It's Not About The Money

[00:00] Steve: Have you ever owned a paper shredder?

[00:02] Tyler: Yeah, I have one right next to me right now, actually. Oh, okay.

[00:05] Steve: Well, I have just joined the club of adults who own paper shredders this week, and it's very satisfying, and I don't know why, but I know why.

[00:16] Tyler: Well, I guess I can't explain why, but I know what you're talking about.

[00:19] Steve: Yeah. Anyway, the ostensible reason was that very occasionally I have client files that are, like, printed on paper that I need to shred when I'm done. So that was the reason, ostensibly. But there's lots of things that are fun to shred.

[00:37] Tyler: Junk mail.

[00:38] Steve: Junk mail, old credit card, health insurance.

[00:41] Tyler: Statements, all the stuff not I used to, as in I did on a regular basis. But have you ever shredded a CD?

[00:52] Steve: No, I did not know that was possible.

[00:54] Tyler: I mean, it's possible. I don't know if it's recommended.

[00:57] Steve: I mean, you can put credit cards in this machine, so I suppose that's not so different from a CD. Other than the size, CDs are much more brittle.

[01:06] Tyler: They crack, it goes all over.

[01:09] Steve: But anyway, that's exciting. Hey, there. I'm Steve.

[01:14] Tyler: And I'm Tyler. And welcome to It's Not About the Money, where we discuss a wide range of topics related to entrepreneurship, leadership, productivity, and, of course, money.

[01:26] Steve: We're not here to bore you with financial jargon or the tax code, although.

[01:31] Tyler: We might normally I say, but not on purpose, but sometimes I think we do it on purpose.

[01:37] Steve: Well, we do it's true on purpose. Maybe we need to change the script.

[01:41] Tyler: Yeah, I think so.

[01:42] Steve: But in the meantime, we're just a couple of small business owners trying to make sense of the world one podcast at a time. So, Tyler, you have told me that you recently, or a little while ago, had an epiphany about coaching, and I want to ask you about that today because I think it would be useful for others who are considering coaching as a career or a side gig. But I'm going to bury the lead a bit for our listeners and back up the story for a minute first. What do you think?

[02:12] Tyler: Sure, that works.

[02:14] Steve: Okay, so you mentioned in an earlier episode that you came upon financial coaching through the Winab certification. Could you recap that process for me? What got you interested? What did it take? What was it like?

[02:30] Tyler: Sure. I guess I should preface this by saying that Winab stands for You Need a Budget, and it's a company that makes a budgeting software which is based on a budgeting methodology. And I've been a big fan of theirs. I've been using them for probably seven years or so. I'm not exactly sure when I started. So the preface is I'm just a massive fan of this company, the software, their methodology. They really helped me put my personal finances in order, and I love it so much. I'm kind of a natural evangelist for them. I guess you could say much to the sugar and of my friends and family, but I learned when I met you. Once in a while, you meet someone else who likes personal finance and budgeting, and you can geek out about it together, so it works out.

[03:17] Steve: I do also love winab.

[03:19] Tyler: Yes.

[03:19] Steve: Although not enough to get certified. Tell me more about that.

[03:24] Tyler: Sure. And that is why I did it, out of excitement. And I guess love might be a strong word, but excitement about the product. I can't remember where I first saw it. It might have been on Twitter, back when I was on Twitter, but I saw somebody mention on the Internet that you could become a YNAB certified budgeting coach. And I didn't even know what that meant before. I was, like, clicking apply. Apply. I was like, oh, that sounds cool. I want to be more involved in winap. Anyway, it's basically they are certifying people to be able to understand and teach their methodology for budgeting, which is actually pretty simple. It's just four rules that they ask you to follow. Sorry, they don't ask you to follow them. They recommend them. And if you follow them, it's easier to do your personal finances and feel like you're in control of your money.

[04:15] Steve: It's more of a carrot than a stick.

