Turn Your Expertise Into Income: Mitch Matthews on Coaching, Speaking and the Authority Bridge
Mitch Matthews explains the Authority Bridge: how to add coaching, speaking, and consulting to your career without a huge following or leaving your job.
- Define what success means to you personally first, because the fastest way to miss a target is not knowing what it is.
- The Authority Bridge is about adding coaching, speaking, and consulting to an existing successful career rather than leaving it.
- Mitch's research found 85% of coach training programs include no business training, which is why most self-described coaches have no viable business.
- You don't need a large following. Mitch cites clients with 200 Instagram followers running $200,000 coaching businesses because they know exactly who they serve and what they deliver.
- Treat imposter syndrome as 'winner's syndrome' - the voice only shows up when you're stepping out to do something bigger.
- Use value-based promotion: teach from your journey, including the failures, instead of ego-based 'look at me' promotion or teaching from a destination that has a shelf life.
- Maximize the 'human zone' - trust, accountability, and safe space - to stay valuable alongside AI, since chatbots can replicate questions but not the relationship.
- Ask the two nursing questions in any meeting: 'What did you hear?' and 'What's something you're going to do because of it?' They doubled understanding and compliance.
- If the word 'dream' feels loaded, swap it for 'experience' and ask what you'd love to experience this year with your family or team.
I always say as a coach, your biggest competitor is not other coaches. It's the couch. It's the comfort zone.
we have people that have 200 followers on Instagram, but have a $200,000 coaching business because they know what they deliver and they know who they serve.
The imposter syndrome only hits people who are stepping out and doing big things.
On today's episode of Right About Now, I talk with Mitch Matthews. He is a keynote speaker and a success coach. He's got the six-figure sequence as his framework. It's helped people scale. Ultimately, we talked about his podcast, Dream, Think, Do. Ultimately, all that matters is Mitch is a hell of a guy. A lot of fun, a lot of insights. I really enjoyed this talk. I think you will too. The Tenets of Success, How to Get Ahead, and Ultimately, How to Dream Bigger Now. I have a love-hate relationship with the word dream because dream sometimes has some triggers to it. Some people wonder, am I dreaming or am I goal setting? Is my dreaming big enough? Is it too small? I always say, hey, if you have any kind of wrestling match with the word dream, maybe it's even too touchy-feely for some people.
Just flip the word dream with experience. What are some things that I'd love to experience in the next year with my family or with my team? Dive into that. You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it. 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real. No theory. No fluff. No shortcuts. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford.
What's up, guys? Welcome to Right About Now. We're always helping you get right now because you got to take action today, baby. It's not about last week. It's not about next week. It's about today. That's why I got Mitch Matthews. He's a speaker. He's a success coach. He is the host of Dream, Think, Do, Get the Hell After It podcast. I'm adding names to everybody now, Mitch. What's up, brother? I like it. I'm going to talk to my producer right now. Yeah, I love it. If nothing else, I've got a DJ jockey is in my future. That exists in the future. You definitely got the voice, but you got the face for it, too. I know some people are in radio because they should never be on camera, but you, baby, you got it all.
Plus the belt. You got the belt. Come on. Come take it out of my hands. Just try. Just try. I don't know that I can even lift that thing for crying out loud, man. Yeah, it is heavy. What's going on, brother? Appreciate you being here. A lot of knowledge to share. Love what you're doing. Hey, I like success. Who doesn't like success? Who doesn't want to love a success coach? The path to glory coach. Right. Exactly. Well, it definitely lends itself. I love a title that demands a question and people ask, what's a success coach? And I do love that question because success is unique to each person, but most people don't define it. And it's the people that are the most successful often have defined what success is for them and they are shooting for that.
And it doesn't have to be what everybody defines as success. But if you know what your target is, you're going to be a lot more likely to hit it. I love a title that kind of begs a question. Yeah. And you took words out of my mouth. I was going to say the fastest way to miss the target is to not know what it is. Exactly. Exactly right. I think it is a lot. And I wanted to get down this path. We could go a lot of different directions, but I really like how you're going. I'm glad we got four hours. I know, four hours. I know, Rogan's the only one that can pull that off. I know, right? Come on. And then I'm still like, are people really listening for three hours?
