If you’ve been working hard to grow your life coaching business and get more clients but you’re not feeling any closer to success, you might be indulging in the dreaded dream killer – SELF-SABOTAGE.

Particularly as it relates to your marketing.

Self-sabotage is behaviour or thoughts that hold you back and prevent you from doing what you want to do.

And nowhere do I see it more than marketing your life coaching business online.

Even though logically you want success and to impact more people with your life coaching, putting yourself out there online and attracting clients can rattle even the most confident life coach.

And instead of working your way through the emotions, you may find yourself torpedoing your success with self-sabotage.

So, let’s talk through those today.

Now to be clear, there are way more than 4 ways you can sabotage your marketing…

But these are the four I see come up time and time again with my clients (and myself).

1. Over-Complicating

When you mix tech overwhelm with a funnel frenzy, you can find yourself adding a ton of steps to your outreach and communications in order to get more clients.

Think whizz-bang websites, ultra-long sales pages, upsells, and down sells.

Now, that’s not to say you don’t need a nice offer pipeline to take your clients from cold to sold – I am all about that – but what I am not about is making this so difficult that you delay the implementation…

… and never getting your offer seen because you’re so busy trying to get potential clients to follow some kind of marketing labyrinth.

Of course, there’s a learning curve with online marketing, and it can’t feel hard to get your head around at times, but when you start making it harder than it needs to be, you’re very likely in the land of sabotage.

Telltale signs are:

– Buying a ton of software programs or overly-sophisticated software programs for where you are in your business.

At one point I found myself spending $3K a month on software and had the most complicated email marketing software that was like owning a Porsche and using it to drive down the shops.

– Spending more time on marketing strategy and implementation than you do on communications, outreach, and client delivery.

You should have pretty even distribution and if amongst these elements, even when you’re just starting out, and if not it’s time to reassess.

– Offers that stay hidden while you work on their branding and execution.

When you delay taking action to test and share your offers, content, and creativity you are indulging in over-complication and need to stop.

2. Over-Outsourcing

This is a big one!

When you know you need to create an online presence, build an audience and create clients it’s easy to immediately believe that you can’t do any of it or all of it alone.

Now, I’m all for mentoring and coaching as well as getting the help you need, but don’t use this replacement for learning what you need to run your business.

Even if that means you learn it first before you outsource it, that is the best way forward.

I also see this happen with the “harder” marketing activities like lead generation, copywriting, and paid traffic like Facebook Ads.

Yes, these skills take time to learn and master, but once you have them down, you can more easily delegate these with confidence (and at a lower rate), and adding these skills to your armory will pay you time and time again.

3. Over-Investing

This could also apply to investing in the wrong things.

It’s easy to believe the hype when it comes to strategy, help, advice, and guidance when it comes to getting the support you need to reach and convert more clients, and not all of these investments live up to their promise.

And sometimes when they do, it’s you who lets down the desired result with poor execution, resistance, fear or overwhelm.

Sometimes the very thought of committing to getting yourself out there making offers and being seen can trigger a spiral that blocks even the most valuable opportunities.

And often, we believe that a big investment in any solution will save us from the misery of feeling our way through the lessons and experiences.

No program, coaching, service, person, or software is your savior – and that is because you are not a victim.

You can’t buy your own power and success!

4. Taking Past Failures Forward Into Future Decisions

I see many coaches with past program or coach trauma, and by that I mean they’ve made investments in the past with great expectations (and often at great expense) that have not delivered the results they expected.

They then make that mean that they shouldn’t head down the same path again because they think the same emotions will come up.

They are seeing the coach, program, or course as the reason for their painful emotion rather than learning what did and didn’t work from the experience, so they can know what worked and take it forward in the future.

They aren’t embracing their failure to move through it anywhere near the way they would embrace success.

In fact, they are over-emphasizing failure and making it define their way forward.

This one can stop you in your tracks, especially when you use it against yourself.

You start to distrust your ability to get results even with the best opportunity in front of you, to the point of holding you back.

You need to assess each opportunity according to where you are right now and in isolation.

That doesn’t mean you don’t do your due diligence, but don’t hamper that process with such a negative bias either.

Sometimes sabotage is unavoidable, but if you stay vigilant and watch for these four common ways it happens, you have a way better chance of staying on track.

And, when you follow a proven system, show up and choose one path to commit to (and one coach’s method), you have a better chance of sidestepping sabotage.

They say a camel is a horse by committee, so don’t outsource your dreams or your belief. That way you will stay on track with a thoroughbred racehorse of a business rather than a camel.

And if you need help, or a sanity check, pop into my free Connect & Convert Facebook group.