The Confession I Wanted Someone to Argue With

I made a confession out loud while I was sitting across from Christine Hakkola, and she refused to let me keep it as a joke. I told her I am the number one culprit of believing that one more thing will finally make me ready. One more YouTube video. One more course. One more credential, and then the voice in my head that says I am not qualified will finally go quiet. I said it the way you say something you half believe and half want someone to argue with. Christine argued with it.

She has spent nearly two decades sitting across from people doing the exact thing I just described, and she told me she has never once watched a person collect enough credentials to feel ready. Not once. The certificate does not silence the voice. The MBA does not silence the voice. She has seen people delay launching the practice, delay the next offer, delay becoming visible, all in the name of a little more training, and she has watched that training quietly become the thing holding them back. Lifelong learning matters, she said, and sometimes more education is exactly the right call. But most of the time, the hunger for one more credential is not a knowledge problem at all. It is a mask. Underneath it is the belief that you are not good enough yet, and the quiet hope that the next certificate will be the one that finally makes you feel like you are.

Here is the part that stopped me. It works the other way around. You do not collect confidence and then act. You act, and the confidence is the thing that shows up afterward, built out of the courage it took to put yourself out there before you felt ready. That is the whole order of operations, and almost all of us have it backwards.

The Fear You Respect

He started with fear, but not the kind you are picturing. We talk about fear like it is always the enemy, the thing that freezes you, the thing that has to be beaten. Dustin made a distinction I have been chewing on ever since. There is a fear you carry, that you wear, that walks around with you and quietly runs your life. And then there is a different kind, the kind he described as respect. Not “I am scared,” but “I respect that what I do, or fail to do, puts food on the table.” That second fear is not a cage. It is fuel. For anyone leading anything, there comes a point where you have to learn to dance with the fear instead of letting it lead. You step into it, and you use the energy.

What You Do When You Do Not Know What to Plant

There is a phrase that sits on Dustin’s desk, and it carried him through his hardest season. Work hard and trust God. We work hard because of the passion and the vision in front of us, but the results were never ours to control. The job is to be faithful, to show up, to put in the work. He framed it as planting. When you find yourself standing in a new field and you have no idea what to plant, you do not freeze. You plant something. It either grows or it does not, and either way you learn, and you move. Every time he reached out to a contact on his phone, that was planting. Some of it produced nothing. But, as he put it, we have not because we ask not.

The Only Way Through the Valley

I told him this reminded me of my own hardest season. If you know any of my story, you know I walked through a divorce, the kind of thing that flips your entire life upside down. I remember sitting in my brother’s office one day, completely defeated, and he said something that still haunts me in the best way. The only way through the valley of the shadow of death is to keep walking. You cannot go around it. There is nothing clever to do. You just keep walking. And the worst move you can make is to lie down in the ditch and wait for it to take you.

Here is what I had to learn, and what I think you might need to hear today. There is a guaranteed outcome in quitting. If you shrink back, if you lie down, the result is certain. There is no other possibility. But if you keep walking, if you go through the storm, there is at least the possibility of a different outcome. That possibility is the whole game. Quitting closes the door. Walking leaves it open.

Why the Buffalo Runs Straight at the Storm

This is where Dustin told me about the buffalo. A friend of his preached on it years ago, and people still talk about the message. When a buffalo sees a storm coming, it does not run away from it, and it does not try to go around it. It runs straight at it, because the fastest way out of a storm is through it. And when you picture a buffalo, you do not picture something fragile. You picture sheer mass, strength, muscle. One of the strongest creatures on the planet is the one built to run into the thing everything else runs from. So the logic is simple. If charging the storm is the move the strong thing makes, there must be something better on the other side. Retreating is not the best path. Going around is not the best path. Going through is.

I know that sounds almost too simple when you are the one standing in the storm. When the week is heavy and every part of you wants to shrink. But simple is not the same as easy, and the buffalo does not wait until it feels ready. It moves because moving toward the thing is what it was made to do.

The Pull You Feel Is Not an Accident

Here is the part that matters most for you, especially if you are someone carrying a craft, an expertise, or a calling that you have been sitting on. The pull you feel to start the thing, to build the thing, to use your voice, is not there by accident. It is not a glitch in your wiring. It is the wiring. So when you lean on everyone else instead of stepping in, when you hold back instead of going all the way through, you are not protecting yourself. You are refusing to be fully you. And the cost of that is not only yours to pay. The people who need what you carry are still out there, still looking, and right now they are finding someone with less expertise and less care, for the simple reason that the other person showed up and you did not.

So if this is a heavy week for you, here is the honest charge. Do not lie down in the ditch. Plant something, even when you have no idea what will grow. Respect the fear, then dance with it. Run at the storm like the strongest thing in the field, because the only guaranteed outcome is the one quitting hands you. And when you are in it, do not hold anything back.

Create your art. The world is waiting.

Watch the full conversation, and if it moves you, send it to one person who needs to hear it. If you want to build a thought leadership platform of your own, visit 1898creative.com.