[04:18] Tyler: Yeah, I guess you could think of it that way. It's more of a paradigm, I would say. You've heard of various budgeting methodologies out there. Maybe you've heard of Dave Ramsay and his seven baby steps. That's one example. Except for YNAB has four rules, and we could talk more about those another time, but anyway yeah, okay. So I was just excited. I've kind of been a fanboy of the company. I've stalked some of their employees on LinkedIn to see if I could get connected with them so they could hire me someday, that kind of thing. It's a little much. So I was like, sweet an opportunity to kind of get more involved with this company. And I had no intention I didn't really know what coaching was. I'd heard of life coaching, but I knew that I liked YNAB. I knew that I liked talking about budgeting with people in my regular everyday life, and wouldn't it be fun to be, quote, qualified to do it? I guess you could say certified. Right. So I applied. It was a three month program, and it was live instruction. There was an element of live instruction to it for three months where you go really in depth on the YNAB method and really in depth on the YNAB software. And I did learn a few things that I hadn't known before about how to use it, kind of tips and tricks and advanced use cases. And then there's also a whole section about how to work with different types of people personality wise or financial situation wise, and help them overcome personal finance challenges. Then the other element of the program was you actually had to coach. So you had to find a certain number of people to volunteer to be your guinea pigs to practice coaching them. And you couldn't get the certification unless you had fulfilled the coaching hours requirement, basically. Right. So, pretty straightforward as far as a certification goes. There's an education practice and then very giant test at the end about the software and the method.

[06:19] Steve: Okay, that's great. That sounds very comprehensive. Yeah. And I've heard Jesse Meekum, the founder, describe YNAB, the company as not a software company, but an education company. And I thought that was a very interesting way to characterize it. But now hearing you describe what this process was like, that makes total sense, because they already had a lot of well, obviously they had the information they were sharing with you, because that's how they shared it with you. But they knew who their customers are, what kinds of situations they're coming from, and could coach you on how to work with all of those different kinds of people.

[07:02] Tyler: That's interesting. I had never thought of them as an education company, but now that I think about it, I can see where he's coming from. I mean, they do make software, and that's how they make their money. People subscribing to their software as a service, but they produce a massive amount of content, whether it's blog posts, podcasts, YouTube videos, tutorials. Yeah, they really want to help people understand how to be successful with their money. And they do have one thing that became apparent during the certification course, is they have a massive amount of experience in house from their customer support team. They're answering questions all day from their customers about how to use the software right and how to overcome challenges and things like that. I guess they didn't talk about their motivation for creating the certification program, but I can see they spend a lot of resources helping people through their method and through their software. And I think they wanted to expand their ability to do that and give people the opportunity, if they so desire, to make a little money doing it at the same time.

[08:18] Steve: That makes sense.

[08:20] Tyler: And I have to say it's interesting. Again, sorry, I'm kind of stuck on this education component of it is I wouldn't say that using the software is particularly difficult or putting all of your money into a budget. That's not what's hard. I found in my own life and talking to other people. It's a behavior thing. I think Dave Ramsay is fond of saying personal finance is like something like 20% knowledge and 80% behavior. There's not that much to know. Spend less than you make, give every dollar job, that kind of stuff. But then following through and actually doing it, sticking to your plan, that's the hard part. And so it requires a lot of support. Okay.

[09:05] Steve: Which sounds like a really good fit for coaching, where the things that you need to get it to work for you are the mindset and the habits and the experience of doing it over and over again.

[09:19] Tyler: Yeah. When you first start budgeting, it's hard to trust your system because you're so used to whatever the case may be. A lot of people are just used to looking at their bank account balance to answer the question, Can I afford this? But that number alone, if you only look at your bank account balance before you make a big purchase, doesn't tell you any information about what else you might need that money for. And so that's where budgeting comes in.

[09:50] Steve: Right.

[09:51] Tyler: Okay.

[09:52] Steve: So I heard that from Jesse on a podcast that he does with somebody else named Mark Butler oh, yes. Called?

[10:03] Tyler: Have I mentioned I'm a huge fan of Mark Butler?

