Better Bolder Braver

I’m really proud to announce that we are partnering with EcoSend, a “pioneering platform dedicated to increasing email marketing productivity and performance while minimising the carbon footprint associated with digital marketing”. 

The coaching industry continues to boom, with over 71,000 professional coaches in the UK alone. In this conversation we discuss helping coaches make wise choices about your marketing in mind of your own Wants, Needs, Limits and Boundaries, those of your Ideal Client, and the Planet.

The environmental impact of our digital activities is an often overlooked subject, despite studies indicating that sending one email campaign can generate as much as 26g of CO2. It is estimated that over 340 billion emails are sent every day, and processing, sending, receiving, and storing the contents of every email requires energy. Even small improvements can add up to make a significant impact when deployed at a global scale.

There is so much noise out there about how to sell coaching to generate a six-figure (or “10x” your) income. For three years now, Better Bolder Braver has been all about how to avoid the Toxic Marketing Bullsh*t. The BBB community and the Coach’s Marketing Journey course offers you guidance and support about building up a coaching business via feel-good and ethical marketing practices.

I have myself moved Better Bolder Braver’s email marketing operations over to Ecosend to reduce our carbon footprint. Building on this, I have partnered with EcoSend to support you to do the same.

Better Bolder Braver friends (that’s you!)  benefit from a discounted EcoSend service as well as some incredibly helpful hand-holding from their team.

As part of this partnership, I’ve been asked by EcoSend to provide them with marketing mentorship - so that they can enhance their own efforts to reach like-minded companies and individuals committed to creating responsible businesses.

The move to EcoSend has been utterly painless, even for a technophobe. If you are minded to make the move, I’d say DO IT! It’s arguably the easiest way you can have a positive impact on the environment as an entrepreneur.

James says:

"Great email marketing campaigns shouldn’t come at the expense of Planet Earth. We're thrilled to be partnering with Better Bolder Braver to support coaches in nurturing and growing their audiences, while sharing a positive climate message and reducing their digital carbon footprint." 

You may also like to visit the MarketingKind and Ethical Move websites for more information about good, ethical marketing - and the Carbon Literacy Trust, which was set up to advance understanding and action on climate change. I trained with them recently and wholeheartedly recommend it.

I’d really love to know if you make the move to EcoSend, and how you are getting on with email marketing generally.

Please be in touch if you'd like the magic link that entitles you to 15% off the EcoSend service.

Humans have been "trying to figure it all out" for a while now...

The most important thing about this podcast episode with highly qualified coach and excellent human, Vix Anderton, is that it comes at a time when so many could do with an injection of hope.

The balance of self-work and bigger picture system change are very alive for a lot of us right now.

But how can we mitigate the overwhelm? We are only human. We are but dust.

We recently ran a BBB Tools & Techniques workshop just for coaches (available on demand for BBB members) about 'Cyclical Living' with Vix. This podcast episode is about that subject... and so much more.

Recently, Vix - an ex-military, recovering perfectionist, has been thinking a lot about the importance of PURPOSE... or, indeed, the importance of not necessarily having one.

Her first book, Enough, is "an imperfect antidote to perfectionism". And now she is embarking on a second... listen to this episode to hear all about what she's cooking up. It's going to be another banger, no doubt.

Whilst arguably IMperfect, Vix's writing, which recently has been focused on themes such as "an alternative approach to discipline", NOT reaching your goals and "leaning into mystery" is pretty damn impressive/permissive/refreshing.

Earth yourself in a moment of realistic optimism and consider creating positive change - both individually and collectively - without a rigid plan.

P.S. If you want a pretty good idea of what perfect MIGHT look like, were there such a thing, do check out Vix's website - from the 'look and feel 'of it to the delightfully-to-the-point blog headlines, it's a great example of where coaching and marketing make magic happen.

Are you a coach who is really struggling to "put yourself" out there in the world?
Is there a voice in your head (that perhaps harks back to your childhood) that is telling you that everything you need to produce has to be perfect before you share it?
Are you convinced people are not interested? Scared of rejection? Worried about what people will think of you? Embarrassed about (being seen to want to be) taking centre stage?
If you've read thus far, you are - what we call in the Better Bolder Braver community - "Problem Aware". YOU are not the problem... the problem is the hold up at your end. And the JUDGEMENT about that hold up!
Please - give yourself a break. Put your feed up. And have a listen to our resident Mindfulness Coach, Alex "mindfulskills" Irving, sharing and caring all about what you - as a fellow coach - can do to befriend yourself and your relationship with what we are calling here your "Inner Critic".
The aim of the BBB game is to provide coaches with a safe and compassionate community within which we can play with, and practice, putting ourselves and our services out there with great clarity, confidence and joy.
Alongside technical tools and strategies for doing good, ethical marketing, we hold each other kindly - and to account - for taking our goodness out to the world, so that we - and "Our People" can benefit from this work.
"We are not for everyone" - says Marketing Godfather, Seth Godin... and that's OK".

So many people that were looking to pivot their career thanks to Lockdown trained to become a coach.

And sadly, a significant number of them then got caught up with some seriously dubious marketing advice and services.

It is totally unsurprising, therefore, that Chelle Douglas (now safely in the BBB community) was one of them.

