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[Transcript begins at 1:00]
What is up y’all? Welcome to another episode of FitBizU. I’m your host, Jill Coleman, and today I wanna talk about mentorship. And um, last week I recorded an episode, it went live on my brother Danny’s podcast. His podcast is called Take Care Radio. And we talked all about mentorship and we talked about networking.
And I got to thinking about this and I wanted to do an episode today. This is gonna be a shorter episode, but one of the things that I wanna talk about is this idea of mentorship versus coaching. And maybe you’ve seen people on social media in their bios on Instagram or Facebook, say, I’m a business mentor, or I’m a, um, I don’t know, I’m a, a mindset mentor or something like that.
And if you were like me, you’re kind of like, what’s the difference? Right? What’s the difference between a coach? What’s a coach and a mentor? Um, a coach doesn’t necessarily walks the walk, right? A coach doesn’t necessarily walk the walk. They don’t have necessarily a, a sort of aspirational, I don’t know, piece to who they are.
And I’ve done a couple episodes recently on mentorship, including the five, the five I guess, insights from my first mentor. Shout out to Rachel Cosgrove. And you know, the reason why I hired Rachel, and this is I think what I wanna talk about today. The reason why I hired Rachel is because she had the life that I wanted.
And she had the success that I wanted and she had the impact that I wanted. At that time, she was writing for several magazines. This is back in 2011. She had a couple books out. She had been published. She had a super successful business run that she was running with her husband, and she was someone who I felt like had.
The, uh, the, the success, the lifestyle, the business that I aspired to. And so I consider her a mentor. Of course, she did coaching. To me, coaching is more the action, right? It’s like, here’s the plan of attack. The mentor is more the being, right? The coaching is the actioning of the thing and the mentoring is just the being.
It kind of gives you something to, in a way shoot for you, kind of shows you what’s possible. And I’m a huge fan of both coaching and important mentorship. And I think in our containers at Jill Fit and especially in FBA, Legacy, and the Mastermind, we do sort of both of these things is the, the mentorship shows you what’s possible and the coaching comes in and sort of fills in the gaps.
What I loved about, and I’ve told this story multiple times, what I loved about joining Rachel’s Mastermind in 2012 was that, and this is what I wanna talk about today, was that she told me it was $10,000 to join her mastermind. And before that we had had a conversation and I wanted to just talk to her on the phone for like do a one-off call, like a one-on-one call and it was $375.
And I remember thinking to myself, the reason why I said yes is I’m a personal trainer at the time, I’m, I’m charging like 35 bucks for 30 minutes, right? She charged $375 for 30 minutes, right? It’s almost like 10 times what I was charging. And instead of, I could have easily been like, I can’t afford that, right?
Easily. I mean, most people would. It’s like, that’s ridiculous. It’s so much money for 30 minutes. But instead, what I did was, instead of saying I can’t afford it, I said, I need to invest in this so I can learn how to charge. Two, that is mentorship, right? It’s not, I can’t afford it. And by the way, like I didn’t have a lot of money back then, so $375 was a a lot of money.
Like I would never have spent that, like to me, I don’t even know if I had like spent that like going to a conference, to be honest. And I spent that for 30 minutes of her time. And the reason I did it was because I needed to be in the energy of someone who was charging that. And so when someone you wanna learn from creates an opportunity for you to do that, right?
Where they open their course or they open their coaching program, or they open applications for mentorship and it’s not cheap, like Rachel, instead of blocking at the costs, like most people, right. Most people who continue to spin their wheels do that. I can’t afford it. Try saying instead, I need to invest in this because I need to learn how to charge that too.
Which is exactly what I did. And after the initial call that was $375, she pitched me on her year-long mastermind, which was $10,000. And I was blown away. And now we kind of hear that stuff, right? The, the mastermind I’m in is like 25 grand. Like I’ve been in 35,000, like, like we threw around numbers quite a bit now, but this is back in 2011.
$10,000 for me was like, are you serious? Like, how is that even a number that you’re charging? I could not even fathom that. I didn’t even have a credit card that had a $10,000 limit on it. Right. Like, I couldn’t, there’s no way I could afford that. But a couple, a couple weeks went by and I told Rachel, I’ll think about it like most people do, right?
