Hey, it's Andy.
Well, summer has landed down here in Spain, and landed hard.
It's the kind of heat where even the cats won't move before six in the evening, and half my client calls have quietly turned into "Can we pick this up in September?"
Fair enough. I'm not sure about you, but I rarely do my best work when it's pushing 40 degrees, and we all need a proper break.
And that's why this week's Edge is a little different. No tactics, no tips. Just one idea, because there's a particular thought that tends to surface when coaches finally stop for the summer, and it's worth getting to before you act on it.
Right, let's get into it...
Every summer, like clockwork, the same thought does the rounds among coaches who've knocked off for a well-earned break.
They're a week in, far enough from work to hear themselves think, and somewhere in all that stillness, the same quiet voice starts up and won't leave them alone.
"I'm not sure I want to do this any more."
Nobody really warns you about this part when you start out. Coaching is genuinely exhausting. I know for a fact that if I do three calls in a single day I'm toast, and that's only three.
So when you're doing it full-time, week in and week out, a proper break stops being a luxury and becomes the only time you ever get to breathe and actually think.
The trouble is that the sudden shock of stopping can make the whole business feel like more than you ever want to pick back up.
You go from full tilt to a dead stop, the silence rushes in, and from inside that silence the running of it all looks impossibly heavy, until the thought finally creeps in that maybe you just don't want to do this any more.
Before you cancel the return flight home and start selling coconuts on the beach, let me tell you something.
That voice is rarely telling you the truth.
The question that actually matters isn't whether you want to quit. Tired people always want to quit, on a Friday afternoon, in the dead of February, three days into a launch that won't convert.
The real question is far more specific than that. It isn't whether you want out of the whole business; it's which part of it you no longer want to do. And once you ask it that way, you almost always find it was never the whole thing.
Because exhaustion doesn't come only from the hours. Far more of it comes from the parts that no longer fit.
- The content treadmill you've come to dread.
- The one client who leaves you flat every single time.
- The offer you outgrew two years ago.
- The niche that suited the old you and quietly stopped suiting the person you've become.
- The VA that's draining the life out of you.
Pull that single thread out, and more often than not, the urge to walk away from all of it loosens and goes with it.
That, right there, is the difference between a pivot and a quit.
A quit walks away from everything. A pivot keeps what still works and changes what doesn't.
And the truth is you can't tell which one you actually need while you're lying on a sun lounger running on empty. That's the worst possible moment to decide.
I once watched someone walk away from a coaching business with real potential, not because the potential wasn't there, but because they couldn't feel it from where they were sitting. They didn't pivot. They quit the lot. Years on, I still wonder what that might have become for them.
If you're there right now quietly nodding along, this next part is the bit that matters.
Coaches do this for other people for a living. Someone sits across from you, convinced the whole thing has to come down, and you're the calm voice in the room who helps them see it's just one fixable piece, not their entire life's work.
The problem is that nobody is sitting across from you. The coach on the beach, quietly talking themselves into packing it all in, has no one there to ask the obvious question back.
So be your own client for a minute.
Don't make a call this big from the lounger, tired and a couple of margaritas in.
Wait until you're rested and back in the swing of it, then do the very thing you'd have a client do.
Write two honest lists.
One for everything you'd keep, and one for everything you'd happily never do again.
That second list isn't your reason to quit. It's your pivot, the part you change, drop, or hand off.
The keep list is the one that decides it. If it comes back genuinely empty, then fair enough. That's real, and you can walk away with a clear conscience.
But most of the time it won't be empty. And most of the time, the thing you were ready to quit turns out to be a pivot in disguise.
Tired is not the same as done.
If you've come back from a break and the doubt hasn't lifted, that's worth taking seriously. Just not alone, and not on a bad day.
Sometimes all it takes is one honest conversation with someone who isn't attached to the answer to work out whether you're looking at a pivot or a full stop.
Believe me, I've been there, so if you want a chat, you know where I am.
Our Kajabi Life: 5 years since our pivot, and the boat says it all.
Five years ago on Wednesday, Jules and I got married in Gibraltar.
The funny part is we didn't really plan to. We'd not long landed in Spain, and we thought we were nipping down to tick a few legal boxes, the sort of admin you deal with when you move countries. A formality. Sign here, stamp that, home for lunch.
Our friends had other ideas.
They'd quietly arranged the whole thing behind our backs, and before we'd properly caught up with what was happening, we were actually getting married, with the Rock looking on.
Then they brought us home on a superyacht, because apparently that's just how the day was going.
And that's the part worth telling, because five years ago wasn't only the wedding.
It was also the year we made the most terrifying business decision of our lives.
We'd arrived in Spain in the middle of COVID, and my old brand marketing business was quietly dying, like a lot of businesses that year.
So we sat down and asked ourselves two honest questions. What are we genuinely good at, and what do we actually want to do.
The answer kept landing in the same place. Kajabi, and helping coaches build and scale.
So we jumped.
We let the old business go and went all in on being The Kajabi Guy. And then, for six long months, nothing. Not a whisper.
We sat there convinced we'd got it badly wrong and would be paying for it.
Then the enquiries started. Then the work. Then the proof. And we knew, quietly, that we'd made the right call.
That leap could easily have looked like quitting. It wasn't. It was a pivot, a frightening one, and everything we have now stands on top of it.
Five years married, five years all in, and on Wednesday we simply took the day off, because we could. That part still feels like the real win.
Right, I'm off to open the anniversary Rioja we've been saving.
Never a dull moment. It's a Kajabi life.
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