Ali Levin (Women's Executive and Leadership Coach)
Jared:
Hi everybody and welcome to the Kajabi Edge podcast. I’m your host, Jared Loman, Vice President of Customer Experience in Kajabi. Our goal with the show is to put helpful and inspirational content in the hands of as many entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs as possible in order to give listeners an edge on Kajabi. In today’s episode we’ll be talking to my friend Coach Ali Levin, Executive and Leadership coach and creator of the CLEAR Program which helps women around the country get promoted. We really hope you enjoy the first ever episode of our Kajabi Edge podcast.
Tell us a little bit about like who you are, who you focus on, ah everything about your executive coaching journey.
Ali:
Sure, thanks. Let’s see, I started out as a Lawyer, ah I spent 10 years as a Labor and Employment Lawyer and at one point after I had my daughter I've decided that I didn't wanna practice law anymore and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do and as an Employment Lawyer I was looking at how people in organizations worked together, but always from perspective of like something went wrong, so someone was getting sued or negotiating contracts, or disputing contracts and so I went back to school to study Organizational Leadership to see how people really engage at work and how I could start to have a difference in their lives but not like when there was a problem but before there was a problem or to make it so there weren't any problems.
So I started, ah I studied, Organizational Leadership at the University of Oxford, I was living in England at the time, and then I became an associate fellow at the business school there and started running Leadership Development programs and coaching NBA students, executive NBA students, I went back to my law firm roots and started running Leadership Development programs for lawyers and law firms and like nobody ever wanted to coach the lawyers (laughing) so I was like coach the lawyers. So that was like really how I started my practice, was was lawyer turned executive coach, coaching lawyers.
And then after about 10 years, moved into the Tech Space, so still have a big coaching practice of law firms but also I coach in a lot of tech firms. And then, about, I don’t know maybe 3 years ago, I have a coach, and I think all coaches needs to have a coach, don’t work a coach who doesn't also use a coach. And he and I we’re talking about what I really wanted to focus on. And I said women, I said this stuff that I do is so important but because I coach primarily at very senior level in organizations, unfortunately I was just coaching fewer women than I wanted to. But coaching is also very expensive and I wasn't really reaching the women that I wanted to reach, and there wasn’t really a budget for that.
So He had me do this amazing coaching exercise where he was like, can you draw a picture of your life today? Can you draw a picture of your desired life? And in my life today I had this great coaching practice, but not a lot of women. In my desired life I had like tons of women that I was working with. And then what was in the way was the next block and I was kind of like, money, geography, time, like there’s no way to get to those women. And the 4th box was supposed to be what do you, what could help you fix this problem. And I just sat with it, like I didn't know, I drew a house for some reason? I just drew a home? But I didn't know what that meant? Or why that came to me. So that leads me to my Kajabi story, I don't know if I should go to that, but like a few years later, as I was still trying to solve this problem, I found out about the Kajabi platform and I was like holy cow, like I can coach women from my home through this platform, and it’s just like, kind of everything came together in these amazing ways. So I still do all the work that I told you I do with law firms and tech companies but like I now have this huge, thriving practice where I’m coaching women in a scalable, affordable way.
Jared:
And how symbolic to, given that like, in a time in a year, you’re little over a year that so many of us have been stuck in a home too, you actually drew that home uh back, this was several years prior right?
Ali:
Yeah, it’s amazing. I mean I, I can’t even believe it happened. Like I don’t, I don’t know what I was thinking when I drew that picture, and my own coach says and I say this a lot as a coach too, is like sometimes you do these coaching exercises and they’re the kinds of exercises I use on the, on the course on Kajabi that, like you have these moments of inspiration you don’t, there is like, all these wisdom we carry inside of ourselves, that doesn't come out unless sort of an exercise or a question or something brings it to your consciousness, so yeah. This was pre pandemic, like by a lot.
Jared:
Yeah
Ali:
And uh, and yeah, I totally coach from my home now through this course.
