In this episode, I discuss the magic of my five-month coaching container. The most valuable part of my coaching program is that we get to do life together. As your coach, I am more than just an app or an envelope system. I will spend those five months engaged and learning about who you are, your values, and your feelings about money. I acknowledge that finances are super personal, and talking about money can bring out feelings of vulnerability. As your coach, I am by your side to dive deep into those feelings of fear or shame. The five-month coaching session is more than just learning how to manage money; it’s also learning how to manage your emotions and build financial confidence.
You are uniquely you, so while every container starts with a three-step plan and 30-day projection, all of the goals we work towards are based on what you want and your beliefs about money. The five-month container aims to help you understand your numbers by building financial awareness. We work on managing your money beyond the balance in your bank account so that you can feel confident making decisions about your finances.
I am so proud to coach my clients. Our relationship is far beyond a static spreadsheet. I am here to empower you to confidently manage your finances and make decisions about money that you feel good about.
While listening to this episode, I go over key components to my five month coaching container including…
[00:12:04] You are going to believe in your ability to manage your finances and that is the fundamental thing that I love to see built within all of my clients.
[00:13:04] In the first 30 days what we are focused on is getting to know your numbers
[00:17:57] Then we have four months to do life together. In the months that come after that first month you’re learning how to not just manage your money from the balance in your bank account.
Tune in to this episode of Money Files to learn how my five month coaching container will help you build financial awareness and confidently take control of managing your money.
If you’ve been waiting for the perfect time to start working on your money management skills, here’s your sign: The time is now. Apply to work with me, and let’s start working towards your financial goals.
IF YOU LOVED THIS CONVERSATION ON THE 5 MONTH COACHING CONTAINER – EXPLAINED, CHECK OUT MY EPISODE ON HOW TO START BUDGETING WITHOUT RESTRICTION & TRANSFORM YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH MONEY!
Transcript for “The 5 Month Coaching Container – Explained”
Hi and welcome to Money Files. I’m Keina Newell from Wealth Over Now, I work everyday with professional women and solopreneurs to help them get out of financial overwhelm and shame so they can experience more flexibility and ease with their finances. Are you ready to gain confidence and learn to manage your finances intentionally? Tune in and grab financial tips that will help you master the way you think about and manage your finances.
Hello and welcome back to another episode of Money File. So I’m excited today. I’m going to actually talk to you about the magic of the five-month coaching container. I am frequently asked like, why do you work with clients for five months? And so today I want to dive into that question about why I work with clients for five months. And maybe you’ve wondered or maybe you just know that I work with clients one to one and you’re like, oh, I didn’t know you worked with your clients for five months. And so I want to dive a little bit more into the coaching container and what some of my clients would call the magic of the coaching container when we’re working together and they’re like, I don’t know how you did what you did with my numbers, but this all makes sense and I feel so good about it.
So let me just dive in and start telling you about why five months. So when I first started working with clients, I would work with them for a month and I’d worked with them for about 30 days and I had an intensive and with the intensive and what I was noticing is that we could get a budget in place, but I really noticed the most progress with my clients that would work with me for an additional four months at the time. And so you’ve probably heard clients in my podcast, if you listen to like season one, they’ll talk to you about going through an intensive with me. And then if you hear my newer clients, they’re talking about being with me for a five month coaching partnership or some of them are even doing a 10 month coaching partnership because they sign on for more than just one set of five months, we’ll end up actually working together for a duration and period of time.
And I have one client that we’ve been working together years at this point. So anyways, I was seeing that most of my clients, like the magic number if you will, is that when I was working with clients like five months was this beautiful amount of time to work with clients. Because my goal as a coach is I want to help you experience real behavioral change. And as a coach, like I’m not just another app, I’m not, you need a budget. I’m not mint, I’m not an envelope system. Like I am able to actually talk to you. You are living and breathing and we get to dive into your numbers and we get to talk about what’s going on with you. And for those five months we get to do life together, like truly do life together. And with over five years of being a coach, like I’ve worked with clients who have quit their job and started working for themselves.
I’ve worked with clients who solely work for themselves. I’ve worked for people that have been on the brink of bankruptcy and they’ve chosen to work with a coach instead of file bankruptcy. I’ve worked with clients that have recently filed bankruptcy and now they’re looking to rebuild their financial self-concept. I’ve worked with clients that are divorced, I’ve worked with clients that are going through a separation. I’ve worked with clients that are having a baby. I’ve worked with clients that are newly married, newly engaged, like I’ve worked with a number of different clients, clients that have experienced death in their family like we have done life together. And that is one of the things that I love, love, love about coaching. And some of my clients say it feels more like therapy because we get to do life together.