Having to think creatively about what to do when her previous line of work became unviable in its current format, Chelle trained with one of the most well-known coaching training providers. But when she qualified, she felt lost and unsure as to what she was supposed to do next to get her business and good name out there. A familiar story.

Along came a seemingly reliable marketing outfit that promised to show her how to get loads of clients pretty quickly and - you guessed it - to "10 x her income".

She followed all their (farcical) advice and... Nothing.

So they tried to get her to pay them even more money (her original investment being no less than £5K... she could have been in the BBB community for more than 8 years for that amount of money!)

But she's not bitter. Thankfully Chelle is a brilliant, intelligent, optimistic and resourceful coach and mother of three children. So she picked herself up, dusted herself off and carried on looking for a way to grow her coaching business.

She's very kindly offered up this candid account of what happened so as to help prevent other, newly qualified coaches from being brainwashed and taken advantage of.

Please do have a listen and kindly share this with fellow coaching students, your coaching training providers, accreditation bodies and anyone else that you think needs to steer clear or could do with feeling that they are not alone.

I am incredibly grateful to Chelle for her generosity here, and so happy she is now safely in the BBB community and working with me on a 121 basis.

The BBB Podcast is back!And here's the latest episode, which is all about... PODCASTING!

In this jovial chat - designed for any people-helpers out there looking to do good, ethical marketing - we give you a raw and ready-to-help rundown of how to go about doing podcasting properly, how to repurpose the content and be inspired by ideas about creating conversations with your "low hanging fruit".

BBB "in-house" podcasting and email marketing expert, Mark Steadman, is all about how to organically grow your followers and build great relationships with them across your podcast and/or email platforms.

This is a great episode to listen to if you are thinking about your ideal client and who you want to surround yourself with.Better Bolder Braver Tools & Techniques workshops are open to community members as well as all "people-helpers" more widely who are interested to join BBB and do good ethical marketing.

The corresponding podcast episodes are designed to compliment these workshops - with each host being a guest on the pod.If you are not a member of the BBB community and so missed the workshop, here's your opportunity to not miss out!

Register for our next Tools & Techniques workshop here

Nearly three years ago, BBB Community Mentor, Kieran Morris, joined a fledging community for coaches on a hunch that it might be just what he was looking for.

He'd already spent time and money on many of the magical silver bullet solutions out there – outsourcing his social media to an agency, trying out a 'bulletproof lead gen' strategy, signing up for those seminars that promise to teach you how to win at LinkedIn.

He truly hated them all – the strategies, not the people – and had rarely felt so little alignment with my own values and vision.

Finding Better Bolder Braver made it feel as though a door had been opened to another world for Kieran. He met people he loved, formed deep friendships, collaborated, get clearer on his coaching offering and became less attached to the idea of what it is to market oneself as a coach.

Kieran is now working for that very community as a Mentor, alongside his friend and fellow community old-timer, Ellie Lloyd-Jones.

Both felt that that they wanted to offer their expertise and lived experience back to the others with whom they share this inspriing space.

On this podcast episode, Kieran and Ellie chat about their plans for a new offering in the BBB community.

Their new sessions - 'Know Yourself' and 'Show Yourself' - will run alongside the existing curriculum, and will give space for members to explore the depth and breadth of what it is to put ourselves out there – emotionally and practically.

In this honest conversation, Simon and I tell you why Simon is leaving Better Bolder Braver, and what exciting things are up next for them and also for the BBB community, which continues to thrive. I announce three big bits of news for the future of BBB and, together, Simon and I look back on what has been a remarkable and very rewarding journey having built this community together.

It is with great joy that I announce a new and wonderful era of collaboration and cheerleading for Better Bolder Braver. I am very pleased to share with you that two of our longest-standing community members, ⁠Ellie Lloyd-Jones ⁠and ⁠Kieran Morris⁠ - two of the most delightful beings there are out there - will be stepping up to help mentor new members.

Having worked their way through the community's signature Coach's Marketing Journey course themselves, and having now built wonderful coaching businesses that continue to grow, they are in a great position to help me guide others along the way. In this brief video, we tell you all about how this new collaboration will work and announce some new sessions for the BBB calendar to complement the existing live sessions - all for the same community membership price of £50 a month... Despite rising costs of living, it's important to me and other community members that we keep our space open and affordable for other coaches on a similar journey in building their businesses.

I will be talking more, moving forward, about how other BBB members are becoming marketing experts, stepping up to support and collaborating to help others to build resilient and sustainable coaching businesses.

Ellie, Kieran and I very much hope you will taken advantage of the 2-week community trial period and join us in time for the first of the next Coach's Marketing Journey Check-in sessions on Tuesday 24th April 2024.

Join Better Bolder Braver before April 24th 2024:

https://bit.ly/3TDYB37

Joe Portsmouth has 51.3K Followers on X (formerly Twitter), 15K email subscribers and 26K followers on Linkedin.

On this podcast episode, I dive deeply with a very dear friend of mine and fellow people-helper, Matt Matheson.

Matt is known as The Speaking Coach. He helps people communicate, present and facilitate better. He is a co-creational events and retreat designer and the creator of The Church of Fail - "a cultural totem to instil reflective learning".

We talk about:

Matt Matheson on Linkedin