My coach retired
- theoseeds
- Sep 30, 2024
- 2 min read
Once upon a time I spent $2,500 — BY FAR the most money I had ever spent — to hire a copy coach.
It was worth it. The month after I did it I had my first ever $10K month.
Last week he sent an email out to his list, saying he’s retiring from coaching copywriters and sharing a bunch of stuff he learned along the way.
Here’s the most interesting thing he said. It was usually pretty obvious what his students needed to do. They needed to get better at writing copy, or they needed to get better at talking to their clients, or whatever.
So he would tell them what they needed to do. They would ignore that advice, and keep making the same exact mistakes over and over again. And he would want to slam his head into a wall.
He decided to take a different approach. He stopped just telling people what they needed to do.
Instead, he would try his best to steer them in that direction, and help them figure it on their own.
(Turns out, when you do that, people are way more likely to actually learn something.)
You can’t learn any hard skills without going through the trial and error yourself. You can’t learn to ride a bike without getting on a bicycle and riding. You can’t learn a foreign language without actually talking to people. And you can’t learn business skills by just reading books or listening to your coaches.
Coaches can nudge you down the right path. But they can’t upload their secret recipes into your brain. You have to figure out your own secret recipe.
So with your students — don’t think in terms of showing people your secret recipe.
(You should still MARKET yourself as showing people your secret recipe, if that’s what your audience thinks they want. I’m not telling you to sabotage your sales. But understand: your product is not a secret recipe. Your product is personal growth.)
Think in terms of where your audience is, and what they’re ready to hear right now. And think about how to get them to the next step.
(Maybe that’s something you were ready to hear. Or maybe it’s something you’ll figure out on your own, down the road.)
No offer this week, because a) I’m exhausted and b) I’m taking some time off work right now.
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