If you’ve been working on your coaching business for years but still feel like you have very little to show for it, the problem may not be how hard you’ve worked.

In this episode of *The Solo Coach Podcast*, we’re talking about what happens when doubt, disappointment, and slow results cause you to change your offer, messaging, niche, or marketing before you’ve given any one decision enough time to produce useful information.

If you’ve ever wondered whether you should keep going, pivot, or admit something simply isn’t working, this episode is for you.

We’ll explore:

• Why years of effort don’t necessarily equal years of useful evidence
• The difference between changing direction from data and changing direction from doubt
• Why six weeks of one consistent decision can tell you more than months of constant changes
• How to recognize when you’re still in the business-building phase instead of judging yourself against a mature business
• Why outside feedback can help you see what’s actually working when discouragement makes everything look broken

As a solo coach building your business, this episode will help you stop treating every slow result as a verdict and start gathering the evidence you need to make smarter decisions about what stays, what changes, and what comes next.

Stay With It Planner: staywithitplanner.com

A free planning tool created specifically for solo business owners who want support following through on the work they’ve decided matters. Use the “Ring the Bell” feature to celebrate the hard things you finish and encourage other business owners doing the same.

Find out more about Michelle Sera and ElevatedMind®

at theelevatedmind.com

Start with the quiz: theelevatedmind.com/focus

If you've been working on your coaching business for years and

it still isn't working, here's the first thing I'd look at.

Probably nothing you've tried has run long enough to tell you anything.

Years of effort spread across a lot of restarts produces almost

no evidence because every time you change direction,

the clock goes back to zero. So the number that matters is

Isn't how long you've been working at it,

it's how long any one decision has been allowed to stand.

Let me show you what I mean. You can't grow anything by digging it up every week

to see how it's doing. I can remember as a child,

my mother was an avid gardener,

and I can remember wanting to dig up the seeds to see if that little sprout

had begun. Not an effective way to grow anything.

That's what years of work can look like from the inside,

real effort, real hours, and a plant that keeps getting pulled up before

it has roots. So the usual advice is to work harder,

be more consistent. I've certainly said be more consistent.

And you've heard both in coming at you probably from all directions.

Neither one is wrong, exactly.

No, but they're just aimed at the wrong thing.

Because

You have been consistent. You've been consistently starting for sure.

And here's the part that I think needs to be said.

When something doesn't work quickly,

it produces a feeling, disappointment,

doubt, some embarrassment maybe,

if you've told people about it.

And that feeling arrives long before any actual information does.

So you respond to the feeling,

you change the offer or the niche or the messaging or all three.

Or you go quiet, you go dark,

you ghost your business. Which feels like,

well, if you're changing things like niche or messaging,

feels like taking action. And it is,

sure. It's just action that erases the only thing that would have told

you something.

Six weeks of one message produces information.

And by information I mean data,

stats, knowing what's working,

what's not. Six weeks of three messages produces a story about how nothing works.

Now, there's a second half to this.

Even if you had stayed with something,

you may be measuring it against the wrong business.

You're comparing your business to businesses that are finished.

Ones with an audience already built,

a list already warm, an offer already tested on a hundred people,

a thousand people, a business that's in a blue ocean versus a red ocean.

That's not the comparison. Those businesses had this phase too,

you just weren't watching during it.

So the years feel like failure when a lot of them were just the phase.

So what changes if you stop restarting?

Three things and they go in order.

The first one is naming what you're actually in.

And I want to give you the real definition here because I'm precise about this

one on purpose. The business building phase is the stage when someone

is still creating the essential pieces of the business and should not judge

it by the expectations of a mature,

fully functioning business. That's not a consolation prize.

It's a measuring instrument. If you're still building the essential pieces,

then it isn't working.

Isn't a verdict. It's a description of a business that doesn't have

all its parts yet. And maybe because you have started and stopped so many times.

You wouldn't look at a half-built house and decide you're bad at houses.

Here's the second thing. Let one decision stand.

And again, the actual definition.

Stay with it is the elevated mind approach to following through on

the right work through doubt.

Frustration, discomfort, and imperfect results instead of repeatedly stopping,

restarting, or changing direction.

It exists because a decision that never runs long enough cannot produce evidence,

and without evidence, there is nothing to learn from.

So I want you to hear that last piece again.

A decision that never runs long enough cannot produce evidence.

That's the whole argument.

It's not the quitting that's bad.

It's not that you need more grit or determination.

It's that nothing you stop early can teach you anything.

and you've been paying for lessons you then cancel.

So pick one thing, give it six weeks minimum.

And it's not that six weeks is a magic number.

It's long enough to produce something you can actually look at

if you're promoting regularly throughout those six weeks.

And you have to be willing to look at the details

to extract the information.

Key thing is it has to be six weeks of the same thing.

Changing the headline halfway through resets the clock two.

Here's the third thing. Look at what's actually there.

This is the one people skip, and it's the one that makes the other two worth doing.

Now, shared reality is using feedback,

data, conversation, and outside perspective to understand what

is actually happening. We all deal with the frustration,

the doubt, the worry, the disappointment.

We all deal with that.

