Two years ago I was floundering in my coaching business. My wife and I had made the decision to move from Vancouver, BC to Kelowna, BC. This was in many ways a move home for us – we had been away for 3 years, we now had our first child Micah, and we wanted to be in a more stable environment. So we bought our first home and relocated.
I took this opportunity to jump head first into my coaching business as my wife was still on maternity leave and we had some money in the bank. I was determined to move and reinvent myself, to show up in my hometown being the young entrepreneur, who was now a successful coach. I donned my hipsteriest clothing and hit the streets, networking with all the local startup hubs, schools and businesses that I could get into. I printed business cards, finished my website and started on my first ebook.
After 4 months of networking I ran full steam into the ground. I had earned almost no business, I found myself with a handful of personal clients and a few consulting gigs but not enough to pay the bills on our new home and not enough to justify the energy I was spending. So I went out looking for a job in my old field, construction management. I found a job quickly and was back to the 10 hour days of simply putting food on the table. There is zero shame in putting food on the table, and there is no shame in doing a job to take care of your family. However, construction left me exhausted when I got home and my coaching eventually went from a little to even less. I didn’t have the time to pursue the clients I wanted and still be a father to my son and a husband to my wife.
I worked for nearly 6 months and then just like before, I couldn’t do it any more. I quit that job and took another job closer to home, less pay and more freedom. I resolved to get back to my coaching business but I still couldn’t find that thing to get my coaching off the ground.
I went back to the beginning, and asked myself what is it that makes me passionate about coaching?
My answer was: empowering those with no voice, to find a voice in their lives, create space for them to find what they love and a place to build something they are passionate about.
Out of this why “Unlockedmag” was born. It was something I had never done before. I love the idea of a co-op work space, but doing something like that in my local environment would cost tens of thousands of dollars, and I didn’t have the capital for something like that. So I decided to create a co-op space online. I began talking with my good friend Jason Vance about the idea, and together we built a plan and started creating something that would empower people to find their voice and work together to build something bigger than themselves. We created a safe space that is free for coaches to experiment, ask for feedback and find the thing that really feels right for them.
Today we have had dozens of posts and contributors, and we continue to develop the platform. To get where we are now, I had to reach outside of my ability to create something amazing. I needed to push through my fears, lack of technical skills and find the people that could help me realize my dream. I decided to focus on the people I really wanted to empower and stop looking at myself.
Once you start building it is hard to stop.
Once we created something that worked, we started getting feedback. We heard people’s pain and the pain we heard sounded like, “I want to turn my coaching into a full time business, but I don’t know how to do that. I am stuck, I have reached out, but I can’t seem to get in front of the people I want to coach. I know that if I could I would get those clients. I am good at what I do, but I am not a marketer or a business person – I am a coach and that’s what I want to do.”
We started looking for answers. Unfortunately we couldn’t find a solution that would allow a person to bypass building a business, so we started looking at the next best thing: making business building as simple as possible.
We had built a free blogging platform for coaches, now we were looking to identify what else would make that business building process simple. The list we came up with was tools, training and community. To create this we would need to venture out into an area that we had never been before, so again we asked for help.
We built a second platform called Unlocked Talks that gives others a place to share their expertise not just in a blog post but in live teaching and webinars as well as private facebook groups for each summit. We literally reached around the world for help contacting people from every corner of the globe. We are excited to announce our first summit is happening Feb 19-20, 2016 and we have 15 experts from over 5 countries participating!
The reason for our success is simple: when you reach beyond yourself, focus on empowering others, and creating space for people – help will come, and others will come to see what your doing. As humans, we have a need to work together, to build communities and tribes and to find people that believe what we believe. When we find that, we dig in. We long to belong someplace – to be seen, and when we find people who see us, we will do everything we can to build something in that space.
Everything we do at Unlocked Talks is about creating space for people’s voices to be heard, and for people with similar beliefs to find each other.
My question for you is, do you belong to our tribe? Do you believe that empowering people to be who they are designed to be is the highest call? Do you want to create and build things that don’t just make money, but make a real difference in the lives of the people that engage with them?
Is hearing people and being heard important to you?
If you answered yes to any of the questions above, then we would love to meet you and hear your story.
To find out how you can join our tribe visit us at Unlocked Talks
Dan Byl is a Millennial Leadership Specialist and founder of Unlcockedmag and Unlocked Talks
to get your copy of his Discover Your Purpose Ebook and to find out how he won his battle against crohn’s visit DanByl.com
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