#createyourart

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Full Transcript

Christine: It was shocking, terrifying, overwhelming, and I wanted to throw up in my mouth. They said, “Okay, Christine, here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to go on Facebook and you’re going to say you’re charging $250 for three weeks of coaching on how to open your private practice.” I will never do that. Confidence is built through having the courage to put yourself out there. I had a gift to help other people build a profitable, sustainable business. That was so scary, because if I failed, it was like failing at the one thing that I felt most passionate about.

Darren: Welcome back to the Create Your Art Podcast, where we are on a mission to help mission-driven entrepreneurs and individuals find their voice and create their art, the art that they’re supposed to be putting out into the world. We’re glad you are here, and I am glad to be speaking with my new friend and an awesome individual, Christine Hakkola, today.

Before we bring her on, let me tell you a little bit about her and why we are speaking to her today, because her story is pretty awesome. Hakkola Horizons was founded by Christine Hakkola and was built to help heart-centered service providers grow without burning out or selling out. That’s huge. Burning out or selling out. Christine started as a therapist and built a six-figure practice from scratch. Then she founded a coaching company that reached more than 6,000 mental health practitioners. And after selling that company, she founded Hakkola Horizons, which is just awesome to say, by the way. Hakkola Horizons. So fun.

Along the way, she kept noticing the same thing, that the most skilled people in the rooms were often the ones nobody could find. And that’s who she helps now. That’s exactly why I wanted her on this show. So, Christine, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s good to see you.

Christine: Well, thank you, Darren. It’s so good to be here.

Darren: It’s awesome. We’ve been working with you and Hakkola Horizons for a little while now, and it’s been so much fun to see you grow even more companies. It sounds like you’ve kind of had your hand in this for a while now, doing awesome things, and I know that today we’re going to find inspiration from your story. We’re going to hear a little bit about some of the struggles and some of the wrestles that maybe you had along the way. But to get started, let me ask you this. You spent years as a therapist, and now you run a company that is helping these women founders not burn out or sell out. So take us into Hakkola Horizons. What it is today, and why helping women founders matters so much to you.

Christine: Yeah. So specifically I work with female and female-identified founders and service providers, primarily because that’s who I am. It’s my background, it’s my story, it’s where my heart is. I work with coaches, consultants, mental health practitioners, wellness providers across the board, and I help them not just with the logistical things that you can Google or get AI support for, but the more invisible things that actually hold women back, like support, accountability, and making sure that they’re focused on the right thing instead of what I refer to as the spaghetti-at-the-wall approach. I didn’t make that up.

Darren: Yeah.

Christine: And it’s important to me because a lot of women grow up being told stories or taught that they should prioritize being kind, not being pushy, being of service, and valuing a lot of things over profit, sometimes to the detriment of profit, which is a real recipe for disaster and burnout if you’re a female founder.

Darren: And I think that’s a huge mission to be on too, just because you can see that in a lot of women-led founder positions. They’re not positioned in the way that they could make maximum impact because of some of those things. So let me ask you this. Take me back a little bit, like as you were starting, or before you started. Obviously you probably had to come over some of those fears in yourself, some of those imposter syndromes, or insecurities, call it what you will, resistance, if you will. What was that resistance in the back of your mind, and how did you step forward into it?

Christine: I mean, at this point in my career, and I’ve been doing this for, gosh, nearly two decades, I think I’ve come across almost every mindset block that female founders encounter, whether it’s, you know, who am I to be doing this? I’m not good enough. I don’t want to be pushy. What are they going to think of me? All those sorts of things. And I’m not sure there’s a single one of those that I haven’t dealt with myself, simply because I grew up in a similar culture as a lot of the clients that I serve. It’s taken years to overcome a lot of those things, and I’m still overcoming them. I think that every phase of business presents a new challenge and a new mindset block that is designed to keep us small. And I think that just being aware of that is really helpful. Yet it doesn’t necessarily make the journey a whole lot easier, because they keep rearing their heads.

Darren: And I think, obviously you speak directly to the female-owned entrepreneur, but I think that resonates with a lot of us across the board. I know that in my own story of just waking up going, is this something that I could be doing? Should I do it? Like, if I start to use my voice, are there going to be people that kind of smack my hand and say get back in line? It takes a lot to step out and build the thing that you know you’re supposed to build. So talk to me a little bit about when you first got started in business. What was that drive for you? Obviously you were a therapist when you first started, but what was that drive for you? What was the thing behind you? What impact did you want to make on the world?

Christine: For sure. First, I’d love to just touch on what you just said about how men, and I think really all people, encounter those things. Just because I serve women and folks who identify as women, it doesn’t mean that men and all people aren’t affected by these things. I think that’s really important to acknowledge.

