Build a Coaching Biz That Feeds Your Soul (and Fills Your Client Roster)
Here’s a little-known secret:
You probably already know that, at the Anti-Boring Learning Lab, we train educators in creative study skills and executive-function strategies that help students resist the habit of boring their brains.
But there’s also a quieter, more intimate corner of the Lab—one designed not for your students’ growth, but for yours.
It’s for those of you who aren’t just classroom teachers, but are building (or dreaming of building) a private practice as an academic or executive function coach.
We call it Rock Your Biz. And while you might assume it’s all about marketing, pricing, and systems (and yes, we tackle those, too!), the conversations often go much deeper.
Because let’s be honest—building a coaching biz can feed your soul…or your self-doubt…or both! The difference? How you meet yourself along the way—and how you allow our community to meet you, too.
Recently, I hosted our monthly Rock Your Biz call—and it went deeper than any of us expected.
We found ourselves exploring what it really takes to build a business that feels alive, not anxiety-driven. What emerged was a powerful reminder that edupreneurship isn’t just strategic—it’s soulful work, too.
When we let it, this work invites us to confront old stories about money, livelihood, and enoughness; to trust our ability to ride curiosity and action instead of fear; and to lean (at least sometimes) on a power greater than ourselves.
Since we’re about to offer a **special training on how to market your biz without hustle** I thought you might enjoy a little peek inside what a Rock Your Biz call is like. Who knows? You might find yourself inspired to join the training… and later, our cozy little biz-building corner of the Anti-Boring Learning Lab.
Here’s what unfolded in the last call. Maybe you’ll see yourself somewhere here?
Story 1: Reclaiming Our Negative Stories About Ourselves
Redefining “Smart”
At the start of the call, I found myself telling a story I hadn’t thought about in years—what my SAT scores once taught me about my own intelligence.
While cleaning out old boxes recently, I stumbled across my original SAT report from 1992. (We’ll post the picture here soon!)
Back then, that lower-than-expected score convinced me I was “dumb for a smart person.” I used the phrase as a joke, but the story stuck. I told it often enough that I started to believe it, and it followed me well into my thirties.
These days it’s wild to think that I—Gretchen Wegner, creator of the Anti-Boring Toolkit; creative, kind, curious, and clever—once believed that about myself. Only after the Toolkit had taken shape and I’d trained more than a hundred educators did I finally realize:
…maybe, just maybe, I’m “smarter” than that old story ever allowed me to believe. Sheesh.
Why I Shared This Story
I shared that story on the Rock Your Biz call because it reminded me how easily we sell ourselves short—especially in our businesses. We downplay what we know, second-guess what we’ve earned, or assume someone else must be more qualified.
For many of us, those habits started long before we ever became entrepreneurs. They began when we learned to measure our worth through grades, test scores, or how others labeled our “potential.”
And of course, that feedback isn’t neutral. For people whose identities have been marginalized—by race, disability, gender, class, language, or neurotype—messages about intelligence or “potential” can land harder and stick longer. What we internalize isn’t just about personal confidence; it’s about the cultural stories we’ve absorbed about who gets to be seen as capable or smart in the first place.
It’s no wonder that when we start running a business, those same insecurities sneak in wearing new disguises—imposter syndrome, comparison, perfectionism.
That’s why it’s useful to pause and ask: What old story might still be quietly shaping how I see myself as a professional or business owner?
The Research Behind the Story
Psychologists call this pattern of belief academic self-concept—the set of perceptions we form about our intelligence and capability based on feedback from the world (Marsh & Craven, 2006).
Furthermore, research from Carol Dweck’s mindset theory (2006) and Albert Bandura’s self-efficacy framework (1997) shows that these implicit beliefs shape everything from risk-taking to career direction. When we believe our abilities can grow, or that our actions make a difference, we’re more likely to take healthy risks, try new strategies, and persist when things get hard.
But here’s the nuance: these belief systems aren’t experienced equally.
For learners—and adults—with marginalized identities, feedback from the world carries extra weight. One study of African American and Latino adolescents found that students’ self-efficacy and motivation were tied to how much they felt they belonged in their learning environments (Matthews, Banerjee, & Lauermann, 2014).