And they get off the phone. I was, there’s no way I can afford that. And a couple weeks went by, nothing was changing. And I knew that I was just in a holding pattern, like Jill Fit was doing fairly well, but I didn’t know how to scale it. I didn’t know how to grow it, and that was why I reached out. And at the time, like I said, Rachel had these sort of aspirational things that she was doing, and I was like, I want that too.
And I got resourceful and I launched a brand new program in order to make the money to pay Rachel. So in a way, The mentorship was already working before I even joined it. It was working, and so good mentors will put a price point in front of you that you could never imagine paying. That’s what Rachel did for me, two times, 375 for 30 minutes, and then $10,000 for a year.
Good coaches and mentors will put a price point in front of you that you could never imagine. And then they will challenge you to become someone different in order to make it happen. And that’s exactly what Rachel did to me. She did not care if I said yes or no, right? She was, she did not need the sale.
She was good with whatever, didn’t follow up. Nothing, right? Here’s the price point. Done. She, she could have taken it or leave it. Did not need me as a client, right? But what that did, just asking for that price point, what that did was it forced me to level up, right? I became a different business owner, and I talk about this a lot.
I went from someone who owned a business to someone who was a business owner, totally different skillset, and she challenged me to become someone different. And what I also realized was when I invest in a mentor, when you invest in a mentor, you’re not just paying for their time, you are paying for the years of investments and the years of experiences that they themselves have had to achieve their own success.
So I always say like, imagine a world where you can literally hire one person and get access to like the wisdom of dozens of people. That’s what mentorship is. When I hired Rachel, she had already done the work , right? She had already done the work she had done. She’d done, uh, you know, different mentorships and masterminds with I think Richard Branson and Brian Tracy, and like all these people who were like massive names in the space.
She’d already done mentorships with them, and she was taking all of that, all that she learned and synthesizing it so that I could learn it. So I didn’t have to do that. So we think about mentorship or even coaching. It’s a shortcut. It’s a massive shortcut. And to me, I’m like, wow, you can really hire one person and get access to dozens of people’s wisdom.
That’s incredible. And so I want to offer an alternative to the narrative of I can’t afford it. I think sometimes we just look at our bank account and we go, no.
And this is actually interesting. I just had this conversation with someone in the DM, like maybe a week or two ago, and she said, FBA is on my radar.
Um, do you mind sharing with me how much it is because I wanna save up for it, which is a common question I get. How much is it? I wanna save up for it. Dare
I give you an alternative, which is yes, if you wanna save up, that’s great. Like that’s a, a safe way of doing it, and that’s fine. But sometimes people wanna do something and they’ll look at their bank account and be like, well, can’t do it.
Right? And they maybe don’t have the time or wherewithal or desire to save up for it. Could you instead do what I did, which is get resourceful? This happens all the time in FBA. A lot of times people make their investment in FBA back before the program even starts because they put themselves on the hook to launch something to make the money.
I call this proactive funding, and this is an extreme different way of looking at it. You know, traditional sort of like corporate job, traditional sort of cultural, you know, save and financial advice would have you being like, okay, put it up on your vision board, then like, save put up a little bit away, like every month or whatever.
Again, totally fine, but when I say put yourself on the hook to make that. That turns that traditional model of save money on its head. It says, I actually believe in myself. It is, uh, a, a self-trust thing that I believe that I can make this money to make this happen. We’ve done this at Jill Fit, we’ve done this several times.
Danny J and I wanted to go to Australia in 2017 and we launched a two hour live webinar, I think it was super cheap. It was like 47 bucks, or even, I think it was 27 bucks, and we ended up making $4,000 and we were able to go to Australia. Now we had the money, but Danny was like, I just don’t wanna take money out of savings for this, so why don’t we just launch something?
We did and we made the money in two hours to fund an entire trip to Australia. Yeah, that was like, you know, we had, obviously it was so low ticket, we needed volume, which of course we had. But you guys can do this so easily. If you look at something and there’s an investment that you wanna make, like FBA, our beginner investment is $1,500, and like $1,500 is like one client.
Three months with one client, but sometimes we don’t think about things that way. We don’t look at it like, how can I make this money? We look at it like, I don’t have that. It’s too expensive. And the people that I know who have the most success are ones who get resourceful, who aren’t scared of high price points.