[10:06] Steve: Oh, okay. Yes, I think you have.

[10:10] Tyler: Yeah.

[10:11] Steve: What is it called? It's called beginning balance. And the thing that drew me to this particular episode was that the title mentions taxes. So I was already interested, but typical. Anyway, they were talking about the research and development tax credit and how that applies to software developer salaries, accounting within their company. And it was sort of just an offhand comment that he said that we're not so much a software company as an education company. But I thought that was profound. So anyway, I'll put a link to that in the show notes. So you've coached a few different kinds of clients so far from your training, the ones you had to do before you got the certification up through now, what was kind of the range and the scope of those conversations generally?

[11:05] Tyler: The range and the scope of those conversations? That's a good question. Well, in the beginning, when I was doing my training, I'd say on one end of the spectrum, you had people who were doing me a favor, hey, I'm getting certified. I need to practice on somebody. Can I have an hour of your time to talk with you about this? And that was way less about coaching because they had no idea they were coming in cold. I was just trying to explain what I was doing and what budgeting is and all about this new app. So I would call that, I don't know, not coaching. That was more like explaining. And then on the other end of the spectrum, after I became certified, now that I'm working with real clients I shouldn't say real clients, I'm sorry everyone is a real client. But paying clients, I should say on the other end of that spectrum are people who are massively engaged in self improvement, I would say, who are maybe sick of making the same mistakes financially over and over again in their lives. And they've tried a ton of different things to get out of the rut that they're in, and they're just excited to have someone with them and kind of guide them through that process. So that's kind of the spectrum of engagement. Maybe you could say, do me a favor just listening all the way to very actively engaged in the coaching process and self improvement.

[12:39] Steve: Yeah. Okay. And what topics have you covered with all of these different people? Does it range from how to use the software or how to change your mindset, everything in between?

[12:56] Tyler: Yes, it covers every topic you can imagine related to personal finance and in particular, budgeting. I will say the first couple of clients that I worked with after I became certified were asking me a lot of questions about how to use the software.

[13:21] Steve: Okay.

[13:21] Tyler: And that's where we spent most of our time.

[13:23] Steve: Were these clients that came to you through the YNAB coaching directory?

[13:29] Tyler: Yes. Okay.

[13:32] Steve: I guess that makes sense. That they were looking for I need a YNAB coach here's, one named Tyler. Let me call him up and see that's.

[13:40] Tyler: Right. And in my listing in the Winab directory, at that point in the game, I had a little blurb. You have basically a tweet length of characters to describe yourself to kind of advertise your services there. And my wording was more focused on that. It was along the lines of learn the YNAB method, master the YNAB apps, work with me. So that's kind of what I was looking for, I guess, at that point.

[14:08] Steve: Okay, so you had some clients coming in that were looking for help to learn the software, and then I'm assuming there were also others who were like, I've tried a whole bunch of things, but really what I need is somebody to coach me through how to change my mindset or my habits, less specifically the software. Is that true?

[14:30] Tyler: No, actually it was mostly software help that I was getting into. Click here. Oh, why isn't this transaction showing up correctly? How do I use this feature? Why is the balance red? That's the worst question. Where's all my money, all these things, et cetera, et cetera. And actually, that's what kind of led to the epiphany that you alluded to earlier, is I kind of got bored of that pretty quickly, actually, because to me, using the software is not that interesting. And I found myself feeling a little bit like tech support or a software trainer, I guess you could say. And I was just like, I don't know if I keep doing this. It's fun the first few times, but then after a while, I just like, just click the button. Just click the button. It's right there. And that's not an interesting problem for me to help people solve. Okay.

[15:29] Steve: Yeah.

[15:29] Tyler: And so the epiphany that I had and we'll just jump right to it is I do not want to be technical support for YNAB and I don't want to be a software trainer. What I want to do is help people experience some kind of actual change or transformation in their life. Right. I don't want to have a three month or a six month coaching engagement with someone. And at the end of that, great, they know how to use YNAB, the software, but their life hasn't changed. Their spending habits haven't changed. They haven't changed their net worth. They haven't paid off any debt. You know what I mean? That's the kind of stuff that I'm interested in, and that's what's exciting. That's what makes the conversations with clients engaging. That's what gets them excited, which in turn gets me excited. That's the good stuff.

