This article has been written by Ed Ley.
What I learned about growing a coaching business by selling up and moving to Denmark:
In the summer of 2017 myself and my family moved to Copenhagen. It was never in our plans but a family situation arose and the move was both the right and most adventurous thing to do.
Inside 100 days we took a flat in Denmark, sold our house, gym and healthcare business in Bristol and moved to a beautiful beach and forest side town just outside of Copenhagen.
The story I told myself at the time was that I was building my dream life in reverse. My wife and I had a lifestyle goal of spending more time in the woods and by the sea with our family. A dream of being away together at weekends and being both physically and mentally present for our children the whole time they weren’t in school.
The flaw in the plan was that the goal had a number of years attached to the achievement of it and children age the whole time that our focus is on other things. We decided to flip societies script on its head.
Instead of setting goals, striving to achieve them and then slowly constructing the dream life, we chose to build the dream life first and work out how to pay for it second.
This was my big lesson.
As coaches we have this idea that it is our job to open the door to a better life for others and once enough people have walked though the door we can follow them. But the longer we stand at the door the more things go wrong for us. We start to place our frustration on what we MUST be doing wrong.
The truth, I have learned, is that nobody wants a coach, therapist or trainer, they want someone who is living life on the other side of that door and is willing to reach an arm out, pull them in and show them around. Someone who is living the dream.
What type of coach you call yourself isn’t important, your logo isn’t important, how well you write isn’t important. They all help a little but they aren’t nearly as important as we are led to believe, they are merely sold by individuals who are in love with them.
What is important is that you are in the process of creating the dream you, that you are in the process of defining who you are and creating such certainty around that, that you are compelled to share it with the world.
It’s not message first. Its you first, message second. People don’t want help from those who know the theory, they want help from those who are living it and constantly evolving within it.
During my last 100 days in Bristol I put pen to paper often. I wrote about what I wanted life to be like and why, I wrote about what I really didn’t want until it became a NOT to do list – an amazing guide that made not creating the nightmare life so much easier. I wrote about what the dream me was like and created feedback systems to help me adhere to it and grow into it.
I put more effort into the exploration of myself and my life than I put into my dissertation and on the back of it it struck me how few of us actually do that and how crazy that fact is.
We put more effort into passing a test than we do building a life. We put more time, effort and attention into passing exams that we do creating our dream life. Is it really that surprising that we so often fall short of creating that dream self and share it with the world?
Today I help business leaders to optimise physical and mental performance. I do this by helping them to define what they value and believe and to construct their dream life so that they can consistently show up and make the impact that they are looking to make in the world.
I spend more time being the example and less time worrying about how I might best deliver that example to the world and my business is growing faster than anything I have ever done before and I have been in the industry for 20 years.
Ed Ley
https://www.edley.net/