The Truth About Coaching Programs
What is the most expensive coaching program you have ever joined and did it measurably grow your business and/or writing?
I spent $7,000 to join a podcast coaching program called, Grow the Show. For that investment, I gained lifetime access to the creator’s recorded video content.
There were also templates and forms of various sorts I could adapt to use for pitching other podcasters to guest on their shows or ask guests to appear on mine.
The two pillars of the program were called TDE and TPP otherwise known as Targeted Daily Engagement and Targeted Podcast Pitching.
And the truth is, engaging with the right audience and learning how to appeal to podcasters who have the reach to organically spread your message are two must-have skills.
If you know how to find the people who are looking for what you have to offer, and what you have to offer is sufficiently appealing, you’re going to enjoy wealth in the form of influence, reach, access, and finance.
It’s great if you are the finder with the salient goods, but what happens when you’re lost at sea, uncertain what land looks like but desperate to rest your weary body on some hard surface that doesn’t pitch and roll with the waves?
You’ll find if you are sufficiently hungry that the promise of a good meal goes from appetizing to lifesaving. And here you are a writer with a book or several books—or in my case a podcaster—unknown and a full of self-doubt.
Someone comes along and promises big things if you join their program. Not only do they promise big things, but they make claims about why you are’t experiencing success, and when you think about it, they are right you aren’t doing the things they say.
They show you a 20-part, bullet-pointed list that details what they’ll do for you if you work with them, and each bullet-point has a cash value assigned to it. At the end of the list they tally up what the cost should be and it’ll be many thousands of dollars.
Then they show you what they’re going to charge you and you think, Damn, that’s a lot of value. Or you think, There’s no way the math works, and you know they’re just making up numbers, but still $7,000 seems way more reasonable than $29,995, and so you feel, despite knowing slot machines have destroyed better people than you, that this is actually probably a totally reasonable price.
You remember how desperate you were to succeed and you convince yourself this coaching program couldn’t have possibly thrived this much if there wasn’t something to it, and if it delivers on all the outcomes it highlights you’ll make more money on the knowledge you gain than you spent to earn that knowledge. Oh, and it’s a good thing to be a humble person and accept that you don’t know everything, and nothing good is free, and if you could succeed without this program, wouldn’t you already have succeeded?
The next thing you know they’re asking for the CVV on the back of your credit card, but it’s okay because you’re going to be the best student the program has ever had and succeed in ways no student has ever succeeded.
When the Math Seems Sketchy
You go through the whole coaching program. You make all the team calls, you say yes to every challenge and you get fully upside down spending so much time doing the TDE and TPP and you do grow your show, but it’s so outrageously less than what you hoped and needed, and any time you’ve reached out with questions the answers are so generic and pointless it seems maybe the figurehead doing the coaching isn’t actually as knowledgeable and expert as maybe he’s supposed to be, but no one else is seeming to see what you’re seeing.
Is the math sketchy, or are you the kind of person who makes excuses when your efforts are too half-assed to make the whole production shine? Maybe deep down you’re what AA calls a dry drunk: on the outside you look sober but in your heart you’re only going through the motions.
A Twist Ending
Before you start a coaching program, ask yourself, can you withstand the upset if the program fails to meet your expectations? If you don’t get the answers you expected, will it reinforce your hunger to succeed all the same?
What will happen to your confidence if others in the program succeed more than you? Will you leave the program with friends you otherwise might’ve not met?
How will you turn a disappointment into a victory?
The answer is simple. If you spend money on yourself, for your betterment, with good faith, and in full commitment of realizing your dream, the content of the program doesn’t matter. You matter.
Let me write that again. You matter.
There’s always going to be something lacking in your skillset. You can’t achieve your dreams without help. But no matter where you go looking for that help, if you show up, help will come, and it may come in unexpected ways.
A Postscript For Clarity
Be shrewd about spending money on coaching, courses, and masterminds, but understand, up to now what you’ve done hasn’t worked. Take it from someone who will never charge for coaching, who will never sell a course, or form a paid mastermind—paying for self-improvement always rewards those who strive.
I’ll gladly pay thousands more to learn the skills I need, and if it doesn’t go according to plan, I’ll be just as bummed as I was with Grow the Show.
This is a great story. I can—of course—relate. I'm glad you had the experience, even though I also think it sounds like the course was a bit scammy. You made something of a bad situation! Thanks for sharing it!
You’re right, Jody: there’s always something to be learned from these situations. The trouble is overcoming the frustrations and losing the negative outlook so you can change your thought pattern and reassess the program or class and recognize the lesson you learned.
I was disappointed by a writing class that I took during the pandemic’s early stages while facilitating my daughter’s remote education. Because I was so busy learning how to teach third grade on the fly and acting as a school psychologist on the side, I opted for the less personal online class instead of the live one with twice-weekly Zoom meets.
The upset happened when the first lesson was emailed, a facsimile of chapter one of the company's book published over a dozen years prior, which I bought because it had been recommended and I wanted to be such a great student. I read the book in a day. The course, Fiction I for beginners—because you can’t take two without taking one and so on—was three months long.
I was annoyed and bored.
There is more to the story than this, including other disappointments, but there’s no constructive reason to list them all.
The course wasn’t for me. So what? It exists for anybody interested in writing fiction—not just me.
A few weeks after the course ended, once my ego had exhausted itself on the matter and pretended to be invisible, I was revising a short story when I realized that I owned a more critical eye. Every writer writes in a tunnel; only they’re decorated differently. Mine was now perforated. Being less purblind, I became a better writer, though sometimes, now, I am too critical of myself.
What I learned in the class came not from doing the exercises or writing but from evaluating others’ work and submitting reviews. Of course, I despised doing this at the time, and it gave me the most value. I now enjoy criticizing others’ work and still learn from it.