Jared:
So, this for you was more about reaching an audience that you weren't currently reaching, like there’s several different reasons entrepreneurs obviously they explore this journey a lot of times, it’s financially driven. Sometimes it’s just, it’s free to motivated, for you it was about reaching this goal of speaking to a specific audience that you wanted to reach, that maybe you weren't reaching in your current coaching.
Ali:
Yeah, I think that’s really important. This is my passion project in every way. I mean I think I was very lucky in that like, this isn’t the income that I need, in fact everything else that I do sort of made it so that I could build what I wanted to build on this end, and it’s absolutely like a labor of love, and what I’ve learned in doing it, is that, and I’m gonna teach this so I hope I learned, I hope I didn’t, it comes during practice, but like when your doing stuff that you really love, just more good comes, you know I never expected it to be any, I didn't even really care if it generated any income, I genuinely mean that, it was literally like I just wanna spend this much of my time, you know like 20% of my time on something that is absolutely aligned with like my passion and my sense of purpose in the world and I couldn’t do it without the platform.
Jared:
That’s so cool. So, tell me about like, what was that kind of journey like from just having that idea in your mind to actually finding a place and an outlet to like, did you explore multiple options? Did you, did you know you wanted to create a course?
Ali:
Yeah, because, that’s a great question. So I’m just trying to think through my work at Oxford, I was always teaching. So it was kind of a, a coach and a teacher before. And in coaching on the programs at Oxford, we have to create exercises, and it's very experiential. So it’s kind of like how do I take that experiential learning and do it on a video? I mean, I’ve never done that, I’ve never made a video, in my life, of any kind.
Jared:
Yeah
Ali:
I mean, I think they filmed us as, you know introduce yourself on a video, I’ve done that. But um, I’ve done big public speaking, a lot of big public speaking, but it was so different from looking into a camera, like.
Jared:
Yeah
Ali:
Like at your desk. So I think in. What actually happened was, I was running an offsite with another group, and as I was running it someone said, this work that you're showing us right now, like you should, you should film this. And I was kinda like, film it? They were like yeah, you know you can film it, and then people can watch it and, so I just started looking into all of those different options of, that was my 1st moment where I was like, you can get your content out in a way without having to fly and stand on a stage. And I just literally hadn’t occurred to me, like I know it’s been going on, but like I’ve lived in, I don’t know whatever world I lived in, where I just didn’t know about it. So when, when she said that to me, I was like, great, I want to start doing that.
So I looked at other people that were doing it and I watched a lot of videos, of other people’s videos, to see how they were doing it. There was so much learning that happened in the content creation that I didn’t expect. So when you’re in a classroom or on a stage, you’re engaging with an audience in real time, and you can kind of move and shift and adjust, and figure things out in real life as people are responding to you. And you can’t do that while making videos, because you don’t know how that’s gonna happen. So it forced me to refine my models, to refine my exercises, to get more succinct in how I speak, although I don’t know that I’m doing a very good job at being succinct on this podcast.
Jared:
It’s alright
Ali:
But like
Jared:
They don’t need to be succinct
Ali:
Yeah, like, you just have to get like. How can I say that in, in 5 minutes or 7 minutes, and then I’d, you know I’d watched it back, and I’d be like, oh that model doesn’t make perfect sense to me, you know. So it made everything better that I do. So is like, someone said you should do this on a video, I watched some videos, and made some videos, I refined some videos, and I probably re-recorded the whole course 3 times.
Jared:
(laughing) Well
Ali:
Um which is not like, because I’m trying to get it to be perfect, because I, perfection is the enemy of progress
Jared:
True
Ali:
But because I have group coaching because along with my course they say, oh this exercise, you know, I loved, and here’s something that came up from me, and I was like, oh brilliant. You know, and I just always wanna go back and like, add it to the video, so that the videos continue to improve based on the feedback I get.
