125. Fear of Failure Is Sabotaging Your Coaching Business: Break the Cycle & Take Action

We've been watching talented, capable financial coaches hold themselves back from doing their best work, and it has nothing to do with skills or caring.

They'll create a freebie but never really put it out there. Someone asks about their coaching, but they don't follow up. They get invited to present at a workshop but decide “now's not the right time.”

It's not that they don't want the results on the other side. It's not that they're not capable, even if it feels a little scary. So why aren't they taking action on the things they say they want to do?

What we’re seeing is a fear of failure epidemic that's showing up in ways that might surprise you. It's creating this cycle where people avoid taking meaningful action because they're terrified of not getting it right.

But we live in a world where everything feels permanent and public. Social media makes it so your mistakes can follow you forever. There's this pressure to have everything figured out before you even start, which creates paralyzing perfectionism where people would rather do nothing than risk doing something imperfectly.

And our environment makes it easier than ever to avoid the challenging work that creates real results. When something feels hard, there's always an easier alternative just a swipe away. You can spend hours watching videos about marketing strategies without ever implementing a marketing strategy, which tricks you into feeling like you're working but leaves you confused about why you're not getting results.

The irony? You’re listening to this podcast right now, learning instead of doing. And that's exactly the trap.

But what if instead of quietly shrinking away and not doing the thing you said you wanted to do, you committed to what we’re calling “loud failure”? What if you decided that if you're going to fail either way, you'd rather fail by actually putting yourself out there?

Because wouldn't it be cool if being okay with loud failure meant you were doing the hard things—talking more, presenting more, offering to help people more—and maybe, just maybe, those things would actually make you successful?

Links & Resources:

• Join the Mastermind
• Ultimate Growth Guide
• Join the Facebook group

Key Takeaways:

• You'd rather spend three days writing the perfect email sequence than three hours making phone calls, because one feels safe and the other doesn't. But only one actually gets you closer to new clients.
• “Good enough to move on” is your new standard, not perfection. Embrace it instead of staying stuck in endless revision cycles.
• If you're going to fail either way, fail loudly by putting yourself out there rather than quietly shrinking away and creating the very failure you're trying to avoid.
• Productive procrastination keeps you busy with tasks that feel important but don't move your business forward, like researching every certification instead of just starting to help people.
• Choose one source of business education and stick with it for a month. Consuming information from multiple sources creates overwhelm and imposter syndrome, not progress.
• Discomfort is a sign of growth, not a warning to stop. Learn to dance with your fear instead of running from it.
• Break big goals into smaller actions: instead of “make $100,000 this year,” commit to “have 5 Q&A calls this week.” The smaller step is what actually gets you there.