Clarity Conversations with Shelby B. Ketchen

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My Guest:

Conversation Transcript

Marta: Hello, and welcome to a, just a short interview with my friend Shelby. I’m Marta Goertzen. I am the owner and operator over at Selah Studios, where I coach women entrepreneurs, specifically coaches and consultants to find clarity in their business.

And today we’re talking about Shelby, who’s one of my clients who’s gone through From Confusion to C larity. And we’re gonna talk about her journey and what a difference it’s made in her life and her business to find clarity in her business.

Welcome Shelby, and I’m going to ask you to introduce yourself, your business, and what you do, and who you, who you work best with.

Shelby: Super. Thank you for having me. I’m Shelby Ketchen. My business is actually named after myself, so it’s Shelby b Ketchen. I work with coaches and counselors who are a little bit lost in their business because there’s so much going on on the back end of their business, all the little to-dos and things that they barely have time for a life for fun or to even work with their own clients. And that is what I love to do.

Marta: And we’ve been working together for a long time now, both in the Mastermind and also diving deep into the finding clarity for you and your business. Before we did our work together on helping you really find the clarity you were looking for.

What were you unclear about before we started this work together?

Shelby: Precisely who it is that I wanted to serve and how I wanted to serve them. I was very muddled in my mind about that.

Marta: What do you think contributed to that feeling of muddled and not really knowing that, that who you serve and what you do, who you like to work with?

Shelby: Too much input from too many sources. Signing up for this freebie and that course and bits and pieces of all of them fit, but none of them made the whole of me.

Marta: I think we can all identify with that one.

So what motivated you to finally take this step forward and going, I’ve, I’ve got to figure this out, and now is the time. Was there an inciting moment or just, was there a line drawn in the sand or what, what caused you to say now’s the time to do this work?

Shelby: I realized I didn’t really like my business anymore. Love my clients. They’re remarkable women, but I did not like the business itself, and I didn’t like how I was running it. Didn’t feel like I was serving them as well as I could. If I had a more clear idea of exactly what it was, I should be doing.

Marta: Pretty big aha.

Shelby: Very, very big.

Marta: When I talk to a lot of women, it’s a lot of the women that I, I coach and people that I’ve, that I talk to through email and social media, they feel like they’re stuck in a rut and they don’t know how to get out. And the, the words I hear a lot are, I really want to be intentional and strategic in my business, but I’m not sure how to do that, or I need to make time to do that.

Is that kind of where you were at as well?

Shelby: Exactly where I was at.

Marta: So when we start working together specifically in this finding clarity work I took you through the Business Clarity toolkit and what, there was a series of workbooks that you went through, and then I was able to give you feedback on that, on the work that, and we also did some Zoom calls going through that.

What was your journey like? And I know from our conversation some of it was really easy and some of it was really hard. But can you tell in your, tell us in your words, what was your journey like going through, through that work and those workbooks?

Shelby: I actually thought that it was going to be fairly easy.

I’ve got a lot of years in business and even two years in this business, and I thought I was gonna mostly zip through. I actually cried through a lot of it. There were things about my business that I didn’t even know that I didn’t like. I, it was hard work. Mm-hmm. There were some easy parts, but mostly it was hard work.

And you had the gift of just when I thought I had the answer, asking me another question to dig a little bit deeper. Yeah. It, it was very clarifying.

Marta: I think we can all identify that with that, that we’re, we’re so in the trenches of what we’re doing.

I know for me personally, I. I have been a subcontractor since day one in my business, and I never could get to the point where it took a, well, it took many years for me to get to the point where I could step out of that, and there were, there were tears along the way going that something has got to change and I need to figure out how to change it.

And, getting to the point where you’re ready to make that change. It’s not a linear journey. There’s a lot of ups and downs and a lot of tears along the way, and asking for help and buying the courses and downloading the freebies and realizing that’s not the good fit. So I can understand there being a lot of tears and frustration along the way through that journey, and it’s hard to get honest with yourself.

Marta: Mm, that’s huge.

And I, I have to raise my hand on that one for myself. I fought the word coach. The title coach for years. Years I’ve people say, what about coach? No, I’m not a coach. I was even reminded by one of our fellow mastermind members. She said, I remember when you and I talked a long time ago, and you said, no, I’m not a coach.

I said, no, I, I wasn’t. But coming to grips with that and accepting that title and Yeah, exactly. It’s just like all of a sudden there’s a big sigh of relief. So I can totally identify with that.