And then, the other like huge benefit is that my course has workbooks, and what I’ve noticed is that when I’m coaching people, having nothing to do with my Kajabi course, I’ll say, let me, let me share something with you, and I’ll open one of my workbooks and share my screen, if we’re on zoom or if we’re together, we’ll just let you know, I’ll show them that, and it’s just like contributed all of this um additional, like material context models, stories to my coaching practice...
Jared:
Yeah
Ali:
So um, what started out as like a side project is like made it’s way into my, my other work.
Jared:
Well let’s, let’s talk about. You kind of touched on, like the, the recreating your courses multiple times. Re-recording the videos which is something that I assume, you know. Many creators struggle with is focusing on perfection, or maybe it’s analysis paralysis. What were some of like the biggest challenges that you faced going from kind of, the moment you had the idea to, you know, I’m ready to execute.
Ali:
Buying a ring light, buying a microphone, getting a subscription to loom or whatever I’m using to record stuff, so like I think initially, the tech, seriously, I mean I’m, I was very comfortable on a big stage and very comfortable in a classroom. But I’d never been on the other side of the camera. Watching myself back, listening to the sound of my voice, I found all of that pretty overwhelming in the beginning.
Jared:
Yeah
Ali:
Cause I think a lot, a lot of the early recordings took longer than they needed to take. After the 1st sort of go through the course, now I say I re-record the videos, but like, I can just sit down and record a video in 5 minutes. It’s not like, all of that, sort of initial, those initial fears, those initial pick ups or those initial, like whatever they were, that went away pretty quickly. So I would say that was the 1st thing to being on a, on a video.
I guess the 2nd thing was, the getting the audience. I’ve been very fortunate in my career. I have never marketed myself at all, like zero, like I felt my entire coaching practice based on referrals and that’s been brilliant. But this is a different audience that I’m trying to reach. You know I’m intentionally trying to reach women that aren’t given coaching as part of their careers because they’re not senior enough in the organization or the organization does never budget for that.
So I had to create a social media presence, which I had never had before. I had to start posting lots of content, you know which I have never done before, even though I have lots of content to post but just kind of packaging it up in like bite size chunks and getting it out there. That was really big for me. But again I just want to say that even though that’s work, it was also aligned with my passion because even if not all of my followers are taking my course, I’m still generating a lot of possibility for them, like all I wanna do is, is give them what they need to get ahead because my like, soul goal is to get as many women promoted as I can. So I don’t even find the content creation to be anything other than following my, like sense of purpose. So that’s probably been a big one, building my audience, let’s see. Not coming up with what to teach, if anything, this is funny. My 1st go at 55 lessons, 55 lessons.
Jared:
Wow
Ali:
So I’ve cut that down to 35. So it’s definitely been like, you know stuff on the editing floor like lots of that, which is been really good again to kind of forcing me to what is the most important thing you can teach them, what are people’s attention spans really, when they’re watching videos, that’s been, that’s been an interesting challenge too.
Jared:
Let’s go back to finding your audience, because that’s, that’s a super common challenge for entrepreneurs. Have, have you found success in this model of, you know, starting your social profiles. Like what’s kind of been key to kind of just getting, getting that audience founded and starting to generate some sales.
Ali:
Figuring out who it was, I think that at first, I thought it was, I, people kept saying to me, it’s really important that you have a target audience and just saying you know, all women is probably not gonna work. And I was like, all women it’s fine. But the more that I watched who came on the course, and what sort of stuff resonates with them, the more I got my age range that sort of like, you know mid to late 20s to kind of early 40s, like that’s really my sweet spot where I, I sort of thought it was everything, now that’s a lot of the working life but getting that right.
In fact in the very first iteration I wasn’t even sure they needed jobs. Like I didn’t know what I wanted. I didn’t know what I wanted until I started watching who came on the course and what was resonating with them. I, thinking back on what, you know, what I talked about the image of the home, as a way to connect to the, my desired life, connecting to all those women, I think one of the things I’ve learned is that when I, with the time that I devote to my course, and I like I said, it’s about 20% of my time that I give to it. I’m very focused on what can I do to get more women promoted. What content can I create for them? What can I post in social media? What can I write in a blog? What can I write in the newsletter that will help them? That will help anybody who comes across my profile, like I’d love for them to take my course because when they take my course, I have this group coaching and I get to meet them and I love to meet the people I coach. But I also have like, a really, a taster of my course that’s like, really inexpensive and they never meet me, so just a few videos.
