During Thanksgiving lunch this week, one of my family members complimented me when asking about my business.
The past three months have been quite good for me. After a little over a year, my coaching business is established, profitable, and sustainable.
After hinting at all that, someone said, “I’m not surprised. You’re a natural.”
It was an incredibly kind gesture, but I thought to myself, What the hell are you talking about?
With anything I’ve ever gotten good at, the only thing “natural” has been my level of interest in it. That’s the one thing that feels totally out of my control.
I wasn’t interested in school, so I skipped and failed classes until they kicked me out. I wasn’t interested in my full-time sales job last year, so I quit and started my own thing.
But when I’m into something, it gets all of my time, love, and attention.
Before, it was acting. Now, it’s coaching and chess. In the future, it’ll be something else.
Anyway, I know this sounds ungrateful, but when someone labels skill as a “natural” thing, I feel like it discounts all the difficult hours that went into developing it.
I’m not a natural business owner.
In the last year…I’ve had three-week runs of pure terror, worried that I can’t make this work. I’ve spent hours on LinkedIn and Indeed looking at more secure full-time gigs. In June, I was at lunch with my mom physically shaking from anxiety that I wouldn’t be able to make my next rent payment.
Thankfully, I’m not in that place anymore. But none of this was natural.
It came from consistent practice. $12,000 in coaching programs. Hundreds of hours honing the craft of coaching. Countless awkward and uncomfortable conversations. Over a thousand rejections. Doubt. Fear. Stress.
But to be fair, it’s hard to see these things.
It’s like Instagram. We see the finished product but not what led to it.
We see the success but not the hours behind it.
Obviously, I didn’t say any of this to my aunt. I’m not that much of a douche.
I smiled and said thank you. And now I’m back to work, putting in more hours so next year I can look like a prodigy.
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