Being an Entrepreneur

Sometimes I meet wellness coaches who introduce themselves with a quiet apology in their voice. “I’m just getting started,” they say. Or, “I’m still learning the protocols.” And I smile, because I know what they don’t yet see: this work was never about becoming a wellness coach. It was always about becoming an entrepreneur who happens to operate in the domain of wellness.

That shift sounds small on paper, but it changes everything. A wellness coach looks at a client and sees problems to fix — weight, sleep, skin, energy. An entrepreneur sees something different: an outcome to be created. A path to design. A set of skills to refine. Where others say, “This is what I know,” an entrepreneur quietly asks, “What do I need to learn?” There’s a hunger in that question… a kind of restlessness that pushes you to upgrade yourself long before anyone asks you to.

But here’s the part we often miss: entrepreneurship is not built on knowledge alone. It’s built on identity. And identity grows through the less glamorous skills — how you speak to people, how you make them feel, how deeply you listen before offering a single piece of advice. These are the muscles most coaches forget to build. They chase every new nutrition book, every new protocol, every new supplement strategy, hoping it will magically make them successful. It won’t. Not on its own.

Because clients don’t follow information. They follow energy. They follow presence. They follow the person who makes them feel understood, not assessed. The one who asks, “How’s life going?” and actually waits for the answer. Leadership, in many ways, is the emotional atmosphere you create around you — the feeling people carry after a conversation with you.

And that’s why mindset and people skills are not optional extras; they’re the quiet foundation of a thriving coaching practice. The books on leadership, influence, and human connection — those are not for corporate managers. They are for anyone who wants to guide another human being through change. Without that growth, you stay stuck in the identity you started with: employee, student, housewife, technician. You may know the perfect detox, but you won’t know how to lead a person through their own resistance.

The real shift happens the day you stop saying, “I am a wellness coach,” and start feeling, “I run a business that transforms lives.” One is a role. The other is a responsibility. One limits you to information. The other demands that you grow — in confidence, in character, in your capacity to hold people’s stories without rushing to fix them.

And maybe that’s the secret nobody tells you at the beginning: entrepreneurship in wellness isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about becoming the kind of person people trust enough to ask their questions. When that identity clicks, everything else starts to move. The protocols matter, of course. But the person delivering them matters more.

Here are some mandatory books for everyone to go through: How to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie, How to have power and confidence in dealing with people by Les Giblin, 25 ways to win with people by John Maxwell