Like the way I look at it is, any opportunity I have to give them something useful, gets me to serve. Like my mission is to help these women. So, one of the things that’s been true for me as I create content, whether it’s social media post or newsletters that I send out through Kajabi or like my blog is what can I give them that’s useful now? That act has like, really challenged my thinking and made me a better coach. If I make no money on Kajabi, I don’t care because this is a vehicle for me to like live this mission.
So, I think in the beginning I was very focused on like writing the perfect blog, you know, or like writing a newsletter that was like really well researched, and you know like, I came out of Oxford, so it was like I decide everything and everything was like really long. And as it’s gone on longer, what I’ve realized is like create something that’s useful now, and that’s been punchier, that’s been more creative and that’s been more successful. And that’s something I had to learn the hard way, like I said I made 55 lessons, now there’s 25. I wrote like 5 page blogs, now I write 1 page blogs. And, and it’s also okay to repeat stuff, because even as a learner with my own coach, Iike I, my coach has told me things for years, where I said like, are we still talking about this? Like how long are we gonna talk about this? And he sort of like, I don’t know, till you feel like you got it and you don’t need to talk about it anymore. So I’ve taken the pressure of myself to have to create like, such new stuff every time or such research stuff everytime. And that’s been great.
Jared:
Yeah that’s such a common scenario for entrepreneurs. Like you print the business cards and you make the t-shirts before you even have anything useful to hand of to a customer or for a customer to buy. So like, was your mission driven mentality, so how long did it take you to go from, I now have a course to I now have an audience to starting to kind of consume my content, whether it’s the free content, the paid content. Like what was that process and journey like?
Ali:
It didn’t take that long, but I didn’t think it was gonna take anytime. So, what’s so funny is that like I had this, you know, as I said I had a practice that I never marketed for. So I guess I just thought, you know that whole if you build it, they’ll come. I thought that would happen. So I built the 1st course and like, I don’t know if I sold any. And so I gave them away. My 1st course, I did a grant with
UC Irvine, and they sent students over, and it was amazing. So I had like 20 students right away on the course. None of them paid but I said, I didn’t care, cause I was like you know, soul mission driven. And I, and I also but like, why don’t I have like a thousand email subscribers right now? You know, cause it’s really different to go to a cold audience, than it is to go to an audience that you know, like I built my practice because people knew me. So that active reaching out to a cold audience was, was slower than I thought, but I got up to a thousand, like within a, you know, 6 months or something. I did. The thing that probably worked the most were like free guides and things that I created. Again I loved creating them, they mattered. I would give them away no matter what.
The other thing that I did was started running free, like online workshops. So they were live, they weren’t videos, but you know, I would just do like 1 every couple of months and like tell everyone I knew and they would tell people they knew. I still think it’s, for me anyway a lot of my courses through referrals. You know people take it, they love it, they’ll tell other people that they’ll take it. Something else that’s been like awkward, is like testimonials. People are really happy to give them, but the first time I had to ask for them, I felt so uncomfortable. I was sort of like, I’m just trying to help you, why would I ask you to help me, like I don’t, you know, like that sort of asking. It just felt very awkward. But people were really happy to do it. They really do matter. I started to look at it through the lens of a consumer rather than a supplier, you know. So I noticed that when I buy stuff online, I read reviews. So I was like, oh, well, then I guess I probably need reviews for me.
Jared:
Yeah
Ali:
So I, that’s helped a lot.
Jared:
That probably goes back to like your physical, I don’t know what to call, the physical business but kind of back to your career and coaching, like you would probably, you’ve got all your clients through referral, once again. So it’s just another version of what you’ve already done, essentially in the past.