You know, it was interesting years ago. Um, I had someone speak at my mastermind event. It was, uh, I think you guys probably know him, Chris Harder, uh, friends with Lori and Chris harder for years now, probably like 10 years. And Chris came to speak at my event, my mastermind event, I think in like 2018. And he, we, him and I were having conversation after he spoke.
And at the time we were both in the same mastermind with Lewis Howes and that was a $35,000 mastermind. It was Chris’s second year in the mastermind. and he said, yeah, Lori and I are trying to, we’re we’re looking for like 50 K or a hundred K Masterminds now. Like he was excited to pay more money. And this is a person who is extremely successful, right?
Extremely successful and over and over and over again. You hear these stories. He’s not scared of investing. Like, I’m not scared of investing because I know it’s gonna force me to level up. Being in James’ Mastermind, I’ve shared this with you guys before too. Like our first, uh, retreat event in 2021 like kicked my ass.
When I, I say that because it challenged me to become a business owner, it challenged me to get out of my comfort zone, not the price point. The price point was fine and I had it, whatever, but it was just more being in the room. And so maybe it’s the price point that challenges you to level up. Maybe it’s just being in the right room that’s just like, holy shit.
I have a couple gals in my mastermind right now who said to me like, wow. Like, I’m in the right room because I feel so outta my league. Like, yes, I’m so excited to be here. And of course they’re, they’re supposed to be there, like I hand pick them, but they’re like, yes. This is definitely forcing me to get outside my comfort zone.
And that’s what these things do. And I, you know, think for a lot of people, it’s not necessarily the price point. I mean, if you wanted to, you could get, you could get resourceful and you could pay it. You could find that money. You could make that money to do it. I think for a lot of people, I think they’re more scared of being put on the hook.
I don’t necessarily think it’s like this price point is really scary. Of course it probably is for a, a number of people, but I think it’s more that like, holy shit, this means I’m really doing it. And FBA especially because FBA is for beginners. Oftentimes I’m people’s first investment. First business investment.
I’ll tell you guys what, we did an episode a couple weeks ago on front versus backend launches. My backend launches like Legacy and the Mastermind. And these more like up upstream or Uplevel, uh, programs are the easiest sales because these people have already invested in their business. They have already had like a level of success.
They just go, yeah, I just invest. They’re at the level where they just invest. They just go. It’s not a matter of if I’m gonna invest, it’s a matter of where I’m gonna invest or with whom am I gonna invest? And that’s, that’s what the goes to conversations that I have with my peers is it’s not about like, are you joining a mastermind?
It’s who are you learning from right now? That’s it. It’s not even like, it’s not about are you, it’s, it’s who are you? And for FBA, for a lot of new people to online business, number one, they haven’t had a show of evidence that they’re good yet. Right? They haven’t had the, the, the clients quite yet. And they’re like, I don’t know if I can hack it.
So not only am I selling them the program, I’m selling them on the concept of investment. Cause I’ve never invested before. Right. So, whereas my, my like more advanced, more intermediate to advanced students have already invested. So they just know that it, that it, it pays back a ton. Same thing with the conversation with Chris Harder.
He was like, now we’re looking for $50,000 masterminds. There are a hundred thousand dollars masterminds, right? There are, there are masterminds out there that’s a hundred thousand dollars. Now I don’t know if you need to be in those rooms. Maybe you do. And certainly Chris felt like they were ready for something like that.
But I, what I noticed wasn’t his fear around it, right? It wasn’t like, oh my God, I’m gonna make this money back. It was just like his excitement around it. And I think that mentorship and investments can really be that if you see them that way. And if you traditionally have had like a scarce energy around, uh, investing or you’re holding on like so tightly to something, or you’re, I hate to say it, but constantly verifying like, am I making every single dollar back?
I think that that’s the wrong approach. I think it’s not that granular. I think you have to look at it like, I’m investing in this $1,500, or this however much the investment is. Like for me, $10,000. I wasn’t sitting there looking at my bank statement, making sure I was making my $10,000 back with Rachel.
That wasn’t what it was about for me. It was exposing myself to someone else who. Who is a mentor of mine, who has already had the success that I wanted. And so for me it wasn’t about like, is this paying me back every second? Am I getting my money’s worth? And I think people who, who approach it that way are missing the entire point of mentorship.