Right. Maybe they are. We'll see. But no, bridging and helping people, that's simplified. It's almost like alternative income streams, almost. Leveraging thought, knowledge, past success, wisdom, all of those things. Because you nailed it with the path to success is different for everyone. But I think we all need options and we all should be diversifying. Unless you're independently wealthy, congratulations. We all need different income streams, different ways and options. I like options, Mitch. Talk to me about what you're doing. I've been a coach since 2002 and had so much success with that in 2006. Other people started to come and say, hey, how are you doing this? And so we started to train up other coaches in 2006. And so we've been able to help coaches and speakers about a thousand or more over the years to be successful, both profitably and having an impact on the world.
which I love. But in the last few years, our biggest move has been something we call the authority bridge. And that is helping wildly successful people. That's your audience, people that are successful in different fields, different industries, different roles to add coaching and speaking to what they do. not necessarily blow their life up or leave that thing that they are really good at to become a coach or a speaker, but to actually add coaching and speaking and consulting to what they do so they can have more impact, have more income, but also have some variety in their life. That's interesting.
Let me ask a question that always comes to my mind that I think might come to our audience. Usually, I think I represent the audience. I hope. I don't know. You never know. I've got 25-year-olds trying to get after it and 50-year-olds way more successful than me. So who knows? But we'll say everybody's a coach. Right. So if everybody's a coach, how is this a real legitimate opportunity? What's interesting about that, Ryan, is we have a coach certification program. But what's hilarious about it is, or ironic, as I said, you don't need a coach certification. What's interesting is that there's a belief there's a lot of coaches out there. But we did research and 85% of the coach training programs that are out there have no business training.
at all. So that means that about 85, probably maybe tipping over to 90% of the people that call themselves coaches don't actually have a viable business. So no matter how many coaches are out there, there's not that many that are actually building a business that has impact and brings in income. But I always say as a coach, your biggest competitor is not other coaches. It's the couch. It's the comfort zone. So I always say you don't need to have a huge following. You don't have to have a huge tribe in order to have a really profitable coaching and speaking business. You just need a core group of people that know truly what you do and what you offer. And you can allow that if you have that clarity to be able to onboard great fit clients.
It's amazing. You know, we have people that have 200 followers on Instagram, but have a $200,000 coaching business because they know what they deliver and they know who they serve. And what's beautiful about that is, again, they're not worried about a thousand or thousands of coaches out there because they know who they help. Yeah. Riches in the niches, baby. Right. Exactly right. We live in a world where our brain is wired for competition. Evolutionary psychologists talk about upward and downward comparison, which is how our brain is wired. It's a part of what's kept us alive. It's one of those things that allowed us thousands of years ago to bring value to a tribe so we don't get kicked out and be eaten by lions and tigers and bears.
So upward and downward comparison, that's good for our brains. But comparison also is dangerous for us as far as especially in a world we're scrolling all the time and it looks like we're comparing or it allows us to compare ourselves to a lot of other people. And it's that, as you well know, what happens on a lot of people's social is not what's actually happening in their world. world, we say, hey, don't focus on that. Focus on bringing value. Don't focus on the competition. Focus on helping those people you're passionate about helping in tangible ways. And it's amazing how you can actually build a business and have actual impact that is incredibly satisfying. Yeah, a lot to unpack there. A lot of good wisdom, Mitch.
Talking with Mitch Matthews, he's a speaker and success coach. Success being what you want it to be and not what you think your friends want. A lot of what you were just saying there. A lot of people think build a framework of success around what they think other people view as success when they haven't defined it. So I think that's the key. And then the noise of the coaches. I'm sitting there thinking, how many of these coaches? I guess anybody can say they're a coach. Right. You don't actually coach anyone. Right. We need a new name, Mitch. We need to start a new category. That's probably true, Ryan. You and I should come up with that, patent that thing and make billions, right? Absolutely. Category of one.
We're not coaches. How about not coaches? Yeah, right. Exactly. I love it. Yeah. What's the biggest target audience, diversification, options, sharing knowledge? They can always leveraging their 200 to 2000, whatever it is, people in their circle, in their niche that they can help specifically getting focused, who they help, how they help them. What's the biggest flip of a switch for people getting into this route? What's the holdback? My first thought is people are so self-deprecating and what are they, imposter syndrome? Yeah, 100%. Even when you've got... 25 years experience. Am I really any good at this? Am I just faking it? I mean, really? Yeah. I do flip the imposter syndrome a little bit, Ryan. You'll appreciate this. I always talk about the imposter syndrome probably would be better defined as the winner's syndrome.
Because what's interesting about imposter syndrome is the people that experience imposter syndrome, which is that small voice in our head saying, should you really stay? Stand up in front of this group of people. Should you really take this chance and do something big? What's interesting about that is people who are not taking risks, people who are not asking to lead, people who are not asked to stand in front of a room and deliver something, those people don't get the imposter syndrome. The imposter syndrome only hits people who are stepping out and doing big things. So I always say, hey, if you start to have those voices in your head saying, are you really? Should you really? Take that as yes. I'm actually on the verge of doing something big.