Ali:
Right, but with a physical piece to it.
Jared:
Yeah
Ali:
You know, I didn’t know that the referrals were happening in the past. I would just, someone would call me and say, you know we, some so and so told us about you. And I’ve been, interestingly enough, I had never mapped my own network. Like I’ve never really sat down to think, like how did I get that client. And when I teach my course for women, one of the exercises is all about sort of building this network, building this entourage, like I’ve written a lot about business development particularly for lawyers. But I’ve never really thought about how I did it myself, like it just happened but it didn’t kind of, you know, analyze it or dissect it, like what did I do? And part of having to do that for myself I think made me a more credible teacher in that space because it’s like, hey I know that it’s really hard and ask people to recommend you, or ask people to sponsor you, or ask people to put your material forward for something, cause I’m doing it, and I hadn’t really had to do it before, which that was interesting.
Jared:
Yeah, you’ve covered some really cool things that are very foundational to just about any business. It’s to know your audience, create content for them or create something for them that they find valuable, and not only find valuable but find valuable now which is, which is really cool, I think that’s a, especially in the online space, like everything is instant. They want something that’s relevant to them in the moment. So like carrying forward, your journey, know that you’ve, how long have you been, like, how’d your course up and running.
Ali:
About a year
Jared:
About a year now. So like where are you at, where are you at today? Like, do you feel like you’ve reached your target? Are you.. Like where is that, where are you at in the process?
Ali:
Yeah I definitely haven’t reached my target. I think a year in, the course is where I wanted to be. And I genuinely, I don’t really think I’m a, like I said I’m not a perfectionist. But I really put everything I knew into the first one and it was too much, it was too overwhelming. Not only that, not only did I had 55 lessons. It took somebody about a year to get through it. And like nobody’s gonna do that. So a year in, I have a course that you can get through in 7 weeks, I have like, just the best material, and I’m now really focused on, I take 15 women at a time on the, on the group coaching, and I’m really focused on making sure that that core group like gets promoted. You know, like, I’m much more like, instead of thinking ok you’re gonna be in this journey and you’re going to learn all these things about yourself, there’s 55 lessons, they’re deep and they’re reflective. I’ve gotten much more, like, what are you here for, you know, you’re here to make your work visible, you’re here to get really clear on your career, and you’re here to let everybody know about your ambition and your success and get there. And we’re gonna do that in the next, in 2 months together.
So having this really clear outcome, and now I wanna measure that. So in the old version I was kinda like, what did you like and what didn’t you like and did this do this and did this do that. And now I’m like, did you get promoted? You know like, did you advocate for yourself? Did you get a pay rise? Did you get a promotion? Did you get the new job that you wanted? Did you apply for things you didn’t feel you’re ready for or didn’t have the confidence for. You know it’s like, much more about the outcome than I had originally thought it was going to be. And that’s really been useful. So I think if you ask me like, what do I want for the next year, the next coaching for me will start on July, and I’m gonna have 6, 6 groups of 15, you know. So I would like to see all of those women get promoted, and then I would be like, now the course is doing what I want because this year we got this many people, many women, you know, elevated in their, in their careers.
Jared:
Give us clues, what’s your elevator pitch for CLEAR?
Ali:
My elevator pitch is, in order to get promoted you have to know 5 things. The C is clarity, I mean I know the program is called the CLEAR Coaching Program but Clarity on what you want. Like the program starts with these women visualizing themselves in the future, in their dream situation. And for too many of us, we just kind of like, get jobs and put our heads down and hope to get ahead and, we don’t like stop and think about it. And also you know, just think about our whole sort of educational system like, and I was in the UK when this all started and it’s like, these kids are supposed to know what they wanna do at 16 or even 18 or even 21 or whatever it is, you know. But it’s still really young. So that 1st act of stopping and thinking, what do I want, matters a lot because you know I had this track coach that used to say, if in your head you can conceive it and in your heart you do believe it, your body will achieve it. It’s that kind of star with like what you conceive of.