They’re missing the entire point of coaching. And instead, can you see this as, um, I am in a room with someone who’s gonna challenge me to. And that’s what I’m paying for. And remember, if you’re looking for mentorship, this is really important. If you’re looking for mentorship, remember to make yourself mentorship worthy.
If you wanna get the most out of mentorship, you want to get the most out of the program. Number one, take massive action. Right? That’s the best thing. That’s the best kind of mentor or mentee. As someone who’s taking action, one of the things we always laugh on my FBA calls is I meet with the girls every and some of the guys every single week and I always say, okay, go out, do things, come back and report.
Like literally I say, go out, take a take action, come back and report. Cause in our calls then we debrief. Now if they weren’t taking action, we have nothing to talk about on these calls. Right? I can teach, of course, like theory. But if they come back and they’re like, Hey, this many people sent for my lead magnet.
I got this. I sold this many units. I’m struggling with this marketing copy. Like there’s stuff for us to discuss because they’re in the trenches. So taking massive action is major. Be coachable, be open-minded. And this is one of the other things too, is realize, and Shante says all the time, realize that this person you’re learning from has already synthesized best practices for you.
So it’s okay to be curious, right? And ask questions, but don’t fight them on stuff like they already literally came up with the, the playbook for you. So it’s not that you can’t be curious and ask why we do that and, and things like that. And that’s certainly how I am. But at the end of the day, I’m gonna look at someone who has clearly more success than me in this space and go, yeah, they know the best practice.
I’ll try it on. Like, is that for me? Right? That’s a little bit different. When James says, oh, we do this with the team, like, I don’t know, is that for me? Is that for me right now? Is that for me? Is that my brand? And you guys know the difference, right? But if you’re constantly fighting against your coach’s vice, then yeah, it probably is a waste of your money, right?
Because at the end of the day, that coach, that, especially that mentor, right, it’s a mentor. They have the lifestyle, they have the success, the impact, whatever it is that you want, listen to them and do it. Shante always says that if you, if you ask someone’s advice, they clearly have more success, where they have the success that you want, just do what they say.
Again, you can have a good discussion. You can be curious and ask questions, but don’t fight for your limitations, especially when you actually don’t have an alternative that will be better for you. You know, like, just do what they say. Doesn’t have to be this mental aerobics. Do what they say and then, you know, yes.
Did that work? Yes. Did that not work? And I think as coaches, that’s probably, if you’re listening to this and you’re a coach, that’s probably one of your biggest frustrations is when your clients don’t do what you say and or they fall off, or they have shiny object syndrome and they go somewhere else. And we want our clients to follow the coaching all the way through.
And the same thing for a mentor or for, you know, a business coach, they want the person to follow all the way through. So at the end of it, they can. Yeah. That worked or, yeah, that didn’t work. Or, yeah, I got something out of that. Or Yeah, I didn’t get something out of that. Right. Or that was valuable. It wasn’t valuable.
I’ve certainly been in containers where it wasn’t that valuable for me. Fine. Right. I don’t regret making the investment. We’ve done whole separate episodes on like my quote unquote bad investments, but I did, wouldn’t have known that had I not just jumped. And so I wanna have this conversation because I think sometimes we get in our head about this and to me, I’m like, mentorship is like, are you kidding me?
This is the the most amazing opportunity we have. So looking at it through the lens of how can I. How can I find this money? How can I find this time or whatever it is, and put myself on the hook big time like Rachel did. That’s why I’m like, she was an amazing mentor for me because she, she put a price in front of me that I could never have feasibly imagined paying.
And it got me to rise up to level up as a business owner and professional because of that opportunity. And so I don’t see it as like, oh, this is really expensive. I look at it like, holy shit, this is a massive opportunity and this is a gift. This is a gift that a mentor can give to you. That’s all I have for you today.
If you are, we’ve talked quite a bit about FBA today. If you’re not on the FBA wait list or interest list, make sure that you are, you can go to jillfitfree.com/fba-waitlist. That’s jillfitfree.com/fba-waitlist. We have a ton of people on that FBA wait list. We’re gonna be opening cart for Early Birds on March 20th, which is coming up soon.
If you guys have any questions, you can always hit me up in the dms at FitBizU or at Jill Fit, and we’ll see you on the next. Bye guys.
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