Nancy: We both spent tens of thousands of dollars on marketing and copywriting and all the things to get ourselves out there. And I was also really clear that I didn’t want to create and perpetuate that need for coaches. So that is why we include the Springboard in the tuition – it is not something that you need to pay extra for. And we are dedicated, devoted to supporting you, getting your business up and running and getting paid clients ASAP. And part of what we also address in the Springboard is it’s all well and good to be a certified coach, but we need to also wear some other hats.
Nancy: Welcome to Your Permission Prescription. I’m Nancy Levin, founder of Levin Life Coach Academy, bestselling author, master life coach, and your host. I train life coaches, aspiring coaches, and anyone who wants to add coaching skills to their current career to elevate their life and their business. I’ve coached thousands of people to live life on their own terms, and now I coach, train, and certify other coaches to do the same.
If you are ready to give yourself permission to finally make yourself a priority and mobilize your vision, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive in.
Nancy: Welcome back to another episode of Your Permission Prescription. I have Linda Perry with me again.
Linda offers mindset coaching and business strategy for entrepreneurs, executives and creatives. Linda is the lead business trainer inside of Levin Life Coach Academy, she is a dear friend, we did our coaching, training and certification together over a decade ago, and I could not have built Levin Life Coach Academy without her. And today we are talking about one of the true aspects of LLCA that sets it apart from all other programs.
So here’s the deal, once you are certified, once you’ve gone through the full training and you are certified, you are automatically enrolled into our Alumni Springboard. This is an eight week module post certification included in your tuition.
And we created this Springboard module because in our experience of being trained and certified, we got our certification and then we were kind of like, now what? And truth be told, one of the reasons I felt compelled and inspired to create Levin Life Coach Academy in the first place, is I had so many coaches coming to me for coaching specifically around how do I get clients and what do I even do with a client when I get one? I also had a lot of aspiring coaches coming to me asking how they could become a coach like me.
So our mentor, Debbie Ford passed, her training program folded, and there was an opening for Levin Life Coach Academy to be born. And so it became very important to me, and this is really why from the get go Linda and I were in this together, it was very important to me to make sure that we were not just leaving our coaches who were certified in the dust, that we were giving them practical, tactical approaches to building a business from scratch and getting paid clients right away.
Linda: So can I add a little bit of like my story is to have this layers because…
Nancy: Yeah,
Linda: We loved our coaching training and once we were done, I remember that feeling of now what? And I always say it’s like I felt like I was like a lemon being pushed off a cliff because I didn’t really know what to do with it. And I was a lawyer and I didn’t know anything about business.
So in those years, I paid tens of thousands of dollars to become trained as a copywriter, as a marketer, in fact, I made a good living helping other coaches create their content so they could be seen in the world. And I helped them learn how to market themselves. And I would often actually run into coaches who didn’t have the, as we call the scaffolding, they didn’t have the actual programs, they didn’t even know what to do with the client. And so it was so impacted by the gap that existed in the coach training world that when Nancy and I talked about this piece, we knew that having a business training portion was absolutely necessary and one that didn’t feel like the coaches now had to go spend tens of thousands of dollars to learn how to get a client.
And so I love sharing this because this is something we’re both super passionate about and the Springboard is it’s where I get to come alive. And so it’s really fun.
Nancy: Yeah. And you know, and that’s the other thing you mentioned, and I’ll reiterate, we both spent tens of thousands of dollars on marketing and copywriting and all the things to get ourselves out there. And I was also really clear that I didn’t want to create and perpetuate that need for coaches. So that is why we include the Springboard in the tuition – it is not something that you need to pay extra for. And we are dedicated, devoted to supporting you getting your business up and running and getting paid clients ASAP.
And part of what we also address in the springboard is it’s all well and good to be a certified coach, but we need to also wear some other hats. We need to wear the hat of business owner, we need to wear the hat of marketer, we need to wear the hat of finance director. We are needing to embrace all of these elements all the time.
Linda: Yeah, I think it was last week, we’re currently in the springboard as we’re recording this, and it was last week that one of the students I think mentioned this is like little MBA for coaching. And the truth is, is that’s what we want it to be. And we wanna have, we have a lot of valuable information that we give that is really designed about how do you get this up and running quickly. And one of the things we’ve learned too is, is that there is no one way. So, because people come into our programs with different backgrounds, we recognize that some may already understand marketing,some may not. But what, what we do is we provide several different avenues in the Springboard for somebody to start their client attraction process.
