Welcome to the Rich Coach Club, the podcast that teaches you how to build your dream coaching practice and how to significantly increase your income. If you're a coach and you're determined to start making more money, this show is for you. I'm master certified life coach Susan Hyatt, and I'm psyched for you to join me on this journey.
When you run a business, whether it’s a coaching practice or any type of business, one thing is for certain. Things will go wrong. That’s for damn sure. Even if you have the best team in the world, even if you have the best systems, even if you triple check everything oh so carefully, even then, believe me, there will be times when things just don’t go according to plan.
And so when that day arrives, when you find yourself with a minor or major business crisis on your hands, what then? How do you respond? How do you bounce back? What’s the next move? That question, what’s next, is what today’s episode is all about.
Keep listening coaches because I’ve got a story for you about a major snafu that happened in my business recently, like a seriously embarrassing situation. So yeah, I’ll spill the backstage drama, so get your popcorn and get ready. Here we go.
We’re starting with a segment that I call your two-minute pep talk. This is the part of the show where I share some encouragement and motivation to get your precious week started off right, and I try, I don’t always succeed, to keep this two minutes or less.
Last December I took some time off, which is a dangerous thing because when I take a little time off to recharge, my brain immediately feels rejuvenated and starts popping with all kinds of new things. New ideas, new plans, new projects. My team knows, uh-oh, if Susan takes a vacation, watch out, because that means a whole lot of emails are coming soon with a whole lot of new assignments and projects.
I will fire up that Slack. And for those of you who don’t know what Slack is, it’s amazing and magical and a great way to chat with your team. So that’s exactly what happened last December. I decided I wanted to produce a documentary film that’s all about women and their bodies.
And I had a really clear vision for this project. My vision was I want to inspire women and girls to stop dieting, stop obsessing about their weight, and start treating their bodies in a whole different way. And I want this documentary to inspire women to celebrate their amazing bodies and treat their bodies with love and appreciation.
So I said to my team, “I want to film everything in the next couple of weeks and I want to debut the film the first week of January in a theatre in my hometown. Get those cameras ready and let’s do this.” And my team was like, “Um, okay, so you want to produce a full-length documentary film and finish it and premier it basically a month from now? Susan, are you crazy? But okay, let’s go.”
Oh, but that’s not all. There’s more. Because here in the Hyatt Riot universe, we play big. It’s ride or die up in Hyatt headquarters. So in addition to doing a premier at a theater in my hometown, I decided I also wanted to do a livestream of the film online for free so that thousands of women around the world could watch at the same moment.
Watching from their couches and living rooms and beds all around the planet. Yes. So the big night rolled around and my team was working up until the last moment to get that movie finished in time and we did it. And my husband and I walked down the pink carpet and posed for photos. If you did not see the pink carpet footage, it was a Facebook Live. We’re going to share the link in the show notes. You’ve got to watch.
A local journalist came and did a news story about the event. It was such an amazing night. I felt tons of nervous butterflies in my stomach. My heart was pounding so much excitement. So then the lights in the theatre went down and the movie started rolling and everything seemed fine. And I thought to myself, “Holy shit, we actually pulled this off. It’s all happening. Oh my gosh, hooray.”
And then I got an email from my dear friend Robert, notifying me and my team that the livestream online was not working and it stopped working. Technical error, not working. My team was scrambling to figure out what was happening and how to fix it. A very unglamorous moment, very embarrassing.
Basically, we broke the internet. Now, in the past, when situations like this would happen, it would derail me. I would panic, I would feel paralyzed, or I’d feel so ashamed or embarrassed like I wanted to disappear into a crack in the floor and vanish from sight. But now that I’ve run my business for almost 13 years, I’ve developed a much more resilient mindset.
So these days, when something goes wrong, my first reaction is, okay, what’s next? What’s the next move? What’s the solution? Where do we go from here? Most importantly, how can we turn the situation into a win?
Because it’s always possible to turn any situation into a victory and that’s what we did. Not only did we eventually get that livestream working again, but we also decided to schedule a second livestream to make sure all the women who wanted to see the film could definitely see it. No women left behind.