And as a coach, the thing that I have noticed is that your money, your thoughts about your finances, it touches every single area of your life. And so with working together for five months, we have a significant amount of time to be together and talk about more than just paying off debt. We get to talk about more than just saving money. Like those are I think are the two main reasons that people come to work with me. But when we actually get into the work, I get to learn about you and I get to learn about your thoughts about your finances. I get to learn about your limiting beliefs about money. I get to learn about the systems you’ve tried that have failed. I get to hear about your fears, I get to celebrate things with you. And so that five months is really what I have found as like a sweet spot for clients to really be able to excel and for us to just have a container that allows you to safely experience failure or even just your fear of failure.
But it’s also the container that is there to safely allow you to be able to dream. And as a coach, I love to hold the space for you to be able to do both. I want you to feel held and I want you to feel kept because I know that money can be this very vulnerable topic and I oftentimes tell people, especially if you’ve ever been on a consult with me or you ever worked with me, I get it. It’s like being like, okay, Keina here is my underwear drawer and I have never shown anyone my underwear. Like I want you to look over here and not overhear, but talking about money is something that can make you feel very vulnerable and I acknowledge that you feel vulnerable and that you have fears that come up. And I want you to have a safe place to be able to talk about your finances because for many of you that are listening to me, you would probably resonate with this idea that nobody ever taught you about money.
And so when you’re thinking about the fact that nobody’s ever taught you about money, you’re scared, of like what am I supposed to do? And that fear can show up in a lot of different ways. I have clients that I’ve talked to that are million dollar earners and they have a fear of money. I have clients that make $60,000 annually and they have fear of money. And it all goes back to thoughts. And so when I recognize that this is happening for clients, it’s important for me to have the space to really be able to dive in with what is going on with you? How do I need to hold space for you and how do I need to coach you? And we do that through a spreadsheet. We do that through mindset tools. We do that through sometimes talking about something that seemingly doesn’t seem attached to a spreadsheet.
Like the thing that comes up for me is when I have worked with women who are divorced, I mean we’re talking about what feelings they have about how their partner might show up and what their partner is able to buy for the children that are involved. And so we talk about that and we really talk about managing emotions because I want them to be in a place where they feel confident and they feel very powerful about the decisions that they’re making and that they are actually passing on the money beliefs and the money habits that they desire to pass to their children and they desire to foster. So I would just love to tell you once again like this five month coaching container has just been a beautiful container for clients to work with me and get the results because of the fact that we are able to do life together and to be in different financial seasons together.
And so my five month coaching container, it’s really a high touch container. Over the course of five months I meet with clients, we have three coaching calls every single month. So we’re meeting almost every single week. We’re diving into money and how they feel about their finances. I have a session check-in sheet where clients are able to share with me like, Hey Keina, these are the things that I’m celebrating and I love to help my clients celebrate because I think that’s something that we don’t do enough when it comes to our finances and the celebrations that my clients come to the coaching calls with, some of them sound like Keina, I just paid off a credit card. Some of them sound like Keina, my husband and I are talking about money and I’ve never talked about money with this amount of regularity, you know, when we weren’t fussing about it or we weren’t making a really big decision.
And so that feels really good. I had a client a couple weeks ago who was telling me, she had ordered some clothes and she has a stylist, she’s a business owner. And she said in the past I would’ve kept all the clothes that I had for my stylist, but since I’ve been working with you Keina, I was thinking about how some of the things that I kept, like if I don’t love them right now, I’m not actually going to wear them. And so I was just felt really compelled to take them back and to think about like I could use this thousand dollars somewhere else, but I wasn’t thinking about money in this way. And so just her hahas every single week are really related to her deepening her own financial awareness and just being able to think about like how does she want to spend money in her life?
And so it’s not about her judging herself about she should have bought this or she shouldn’t have bought this, but she’s been able to hone in on how she desires to spend money. And then I have other clients that we may talk about canceling a subscription and them actually calling and being on the phone to cancel the subscription because they’re not scared to talk about money with the other person on the other end. Or we’ve celebrated like asking our friends to pay us back for something that our friends said that they would actually pay us back for. So we followed up on that. But every single week clients have an opportunity to celebrate what’s working because I really want them to see the foundational pieces that they’re putting into place that help them create this new financial self-concept and this new financial identity.