The L in CLEAR is Learning The History. I spent a lot of time talking to women about how the systems are broken, how they weren’t designed for women to get promoted in the first place. We talk about unconscious biases, we talk about the kind of behavioral traps we fall into because we were rewarded for certain behavior that doesn’t actually serve us, in our career. So I do a whole bunch about learning the history of biases and how we can help fix the places that we work in.
The E stands for Entourage. That’s all that networking stuff that we were talking about, who’s in your network? How do you leverage your network? What’s the difference from mentor to sponsor and everything in between? How do you ask for people to be with you on this journey because you cannot get there alone, you cannot get ahead by putting your head down and doing a good work, like you have to had advocates and how do you build them.
The A is all about Awareness, like emotional intelligence, awareness of others, awareness of how you show up, how do you get good feedback, how do you help other people understand who you are, what you want, what you need. So a lot of emotional agility, also growth mindset and the hours resilience, because like we have to bounce back, you know like it’s tough going and oftentimes one of the things I teach on my course is like, when it comes to, to really wanting to get out there and you know take risks, our brain is not our friend, you know our brains like ooohh this is a risky situation, better hold back you know, the amygdala hijack, like when your reptile brain takes over cause it’s not safe, fall back, you know. So helping them develop that sense of confidence and staying in the game even when they feel like, do I really wanna keep going? Do I really have the energy for this? Or some energy management body stuff. So that’s my clear model, clarity, learning entourage, awareness and resilience.
Jared:
Let’s talk about resilience more because that’s such a common entrepreneurial struggle, especially you’ve been at this for a year. Where have you had to really step in and show resilience throughout this process of establishing your online version of your business.
Ali:
That’s been really good challenge for me, because as someone who never have to like build an audience, it’s not easy. Like it’s just not easy. So in the beginning it went quite quickly and then it just you know, slower going. And there were times when I was just like, why am I doing this? You know, like am I throwing good money after bad? Because it’s also like expensive, not just my time, which I’m spending you know doing stuff that isn’t like immediately making me money, like from coaching somebody, I’m an hourly rate and I’m making money.
So part of it was that connection to purpose, like I cannot say enough about how much that matters. Anytime I ask myself like, why am I doing this? I have a group coaching session and I have these women who show up and talk about what it means to have these group of women supporting them, what it means to have a forum, to ask their questions in that’s costing them like 30 bucks a session or something. You know, you just can't, you can’t buy coaching for that inexpensively. So things that I do to kind of stay in it are 1- just why am I doing it, I’m doing it because I want to change the paradigm and I want our workplaces to get to gender balance. So any step I take in that direction whether it cause me time or money, it’s irrelevant because getting there matters so much to me. I think also the sense of gratitude I feel for the opportunity to, to reach the women that I reach on social media or through my newsletters or whatever, the fact that like a thousand people are you know reading what I send out, every week is ridiculous.
Jared:
Yeah
Ali:
And someone always responds. You know, like thank you so much for saying this is exactly what I needed to hear right now. That enough will keep me going. Whether they buy my course or not, I don’t care. The fact that I have so much agency over it really helps like, this is all me. And when I coach in organizations, yes I come in as a coach, but I’m coaching for the organization’s goals, whatever those may be. And in this I was coaching for like one goal only, which is like I want these women to get ahead, and I get to figure out how to do that in my own way. I create whatever videos I want, I create whatever post I want, I create whatever blogs I want, and that sense of agency is really empowering and really exciting.
The more audience we build, the more you're like wow, like, what really important thing do I want to say to like people who are actually listening. And I couldn't have imagined having how, how I would’ve created that platform, like literally without, without Kajabi, like I don’t know how I would’ve done it. So those are the things that keep me in it.
Jared:
Chicken in an egg question. Did CLEAR come before or after coaching, or not coaching but after moving your coaching to Kajabi?.
