The Truth About Choosing the Wrong Path
This blog post was transcribed and edited from my podcast episode with the help of Castmagic.
This question came in from one of our community members:
Help! I really connected with your mention of finding a good mentor or coach last podcast episode. I have no idea where to find a good coach and I have been looking for one. I've been inviting people I admire to coffee in my field but what i really need is someone who can listen to my personal situation and guide me / push me to my highest path. I have three paths I'm working towards and just hoping one will take off. I think the better strategy is to focus my energy on one. I have no clue which one though. It seemed like your coach said sell your binder online and that was it for you. Was it that simple?
Here's the quick list of what's covered in this episode:
You already know which path to choose — a good coach's job is to help you see what's already inside you, not tell you what to do
There is no wrong path, only paths that teach you more about yourself
The real lesson entrepreneurship is trying to teach you right now is to let go of being afraid of making the wrong choice
Life will keep bringing the same lesson back around until you learn it — and it gets harder each time
A good coach helps you learn your lessons faster, not avoid them altogether
Coaching works best when you already have a foundation of self-trust and self-awareness
Investing in high-level coaching before you've done the foundational work often leads to freezing, not growth
The most important skill in entrepreneurship is becoming someone who can make decisions quickly and trust themselves to course-correct if needed
Your Highest Path, Not the "Right" Path
I love that you used the phrase highest path. Not "the correct path" or "the right decision" — but the highest one. That framing matters.
Because one person’s highest expression can be the complete opposite of someone else's. It all comes down to alignment. Not what is the right way — but what is your way. That's the whole point of coaching and mentorship. We don't want a cookie-cutter blueprint. We need to adapt advice to our own background, our story, where we're coming from, what we're learning, where we're going. All of that is uniquely yours.
There is no correct path. There is only your path.
Nothing Is Wasted — Not Even the "Wrong" Choice
Here's the thing about choosing: even if you pick the "wrong" path, that is not wasted time.
You will learn things about yourself. And you'll take those things and apply them to the next decision. There is no wrong path in entrepreneurship — there's only taking longer than you need to learn the lessons you need to learn.
Life is always teaching you lessons in one way or another. The first time around, life taps you on the shoulder. If you don't pay attention, it comes back with a hammer. Then a bowling ball. So when you have the chance to learn something now, learn it now.
The lesson trying to come through right now is this: there is no wrong path when you are listening to your body and giving yourself permission to change your mind.
The Real Reason to Hire a Coach
A good coach doesn't save you from learning hard lessons. They just help you learn them faster.
Maybe a lesson that would have taken you three years to learn on your own takes three months with the right coach. That's it. That's the whole ROI.
But here's what a coach cannot do: they cannot take on the risk of your decisions for you. They cannot hand you a bulletproof roadmap. They cannot guarantee results. They cannot make you trust yourself.
And self-trust? You have to build it yourself. And until you do, coaching — even excellent coaching — will feel like paying a lot of money to doubt yourself in a more expensive way.
Here's the energetic difference I'm talking about: the most powerful place to hire a coach is when you can honestly say, I don't actually need a coach. I have everything I need inside of me. But I'm choosing to invest because I want more support in hearing my own voice.
When you hire from that foundation, coaching can be transformational. When you hire from a place of please just tell me what to do — it rarely sticks.
My Most Counterintuitive Business Decision
About eight years ago, I deleted 10,000 people from my email list.
No coach told me to do that. No piece of business advice anywhere suggests that deleting a decade of list-building is a growth strategy. But I knew, in my body, that it was the right decision for me — in that season, in that moment.
I bounced it off my coach. They probably thought I was a little crazy. But their job wasn't to stop me. Their job was to help me get clear, ask good questions, make sure I had thought it through. The decision was always mine.
That's the thing about building a business that is genuinely yours — you will make decisions that no one else would make. Counterintuitive ones. Ones that look backwards from the outside. And if you haven't built the self-trust to make those calls and stand behind them, no coach in the world can compensate for that.
You Don't Have to Wait to Find a Coach
Here's the practical piece before we close: finding a coach who truly knows you and guides you over time is a significant investment. We're talking hundreds to thousands of dollars. And in my experience, that level of investment works best after you've already done a lot of the foundational work yourself — after you've gotten your hands dirty, learned your own patterns, and built some basic capacity to make and own decisions.
If you're earlier in the journey, you don't need to pause everything until you find the perfect mentor. You can start right now by doing the thing that coaching is actually trying to teach you:
Pick one. Trust yourself. Move forward. And if it turns out not to be the one — change your mind, reroute, and keep going.
That is not failure. That is the whole game of entrepreneurship.
Every decision you make — even the ones you eventually pivot away from — builds your self-trust. Every time you choose and then honor your own feedback, you become someone who is better at choosing. And that is the only skill that ultimately matters in entrepreneurship.
The magic isn't in the path you pick. The magic is you.
Want help creating a foundation of self-trust?
Join Banish Your Blind Spots — my program that shines a light on exactly how you may be standing in your own way, and hands you back the keys to your own clarity.