[16:17] Steve: You don't want to just be conveying technical knowledge without helping them affect some change in their life.

[16:24] Tyler: Yeah, that's right. And I kind of had this realization in real time as I was talking with a prospective client. We were talking about what it would be like to work with me, and I kind of just had the rant that I just gave. I just said that basically I'm like, you know, I'm not that interested in I don't want to be tech support. I don't want to teach you how to use the software. I want to help you change your life. I want to help you turn your finances around and winab as a methodology and as a tool can be instrumental in that. But frankly, you don't have to use it. And I don't care whether you do, even if it's useful, there's a lot more to this, and it actually really resonated with that person. And they hired me on the spot, so it worked out okay.

[17:08] Steve: Wow. So that was like the eureka moment.

[17:10] Tyler: Yes.

[17:11] Steve: In the middle of a conversation.

[17:13] Tyler: Yes. That's great. Basically because I was bored. I was like, I don't want to show someone how to log into the software again or whatever.

[17:22] Steve: Click the button, for sure.

[17:25] Tyler: And it's been very rewarding since then. It was a great realization that led to pivot in how I approach everything from what's on my website to how I engage with people the first time. It's been great.

[17:40] Steve: I think this is a great example of the Iterative approach that you have to take when you're starting a business of just, first of all, figuring out what it is you want to do. You kind of have that. You want to do financial coaching, but then figuring out, what kind of client do I want to serve? What problems do they have that I want to help them solve? And I'm good at helping them solve. And then you're just kind of iterating on that as you go, and you'll get better at defining that and describing that value to other people.

[18:13] Tyler: Totally. In fact, that's one of the biggest problems I have with the information that's easily available on the Internet about how to start marketing yourself as a new business or a solopreneur or whatever it is, is so often you hear, like, step one, choose your niche. And like, that's fine. But what if you choose the wrong niche, right, that you think you're interested in it, but just like I was interested in being a YNAB coach, right, and helping people use the YNAB software, that's 100% what I thought I was interested in. And so that's kind of the niche that I was diving into until I realized, like, no, that's like a micro part of the niche, I guess, or what I want to do, but that's not it. And if I focused only on that, I would be missing out on the best clients and helping them solve the most interesting problems. And so I think you're absolutely right. I think, in my opinion, and I guess this totally depends on the business that you're in. I would hate to generalize, right, but it seems like it's best in my experience to start with, like casting a wide net and iterating just like you're saying and then kind of following the feedback that you get and I don't know if it ever ends.

[19:29] Steve: That's a good point. Maybe it doesn't. But I agree though, I've followed that same approach so far in my business. Kind of taking everybody that comes in the door for this first year just to, one, get the experience, but two, to figure out which problems are the most interesting to me or which ones have the highest value to the customer where I can really dive deep on that and get super good at solving that kind of a problem and become more valuable to them.

[20:02] Tyler: Have you noticed any patterns yet in the type of people that you have been working with or enjoy working with the most in terms of kind of like narrowing it down or are you still casting a wide net?

[20:14] Steve: I have narrowed it down to solopreneurs and small business folks with just a handful of employees. But that's still very general. That's the way I describe it so far. But yeah, as the Iterative process goes on, it will probably end up in like I'm really good at solopreneurs in this particular vertical or if you're in a particular revenue range no matter what the business is or something like that. I'm not quite there yet.

[20:46] Tyler: Yeah, that makes sense. What again, the advice that you see out there is like have a and I'm not saying it's bad advice, I think this is more of an, but it's kind of an advanced marketing tactic that maybe can be applied at a later date. I don't know. But you've heard about creating your customer avatar? Have you heard of that? Where it's like get real specific, give them an age, give them a name, give them a gender, give them hobbies, give them an income range, figure out who is the person you're talking to because then you can connect with them. I do think there's value in that, but I just don't think I'm ready. I don't know who that person is yet. For me.