Maybe they had a conversation at work about negotiating their salary or they dropped a seed in the conversation with their boss that they are looking to earn more money and change their position at work. And so there are so many things that clients are celebrating outside of this spreadsheet. And so I’d love to be able to give clients that opportunity to celebrate. But then it also allows. That session check-in also allows me to know as a coach, like what is top of mind for them from one week to the next so we can dive into that area of their finances. And so we could have been planning to pay off a credit card, but someone could need to take a flight that they hadn’t anticipated needing to take a flight and so they need to go back and see their family or maybe they had a dog that needed to go do a pet visit or what am I saying?
I want to say like an ER visit for their pet. And we’re able to talk through like, okay, like how can we make sure that your dog is taken care of and let’s look at how much you have in your pet funds. So we’re always talking about what’s coming up in terms of our work and then also what’s coming up that maybe we haven’t addressed yet. And so clients week in and week out are building this financial muscle that allows them to feel confident in their decision-making. And I want people to feel confident in their decision-making because when you gain that confidence over time, that is something that goes with you from one salary to the next salary. You’re making a hundred thousand dollars this year when you make $120,000, when you make $150, when you make $200, when you make $300 like that confidence is going to go with you and you are going to believe in yourself.
You are going to believe in your ability to manage your finances. And that is the fundamental thing that I love to see built within all of my clients. So I want to talk to you in the five months, kind of want to talk to you about the first 30 days. And when you book a consult with me, we really lay out a plan, like a three step plan about what we’re going to work on. Each person is unique, and when I talk about personal finances, it’s because they are personal. Even if you are coming to me for business finances and you’re wanting to work with me as a business owner, there’s still a personal aspect to it. I want to know about you and your goals in your life. I want to know you about you and your values. I want to know about you and your fears.
I want to know about other challenges that are coming up for you. And so the consult gives us an opportunity for me to learn more about you and really lay out a three step plan for you so we know exactly where we’re going and exactly what we’re going to cover for the five months that we’re working together. And so most of my clients in the first 30 days, what we’re focused on is getting to know your numbers. And so if you’re working on personal finances, we are getting to know how much do you want to save? What does it look like to be able to start saving for the house that you said is like in your plan for the next year? What does it look like to make sure that you can balance the balance of saving money and having fun?
And so we start to lay that out in what I call a spending plan. And so I want you to be able to see your numbers clearly. I want you to be able to see your numbers beyond the bills that you pay. I want you to be able to see the things that you say in your head you want to be able to do. I want you to be able to see your numbers even in light of how you currently spend money. And so together we work on the spending plan and we get to know your numbers. And so if I’m working on personal finances, we’re doing that on the personal side. If I’m working on business finances, oftentimes with business owners, I still start with like, hey, how much do you need to pay yourself? Because that’s generally a gap for business owners, but the goal is to get to know your numbers and for you to know what’s coming in and what’s going out.
And within that first month, we’re also building what I call financial awareness because just by way of you saying yes to coaching, a lot of my clients tell me about how they just start to notice numbers more around them. And they’re like, oh Keina, I didn’t realize I had like a Costco membership or I realized that one of my clients, she told me about this eucalyptus subscription that she had for her shower. And she’s like, I realized that I pay for this like every month or however often she was paying for it. And she’s like, I don’t even really use it. Why am I paying for that? And so I put that into the category of financial awareness because in that first month we’re looking at your transactions from week to week and we’re just asking the question like, do I want to spend money in this way?
Did we forget anything? What else needs to be included? But we are just building that overall awareness so you don’t feel like things are just like happening to you because you can tell me like, oh, here’s when this bill is due or Keina, here’s this other expense that I have coming up. So we just start talking about the things that generally catch you off guard. I ask you prompting questions, but I’m really creating that space for you to feel confident and more aware. And so as you learn to manage the things that are coming up, you are also going to start building trust with yourself. And I will say like in the first month, there’s always, always, always something where somebody’s like, Keina, I forgot to tell you about this. And I’m like, okay, great, let’s just put it in. And so I want my clients to talk to themselves about that.