Ali:
After
Jared:
Okay
Ali:
Absolutely after. I, I had a little model that I’d kind of like had some, was very business schooling. Actually like it was this kind of like matrix-y model and it just wasn’t clear. And literally like I sat down with somebody and she said, what do you think it takes. And I just told her, I was like, you gotta know what you're doing, and you gotta know that these systems are in place. And I just said everything to her, and she, she actually helped me with CLEAR. She was like, here’s what I heard you say. She was typing as I was speaking and then she shared her screen with me and I was like, wow that’s pretty cool.
Jared:
Yeah. isn’t it amazing how like content, when you're thinking about through that lense, it forces you into a box. You have to really be intentional about delivering your message, you know. You don’t have that ability to just completely go off the hip like you would’ve on a one on one coaching session. So let’s talk a little bit about like the fears associated with putting it out there, because that’s a big thing for entrepreneurs, like you are now no longer, you know as a coach you kind of, your working one on one with clients, now your working one to a million or the world is your audience.
Ali:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I did not expect to be afraid, and I want to just say because I had been a coach for so long and I had such a successful practice that I just thought, oh this would be easy, I’m gonna do my day job just in a different format. But it wasn’t like that. And the fear came when I was, first of all I was creating a brand for myself, like I was never a brand, you know. Like I was, I was me and people knew what kind of coach I was and what my style was. But I didn’t have like a website, I told you before, I didn’t have any social media presence. So suddenly I was really putting myself out there. You know my picture, my images, my content and like people criticize things, you know. Where’s the program for men? Why is this just for women? Or you know something I would say, and they would say, you know, you’re just trying to fix the women. You need to fix the places, like you're always gonna open yourself up to this, you know, criticism and that was really scary. And it caused me to have to really go inward and think about -
One of the exercises, again it goes back to like what I’m teaching and then what I’m living, but you know, I have to go back to like my core values and like what’s at stake here, like why is it, why is it worth taking this risk, to be criticized. And to be criticized about anything you know, especially like my brand is me, so like all these pictures, you know. When you start to go like, oohh what do I look like, and do I really want to put that out there? You just have to have courage and believe in the importance of what you’re doing.
And I think the flip side of that like I’m just, I’m thinking out loud as we’re speaking but another fear I had was like, who am I, to put my picture out there and put this content out there like, like, why do, why, I don’t know, like is it some active arrogance or some active like, I know so much that like I wanna put myself out there, someone who knows these things. Again, it really forces you to have to be willing to take those risks to be criticized about what your content is or even that you’re somebody who thinks you are worthy messenger or worthy teacher or something. Because in order to be successful at this, you like have to put yourself out there. So as I said before with the resilience piece connecting back to purpose, I keep finding the courage to do it, in the results that the people who work with me get. And that’s the only, you know, the only way I can keep doing it because otherwise it feels like some real act of self promotion, you know that I’m just like, I don’t want or need to be promoting myself. But you do if you're promoting your course.
Jared:
Yeah
Ali:
So that was really big.
Jared:
Yeah. I saw an interesting, I don’t know if you’ve seen this, an interesting image where it showed like a ladder, like a physical ladder and it said something along the lines of you’re right here and it was someone in the middle of the ladder, you’re not the tippy top, you’re not say, the, the, the most well known worldwide known coach on the planet, you’re somewhere in the middle but it pointed out at someone else is right here and it showed the step below you. Think about the things that they would need to know, or even the people down any step below down the ladder. The things they need to know to get from where they’re to where you're at today and how important that is for anyone who’s just starting out.
Ali:
Yeah, I love that. And also building this course which I’m still working on, on building its brand and reputation, that’s a big learning journey for me and that’s been really fun to have a whole new world to learn because learning is fun and we don’t learn when things are easy. Like we just don’t, you know what I mean. You learn when it’s hard.