And so we definitely spend the Springboard talking mainly about, how do you become visible, right? How do you get yourself out there? And it’s really an important piece because if you can’t be seen, you can’t be found. And so we really spend a lot of time defining what that looks like and defining different kinds of business structures because not everyone is going to have the same set of skills as they come into the program.
Nancy: And what I especially love about the way we approach the Springboard is we are still consistently bringing in the coaching concepts throughout.
So, you know, as I’ve mentioned back in the sort of tour through module one, the first coaching model that you are coached in by me and that you will be certified in is reinvention coaching. And so there are 8 Dimensions of Reinvention and the last dimension of reinvention is visibility. And we are weaving visibility throughout the Springboard. We’re also weaving the first dimension of vision throughout. We’re also checking in on what are the beliefs you’re holding around your ability to market, you know, where are you still wanting to hide out?
And so it’s another way in which the concepts get deeply rooted and become embodied.
Linda: Yeah, it’s, it’s a word that I think everybody gets sick of hearing, or I should say a phrase, everybody gets sick of hearing from us.
Nancy: Yeah.
Linda: It really is about embodying work because there’s nothing like building a business to bring out so many of those fears that maybe you thought you worked through during module one, but there’s nothing like a business to bring out the next layer. It’s an opportunity in fact for another layer of growth. And we’re really keenly aware of it and so we are always weaving through that. And we’re always inviting the coaches to do their work around the beliefs around visibility or their beliefs around sales. We provide some tools, particularly around sales, and some of the ones are really fun because they’re not your ordinary tools of, “Hey, just go out there and sell” because this isn’t a product like others. This is about transforming people’s lives. And so we give tools about communication and thinking through your own mindsets so that you can show up your most confident self.
And really, again, we go back to what we talked about in the last episode, why active listening is so important because working through all these pieces around your beliefs around selling or visibility allows you stay to stay present and really serve those who come into your world and we really presence that throughout the training.
Nancy: Yeah, and you know, one of the, I think really like a golden key of standing in business owner, marketer, is also being willing to leverage your own history and your own experience. And so this comes in, in a couple of different ways.
One is, once you become certified as a coach, it doesn’t mean that you just release everything and everyone from your past. You know, you get to bring in everything that you’ve done, everyone you have worked with up until now and find new ways of connection.
The other piece is really doubling down on the truth of who you are. You know, when you are putting yourself out there, the more detailed and truthful you can be about where you were, where you are now, and what that journey was like, that’s what’s going to be able to attract the people with whom you wanna work.
Linda: This is such an important point. We do spend, and I think it’s, I think next week coming up in the module is we do spend some time teaching our coaches how to talk about themselves, how to find their own personal story and which stories matter.
We also teach them how you know where to start because most people don’t want your whole history when they’re going to choose you to work with. So we teach you those places that really resonate with your ideal community. So we’ve identify those ideal communities, we teach you exactly some of the stories that you can excavate and how do you talk about them, whether it’s in person, whether it’s on your website, whether it’s in presentations. So we spend a little bit of time talking about all the different aspects so that you feel comfortable showing up and knowing exactly what parts of you to share. And the cool thing is that they may differ in different places. And so we spend some time helping you figure some of those pieces out. We share our own personal stories and how we’ve gotten to create those.
And so, again, and they’re also very different. So it helps people get different angles, right? We use even the mentors to share their stories so that people can get really different pictures of what can mine look like? How do I wanna share myself with the world? And so being visible in that way gives, builds a lot of confidence to go out in the world and find the people that you wanna serve.
Nancy: And throughout the springboard, we are giving templates and resources and exercises. And the truth of the matter is that there is no one way to begin your business. We have coaches in the Springboard who create a website, get on social media, you know, do it that way. We have coaches who are just doing it purely from word of mouth, someone they met on the airplane. There is no one way to be visible, there’s no one way to network, there’s no one way to put yourself out there. So we’re also wanting to sort of bust the myth around, it has to be done this way in this order, and don’t start until you have all these things.
So in other words, we want, in some ways, we really want you to know that by the time you get to this point, you’re actually ready. You’re far more ready than you think you are. And if you keep dragging your feet and waiting for a perfect website, you’re actually going to lose momentum. Linda: Yeah. And I think that’s really what the Ppringboard is all about ultimately is, is how do we build momentum? It’s, and it’s, you know, because I work with business owners, this is the, the key trick is as we break it down into these small steps, and in fact we encourage our students to say, what is the smallest step I can take today? So that fear and overwhelm don’t kick in, and it’s an opportunity to, to build what you need so that the mountain doesn’t seem as big and you continue to make progress. And that’s something that we really spend a lot of time teaching.