What did you learn about your business through through your journey? Through the, through the workbooks and our coaching and our work together.

And once you understood that word coach and what that meant to you, how did that, what did you learn about your business through that process?

Shelby: I need to have an intimacy business where I work predominantly one-on-one with people and form close relationships with them. I’m never gonna be the one to many coach or teacher or strategist.

 That is just not where I am, and I learned that for the most part, I was actually already working with the right type of people. I had more or less my right audience, so I was sort of on the right, the right track, but just not quite.

Marta: Amazing too, because knowing that you’re with the right people, but maybe you’re need to tweak your services to align better with that word coach rather than the doer.

That’s a pretty big aha.

Shelby: It is very big. Yeah.

Marta: How did it help to have coaching through this journey? Because this is something you could, this is some work you could definitely do on your own, but what difference did it have, having me as your coach help walk you through this?

Shelby: The feedback was invaluable.

 Yes, you could, you could almost certainly do a lot of it on your own, but then you miss the give and take. When you’re in the depths of your own stuff, you don’t really see a clear picture, and it takes someone on the outside looking in to be able to give you that kind of feedback and to ask the deeper questions.

Marta: So hard for us to see our own stuff, and it’s very hard for us, oftentimes for us to see the patterns. One thing Shelby has done in the past and still offers now is what she does is she goes in and does a content audit of all the social media posts, the articles you’ve written, the videos you’ve produced, and she’s able to pull out these threads of commonality between a lot of what you’ve produced, and you’ve created.

And she’s pointed out to me things that I never would’ve seen. So having somebody else. Point out and see the patterns and see the whole, and it’s not stuck in your own head. Getting stuck in our own heads is very, very difficult, hard to get out of. So I’m glad to hear that, that that really made a difference for you.

I know you’ve made a difference for me that when you did my content audit there, there are threads there that one you saw things that confirmed things for me, but also identified things I hadn’t seen before. So that’s, it’s so, it’s a. Such a gift to have somebody walk through that, so I’m glad I was able to give you that gift as well.

What has changed for you personally and your business since going through this finding clarity journey,

Shelby: Both personally and with the business I have gained confidence. I can say who I, who I am, who I serve, and how, with a lot more confidence than I did when I was only sort of doing what I was called to do.

 There’s no doubt in my mind anymore. And as a result of that, I redesigned all of my offers and increased my prices. And I’m actually saying those prices out loud to people and put them on my website. And for most entrepreneurs, you get it. We’re scared of things like that.

Marta: Yes.

You had shared one particular story, and without going into to details, but you had a call with a client that you really thought you wanted to work with, but realized because of the work you’d been doing that it wasn’t the right fit.

Can you describe that, what that, that call and the aha.s you had in the midst of that call?

Shelby: Yes. It was a discovery call with somebody who I thought I was aligned to work in with corporate type people. That was my next step up I thought. And I had done enough work with Marta doing the coaching and the clarity work that in the middle of that call, I realized that corporate is not at all where I wanna go.

The woman was lovely and I, you know, I would love to be friends and buddies with her, but she is not the right client for me, nor am I the right person to work with her. And. It was exhilarating. I, I felt like I should have been crushed because, you know, corporate typically equals more money and, and more exposure.

And I was exhilarated because that was not where I was supposed to be, and I was sure of that.

Marta: That’s so fun to hear.

So thank you very much for your time. I wanted to just talk to you for a few minutes about our journey together. I have a lot of fun working with you on this and asking, asking questions and asking you to dig a little deeper. That’s fun work for me.

For anyone who’s considering this program, From Confusion to Clarity, what advice would you offer them?

Shelby: Do it and don’t quit when it gets hard and it will. I don’t know at which point of your journey it will be hard, but at some point it will. You might cry.

You got, might get mad, you might have to walk away for a few days, but walk back to it. Don’t stay away from it because it’s life changing, both from a business point of view and a personal point of view. Because in our worlds, they mingle together.

Marta: You very much, Shelby. And just one more time, where can people find you and the services that you offer?

Shelby: I am at Shelby B Ketchen, K E T C H E N, as in nancy.com. www.ShelbyBKetchen.com

Marta: Wonderful. Thank you so much for your time today, Shelby.

Shelby: Thank you very much for having me.

Links Mentioned:

• Guest: ShelbyB.Ketchen.com
• From Clarity to Confusion: https://SelahStudios.co/confustiontoclarity