When I first got started in business, way back in the day, I don’t even know that I thought of it as starting a business initially. And we’re dating, you know, I think twenty years ago now. I was a yoga teacher and a life coach, and it was something that I did in my community, with my friends, with people in my network. So it seemed more fun and natural and less like a business. But the first time that I realized I was in business for myself was when I actually launched my private practice. I had grown up in a family of entrepreneurs, so you could say in some sense it was the water I swam in. I don’t think I ever thought about it until my colleagues and my friends that I had gone to school with, who had become therapists with me, were all looking for agency jobs or going to work in a group practice. And they started calling me up saying, how did you do this? How did you build a six-figure practice right out of the gate? That was the first time it kind of dawned on me that I might have some skill in business. Falling into it, and I use that word intentionally, it wasn’t something that I did consciously or chose. It was something I was doing for myself that other folks saw in me. And then it really felt like an extension of the therapeutic work that I was doing. I went into private practice to help people, and here were my colleagues needing help to start their private practice. So that was really the beginning of it.

Darren: I love that, too, because, like you said, swimming in the entrepreneurial waters with a family that way, it does lean for you to not even realize that that was kind of where your brain goes. Where other people are trying to follow these other traditional pathways, if you will, and then all of a sudden you wake up and you go, oh, I can do this. This is something that I’m doing. So what was that like growing up? Were there things you saw in your family as they were taking the entrepreneurial journey, where they were battling some of that? Did you watch them in the struggle and go, I see how they navigate these waters and how I can do that, or did they kind of keep that away from you?

Christine: Yeah, you know, I wish I had a really good story about that, but I don’t. We grew up in a family where we didn’t talk a lot about the things we were grappling with, or feelings. I just remember thinking that was normal. I remember watching my dad leave the house to go to other people’s houses to repair appliances, and my mom sitting at her desk in their master bedroom contacting clients and sending invoices. I don’t have an awareness of anything other than that. It just felt normal to me.

Darren: Yeah. My dad was also kind of, I call him a serial entrepreneur, and then when he was, you know, fifty-ish, he kind of built what he’s done the last thirty-plus years at this point. It’s so funny, because I will have conversations with other people where I’m like, yeah, just go build your own thing, and they’re like, oh man, I could never do that. But it’s almost just in my blood, in some way, shape, or form. It’s just what you saw. Dad got up and went to work every day, and now all of a sudden I can do the same thing. It sounds like you were the same. You just watched this unfold, and one day you wake up and that’s where you’re at.

Christine: Absolutely. It’s very well said, Darren. I think the thing that was actually hardest for me was then figuring out how to teach that thing that was inside of me. It really took several months for me to realize that not everyone had those skills innately, and to get enough distance from myself and from what I was doing to conceptualize it and then teach it, and really understand the mindset of folks who didn’t grow up in that environment and how I could best serve them. And then the thing that was most surprising of all was that folks were actually willing to pay me to help.

Darren: Exactly. I want to double-click on that a little bit and go into that, where you realize, I call it the curse of knowledge. We’re so close to the thing that we have that we don’t see it, we just assume everybody did that. Kind of like how we were saying that, oh, everybody just goes, yeah, I can start my own business. Well, not everybody thinks that way. So what was that journey like when you started to have to go, wait a minute, I actually know what I can do here. How can I put this together and actually make a business out of this? What was that journey like, getting to a place where you started charging money for it?

Christine: I think that part is actually very connected to the mindset piece. In the early stages there was a lot of, who am I to charge for this? Are people actually going to pay for this? How does this whole thing work? And the fact that I did know it intimately but didn’t know how to teach it, I think initially that actually enhanced my imposter syndrome. When I looked out into the world and saw people who were teaching business, and I thought about, do I need to go get an MBA? There are a lot of business coaches doing this who have legitimate business backgrounds, which I didn’t have. It actually doubled down on my imposter syndrome. But all along, here were these people that I knew, that liked me, trusted me, and they didn’t want to go to somebody else. They wanted to go to somebody who they felt understood them and had walked the exact path that they were about to walk. So it was really a journey of grappling with, on the one hand, these real live people that I was connected to that I knew I could help, versus all of the thoughts and beliefs I was coming up against when I looked up and out into the world and really acknowledged what I was creating.

Darren: I know that everybody’s journey is a little different, or I guess I should say everybody’s personality is a little different. But ultimately when you were faced with that, like, hey, these people actually want to engage in this, I feel like maybe I should go back, do I go to business school? Like, what do I do? I’m trying to weigh all of these things. What would you say to somebody who’s in that spot right now, who is like, I should do this, people are looking to me, but do I need more education? Do I need more of this? What would you say to encourage them today?

Christine: That’s a great question, and I have actually had to give voice to that to many, many of my clients that I have sat across from. I think it’s really common in general, yet I’ll speak specifically for the audience that I serve. For service providers to feel like they’re not good enough, or that they need that next credential, whether it’s an MBA or more training. I’ve met folks who delay the start of their own practice, or delay launching that next offer, or becoming more visible, because they hold a belief that they need more and more training. What was helpful for me is, I think, the same thing that I provide for them, just an outside observer saying, hey, you’re already amazing at what you do. Lifelong learning is important, and yeah, go get that training, but if you’re going to get that training now at the expense of serving people, of growing your business, of doing that thing that’s in your heart, and the training is actually holding you back, we’ve got to consider whether this is a legitimate issue of, do I need more training to be qualified to do this thing? Most of the time, that’s not the case for the people that I serve. Or is this an issue of, I’m holding a belief that I’m not good enough, and that if I get more training, maybe at some point I’m going to have the confidence to do this thing? The reality is, it actually works the other way around. I’ve never seen someone acquire enough credentials to actually overcome that feeling of insecurity and vulnerability that is required to put yourself out there. It actually happens the other way around. The confidence is built through having the courage to put yourself out there.