That's Winder syndrome, not imposter syndrome. I love that. This episode is brought to you by HighLevel. Make sure to check out the link in the show notes to sign up for your 14-day free trial. If you run a business, you know leads rarely arrive when it's convenient. A call comes in while your team is helping another customer. If someone reaches out, but the follow-up gets delayed, an invoice sits unsent, or a promising lead gets stuck in the wrong stage of your pipeline. I've built enough businesses to know that growth has a way of exposing every gap in your systems. That's why High Levels Voice AI and managed AI agents caught my attention. High Levels Voice AI can answer incoming calls, qualify leads using information from your website or uploaded documents, and even book or reschedule appointments.
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Is that one of the biggest hurdles for people you work with? I think it is. I think one of the other things, you know, when we walk people through this authority bridge process, a lot of people, a lot of the people that we tend to attract are natural coaches. They're natural mentors. Somebody's told them, oh my gosh, you should be a coach. You should be a speaker. They've even had people probably offer to hire them or boy, they have people reaching out to them all the time saying, can I pick your brain for this? Can I get your insight? One of the things, probably the biggest hurdle when it comes to people saying, could I really make this a viable business is most people think they need to teach from the destination.
Most people, they think they need to have fully arrived on every corner of their life. in order to have credibility to teach. And I say, don't worry about the destination. Don't focus on the destination. Teach from your journey. Because what's interesting is, is that you talk about marketing so well. One of the things, especially in the coaching and speaking and consulting world, when you look at most people that have gotten a little bit of coach training or they want to call themselves a coach, most of what they're doing is ego-based promotion. Look at me. Look at me. I'm a really good coach. I'm coaching now. Did I tell you I'm coaching? But what we really encourage people to do is something we call value-based promotion, which is about bringing value by teaching from your journey, meaning we can talk about things that we're trying.
Talk about things that we're experimenting with. Talk about the book that we're reading and how we tried this thing. And sometimes the ones that can bring the most value are the ones where it's like, well, I tried it and it went down in flames. Like I made every mistake. But hey, I tried it again, did a little different and it worked. People love that. Then they feel invited onto the journey. And what's beautiful is when you teach from the journey, you never run out of content. But when you teach from a destination, there's a shelf life to it. If you look at, sadly, people that win gold medals, God bless them. Every Olympics, people win gold medals. And then you'll see a lot of those folks go out on the speaker circuit.
But most of the time, those gold medals have about a four-year shelf life on being able to speak. Because what happens every four years? another set of gold medals get given. And what's sad about that is when you teach from a destination, again, it's one of those things that you tend to run out of audience, you tend to run out of stories, you tend to run out of credibility, all those things. But when you teach from your journey, you truly are doing the things that you are teaching, you will never run out of content, you build credibility, and you truly connect with that ideal client, that person that wants to work with you. Mitch, I love that. What I would say is you just gave the playbook for modern social media too.
Like that's what it should be. That's what works today. Right. And it's one of those things, I don't know about you, but we're doing a ton of experimenting with AI and there's a lot of people, oh, AI is going to be the death of coaching. It's like, well, it's going to be the death of some types of coaches. There's no doubt about it, but it's one of those things we're encouraging our folks that we work with that we help. Hey, maximize AI and maximize the, what we call the human zone. And the human zone is truly the elements of a coaching relationship or a speaking relationship or even a consulting relationship where the human zone is that part of connection. It is that trust. It is that accountability.
Because I know I still maintain an executive coaching business, success coaching, where I work with CEOs and founders and entrepreneurs. And they could definitely get some of the questions I ask from a chat box. They could train up a chatbot in some of the things that I do, and they could definitely get those questions from a chatbot. And they could probably have some good interaction. But from an accountability standpoint, from a trust, from creating a safe space, that's the human zone. It's one of those things that if you truly know what you're delivering there, we can also continue to outrun AI, at least until the robots take over. Yeah. Until they're in full human form, which... That's right. Exactly right. That'll be a different story altogether, but whatever.
If you watched Westworld at all. Yeah, exactly. How many sci-fi movies had to predict the future and we still had to go create it, you know? That's exactly right. It's amazing how often art truly predicts the future. James Cameron, I don't know, man. There's a part of me that thinks he has a time machine somewhere. So, yeah.
Knowledge has gotten really cheap. Human experience is still extremely valuable. If I'm encapsulating, that's what it feels like you're saying. Truly. And it's one of those things, too, that we teach a question-based coaching approach. And some people are like, oh, that sounds a little touchy-feely. But it's not. It's one of those. It's actually science-based. It's neuroscience-based. It's a question-based approach. where you're truly drawing out the best in your clients. And in our Authority Bridge process, we're training up people that have had a lot of success. But we also say you can connect based on your success, but the questions draw out the value from your clients. Yesterday, I was working with a CEO, amazing leader, incredible. But she had a challenge on her team and we had a session.