[21:22] Steve: Right, I agree. I think eventually I will probably get to that point with my business. I'm not quite there yet. I'm starting to sketch out an outline, I guess, but I don't have all the details of what it's going to look like and that's totally fine at this stage for me.

[21:42] Tyler: Totally. Yeah, same here.

[21:44] Steve: So when you get a new client, they have gone through the onboarding process, whatever that is, and said, I want to work with Tyler to be my financial coach. What is your goal at that point for a client?

[21:59] Tyler: Where do you go? Yeah, well, I mean, at a high level, my goal is to have conversations with them that are powerful and for being ambitious, I would say the conversations should be so powerful that they'll never forget them as long as they live. Which maybe that's like my that's an aspiration. That's a pretty tall order. But and the reason why I say powerful conversations is the goal that's also kind of a pivot from how I started. When I first started, I had kind of a program. It's like, oh, I think it was like five sessions and session one will cover this and session two will cover this. In session three, we'll practice what we learned and then we'll meet every other week for a little while until you feel comfortable. I don't know. It was a very regimented by topic what we were going to cover. You know what, I found that that did not work because everyone that I was meeting with was just so different and they just had different questions and different problems. And this is where I kind of started to realize there's a big difference between coaching and teaching.

[23:14] Steve: Interesting.

[23:15] Tyler: Yeah. So similarly, how I think there's a difference between tech support and coaching. We talked about that already. But teaching if I was teaching, I could make a course or I could recommend they watch one of the many YouTube videos that, YNAB, the company has already produced about how to use their software and learn their method. Right, yeah. Or I could make my own course and I could try selling that. My initial approach was more of a teaching approach, I would say, where it's like, okay, there's an order of operations, kind of the most efficient way to start managing your personal finances. I still think that's true in a general sense, but the problem is everybody has progressed a certain amount already along that spectrum, along that path. And so sometimes it doesn't make sense to start at the same place at the beginning, if you will.

[24:10] Steve: Okay.

[24:11] Tyler: Instead of that being the goal, I guess the goal back then would have been actually, I literally had a checklist of skills to learn and my goal is to get them all checked off with that client. It's like, oh, you can reconcile your accounts now. Oh, you can assign budget sorry, assign money to budget categories and so on and so forth. There was like 20 of these things, 20 to 30 of these skills. But yeah, now the goal is to have powerful conversations that change their mindset, change their lives, because the technical aspects tend to flow from once they're enthused and once they see themselves making progress. If you start too much in the weeds of the details of how to use the software, I found that they don't have any quick wins. And so it's like your momentum gets killed early on and it's not a very pleasant experience. That was a very long way of saying the goal is to have transformation through conversation. And I know that sounds a little ambiguous and kind of what does that mean? But it seems to be something like, you know, when it's happening.

[25:20] Steve: Yeah, that is super interesting because when I asked the question, I was expecting you to have a goal of an end point in mind of like, we will get this together, we will get you to this point, we'll get you.

[25:37] Tyler: Out of debt, we'll get you whatever.

[25:38] Steve: You had or whatever it might have been. I didn't know what it would be. But your answer is more like, it's going to depend on you. And we're just here to have powerful, transformative conversations as we go along that will move you along your journey to wherever it is that you want to go. I love that.

[25:57] Tyler: And it really works. I'm telling you. I'm working with a client right now who I just love. It's so fun to work with him. It's kind of a typical case for people I'd work with. He makes really good money, but likes to spend it, doesn't have much left over at the end of the month, like many people. And so we've been meeting for about two months now and about a month and a half in, we finally got to a place where he was really comfortable understanding his spending. Right. He kind of had done the analysis, had figured out what he was spending money on and more importantly, why. Like, what was driving the spending on all those different things. And by the end of our last session just recently, he was still kind of like, from a strictly financial perspective, not in a great place, because the amount of money he was planning to spend in any given month is still more than his income per month. That's a problem. That's like negative cash flow. Right?

