What Coaches and Mentors Can Learn from The Magic of Thinking Big
Coaches and mentors are professionally in the business of expanding someone else's sense of what's possible, which makes it easy to overlook the same pattern running quietly in their own careers — the practice sized the same way for years, the rate never raised, the bigger opportunity never pursued because "my job is to help others get there, not chase it myself."
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Coach yourself the way you coach your clients
Coaches often hold their clients to a standard of ambition they don't apply to their own careers, treating "that's just not realistic for me right now" as fact rather than testing it the way they'd push a client to test the same statement. The skill of expanding someone else's sense of ceiling is fully transferable to your own.
A coach who routinely pushes clients to pursue stretch goals has quietly kept their own practice the same size for five years, telling themselves "I'm just not a big-business type of coach," never applying the same challenge they give clients to their own assumption.
Write down the advice you'd give a client in your exact situation, then ask honestly why you haven't taken it yourself.
Tell "that's not my kind of coaching" from a real capacity limit
"I'm not the type who runs group programs," "I'm not good at the marketing side," and "people like me don't build big platforms" are common mentor excuses that are often untested rather than true. This is different from an honest limit on hours because of caregiving, a real health condition capping your capacity, or a genuine need for the stability of one-on-one work over a riskier scaled offer — those are real constraints worth planning around, not overcoming through bigger thinking.
A mentor avoids ever building a group program, telling themselves "I'm just a one-on-one person," when the real barrier is having never tried designing one, not any actual mismatch between their skills and the format.
Name one format or offer you've ruled out as "not my kind of thing," and spend one hour actually sketching what a small version of it would look like before deciding.
Test the new program idea with three people, not a full launch
A new offer, format, or approach rarely needs a full launch to learn whether it works — it needs a small, honest test with a few real people. Waiting for a complete curriculum or a polished sales page before trying anything usually means the idea goes stale before it's tested at all.
A mentor has wanted to try a different coaching format for over a year, waiting to build out the full program first, while a colleague tests a rough version with a handful of willing clients and refines it in real time, reaching a workable offer months sooner.
Pick one idea you've been fully building out in private, and instead offer a rough version of it to three real clients or contacts this week.
Set a specific goal and find peers who expect ambition from you
A vague intention like "grow my practice" changes nothing about this week's schedule, but a specific goal — a client count, a new offer launched by a date, a revenue target — does. Being part of a peer group, mastermind, or mentor relationship that treats bigger goals as normal, rather than only people who reinforce staying comfortable, makes that goal far more likely to survive contact with a busy week.
Encouraging yourself to believe bigger can clash with a real need for predictable income if your practice is your main livelihood. When that happens, keep the bigger goal but stage it — test the new offer alongside your stable work rather than replacing it outright, so ambition and financial reality can move forward together.
Name one thing, honestly
What advice would you give a client in your exact professional situation, and what's stopping you from taking it yourself?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Pick one idea you've been fully building out in private, and instead offer a rough version of it to three real clients or contacts this week.