And what's funny is, is that I asked her a series of questions. I definitely had some opinions on what she could do and maybe even what she should do in this scenario. I kept those and just asked questions and helped to draw out the solution from her. And that was a solution that she owned. And it's one of those things where she's hilarious. She's like, I pay you an insane amount of money to help me know that I know what I'm doing. I'm like, yep.
Hey, sometimes we all need a little bit of validation and confidence that comes with having someone on our team. Sometimes it's not always about learning something new. It's like having someone in your corner. Yeah, 100 percent. That's what the best coaches are. I'm not always teaching you a lesson. I'm sometimes just giving you confidence in what we both already know to be true. Absolutely. I know you bring a ton of value, but I know you use the coaching approach too. And one of the things we teach is you can still teach. You can still offer a strategy, but always flip that and come around and ask questions. It was interesting. We helped a nursing education organization. They were training up thousands of nurses because there was a major challenge in the medical world in that people were leaving doctor's appointments, not understanding what their diagnosis was and not understanding their treatment plan.
And they tried to equip doctors to flip that conversation and the doctors were incredibly resistant. And what was amazing was we equipped nurses with two questions and it increased understanding and compliance about 100% in both cases. And those simple questions were, what did you hear and what's something you're going to do because of it? And just to have someone verbalize it, what they did was sometimes it helped to uncover when there was misunderstanding, helped them to actually verbalize their understanding and commit to something specific they were going to actually do. And what I love about those nursing questions is those are questions that every leader can ask their team. Because, you know, in a corporate setting, the greatest lie is that communication has actually happened.
So to be able to say, hey, guys, this was a great meeting. What did you hear? And what's something specific that everybody's going to do? A lot of wisdom, Mitch. As we close out, man, I feel like the risk takers and the dreamers, it feels that circle is diminishing. How do we make people dream bigger, think more? Truly, dream, think, do. My hope is it's a catchy name. It is. Dream, think, do is also. Yeah, right? I appreciate it. But it's also a three-step process. I'm a big believer in helping people dream, and I'm a big believer in helping people to think, but it's important to give yourself space to do both independently. So I always say, hey, give yourself space and time to dream without thinking too early, without planning too early, without strategizing too early, without starting to ask some of those questions of, do I really have enough money?
Do I really have enough time? Give yourself space to say, hey, what if? What would I love to do this year? What would I love to experience this year? In some ways, if we're going to wrap it up with one thing, probably this might be marketing suicide, but I'm actually going to suggest a switch of words, even though the podcast is called Dream Think Do. I have a love-hate relationship with the word dream because dream sometimes has some triggers to it. Some people wonder, am I dreaming or am I goal setting? Is my dreaming big enough? Is it too small? I always say, hey, if you have any kind of wrestling match with the word dream, maybe it's even too touchy-feely for some people. Just flip the word dream with experience.
What are some things that I'd love to experience in the next year with my family or with my team? Dive into that because experience is amazing because experience is also visceral to be able to say, hey, I want to experience more joy or I want to experience more health. I want to experience more success. It's like, OK, awesome. What does that mean? Dive into what that word might mean or how you might do it without necessarily worrying about budgets or the clock or any of those things. And it's amazing where your brain and heart might take you with that simple question. What's something I want to experience more in this next year, in this next month, in this next week? See where it takes you.
Mitch, where can everybody learn more on how to work with you and how to become a success coach? They can go to MitchMatthews.com as a great place to start. And we send out email every week that's packed with different things that I'm learning, that I'm using, that I'm experimenting with. And people can go to MitchMatthews.com backslash things to grab that. Mitch Matthews, the dream enabler. Appreciate you, brother. Brian, keep up the great work, brother. You are needed. Hey, guys, we appreciate Mitch. Go check out his work. He's the real deal. I've talked to a lot of people. This was as insightful as it's been in a long time for me. And I really appreciate Mitch for coming on. A ton of value here on Right About Now.
Go to Ryan is right. You'll see the full highlight clips, all the links to Mitch's stuff. And of course, where to find me at Ryan Alford anywhere on social media. We couldn't do it without you. We'll see you next time. Right about now. Here's the truth. Information doesn't change your life. Execution does. So don't just listen to this episode and move on. Take the idea. Make the call. Launch the thing. Fix the problem. Build what you keep talking about building. For more, follow Ryan Alford on Instagram at Ryan Alford. And watch or listen to every episode at RyanIsRight.com. This is Right About Now. Now quit waiting. Go win.
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