’t.

I looked him dead in the eye and said, “What’s the payoff?”

He said, “What do  you mean?”

I said — “What are you getting 0n a subconscious level by NOT getting your Broadway Show?”

For a second I thought he was going to leave the table…so I continued…

“I’m not being mean…but seriously, you’ve already told me you are more than qualified and you work all the time in big productions…so what are you getting from it?”

He sat and glared at me for more than a minute…

And then his face changed — his eyes flashed and he got a weird smile on his face and then he said, “Wow…I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you’re right. Every time I complain about all the people who aren’t as good as me who are getting rewarded with what I deserve, I feel a weird sense of being better than them…like I work so much harder than them and deserve it more than them…so in my subconscious, by not getting what I want I’m somehow giving myself the message that I’m better than everyone else…”

I said, “Wow, that was honest…”

He said, “Yeah, but as I’m verbalizing it, I’m realizing that I don’t care about being better than everyone else, I just want my Broadway Show!”

Here’s what happened after that…

He consciously stopped judging people who were getting what he wanted…

In fact, whenever he wanted to complain about them, instead he said 3 words…

“That’s for me!”

It didn’t happen overnight…

It took a year of him sticking to his guns…

But he finally got his Broadway Show (and has been on Broadway ever since)…

So…

I’m going to ask you 1 more time…

Whatever it is you are struggling with…

“What’s the payoff?”

Be honest with yourself…

Leave me a comment and let me know!

Go Big!

Kristen

You Won’t Save the World by Giving Your Solution Away for Free

Have I already hit a sore spot?

I know it’s a touchy subject when it comes to making money from your passion, and I hit on it slightly in one of my posts a few weeks ago and I’m still getting emails about it.

So what’s the nerve I’ve hit?

I’ll tell you…

You won’t save the world by giving your solution away for free!

We’ve been doing all of this work on finding your passion and making money from it and discovering how you can help people…

In other words, defining what solution you have to someone else’s problem…

I do one-on-one and group coaching to help people do all of this and time and time again one of my clients will say to me…

‘But I want to make the world a better place and if I have a solution that someone else needs, shouldn’t I give it to them for free?’

YIKES!

NO!

Here’s the deal…

Do I want you to take advantage of people?

No, of course not!

But the fact of the matter is you are NEVER going to make the world a better place by giving your solution away for free for 2 main reasons…

1. If you give it away for free, how long do you think you’ll be able to keep giving it away? Honestly, won’t you end up depleted of resources like time and money and energy if you go this route? I say this to my coaching clients like a mantra, “When you fly in an airplane, there’s a reason they tell you to put the oxygen mask on your self first.”

2. People don’t have anything at stake if it’s free and if you REALLY want to help people they have to have something at stake.

Now before you argue with me on that second point, I have proof…

Years ago, I had enough people ask me why I didn’t give my coaching for free so I thought it would be an interesting experiment. I invited 10 people to work with me one-on-one for free. This normally would have been a $5000 investment for them to work with me, but I agreed to have them pay that amount once they finished the program and saw what it could do for them.

What do you think happened?

Well…the first 2 weeks went quite well, everyone stayed accountable and took the action I gave them to take and then…

Well, let’s just say that after 5 weeks I was putting all my time and effort into chasing them down.

I called a group session together and asked them what they thought the problem was…

I’ll be completely honest about the response…

• 1 of the men in the group said that I just wasn’t the coach for him
• 1 woman said that she realized she really didn’t want to do what it would take to be an enterpreneur
• 1 younger guy didn’t even call into the group session
• And the 7 remaining people agreed that because they didn’t have any skin in the game, the program had gone to the bottom of their priority list…

They literally told me that because they didn’t have their investment in the program pressuring them to follow through, they just weren’t making it a priority at all.

Ultimately, as a group, we called off the experiment and 3 of the people made the investment to start working with me…

The results?

2 of them now have extremely successful businesses and the third didn’t follow through anyway so I let him out of the program.

So, I’ll say this a million times if I have to…

If you have a solution that will help people, and you really want to help as many people as you possible can, the results will be much better for everyone if you don’t give it to them for free!

I’m all for giving and charity, but that isn’t what this is about…

You don’t have to charge huge amounts of money, but it does need to be enough that it inspires the person to follow through and actually use the solution you have offered them…

If you want to make money from your passion, please take this to heart…

Put the oxygen mask on yourself first and then get out there and you’ll be able to help all the people you can reach!

Leave me a comment or shoot me an email to let me know how you feel about this, it’s a hot button topic and I want to open up a conversation about it!

Go Big!

Kristen