[27:04] Steve: Right.

[27:05] Tyler: But he's very good at budgeting. Now when he gets paid, he knows exactly how to allocate those dollars to the highest priorities, basically answering the question, what do I need this money to do until I get paid again? And so he's like, got all the good habits. So he's budgeting his money, he's recording his spending. He's doing retrospective. So even though he hasn't arrived where he wants to be in terms of cash flow, in terms of debt repayment. He feels awesome about life because he has clarity and he has momentum, and he knows there's still work to do. So, yeah, success can look like that, too. It's not all in the numbers, but I'm very confident that he's going to become financially successful and meet his financial goals, of getting out of debt, et cetera, et cetera, because of the light bulb moments that he's having. And just like the change, you can see it in his eyes. It's awesome.

[28:05] Steve: Yeah. Developing that understanding of what is going on, where the money goes, and also the technical skills of how to manage it so that you can get it to do what you want it to do. And it may take some time to get there. And that's okay. Yeah, that's great. I want to pivot a little bit here and ask you what life experience you have that brought you to coaching. Can you look back now and see, oh, here and here and here? In my life, I was expressing interest in being a coach, but I didn't realize it at the time, perhaps, or I don't know, something like that. Do you have any of those kinds of experiences?

[28:47] Tyler: Yeah, I mean, if you can't tell by now, I'm pretty obsessed with the idea that conversation can be powerful. And I think most of my life that I can actually remember, I've felt the same way. I just never would have called it coaching. I would have called it, like, friendship or just having interesting or deep conversations. I mean, I can remember stuff all the way back to my teenage years. Like, I used to work at a scout camp in the summer, and you sit around the campfire late at night and talk about things that are important to you and with other people your age. That was formative for me, like having those deep conversations about important things.

[29:24] Steve: Yeah.

[29:25] Tyler: Later in my life, I served as a missionary, proselytic missionary in Russia. And that's the same thing. You're just having conversations with people all day, every day about stuff that's important to them, stuff that's important to you, and then that's kind of how I like my friendships to go to. Some people might think this is boring, but at the top of my list of things that I would love to do with you, if we were hanging out, it would be just chatting, just talking and going deep. And I guess that's kind of maybe also why we're doing a podcast. I don't know.

[30:00] Steve: That's basically what this is kind of an outgrowth of our friendship, which is, as you describe it, of long, thoughtful conversations about deep things.

[30:11] Tyler: Yeah. And we've had many of those in our personal friendship, too, not related to anything that we're talking about right now.

[30:17] Steve: Right.

[30:18] Tyler: Maybe I'm an addict to conversation. I don't know. So that's one side of it. The other side is a lot of my professional career. Has been in management roles where I'm manager of people, basically. So people directly reporting to me and being partially responsible for their professional growth, for their performance, et cetera, et cetera, all the things that are involved with being a boss. And I wish I would have had some of the thoughts and frameworks that I've gained over the last year about coaching in my professional career before this, because there's a lot of coaching opportunities in a management role in a profession. Right. Mentorship opportunities. There's opportunities to correct people who maybe have done something wrong or don't know how to do something and teaching them. So, yeah, there's a lot of application there that I'm currently trying to apply from this experience. So that's another area. Okay.

[31:17] Steve: I have a thesis that I would like to eventually prove out in conversation with you that goes something like everything I Needed to Know for a Career in Coaching I Learned as a Middle Manager. I love that sort of the provocative title of it. But it sounds like from what you just said, that there's maybe something there, so we should explore that in the future.

[31:39] Tyler: That sounds like a book title or something. Yeah, right.

[31:44] Steve: A play on everything I needed to know about something I learned in kindergarten. I don't remember the original book, but.

[31:51] Tyler: Yeah, no, I love that. That's a lot of overlap there. I guess my theory is there should be a lot of overlap between a coaching skill set and a managerial skill set that will not always bear out in reality. We've all had different kinds of bosses, right? Yeah.