And I will say,you know, as somebody who has worked in the marketing field, I’ve worked with copywriters, I have done this all for a long time. It’s so interesting ’cause I come from a background of there is the way and there is the right way. And the truth is, is there is the way that you’re going to do it. And that’s really what we encourage is this, what will you do? And we give people enough choices and we even have presentations that we create some templates for you so that you can start to use that. We create conversation starters, emails, all sorts of ways that you can modify, make it your own and put yourself out there.
And that’s really the key of the Springboard, because we know that this is a place that a lot of coaches get stalled, right? This is a lot of places that coaches are just not taught this. And so it is not your average business of I’m selling widgets, or I’m selling some sort of product that may date me by saying I’m selling widgets. But like the truth is like, you are selling something that is transformational. You are selling a service. And we are really cognizant here that there are different ways to do this and we wanna make sure that we address all of those in the Springboard and help you continue to make that momentum every day.
Nancy: Another aspect of the Springboard is that it is a built in community.
Now, from the beginning of the training, the cohort is bonding, but there is something that happens on the other side of certification because there’s a way in which we’re all together in this, we’re all in it together to put ourselves out there, to make ourselves visible, to share our stories. So there’s a lot of support, there’s a lot of opportunity for connection and feedback. And I must say that over the years, all of the cohorts have bonded so significantly beyond my wildest dreams. And the connections and the deep true friendships that have been formed inside of LLCA are really unsurpassed.
Linda: Yeah, it’s really fun to see because here’s the thing, where else is anyone going to understand? A, what you do, B, what you’re going through to build a business. You know, it is this group of people who will understand sort of the, the tears one day, the joy the next.
And I mean, it’s funny, it’s a little medic has here, Nancy and I are talking about LLCA when the truth is, is we ended up bonding over our own program and connecting and you know, she’s become a lifelong friend, but also somebody that I get to build and do something really powerful with.
And that’s really what we wanted to create for our students in the community, is as an opportunity to have that level of trust, that level of connection. And it is really fun to watch how these friendships are formed. And we actually, even, especially this year, we’ve encouraged people to get accountability buddies within the group because we know that once you speak your commitment, that it starts to build the momentum. And several of the students have actually reached out to tell me that they have joined up with an accountability buddy and it is somebody that they can connect with, tell them what they’re working on, and really get the daily support. Because building a business, some days you don’t feel like being visible. Some days you don’t feel like doing a thing, and that’s where you’re gonna get a lot of your support and your resources really for those, those moments. And so it’s something that, that really organically has grown out of the whole community. But it’s something that is really exciting to see,
Nancy: Especially because entrepreneurship can be isolating, can be lonely. And I’m so grateful to have all my business besties who I can bounce things off of who I can, you know, we are, you and I are always reaching out to each other and you know, running things by each other. And you know, I have a handful of other people with whom I can do that. And what we create inside of Levin Life Coach Academy is the opportunity to have your built in, you know, your built in business besties.
Linda: Yeah, and you know, I, I just remembered too, another important point is, is that in other programs, these will be prerecorded again, we have live sessions, and what I actually invite the students to do each week is to actually use me while I’m there.
Nancy: Yep.
Linda: I encourage people to share their visions with me. They’re about pages, all of these things. I will go in and give feedback and I loved how active this current cohort has been.
Nancy: Yes.
Linda: I have received people’s visions. You can see when somebody is hesitant or somebody’s really playing flat, and the energy that comes from it is really exciting. And so people send me things, I respond, and you get actual direct feedback, not from somebody else, but literally in the springboard, I am attending to everything and helping people really keep that momentum going and point out some of the ways they can maybe change a sentence or two even to help attract who they really want.
Nancy: So, you know, the Springboard is our little baby. You know, we love it so much because it’s so different than anything else that’s offered. And the fact that we have created it to be part of LLCA from the beginning is thrilling for us too.
And we would love nothing more than for you to join us inside of LLCA. Enrollment is opening soon for the next cohort, and you can go to nancylevin.com/yes to join the priority list. And we hope to see you inside.
Linda: Can’t wait to see you there!
Thanks so much for joining me today on Your Permission Prescription. For even more, I invite you to head on over to nancylevin.com and sign up for my newsletter, The Practice, and follow me on social media.
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