Like, okay, great, let’s just put it in because there can be things that are going to pop up. Like an expense you didn’t know about. What I want you to be able to experience is ease, that when you have an expense that feels like it just popped up, that you feel in control of knowing like, okay, I can go move these numbers around, or I know the money is exactly over here in this spot, in this location, and I know it’s not going to touch another goal, like I prepared for this moment. And so when you’re talking to yourself in this way, you start to build a new financial identity, you start to talk to yourself as someone who is a saver. You start to talk to yourself as someone who is paying off debt. You start to talk to yourself about someone who knows how to manage credit cards responsibly.
You start to talk to yourself as someone who knows their numbers. You start to talk to yourself as someone who can manage large lump sums of money in your business. You start to talk to yourself about, like I’m someone who pays myself consistently. And so in that first month, we’re really laying the foundation for you to build, like I said, that new financial identity, that new financial self-concept where you can start to financially trust yourself and you can trust in your decisions. So in the first, like I said, 30 days, it’s really about getting your numbers laid out. We would have met three times that month. We would’ve been talking back and forth and actually looking at numbers together, putting your numbers in one place so you could clearly start to say like, oh my goodness, I see how I’m going to get out of the paycheck to paycheck cycle.
I see how I’m going to start paying off debt. I see how I’m going to save consistently. I see how it’s not going to feel like feast or famine in my business. And so you’ll see things that start to emerge for you after that first month because you are someone who knows your numbers, you’re going to be familiar with your numbers and we are going to work through that together. And in the first month, like I said, it’s about getting to know your numbers and then we have four months to do life together. In the months that come after that first month, like you’re learning how to not just manage your money from the balance in your bank account, which is so common that we’re managing our money from the balance in our bank account. If I could tell you how many calls that I have and someone’s like, yeah, Keina, I paid all my bills and then the money that’s left over, I like spend it until next payday.
But you start becoming the person who is a month ahead in your bank account. You have like two months of savings in your bank account. And so the way that you transition from someone who’s living in that paycheck to paycheck cycle is you’re learning how to manage your money. We are constantly talking about the things that are coming up for you and how you want to plan for them. We’re making decisions in advance. And so months 2, 3, 4 and 5 are really putting into practice what it means to know your numbers, what it means to feel financially confident. And I would say like within the first 60 to 90 days, people know their numbers in and out, they feel like they can manage things and they’re like, okay Keina, I already see how my debt is getting paid off. I see how I’m going to save money.
I see how my business income is increasing, I see how my taxes are, how I’m saving for taxes and I feel really confident like what’s next? And I think about my client, Janine, who when she came to me, she had just recently paid off all of her debt. And the thing that she was concerned with is that although she had paid off her debt, she was like, I don’t want to get back into debt. And so we helped her get out of that paycheck to paycheck cycle. And when she started to ask like, what’s next, we started to build out like, okay, what’s your dream budget look like? Like how much money do you want to make next? Like you are already making six figures, which is great, but like what are the things, like I work with my clients on goals. Like let’s go back to your goals and let’s see where you said you wanted to be a year from now, which I will give you a little hint.
A lot of my clients are crossing off the things they say they want a year from now and we can start to cross those off before we even stop working together. And so we start looking at those goals and what would it look like if you had more money? So we get to actually explore and dream. Like with my clients, I want to help them think about expansion. Like oftentimes I think we think about budgeting as a way to constrict, and I want budgeting to be a tool that you get to use to expand. How do you take up space? How much money do you want to have? And so when you actually feel confident that you can manage money, we can actually explore with your brain like how much more money do you want to make? And when you have that amount of money, like what are you able to create in the world?
What does it mean if you are a rich person? And for some of my clients it’s an easy exercise. For some of my clients, it’s a more challenging exercise because they have thoughts about what it means for them to be wealthy. But that’s one of the exercises that we start to explore about like what comes next? What happens when you make $150,000? What happens when you make $200,000? And so we start planning with a dream budget, we start looking at like if the goal is to buy a home, how does our budget need to shift? And so my clients are learning not only how to manage their money from the moment that they walked into the container, but also thinking about what’s next. Because my goal as a coach is that this is the last time you have to learn how to budget. I don’t want you to always feel like you’re in like a budget rehab program.
I want you to work with me and feel like, oh my goodness, Keina, you helped me understand numbers in such a different way and you helped me shift my mindset and you helped me shift behaviorally how I relate to my finances, that now I get it. And like I said, clients work with me for more than five months, but we’re not working on the same things. We’re working on that next version of themselves. We’re working on them having left their job and they’re like, okay Keina, I’m working for myself. What does this look like? Or we’re working on Keina, I’ve doubled my salary and so I want to continue to work on my money mindset. What does this look like? Or Keina, I just got married and so what does it look like for my husband and I to combine our finances?
