3 Ways to Manage Your Energy in Your Health Coaching Business
Managing your energy in your health coaching business is about setting boundaries and claiming what you want for yourself.
It’s important to carve out time to manage how you want your day to look, how you want to show up, and what is most important to you.
Some Tips for managing your energy in your business:
1. Use C.A.B.O.
Unfortunately I’m not talking about Mexico here; what I’m referring to is a way to determine what tasks you actually need to do yourself in your business.
C.A.B.O. in this case stands for Cease, Automate, Batch, and Outsource. Let’s talk about each of these in more depth:
CEASE doing the things no longer serving you or that don’t really move you forward. A lot of my health coaching clients spend an exorbitant amount of time on tasks and making decisions that do not lead to clients.
Some examples of tasks to cease include randomly posting on social media, taking hours to create 1 social media post, agonizing for months on what niche for now to choose, and re-recording that video over and over until they sound and look perfect, meanwhile only 3 people even see it because they haven’t focused on building their audience.
AUTOMATE the tasks you do on a consistent basis; creating an email template is a great example.
I once had a health coaching client really excited to get her first workshop scheduled. Her goal was to reach out to 5 new potential collaborators each week; however, she reported being lucky to make 2 connections and had yet to secure her first workshop.
When we looked more closely at her challenge, it was because she started each reach out completely from scratch. Once we discussed how to structure the email and specifically what to say, she created a template that could then be personalized and she was able to reach out to many more than 5 collaborators each week with ease and booked her first workshop within 2 weeks!
BATCH like items together and do many at once. Writing multiple email newsletters, social media posts, or creating multiple videos can be great examples of batching. When I blog, I now create 3-4 blogs at once, then I don’t have to think about it again for another month.
OUTSOURCE things that others could do, leaving your business tasks with the things only you can do. What is something someone else could do faster, cheaper, better, or easier than you?
Even if it’s something you can do, is it the best use of your time? Would you pay your hourly rate to someone else to do it? If the answer’s no, then it most likely needs to be outsourced.
I will say I really struggled the first couple years in my business by not outsourcing and once I hired my first social media virtual assistant and began to see how exciting it was for things to get done while I slept or worked on something else, I became hooked.
Last year, I hired an online business manager who helps me with both strategizing and implementing and my constant stress and overwhelm was almost immediately replaced with excitement and creativity.
Generally this is more cost effective than you might think; get creative here: get help from a college student or take on an intern (someone who wants to get experience-like a marketing student for example). You could ask a family member or friend who’s good at tech or social media to help you. You can often hire a virtual assistant for around $15-$20/hour.
To implement C.A.B.O., make a list of your business tasks and put a C, A, B, or O to anything that isn’t a MUST for you to personally complete, then choose 1 of those tasks to take off your plate. Note: this will be an ongoing process as your coaching business grows and evolves.
Lastly, keep in mind that even small amounts of time saved really adds up. For instance if you have your virtual assistant schedule all your social media posts that generally only takes you 5 minutes to do every day M-F, that’s 25 minutes saved in 1 week, 100 minutes/month, and 1,200 minutes/year; that’s an annual savings of 20 hours!!
2. Set up specific “Admin” time
Nothing wastes more of your precious time and energy than constantly responding to “the ring, the ding, or the ping.” Instead schedule specific admin time where you check and respond to emails, texts, phone calls, social media and any other kind of communications.
Do NOT leave these super distracting tabs open or notifications on all day. Nothing robs you of your energy more than constantly switching from task to task and being continually interrupted. Even if you’re not responding to them, simply hearing them will break your focus.
I personally check my email once in the morning, once after lunch, and again 30 minutes before I wrap up my day. You may have to play around with what works for you, your schedule, and your demands. Generally speaking, most things are not an emergency with your health coaching clients and do not require an immediate response.
It's important to get clear on your communication boundaries and expectations and then let your clients know. For instance, what is your general email, Voxer, text, or Slack response time? Tell your clients. Put it in your client agreement. You can also include it in your signature line in your emails or as an autoresponder, something like, “Thank you for your email. You can expect to receive a response within 24-48 hours.”
3. Instead of a “TO-DO List” create a “Not do list” and/or a “DONE list”
It’s easy to put everything on our to-do list when it comes to business building and then completely overwhelm ourselves. Start instead with a “NOT do list” where you brainstorm things you no longer need to do or that’s not moving you forward in your business towards your 2 primary goals: revenue generation and list building (this can go alongside the C.A.B.O. strategy above).
Some examples for your “NOT do list:” Overthinking your business logo; investing in a website designer when you don’t even know your niche or have had a client; spending hours mindlessly on social media; overanalyzing everything; re-recording every video you create over and over until it’s “perfect”; spending 2 hours trying to find “just” the right image for your social media graphic.
Your DONE list is where you track everything you COMPLETED that day. I used to do this on an app called Trello. I would make my weekly to do list using cards (I put one task on each card). Once the task was completed, I moved it to my DONE column. It was awesome to see what all I had completed at the end of the week; come Friday, my DONE list was super long! It helped me focus on all that I was doing and to celebrate myself-as that’s how you can maintain and reclaim your energy.
So there you have it; 3 ways to manage your energy in your health coaching business. I’d love to hear from you-which strategy are you going to implement to reclaim your energy?
If you’re not sure or feeling so overwhelmed you don’t even know where to start, shoot me an email with the subject line: “OVERWHELMED” to laura@alberswellness.com and I’ll guide you on what you can do right away to gain clarity and breathing room so you can get back to doing what you most want: serving your dreamy health coaching clients!