Darren: Oh man, and I raise my hand and say I am the number one culprit of that. Like, maybe just one more YouTube video might help me get to the place where my imposter syndrome quiets down enough. I think we all do it. In your case, the certification, where it’s like, oh well, let me just get that, because then people will take me seriously, when really the only way for somebody to take you seriously is to get out there and do the work.

Christine: Yeah. And I see folks who are in unregulated professions thinking, I need to get that credential to get into the regulated profession. And then I see folks in the regulated profession going, I still don’t have enough credentials in that specific specialty. So it’s really just a never-ending loop that happens as a mask for imposter syndrome and for fear of vulnerability and visibility.

Darren: So in your story, facing that, having those things come up, what did you do to battle against that?

Christine: Yeah. Oh my gosh, it’s terrifying. And it still is. I think what has been helpful is good friends and business coaches along the way who have held that up for me. And I take the same frame now as a business coach that I did as a therapist. Whether you’re trying to heal childhood trauma or something that has happened to you that you’re trying to get over, I don’t know that it ever goes away. I experienced that with my therapy clients, that those who experienced the most significant healing, it wasn’t that they forgot about the thing that happened, it’s just that they changed their relationship with it, such that that belief or that experience was no longer controlling them. They were able to get enough space away from it that, even though they might still feel the fear or feel the reaction, they could make a choice to do something different. When it comes to visibility as a service professional, putting yourself out there, whatever that means, whether it’s networking or on Instagram, whatever channel suits you and your business, for me anyway, that fear has never gone away. I still don’t watch my video recordings that I put out there. But I know that little voice that’s saying, don’t do that, you shouldn’t do that, you’re not qualified, is old and is lying. So I just do it anyway, and it’s something that I’m still working on today.

Darren: That’s always good to hear from somebody who’s seasoned, somebody who has built something, exited something, and built something again, that you say, it still happens to me too. Because I think we can often feel that it’s only us. And when you stay isolated, when you stay away or pull back, that’s why joining coaching groups or communities in that like-minded space is so beneficial, because ultimately you get to hear somebody else say, oh man, I’m struggling with that too, and you go, oh, thank God, I’m not alone. I’m sure you’ve seen that time and time again with the clients you’ve worked with.

Christine: Yes. As I’ve gotten more and more into group coaching and small-group work, one of the most powerful things I’ve seen is folks just learning from other people’s stories. It’s one thing when I’m one-on-one with a client, for me to name it and say it. Yet it’s a whole other thing, and sometimes a hundred times more powerful, for someone who’s going through that themselves to then hear it from a peer. I just can’t describe the power that comes with that. Not that that in and of itself should be enough, but sometimes it is enough. Or at least enough to bring awareness, so that the rest of the healing has a chance to occur.

Darren: That’s good, Christine. I love that. I think that speaks to a lot of people out there, myself included, that just might be going, I know that I have more in me. I know there’s an impact that I want to make. There’s, around here we say, art that you need to create. And that doesn’t mean literally painting or music. It’s the thing that’s inside of you that you need to get into the world. That’s really beautiful, and I think it speaks to a lot of people.

So, talk to me a little bit about when you started, you had some people talking to you about, hey, will you help me, and you’re battling a little bit of imposter syndrome, and you’re going to start a business because it’s kind of what you know. What was it like when you actually started charging people for the first time? What was that journey like when you actually said those numbers out loud and went, man, this is a business now? Tell us a little bit about that journey.

Christine: It was shocking, terrifying, overwhelming, and I wanted to throw up in my mouth, to be honest.

Darren: I know that feeling. Oh man.

Christine: And I will say, I have to give credit, I don’t believe I ever would have done it alone. I had the great fortune to meet two wonderful coaches who I’m still friends with today, who I told what I was doing, which was getting on the phone with my friends and talking them through it. And they said, well, how much are you charging? I said, I’m not. And they said, how many people have you done this for? I think dozens. They said, well, how long would it take you to teach all this stuff? [VERIFY: speaker attribution. In the raw transcript this line was split onto Darren’s track, but in context it is Christine continuing to recount what her coaches said. Confirm against audio.]

Christine: And I said, I have no idea. A few hours? And they said, well, if you taught it, what format would you want to teach? And I said, I don’t know, like, three sessions of 90 minutes or something? And they said, okay, Christine, here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to go on Facebook and you’re just going to put up a post, and you’re going to say you’re charging $250 for three weeks of coaching on how to open your private practice. And I was so shocked and appalled at this idea, and my knee-jerk reaction was, I will never do that. I would never put myself out there or charge for this thing that I’ve been doing for free all this time. But I trusted them. I knew they had my back, and I knew they were on to something that I had no idea about. So I did it. This was back in 2016. And I earned $2,000 and filled the first cohort in under 24 hours.