So those are the things that we’re exploring and we’re not looking at like what does it look like to budget? We are pushing the envelope, we are really thinking about expansion there. Also within, when I was telling you that I really work with clients within financial seasons like some of my clients, yes, they are like Janine, when I was talking about her, we started really working on her business finances. So at the time we were working together, she had a photography business and she was like, oh, I think I make like $300 a month in my photography business. But she had no clarity for how much money she was making. She didn’t know how much money she wanted to make, she wasn’t saving for taxes. And so we really spent the time towards the last probably like 60 days of our 5 month coaching partnership, diving into her business finances and helping her get clear on that so that she could say like, no, I have a goal of making $10,000 in my business this year, or $20,000 in her photography business.
So we gained clarity on that. But then also when I mentioned that I’ve worked with all different types of clients, like I have clients that have recently been divorced or separated. And so when I’m thinking about the five month coaching container, it’s a perfect container for them because we are also able to talk about money and emotions. And the thing that I’ve learned working as a coach, and the thing that I know as a coach is that emotion cause us to spend money. And I’m thinking about when I’m working with women and specifically like we could be thinking about the holidays. And so I’m able to help, if we started working together, let’s say in September, we are most definitely going to be working together through the holidays and we’re going to be working together through the new year. And so we’re able to talk about like, okay, how do you want Christmas to look like for your son, for your daughter, for two of your kids or three of your kids?
Or you are going to be alone for Christmas this year. How do you want to experience Christmas? What money do we want to have set aside for that? We know emotional spending might happen, so let’s just go ahead and talk about what that may look like and how you want to be onto yourself when that happens. And let’s also make sure that you have a buffer in your account when that may happen. But we get to prepare for those things in advance. And then I’ve also had clients if you’ve listened to Jennifer and Amy’s podcast, Jennifer and Amy, we work together for 10 months and while we were working together, Jennifer, she quit her job. She started working for herself. And so we were able to talk about what do finances look like in this season? The other thing that happened while we were working together is both of them actually had a father that passed.
And so we were also able to talk about grief and money, but the five month coaching container is really about us being able to do life together. So when you are working with me as a coach, you aren’t getting this static relationship, the static relationship of a spreadsheet, you are going to get, yes, the tools, whether that be a spreadsheet, but you’re also going to get mindset coaching and you’re going to get other resources that I have available because the goal is for you to become someone who has financial peace of mind. And I want you to have financial peace of mind as a six figure earner. And I want you to have financial peace of mind regardless of what season you are in life. You’ve probably heard some of my clients say like, hey, you just need to go ahead and work with Keina, and that’s the truth you just need to go ahead and work with me.
And I don’t want you to think that you need to get everything in order before you work with me. It really is this five month coaching container is an opportunity for you to come as you are. I know that I want to be able to help you feel in control of your finances. I also want this to be the container that you are safe in. And I want this container that you are safe to experience failure, you’re safe to dream, and you’re safe to push yourself, whatever that may look like for you. But we are going to get to co-create how you want to experience your finances. So yeah, I will be there for you every single step of the way, but I realized that I hadn’t really talked about and given you my perspective as a coach for the beauty and the magic of the five-month coaching container.
And I had it in my podcast notes, my list of things to talk to you about on the podcast to tell you about this five month coaching container. And also you can listen to any one of my client episodes and they can also give you their perspective on what magic they were able to create in working with me for some of them five months, some of them 10 months, or many, many months after that because I do have some clients that have continue to work with me month after month. So I would invite you if you’re like, oh my goodness, Keina, yes, I need this. I need this container for me to be able to dream. And if you have any inclination that you’re like, Keina, we need to work together, my challenge for you today, no matter where you are, no matter what you’re doing, is to go ahead and apply to work with me.
I promise you, this is the best gift that you will give yourself. And that 60 minutes on a consult with me is honestly going to change your life because you are going to see exactly where it is that you are getting stuck. And you’re also going to know this is the exact plan that I need to be able to move forward with my finances. So you can go to www.wealthovernow.com/appointment and let’s get started. You are going to make so much money from this one investment and you’re going to experience the world differently. So I look forward to talking to you on my next consult, and until then, I will talk to you later.
Thank you so much for listening to Money Files. If you’re ready to take the next step to reach your financial goals, head to www.wealthovernow.com/appointment and let’s get started.