[32:09] Steve: But the bosses that I've had that I really enjoyed working with have been of this caliber that you described, where they have good conversations. They understand you as well as the goals and needs of the team. And they know how to steer everybody in the right direction and get the best out of each person, which is different for each person.

[32:31] Tyler: Yeah. Well, that's interesting. That connected with something. In my mind, there's another coach kind of a I don't know if celebrity coach is the right word for it, but his name is Rich Litvin. He actually wrote or co wrote the book The Prosperous Coach, which I get a lot of my inspiration from. And he has a podcast. He has many YouTube videos as well. But one of his taglines is this thing that we call coaching. It wasn't always called coaching. It used to just be called leadership. And I find that really interesting. Food for thought.

[33:07] Steve: Yeah. How would you counsel someone trying to figure out what aspects of coaching they really enjoy if maybe they think this could be a useful career or side gig for them? How do they figure out whether they want to be tech support or they want to be a teacher or they want to be a coach or somewhere in between?

[33:30] Tyler: I think it depends on what you want to coach around. So I'm coaching around personal finance and budgeting as a starting point. And so when you're using that as kind of a way to create customers around that topic, there is an element I will say, like what I do in a coaching session, I talk all the time, as you can hear from this episode, about it's all about conversation, conversation, conversation. But in reality, like I said, when you're working with someone on their personal finances, I'll kind of switch modes, right? Sometimes it's coaching, sometimes it's teaching, sometimes it's consulting. Maybe we call that consulting, like the software consulting, teaching them how to implement a certain software, a certain method into their life. And so it's not like all the same every time. Again, another one of my clients, we were kind of starting from high level and working our way down. Starting at a high level. I mean, like, having conversations about their identity, you know, who what, who are you? What do you stand for? What does your future look like? Those kind of questions. So that we could have a foundation upon which to make decisions about how to spend this person's money. But they were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, stop. I think we need to stop because I'm not ready to have that conversation. I just need to get my money under control first. I'm not in a space where I can mentally give energy to those conversations because I'm just stressed about my money. So in that case, we flipped the script, right? So we're like, okay, fine. Yeah, let's train you up on YNAB. We'll teach you the method. We'll get your money in there. We'll get you, like, a functioning budget first, and that will give us a starting point where you're, like, at peace, you have some clarity so that we can kind of go back to asking questions about, okay, here's how you're spending your money. Are you happy with that? And then kind of work our way back up the ladder. So I guess the point of saying that is, again, every engagement with the client is different. And I kind of like to think of it as the person is the program. Like, we just go where they need to go to get the most out of working together.

[35:42] Steve: Oh, I like that. The person is the program.

[35:45] Tyler: Yeah. Instead of trying to cram every person into the same program. Yeah. Okay, so I guess back to the beginning of my answer is kind of do some pondering about what it is that you're coaching around. It doesn't have to be personal finance. It could be fitness. It could be nutrition. It could be health. It could be mindfulness. It could be professional development. There's a lot of career coaches out there, right, that help you put together a plan for your career and then execute the tactics to advance along your plan and think about what kind of technical knowledge and expertise you bring to that conversation. And then do what I did, I guess, and just try it a few times. Maybe try putting together a program, I think, for you to be successful at X, Y or Z. Here's the steps, and I'll teach you how to do it. Maybe that's your thing. Maybe you're a trainer at heart. Maybe you have the heart of a teacher. Maybe you just like powerful conversations or maybe a little bit of all three and kind of we talked earlier about iterating, so just iterate until you start to find your groove.

[36:49] Steve: Yeah.

[36:50] Tyler: Great advice. Thank you, Tyler.

[36:52] Steve: Is there anything you wish I had asked that I didn't that you want to talk about?

[37:00] Tyler: No, I think that's everything. Thanks, Steve.

[37:02] Steve: You're welcome. All. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. And we will see you again on another episode of It's Not About the Money.