Why Setting Boundaries With Your Athletes is 100% Neccessary

(upbeat music) - Hey everyone, Spencer here, former burnt out coach and founder of Coach Now, and the Connected Coach Academy. Welcome to the Connected Coach podcast, a show by coaches for coaches. Our mission is to help coaches just like you unlock your time, income, and location. Today's episode is called Three Ways to Set Boundaries with Your Athletes. Let's get to it. (upbeat music) In the first episode of this podcast, I spoke about the importance of being a little selfish in order to establish boundaries in your coaching business. But while it's one thing to know you should set boundaries, knowing which boundaries to set is an entirely different question. I get it. When growing a coaching business, you wanna go above and beyond for your clients, for sure. You wanna show your dedication to their success by being available whenever they need, working with the software and the methods they're comfortable with, and you certainly don't wanna turn down a potential client, even if their goals aren't quite aligned with your skillset. Because more clients equals more money, and equals a more successful business, right? Unfortunately, wrong. For my experience, such thinking actually leads to less success. A more accurate equation looks something like more clients equals less focus, equals less free time, equals increased burnout, equals less value delivered to clients, equals less successful business. And I'm coming at this from direct personal experience. At one point, I was pretty much in the best possible scenario for a coach. I was making well over six figures. I had star athletes as clients, and I was growing quickly due to pause word of mouth, but I was also miserable. I was working way too much, and I wasn't taking any time for myself. I was completely burnt out and wanted to quit coaching. My goal now is to prevent the same thing from happening to you. Learn from my mistakes and set boundaries sooner rather than later. To that end, I'm gonna share my top three pieces of advice for setting healthy boundaries with your athletes. This advice is equally applicable to someone just getting started with their coaching business as it is to somebody that's been doing this for 20 plus years. My goal here is to help you save time, increase your impact, and avoid burning out like I did. So the three pieces of advice are number one, control your communication channels, two, set clear boundaries around your time, and three, don't coach just anyone. Let's start with point number one, control your communication channels. This is perhaps the most crucial boundary in this list. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. If coach now is just another communication channel that you use in your coaching business, I'd rather you not use it at all. All the time I see coaches using various channels for different use cases, something like email for general communication, text or WhatsApp for scheduling and checking in, YouTube or iCloud for sending videos, Facebook or social media for community, et cetera, and the list goes on and on and on. This almost always results in a stressed out coach who never catches up with the flurry of disparate notifications. I don't want you going to bed anxious, wondering if you missed a message, a post or a notification, when this happens, you're suffering unnecessarily. This makes it impossible to show up as the best version of yourself for your athletes, your friends, and your family. My advice, go all in with one channel and train your athletes and their parents in some cases to only expect communication, feedback, and coaching right there. And this next part is super important. When you set this boundary, never give your feedback in the wrong place. If you have an athlete who has already gotten used to accessing you across these other channels, I found it helpful to prepare a canned response in advance. Something along the lines of, "Hey, great question. Please post this in coach now and I'll respond there." Don't reinforce disparate communications. Trust me, 100% please trust me. You will thank me for it. The coaches that draw the firmest line on this are absolutely the happiest. Now onto my second piece of advice, set clear boundaries around your time. Remember, your time is the most valuable resource you have. They aren't making more of it and to be a successful coach and to build the lifestyle you love, you need to treat it as indispensibly valuable. I found that when most coaches are beginning their careers, they look at it in a very linear way, which is essentially if I give X amount of lessons and I'm gonna make X amount of money, they don't really think beyond that typical exchange. But at the connected coach academy, we think differently. And we know while revenue is important, while making money is important, of course, if you don't have revenue, you can have a business. We also want you to measure success based on your location and time freedom. We want you to be in control of your life. In our flagship course, the connected coach blueprint, I start first by asking the attendees what their ideal lifestyle looks like. Then I help them reverse engineer what that means for their business. The difference is subtle but vitally important. It's all about what you hold fixed as the number one priority. Fact is, the decisions you make while optimizing your ideal lifestyle will differ completely from the decisions you make while organizing or optimizing your revenue. And to avoid burnout, it's crucial to set a clear demarcation between when you're working and when you're not. And don't just make it a goal in your head clearly communicate it to your athletes and stick to it. I recommend setting aside specific times in the week to review video footage, review questions, add comments, and do whatever you need to do within the coach now universe. But you want to make your athletes know ahead of time what they can expect. So you can create windows where you provide feedback during that set window for all of your athletes in one fell swoop. Additionally, you should position your asynchronous feedback as a component of your coaching offer and set a maximum number of comments posts that you are gonna provide each week. Another way to do this is actually in the reverse, setting a minimum level of expectations that way you they fully understand what the minimum commitment you and they are making. But believe it or not, setting these expectations is actually a win-win-win for you and your athletes and their parents or anybody else that's involved. You're gonna keep your sanity while encouraging athletes to make progress even when you're not in a real time session together. By clearly defining the quantity and the timing of your feedback and your offer, you encourage your athletes to stay actively engaged. If they pay for this feedback and it's use it or lose it, they'll be more likely to hold themselves accountable. And conversely, I found that if you don't include specific expectations and your offer, your athletes will fall into two camps. Either they will expect constant interaction and be frustrated when they don't get it or they won't feel comfortable asking for the feedback they need, making it more difficult for them to reach their goals. So in 2022, avoid falling into the trap of going above and beyond if it means compromising your schedule. Now, don't get me wrong. It's fine to surprise and delight here and there, absolutely so that you could show that you care. But be sure that that's not the expectation or the rule. All right, now to the last piece of advice. Don't just coach anyone. I love the saying, if you're trying to be everything to everyone, you'll end up being nothing to no one. I think it really applies in the coaching world and it really applies to just about every coach that I've met. It's incredibly important to pick a lane with your business and hyper focus on one element of coaching that you know you do extra well. I often make the joke that you shouldn't be the cheesecake factory of coaching. Now, if you're not from the States, it's a restaurant with a giant menu. Now, I have nothing against the cheesecake factory. In fact, their cheesecake is fantastic. But have you seen their giant menu? It includes everything under the sun. It's all decent quality, but in reality, no one thinks, hey, I could really use a slice of pizza from the cheesecake factory right now. Sure, pizza is on the menu, but there is likely a pizza rear down the street that specializes in making just pizza. Their specialization will almost always lead to a better slice that keeps you coming back when the craving returns. In a similar fashion, adding specificity to your coaching programs create more demand for your services, not less. Sell from a position of expertise and make your clients prove to you that they are good fit. For more on this topic, you can check out a previous blog post and podcast episode titled, "No Who You Serve and Who You Don't." If you don't set a clear boundary around who you coach, you'll only add additional stress and pressure to your workload. It's easy to fall into the scarcity mindset when acquiring new customers, but trust me, if you've constantly been your standards, you're gonna be struggling to make the impact that you want and it's gonna take a toll on your well-being. Be clear about who your coaching isn't for and stick to it. All right, I hope this advice was helpful. I know it was a lot, but if you did enjoy this information, I'd encourage you to think long and hard about what boundaries you wanna set for yourself this year. If you wanna share those with me, please do so by shooting my team and email at [email protected]. We'd love to hear what you think. I hope you enjoyed this many episode or what we're calling for. calling the blog pod since these are all different takes on our growing database and articles. So if you like this format, please consider subscribing so you get notifications when we drop new episodes. And remember, you can learn more about what we do at CoachNow at CoachNow.io and you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter at CoachNow.io/blog. Hope you have a great day. Talk to you soon and cheers to setting healthy boundaries in 2022 and beyond. (upbeat music)