Darren: Oh, that’s amazing.

Christine: That’s when I knew I was onto something.

Darren: That was that lightbulb moment. You were like, oh my gosh, this actually works. Did you have the feeling after you saw that, did you go, oh crap, now I actually have to teach them this stuff?

Christine: Oh yeah. I was even more terrified, because now I had to show up and do this thing, and I was accountable, and I was so scared of, well, what’s going to happen if they pay me and I’m not good and they don’t get the result. All the fears, Darren.

Darren: It just was awful.

Christine: It was awful. It was exciting and it was awful all at the same time.

Darren: I think anybody that’s built something can relate with that emotion right there. Of just, oh, I’m now using my voice. I’m now saying to somebody that I can do this. Because when you keep it just to your friends and family, and you’re not charging for it, if they go, that didn’t work, you’re like, okay, take it or leave it. But once there’s business and finances, and now I’ve got to take you on this journey, it’s like, oh no, now that’s a whole other thing that you have to do.

Christine: And I will say, if I could add, I think there’s something particularly vulnerable about moving into the space where you’re actually charging for the thing that is closest to your heart. If somebody had come along and said, I’ll pay you twenty bucks to cut my hair, I’d be like, well, okay, because cutting hair is not my passion. But there was something about stepping into that space of really owning that I had a gift to help other people build a profitable, sustainable business. That was so scary, because if I failed, it was like failing at the one thing that I felt most passionate about. That was really scary about putting myself out there.

Darren: Oh, that’s a protection thing, right? If I do this and it doesn’t work, that’s going to hurt me beyond, like, your analogy of cutting hair, where it’s, oh, I don’t care about that, so I’ll charge you for it and we’ll figure it out. But when it’s something that you’re passionate about or on mission for, now all of a sudden there’s another layer there. There’s that fear of, I don’t want to get hurt. That resonates, because that’s where I think imposter syndrome, fear, insecurities come in the most, because we’re so passionate about it. So what do you tell those that you’re working with that have that passion, that mission, and they’re freaked out, they’re trying? What did your friends tell you? What do you say to them in those moments?

Christine: Yeah, I mean, I’ll draw on a phrase that my six-year-old recently taught me. She goes to a wonderful school, and she’s just graduated from kindergarten, and one of the phrases that they instilled in the kids this year was the idea of taking a responsible risk. I really love that, and that’s the way I’ve approached it. It’s the way I encourage my clients to approach it, because there is a level of responsibility that comes with charging for a service and claiming to deliver a result, whatever that is. I think there are cases where we can claim too much or put ourselves out there too quickly. So an approach that has worked really well for me is just baby steps. I didn’t do this on purpose, but in hindsight I took multiple baby steps, probably hundreds at this point looking back. First, a colleague just called me up and I got on the phone, and it was a friend, for free. And then it was a small group of eight people who I knew, who paid me 250 bucks, and I was fully prepared to refund them if it was no good. And I did it again, and I did it enough times to know that this thing worked, to feel confident, to see that what I was offering actually solved the problem and produced the result that I was claiming it did. And then I turned it into a course, and then it became a membership program, and so on. And then it was a business, and then I sold it. But if somebody had told me in 2016 that I was going to create and then sell a multi-six-figure business that served over 6,000 practitioners, I never would have believed them. But in hindsight, it was just a series of responsible risks, if you will, one after the other, as I gained confidence.

Darren: I’ve heard it said, to hit the first domino, if you will.

Christine: Yeah.

Darren: Because it builds upon itself, and you step into it that way. That’s what I hear you saying, basically, like, hey, sometimes it’s just, what is the logical next step. And there is a little bit of safety to it. The 250 bucks, you said, oh, I could have refunded it. That’s the worst-case scenario. I get the money and then I refund the money and I’m out nothing. So what is the logical next step? That’s good advice right there.

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So good. I’m just sitting here thinking about all the, like, in my own journey, that whole charging for the first time and being scared to say the amount out loud, and how you lower it because you’re going, well, I don’t want to charge that, because that’s what the experts charge, so I’m going to charge here. It’s like, $250 is fine. I should have charged five hundred, but $250 is where I feel comfortable. So I know you talk a lot about that, about burnout and about charging what you’re worth. What do you say to those folks that are either getting into this or have been in it for a while? Speak to me, somebody who’s been in it for a little bit, charging what you’re worth. How do you figure that out? How do you walk somebody through that? What does that look like?

Christine: Yeah. Honestly, I don’t love that phrase, “charging what you’re worth,” because it relies on the person to have really clear sight into what it is that they offer, and asks them to have confidence that they may not have at the outset. I think it also puts too much focus on them being personally responsible for delivering a result, which is okay in maybe a product-based business, or manufacturing. But in a service-based business, a lot of the time things are up in the air and we can’t guarantee results. So the way I encourage my clients to approach this, and the way that I’ve almost always approached it in my business, is, instead of asking, what am I worth, asking, what would the price need to be for this business to be sustainable? Because at the end of the day, if you’re underpricing, if you’re charging the wrong amount, either related to the service or in order to reach your revenue goals, the business isn’t going to be sustainable.