Another review of intersectionality research concluded that our self-concept develops at the crossroads of our overlapping identities—race, gender, class, neurotype, and more—not in isolation (Cole, 2019).
And while those studies focus on young people, the same dynamics show up in our Rock Your Biz community. Many of us—educators, coaches, and creative entrepreneurs—carry the impact of one or more historically marginalized identities.
The stories we’ve internalized about who gets to be an expert, who gets to earn well, or who gets to take up space often shape how confidently we build our businesses, just as they shape how students approach learning.
That’s one reason I love this work: we’re not just building businesses; we’re reclaiming our self-concept—as capable, creative, and well-compensated.
And once we start reclaiming our worth, something beautiful happens: we begin to own what we know.
Story 2: Own What You Know
If my SAT story was about confronting old narratives, this next one is about rewriting them—specifically, what it means to claim your expertise even without traditional credentials.
A Question of Legitimacy
A little later, we discussed the following question sent in by another Learning Lab member (which I’ve lightly edited for this blog post):
“I got energized by your challenge for me last week—to develop a coaching model that better supports Chinese students, based on my experiences coaching them.
I’ve been thinking about doing research, documenting my field notes, and eventually creating a coaching model or even a book.
I have some confidence in my experience, but I also feel self-doubt. I’m not affiliated with a university—how am I qualified to run this research and create my own model?”
What a beautifully vulnerable question. I shared this story because it captures another way we sell ourselves short—by waiting for someone else to tell us we’re qualified.
The Paradox of Expertise
The group immediately lit up in support of this coach. Everyone could see how her expertise had grown from years of lived experience with the Chinese families she serves.
We encouraged her to notice how she’d internalized the same ultra-rigorous academic standards she’s helping her students loosen. What a paradox—the very systems we try to help others heal from are often the ones we still hold ourselves to.
I see this in so many educators and coaches: we’ve internalized the same pressure to prove our legitimacy that once made school feel like a test of worth.
And then came the all-important reminder: you don’t need permission from an external authority to name what you’ve noticed.
How many business programs actually make space for both oppression analysis and personal meta-noticing? I’m willing to bet not many—and that’s exactly what makes Rock Your Biz different.
Just so you know—in the field of education, there’s a legit way to honor the power of practice: the fancy terms are action research and practitioner inquiry. These are legitimate—and deeply valuable—forms of knowledge creation.
And here’s something worth noticing: these modes of inquiry have often been championed by women, educators of color, queer folks, and other practitioners whose wisdom wasn’t always welcomed in traditional academic spaces. In many ways, practitioner inquiry is an act of reclamation—naming that lived experience, reflection, and care are valid sources of insight and innovation.
Every client reflection, classroom moment, or coaching experiment you record is a data point. Over time, those notes become patterns, and those patterns become frameworks. When we track what works and why, we transform experience into expertise.
You don’t need a university title or research grant to claim what you know. You just need curiosity, consistency, and the courage to synthesize your learning—whether publicly or privately.
That’s why I call Lab members our Co-LAB-orators—a community of educators who remix, refine, and test ideas with our clients and each other until they evolve into useful, shareable tools for the world.
This particular coach committed to posting more about what she’s noticing in our community chat lounges, and I can’t wait to watch her model emerge.
Watching her take that step reminded all of us that business-building isn’t just about marketing or systems—it’s about owning your voice, trusting that it matters, and letting it ripple outward.
That’s the heart of what we practice, week after week, inside Rock Your Biz.
And guess what—this same spirit of owning what you know is also what helps us attract the right referral partners: the ones whose values align with ours and who are eager to share each other’s work for the good of the students we serve. We’ll dig into that more in our upcoming training, Beyond Hustle.
Story 3: Finding Faith — Trusting a Power Greater Than Ourselves
As we neared the end of our Rock Your Biz call, the conversation drifted into familiar business territory—packages, pricing, and program design.
But beneath the spreadsheets and strategy talk, one quiet thread kept weaving its way through everything we shared: facing our own vulnerability.
The Power (and Vulnerability) of Relationship Marketing
One academic coach reflected that, while building a new group program for college students, he’d spent weeks (and quite a few dollars) running YouTube ads—ads that families watched in full but that rarely converted into sign-ups.