But what we're trying to do here is not make decisions from doubt

or broad assumptions. We want to instead of say it's not working,

we want to understand precisely what is working,

what seems to be falling apart,

running some tests to decide or to determine why it's not working,

and then proceed with the information that we have.

When you look properly, you often find that something is actually working.

People are reading an email, for example.

They're replying, or maybe they're opening the email.

But something more specific after that isn't working quite right.

That's a completely different problem from a business that doesn't work,

and it has a much smaller fix.

But you can't see that from the inside of your own head,

especially when you're pulled down and weighted down by the doubt

and the discouragement and the disappointment.

Doubt is a closed loop. It generates the conclusion and then

it supplies the evidence, not what I recommend.

Feedback is what breaks it open,

though. A conversation with one real person will tell you more in

20 minutes than another month of wondering.

Go back over conversations you've had in the

in the past. Look at the clients that you have gotten,

whether it was a low-tier offer or a bigger body of work.

Where did you get them? Where did they come from?

Now, years ago, I received a one thousand dollar grant for women

who had experienced trauma. And I decided that was it.

I was finally going to build my own business,

create real freedom, and never worry about money again.

I've had a good laugh since then.

It doesn't really work that way,

but still, the grant was a really meaningful point in my life.

And the business didn't happen because I decided at that point.

It also didn't happen quickly at all.

And I hadn't planned for that.

What I did instead was repeat a pattern.

Start something, watch that it didn't work fast enough,

feel foolish about it, begin again somewhere else.

And I want to be really honest about how that felt because I think it's part nobody

really talks about.

Every time something didn't work,

and hey, I still have things that don't work now,

I felt betrayed and fooled,

embarrassed even, as if what I'd believed to be undeniable had been a silly fantasy.

Every single time I'd limp away with a bruised heart

and usually some shame. And then a few weeks later I

I'd find the motivation and I'd start again.

New idea, same pattern. What I eventually understood,

and this is after tons of trial and error and failing faster,

is that I wasn't failing at business.

I was quitting at the exact moment the discomfort arrived,

which was always well before any actual information did.

I never once let something run long enough to find out.

And the worst part of it is because of my background in marketing,

I thought I knew I didn't have to look at all the details,

right? Goodness. Very humbling experience.

The decision wasn't the problem.

The grant wasn't the problem. The staying was.

Let me answer a few things that you're probably thinking.

How long should you stick with something before deciding it doesn't work?

Long enough to produce something you can look at.

Usually six weeks, and that's with very consistent promotions.

That's not just say one post a week for six weeks.

That's really not going to be enough.

And if you change it midway, the clock restarts.

So what if you've genuinely been doing the same thing for years

and it isn't working?

Then you have real evidence. I'd want to see,

for example, ~ what is the offer called?

How do you describe it? What is the big desired outcome?

How are you promoting it? What kind of traffic are you getting for that?

Or I should say, what kind of volume are you seeing with around those promotions,

whether it's posting on social media or it's videos on YouTube or it's running

ads or it's what you name it, tell me.

I want you to gather all the evidence,

which is incredibly valuable. The answers are there.

And I want you to look at it with someone else before you decide what it means.

Because nothing works in quotes is almost never what the evidence actually says.

Isn't it smart to change direction when something isn't working?

Yeah, so you have to pivot. I've certainly had to pivot in my business over

the years. When you're changing based on evidence,

that is, based on information,

something told you that this piece wasn't resonating or that this piece

of your offer isn't what your people want.

It's expensive though when you're changing based on how long it's taking

to see results, or for that matter,

how it feels.

How do you stay with something when you don't believe in it anymore?

Separate not believing in it from being tired of it.

Which one is it? Do you need to step away and take a break?

Take a vacation? Go do something fun,

spend time with friends and loved ones,

let it go for just a little while and revisit your why?

Believing in something and just being darn tired of it can feel identical,

and they mean opposite things.

Talk it through with someone outside your own head before you decide which

one it is.

if you find that staying with it is the challenge,

I have a free tool for you. It is called the Stay With It Planner.

You can go to staywithitplanner.com.

It is something, now I warn you ahead of time,

this is something that I have built.

It is still in the beta mode.

There are still glitches and bugs for sure.

It's something I use every single day.

It helps me to

Plan out my weeks. And this is for specifically for the person who

is building a business solo. This is not a project management tool

for other people to access with you.

But the really cool part of it is there's this feature,

and you'll see this bright orange button at the top that says ring the bell.

When you finally get that one really hard thing done,

and that might actually happen several times a week,

that you can go ring the bell and say,

Hey, I finally got that.

video done and published or uploaded.

I finally got that email campaign built and automated.

You can ring that bell. And if you click over to community,

which is very minimal, nothing to distract you massively,

you can see ~ where others have are ringing the bell as well as more people come

in to use the planner. But the cool part is is I can see that you've posted that,

that you got the video done and I can

encourage you by just clicking a button to say cheer you on.

And that's the part that we need to kind of band together with

to keep each other going. And that's a big reason why I built the Stay With

It planner. So it's free for you to use.

I'd love you to check it out and help be a part of that community so we

can all keep going and work at this.

All right. Much love.