Time and time again, I see people spend years building businesses, they fill their roster, they fill their schedule, they’re successful by all accounts from the outside in, yet they’re in debt. They don’t have enough money to cover their monthly bills. They don’t have any savings. And they’re still not earning enough. I would encourage folks to ask themselves, if lowering their price, or charging a price that is never going to build them a business that gives back, that fuels their lifestyle, that creates a sustainable lifestyle for them, if that’s worth it. And instead, actually apply math to it.

I walk my clients through an exercise to reverse-engineer their revenue goal. How much do you need for your lifestyle, to pay off your debt, for retirement savings, for short-term savings? How much do you need for your business expenses, your taxes, so on and so forth? Figure it all out, and reverse-engineer from there. How much do you need to earn? And based on the offer or offers you have, times the capacity, the amount of hours you have in a day, including your vacation time plus sick time, what do you need to earn per hour? And then let’s design the offer around the pricing that you actually need to be charging to build a sustainable business. Sometimes there’s some adjusting that needs to happen in there, but a lot of the time, maybe surprisingly, we actually land on a really doable price. And it’s less about what the thing is worth and more about, is it sustainable, and will your ideal client pay for it? If somebody will pay for it, and it builds you a sustainable business, you struck gold.

Darren: Yeah. Sweet spot right there. What I love that you just outlined is that so often the charging piece of whatever it is that you do becomes this emotional thing, like, oh, it needs to be here. And what you just described is, look at the data. Do the math. Run the math equation, and get down to a place where you go, this makes sense. Now you can go, will my audience pay for this, or will they not? And now I have a decision to make. I can change the offer, I can change the price, I can change the thing. That’s one of those things that’s so simple, but yet it’s so overlooked.

Christine: Yeah. And I think, in part due to phrases like “charge what you’re worth,” when we are entering a sales conversation or a pricing conversation with a potential client, especially in the early stages, or if we’re feeling financial scarcity or insecurity, and if we haven’t identified our ideal client, if we feel wishy-washy on our offer and our pricing, if we’re entering that conversation in the mindset of, I’ve got to get this client, then that gives us the underhand. We don’t go in with the confidence and the clarity that we need to state our price and to give the person enough space to respond. We go in instead from a place of fear, scarcity, overwhelm, being afraid of being judged or being told no. And those emotions don’t have a place in the room, in my opinion, in a sales or a pricing conversation.

Darren: Right.

Christine: Instead, if we can go in knowing why we charge the price that we charge, with the understanding that sometimes it takes 10 or 20 or 100 conversations to get good at sales, to make sure we have the right person in front of us, and if we can let go of the need to sell to this one person, and instead think of it as a conversation, a relationship. Do I have the right person in front of me? Could they genuinely benefit from my service? Is this the right service at the right time for them? If all those boxes are checked, and we’re clear about our pricing, it makes it so much easier to state our price with confidence and not waver. And the funny thing is, when you have the right person in front of you, and it’s the right service for them and the right timing, most of the time they won’t hesitate to say yes, even if stating the price makes us feel uncomfortable.

Darren: What I love about that is, we started talking about imposter syndrome, just starting, people finally getting beyond their comfort zone, and now they have to charge. So this is another layer of fear and insecurity. And in what you just said, even I’m thinking in my own mind, oh yeah, if you walk that through, now when you say the price, you know why the price is the price. Sometimes the fear comes from not knowing why you’re charging the way you’re charging. You’re just throwing out a number to throw out a number, so that feels weird. And then you hear those things of, charge what you’re worth, and you’re like, well, I’m worth seventeen dollars. Because the imposter syndrome has just spent the last three years of your life telling you that you’re not, unless you get that certification, you can’t do it. So you charge what you’re worth, and that becomes, I’m now on team that’s a bad phrase. Let’s get it out of here.

Christine: Sustainable. Let’s change it to that.

Darren: Charge what’s sustainable. It’s the new motto now. I’m with you. We’ll start a new campaign. You and I will take this all the way to the top. So you talk about helping them not charge what they’re worth, but charge what is sustainable, and then also this idea of burnout. A lot of podcast episodes of yours speak to that, helping them not find burnout, not hit that wall. Some of that’s charging what’s sustainable, but what else are you seeing as far as avoiding burnout, avoiding the collapse of the never-ending entrepreneurial thing? What are you seeing that is really helpful?

Christine: It’s a great question, Darren, and I do think we hit the nail on the head with the first one, of charging what’s sustainable, because there’s nothing more obvious to me that leads to burnout than underpricing and continuing to work and sell and deliver in a business model that is never going to get you where you want to go. I don’t know where else that road leads besides burnout or dissatisfaction.