And then since we scheduled a second viewing, we figured, well, how could we make the second viewing even better than the first one? How could we attract even more viewers? How could we bring this message to even more women and girls? And we came up with a cool idea. Viewing parties.
So we’ve invited some fellow coaches to host viewing parties and share the film with their friends and clients. Boom. Now even more women would get to see the film. Was I annoyed about this technical glitch? Yeah. But I was also super proud of how we handled it.
Whenever something disappointing or embarrassing happens, there’s always a way to emerge victorious. You just got to be creative and solution-focused and ask, okay, what’s next? For instance, last year during a sudden power outage in New York City, all the lights in the Broadway district went out.
What happened next? Cast members from all the hit Broadway shows poured into the streets and they started signing live acapella in the middle of a blackout. It was an amazing moment. Making art no matter what, showing up no matter what, moving forward no matter what. There’s always a way to feel like you’ve won, and that is your pep talk for the week.
Now we’re moving into the part of the show where I give shout-outs to you. Shout-outs to listeners, clients, all you wonderful people in my business community. And today, I want to give a shout-out to KM. So KM left me a five-star Apple Podcast review and said, “Must, must, must listen, endless gold nuggets and inspiration to get your day and your life kicked into high gear. so thankful for everything Susan brings and contributes to this podcast. Business plus life plus motivation to up-level is all here.”
Thank you so much KM, and that’s my shout-out for today. If you have something to say about this show, please send an email to support@shyatt.com. I love reading reviews on Apple Podcasts, or Stitcher. Maybe if you leave me a review, you might win something or hear your name on a future episode. I love giving shout-outs to people in my community so holler at me. Thank you for the love. I love you right back.
Okay, a last quickie for today. Have y’all heard of Fuckup Nights? Fuckupnights.com. This is the most brilliant thing. It’s an event, kind of like a TEDx event, except everyone on stage shares a true story about a time when they seriously fucked up.
Businesses that went bankrupt, product launches that crashed and burned, all kinds of embarrassing flops. And the people who founded Fuckup Nights have a beautiful philosophy, which is when we bring failure out into the open, it’s healthier for everyone. It’s healing for you as the storyteller, and it’s healing for everyone in the audience.
We need to stop hiding our failures, stop feeling ashamed and isolated. When you share your biggest fuckup with a big audience or maybe just one person, it feels so liberating. And pretty quickly you realize that everyone else has fucked up too.
Go to fuckupnights.com and you can find an event near you. They’re everywhere. Fuckup Nights have happened in 321 cities and 90 countries. Wow, hello? 15,000 stories about failure have been shared so far. Incredible. You can apply to be a speaker or you can watch fuckup videos online. Such an awesome organization and definitely worth checking out.
And now, I think this episode contains the word fuck more than any other previous episode in history, which is really saying something. One more for good measure. Fuck. Sorry. Not sorry. Hope you don’t have kiddos in the car while you’re listening.
Thank you for listening to today’s episode. And the next time you encounter a challenge in your coaching business, I want you to ask, okay, what’s the next move? Find a way to turn the situation into a victory, and there’s always a way to do this, always.
Thank you for listening to Susan Hyatt's Rich Coach Club. If you enjoyed today's show, please head over to shyattagency.wpengine.com/cash where you'll find my brand-new money magazine. Now listen, we designed this magazine to be entertaining, educational, and help you make serious bank.
So you can download the magazine, there’s a money quiz inside, there’s an interview with one of my favorite clients who went from making no money and being served eviction papers, to making over six figures in a very short amount of time. So the magazine includes that feature, lots of resources to help you do it, lots of resources about creating wealth and investing money.
It’s pretty robust, y’all. So head over to shyattagency.wpengine.com/cash to get that magazine. And you’ll also find a link to join my free Facebook community, especially for coaches called Rich Coach Club. So bring your coaching practice and your income to the next level at shyattagency.wpengine.com. See you next week.