Yet, in all that time, he hadn’t reached out to a single real person to tell them what he was creating or invite them to share it with their communities.
It was such an honest moment. He recognized that this focus on ads was, in some ways, a distraction from what he knew worked best.
After all, one of the key strategies we teach inside Rock Your Biz is the power of relationships—how strong, genuine connections with complementary professionals are the most sustainable way to grow a practice (at least at first, when you’re going for your first 1 to 16 clients).
And yet… this is the paradox of relationship marketing: we know connection converts better than algorithms, but it also asks something scarier of us—authenticity, vulnerability, and trust.
He smiled wryly and said, “Maybe I’ll work on that resistance someday.”
I smiled back. We’ve all said some version of that sentence, haven’t we? We know what would move us forward, but we hesitate—caught between wanting to trust yet craving control.
Surrendering Instead of Strategizing
That’s when I took a breath and asked a follow-up question that doesn’t often surface in business (or educator!) spaces: “Have you tried praying about it?”
I don’t bring up prayer often in professional settings, but the group felt so tender and safe that day—and I knew this coach’s faith mattered deeply to him.
He paused. “Honestly… no.”
That exchange opened a beautiful turn in the conversation. Another coach shared how, over the ten years she’s been slowly and organically building her own group program, faith has been her steady companion. When the next step wasn’t clear, when self-doubt was loud, when the data didn’t yet add up—relying on her relationship to God helped her stay the course.
Not everyone in the Zoom room identified as religious, but we honored the truth that for some of us, faith is part of the work—and for all of us, reaching out to a power greater than ourselves can be grounding, even healing.
Maybe this is what the “biz doctor” really recommends: that from time to time, we pause to surrender instead of strategize. That we step off the treadmill of doing and allow something deeper, wider, and wiser to guide us.
By the end of the call, the energy in the room was both soft and strong. We weren’t just entrepreneurs…
…We were human-preneurs in the thick of it—practicing a kind of courage and resilience that isn’t always about pushing forward; sometimes it’s about letting go.
Ready to Find More Clients Without Losing Your Self?
If this peek behind the curtain of Rock Your Biz resonated, you’ll love our upcoming training: Beyond Hustle: Grow Your Academic Coaching Practice with Ease
In this session — a “least you need to do” guide to growing your academic and EF coaching biz — you’ll learn how to avoid the common pitfalls most new business owners make and instead focus on the simplest actions that actually move your practice forward.
We’ll cover:
Which marketing trends to approach with caution (and which ones are truly worth your time)
Why relationship marketing is the smartest place to start for academic and EF coaches
How to identify your best complementary professionals—and use our ready-to-go scripts for confidently reaching out
How to layer new anti-boring marketing strategies as your practice grows, so you always have a steady flow of clients
We designed this training as the realistic first step toward that deeper, more soulful kind of business growth we’ve been talking about here.
Because before you can heal your money stories, trust your instincts, or practice the courage to let go, you first need a simple, steady plan for finding clients with confidence. Once you have that plan, you’ll start to notice where resistance shows up—and that’s where having a loving, grounded community (like ours!) can make all the difference. Together, we help you move through those stories toward a practice that’s not just sustainable, but truly lucrative and alive.
That’s what this webinar gives you—a foundation built on clarity and connection, so that the inner work of being an edupreneur has room to grow.
Your Next Steps
Option 1: If you’re seeing this before December 13, 2025, join us live for Beyond Hustle!
Our goal is to help you land your first few clients so you can confidently invest in growing your practice—and then magnify that momentum inside Rock Your Biz.
Option 2: If you’re seeing this after December 13, 2025, don’t worry—you can still get the full experience.
Start by joining the Anti-Boring Learning Lab, then take advantage of the $500-off discount we’ll email you when you upgrade to Rock Your Biz within your first month. You’ll get the best of the Lab’s tools, support, and business-building resources all in one fell swoop.
To recap:
👉 Before December 13: Register for the webinar here.
👉 After December 12: Learn more about the Rock Your Biz Add-On.
👉 Anytime: Reach out here with questions—we’re always happy to help.
Because building a coaching business shouldn’t drain your financial or inner resources—it should feed your confidence, creativity, and calling.