Where else I see folks burn out is in what I’ll call the early stages, it’s often under $250,000 to $500,000 gross, in the client-acquisition stages, whether it’s a brand-new service provider getting their very first client, starting from scratch, or someone moving from one-to-one into a scalable offer, a one-to-many offer. Client acquisition can be very overwhelming, because there are so many ways to acquire clients. When folks look out into the world, especially the digital world, there are like a million ways to get clients. And we look up the ladder, many times too far, to people who are posting 60 times a day, who are running Google Ads, who have podcasts, who are doing all of these things that feel really out of the comfort zone of a newer entrepreneur. And then, sometimes very well-intentioned, we sign up for a course or a coaching program, or we get advice from someone who has done something, and we try a thing. And it doesn’t work. And we try another thing. And that’s the essence of the spaghetti-at-the-wall technique. I have seen more practitioners burn out doing that than anything else. I don’t think I have a single client who hasn’t experienced some semblance of that before coming to me. What I’m so passionate about at that stage is getting clear that all of those marketing strategies can work. It’s just that there are marketing strategies that are better suited for certain types of business and better suited for certain stages of business. So when you understand your business type and your business stage, that actually takes all the noise and reduces it down to one, two, maybe three things that are actually effective.

The last piece I’ll say about the burnout is, beyond the client-acquisition stage, when someone has built a sustainable pipeline and lead generation is no longer an issue, the clients are coming in, the next bottleneck happens as that service provider goes to deliver, and the demand has suddenly increased so significantly. So they’re hiring, they’re building systems, they’re trying to shift up their offer to automate parts of it or to get themselves out of the delivery. And the service provider ends up getting stretched really, really thin. That’s really the third place I see folks burning out.

Darren: Yeah. Were you in our team meetings or something? Did you know? That is so, so true. That journey is, I’ve never thought of it in burnout phases. Because when you’re in the early time of starting something, or starting to use your voice for the first time, you feel like you have to do all that stuff to get it moving. So you go, oh, this is a natural feeling, to lay down at night and go, I’m exhausted. But really what you’re saying is, that’s kind of leaning toward burnout. The client-acquisition side of it is so true. As you were saying that, I’m thinking of my own journey, going, man, there are so many times I look up and go, well, I should be running ads like that. And I should be doing this. The ads and the Instagram stuff is really cool and sexy and all that fun stuff. But then the thing that might actually work is, like, cold emails, or reaching out to people that you know, or tapping your network. That actually might open the doors. But over here, you’re like, but it’s really cool to post on Instagram and run an ad. That balancing piece, that’s exactly what I thought of when you said that. It’s so true, because it easily leads to burnout when you’re just doing everything, new shiny objects, kind of cool, crazy things.

Christine: Yeah. And I’ll tell you a secret, Darren.

Darren: Please do.

Christine: You’re doing a great job of describing the mindset of pretty much every person I’ve worked with, and myself included, many times over. When things aren’t going the way we want, our tendency as human beings is to look outside of ourselves, and do the next thing that looks shiny or interesting, like it’s working for somebody else. And what I will say to you and to everybody listening is that, if you already have a business, chances are that the marketing strategy or the lead-generation strategy that is going to work best for you, that will bring you in the best clients the quickest, already exists within your business. And it’s simply a matter of identifying it, systematizing it, and amplifying it.

Darren: That’s what in this world is called a bar. You just gave a bar right there. That was really good. It’s already here. I’ve been wrestling with that in my own business literally right now, because I’m going, there’s a coach that I’m working with, and I’m like, oh, I want to do that. And he’s like, bro, no, do that. And I’m like, okay, I’ll do that. Wait, do I really want to do that? And he’s like, bro, calm down, just go do that.

Christine: You’re describing my experience last year with my coach, who said the same thing. And what I’ve realized is that most successful businesses actually feel really boring to run.

Darren: It’s so true. Once the system is dialed in, you can run it, and it’s building that system and then running that system, and it seems boring, but it actually works.

Christine: Exactly. And I’m at the stage now where I used to chase bright, shiny, and new. Being married, having two young kids, being at a stage of life where saving for retirement is important to me, I still like to have fun, I still love bright-shiny-object syndrome, but now I make a choice to actually do the boring thing, because boring is what creates success and profitability.

Darren: The boring business creates success and profitability. That’s so true. And how many of us, when we start out, we go, man, I’m on this mission to help all these people do this thing. I want to make impact. And it seems like we have to do all those bright, shiny, flashy things, but ultimately we’ve got to build the thing that might feel a little bit boring. But on the other side of boring is the impact that we want to make. The people coming back to us going, man, if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be here. That’s the impact we’re trying to make.

Christine: Yes. Looking up the ladder can be helpful, yet if we’re looking up the ladder and, as I said, applying the wrong strategy, or trying to move too far too fast, it can actually be detrimental. Most of us come into the entrepreneurial world already really skilled at our service, yet, myself included, most of us come in lacking the business skills. And I no longer believe that I, or any entrepreneur, needs an MBA. But what we do need is to take responsible risks and learn those skills in baby steps. Running ads, selling scalable offers, are things that are far enough up the ladder that they do require sufficient experience. You’ve got to know who your audience is. You have to have your offer and your pricing dialed in. You have to know how you get clients, how to sell, how to nurture those in your network. Those are all muscles that are best developed in baby steps, without a $2,000 ad spend behind them.