So when I find myself having to reach out to someone to help me with something and that’s really hard for me, that’s when I learn or you know the, like I said the first time I was lIke, okay I’ll ready to launch, and like no one bought the course and I was like devastated for a minute. I was kinda like, what did I do wrong? I spent like all this time filming 55 videos and making all these workbooks and it was too long as we said but, so then I got people to come on the course, watched what was happening, learned from it, refined it. That was tough going, but I learned about - and, and I just wanna say something, I didn’t start without talking to people first. So even though I had great people helping me before I even launch my first, the first iteration, I still got it really wrong.
Jared:
True
Ali:
I still got it really wrong. So that was like, I invested all this time, and I invested money, and I asked all these people, how did I still get it wrong? But it’s because whatever, whatever we create is unique. It has to be right for us, it has to be right for our audience, it’s a lot of getting a lot of things right all at once. I don’t think it’s easy, I don’t think it’s formulaic, I think it requires, at least for me, a lot of why am I doing this, why does this matter? If I am really successful at this, what is that success mean for me? And like I said before, for me it means that my, that the women get ahead. And so I just keep going for that. And I’m like if that didn’t get them ahead, let’s try again.
Jared:
Well let’s, kind of a, I guess kinda wrap that up. I was, so going back to just a little over a year ago, you're strictly a coach like, what has changed for you today? You know, with your 20% efforts on the course. Like what’s different for you know?
Ali:
I’m so much more purpose driven than I ever was, and like this is not to just count like, the loads of men that I coach. Cause I still do and they’re like wonderful people that I coach, and, and I love that work and I’m not giving up that work. But to have a part of my work be, really clear in what I stand for, has informed everything that I do. So I noticed that. And I think funnily enough, like you know Google holds 20% rule how they had that whole like you could work on - and then it would move into their inner circle, so like Google Maps was a passion project someone worked on now, it’s like we’re obviously a huge part.
In many ways I feel like that about this. So the passion project has been this work for women. But what I’ve noticed is that it infiltrates everything now. So when I’m working with some of my clients that say run, you know, a session on, on imposter syndrome let’s say. But that session is open to men and women. But when I have an opportun- now I noticed when I’m teaching, and I might say, even though men and women both experience imposter syndrome, let’s talk about what happens in workplaces where women don’t have many female role models in leadership positions. And when they’re looking for that and they’re feeling like imposters, it’s not because they're struggling with their own sense of self or confidence. It’s because I feel like an imposter because everyone in this C-suite’s a man, so how am I ever gonna get there? And like I didn’t used to teach that when I used to teach imposter syndrome because that wasn’t always the lens through which I was looking at things. So I think that beyond my course, I’m also encouraging organizations to get to gender balance more quickly whether I’m coaching the men or the women, whether I’m, whatever kinds of sessions I’m running. It’s like always there now, and that’s been life changing for me.
Jared:
Very cool. Well Ali, it has been an absolute pleasure having you. How do you, any listeners find you if they wanna know more about you, where do you wanna send them?
Ali:
So everything is Coach Ali Levin. My Instagram is @coachalilevin. My Kajabi website is coachalilevin.com. Linkedin, Twitter, Youtube, anywhere if you type in coach, C-O-A-C-H, Ali, A-L-I, Levin, L-E-V-I-N.
Jared:
Well, thank you so much for joining us today Ali. We’ll look forward to seeing everyone next time on the Kajabi Edge podcast.
Hey, Jared here again. Wanted to ask a small favor of you. If you enjoyed the content of this podcast, it would mean the world to me if you subscribed on your favorite podcast provider and left us a review. This will help us ensure that we can get these stories out to as many people as possible. Thanks again.
Did this episode help inspire you to start your own online business with Kajabi? If so, head on over to kajabi.com/edge or mention the Kajabi Edge podcast in the where did you hear about us field when signing up on our homepage. Listeners who sign up from our show will receive an additional success call with one of our customer success managers on top of the call, all new customers receive. That’s 2 calls to help guide you along the way to success. So head on over to Kajabi.com/Edge, that’s K-A-J-A-B-I.COM/E-D-G-E and start writing your story.