Darren: Good grief, that’s good. And you’re challenging me in the same way. I was like, all right, lock it in, buddy, lock it in. Let’s go. That’s awesome. So, a couple more things here for you, and thank you for having these conversations and sharing this wisdom. It’s so good. If it encourages nobody else, it’s encouraging me today, so just take that.

Somebody’s out there, they’re trying to figure, they have a dream, they have a vision, they have this thing that they want to create, whether it’s an actual business or something inside of them. We already talked about how, most of the time, they’re trying to protect it because they don’t want to get hurt by it. But what would you say to somebody who’s on the brink? Maybe they’ve started, they’re actually out on the water a little bit, but it’s a little rocky, they’re a little freaked out, a little scared. How would you encourage them today to stay the course, to keep the path?

Christine: Yeah. Well, at the risk of repeating myself, baby steps. Responsible risk. And then, further to that, and perhaps more helpful, I would encourage that person to get and stay clear about who they serve, the problem they solve, and the transformation they provide. And to just go do that. To not worry about creating some complicated, fancy offer, about posting sixty times a day on YouTube or Instagram. To look around in the world that is already around them, in their current network, amongst their friends, amongst their family, amongst their neighbors, amongst the community that they live in, and ask themselves, who is the person who is struggling right now, who has a problem that I can solve? And how can I be helpful? Sometimes that does mean practicing for free. Offering a package of three coaching sessions to somebody to get your own feet wet. As we start to get more experience, we gain confidence. And as we get experience, the people that we have served in our world, assuming we’re good at what we do, will start talking. And then that person we did three free sessions for is going to go tell their neighbor, who contacts us. And then maybe we put a $90 price tag on it. That’s the baby steps in action. We’ve got to start somewhere. And if starting too far up the ladder means you’re going to fall, means you’re trying to flex muscles you don’t have, or means that you’re too scared to start, then I would suggest coming down to the first rung and doing the very first step to help solve a problem that you know how to solve.

Darren: That’s good, Christine. I love all of the things that you said today, but that’s just a really good encouragement to take those baby steps. And often we get too far ahead of ourselves. We have the vision. I guess that’s a little bit of a founder-visionary problem. You see where you want it to be, and to start with the small baby step is really hard. So what you’re encouraging us today to do is just to take the next logical, semi-safe baby step. And that’s how we’re going to get to where we need to be.

Christine: Yeah, and I would say that advice applies for those starting out as well as those already earning multi-six figures, seven figures, eight figures. It happens at every stage. I see $500,000 business owners running ads too soon, before they’ve solidified their foundation. The tendency to jump ahead of where we actually are persists, and having that diligence and that awareness to just slow down and make sure that the t’s are crossed and the i’s are dotted at every stage before we take the next one, is what’s going to set us up for success.

Darren: That’s good. Well, hey, before we get out of here, talk to us a little bit about Hakkola Horizons. We shared a little bit about who it’s for and all that fun stuff, but talk to us about who it’s for from your perspective, how they get a hold of you, all that fun stuff for anybody who might be listening out there who would fit the persona.

Christine: Yeah. So I work with female service providers, anyone who is heart-driven, mission-centered, who is struggling to get clients, or has clients and is struggling to grow and scale. And these days, I honestly struggle calling myself a business coach, because a lot of folks have had experiences of really being coached through the spaghetti-at-the-wall technique. Over the decades that I have been doing this work, and with the entrepreneurial blood in me, at this point in my career, I’ve developed a framework that I use, so there’s no guessing. When a client comes in to work with me, we diagnose their business, their problem, and provide a prescriptive solution to it that, probably not surprisingly, is step by step.

Darren: I love it. So you can go to hakkolahorizons.com, right?

Christine: Uh-huh. That’s my website. And you can also find me on LinkedIn. That’s probably the platform I’m on most. Also on Instagram and Facebook, but Christine Hakkola, H-A-K-K-O-L-A, on LinkedIn is a good place to find me.

Darren: That’s awesome. And the podcast, FoundHer Rising, that you’ve been dropping for a little bit now, just filled with great conversations of those that are out there doing all of that. So go check that out as well. And yeah, if Christine is somebody that sounds like you want to work with, reach out, do the thing, all the links in the description. But no, that’s awesome. Christine, thank you so much for spending time, sharing your wisdom, sharing your story with us a little bit. Like I said earlier, it encouraged me so much. So thank you so much for joining us.

Christine: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Darren: And thank you for joining us for another episode of the Create Your Art Podcast. Before we go, I want you to remember three things. One, that you are an artist. Two, your voice is needed in this world more than you know. And three, you are loved more than you could ever imagine. So go out and create your art, and we’ll catch you next time on the Create Your Art Podcast.