COACHES: A quick note before we start. If you’re a client with LifeCoach Elevate, you already know we gift you a new blog post each month to share with your own clients. So this one might look familiar. But please read it again anyway, because this is the COACH VERSION written just for you. Same scary movie, different seat in the theater.

Halloween is the one month a year the whole world agrees to be a little unhinged in public. Yard skeletons are somehow twelve feet tall and playing volleyball. Someone shows up to the Zoom call as a shark eating a man in a rowboat, and nobody asks why. It’s easy to see why Halloween is so many people’s favorite holiday.

But here’s what gets us every October. We’ll spend real money and real effort on fake fear, haunted houses, jump-scare movies, the works, and then walk straight out of that theater into a week of very real, entirely unpaid dread about a website we haven’t launched, a post we haven’t published, or a Discovery Session we still haven’t invited anyone to.

We’re not short on imagination. Far from it. As coaches, imagination is practically our job description. We help people picture a life they’d love before there’s a single piece of evidence for it. We can see a client’s dream business before they can. We can picture the room, the workshop, the book, the whole thing. Our imagination is working overtime. It just isn’t always working for us.

The Shark You Never Saw

Here’s a bit of movie history that’s so relevant to what we’re talking about. While filming Jaws, Steven Spielberg’s mechanical shark kept breaking down. He couldn’t shoot it the way he’d planned, so he was forced to imply the shark instead, a fin, a point-of-view shot, that music, and let the audience’s imagination do the rest. Most people consider it scarier than if he’d shown the whole shark from scene one. Left to fill in the blanks, our brains tend to build something worse than what’s actually there.

Haunted houses run on the same trick. The scariest part usually isn’t the actor in the mask, it’s the ten seconds of dim hallway before you get there, when your own brain is doing the actual work. Theme park designers know this and stretch that hallway out on purpose, because anticipation almost always outperforms whatever they could actually put in the room.

Now think about the hallway in a coaching business. The site that’s still sitting in a .zip file in your inbox. The post you wrote, reread, and didn’t publish. The moment on a call right before you say the price out loud. The invitation to a Discovery Session that’s been sitting in your drafts folder for a week. None of those is the monster. They’re the hallway. And in our experience, the hallway is almost always where the real fear lives.

That’s not a flaw in the system. That’s the whole feature. Imagination doesn’t come with a setting that says only use this for good. It’s a tool, full stop, and it’s just as willing to build our worst-case Tuesday as it is our dream practice. Given nothing else to work with, it may happily write a screenplay where nobody books, the one person who does book says “that’s too much,” and the coach we trained with sees our website and quietly thinks we’re not ready.

Psychologists have a name for that particular screenplay. Aaron Beck, who helped found cognitive therapy back in the 1970s, called it catastrophizing: taking one uncertain moment and fast-forwarding straight to the worst possible ending, then treating that ending as the likely one.

The tricky part is that our bodies don’t wait for the credits. An imagined “no” and a real one can land in the nervous system in much the same way, with the tight shoulders, the shallow breath, the 3 a.m. wake-up. Run enough reruns and the dread stops being about any one post or any one call. It just becomes the background hum, and over time that hum can wear on our energy, our confidence, and how much of ourselves we have left to give the clients who are actually in front of us.

We’ve all done it. We’ve rehearsed the entire “no” from a prospect who has no idea we’re even thinking about them, complete with their polite excuse and our brave face. We’ve imagined the comment section before there was a single comment. We know better when it’s a client doing this. We sometimes forget to apply it to ourselves.

You’re Already the Director

Halloween is actually a great, non-salesy moment to notice this, because for one month a year we deliberately choose our fear. We pick the costume. We pick the movie. We know none of it is real, which is exactly why it’s fun instead of just scary.

The rest of the year, most of us aren’t choosing. We default. And whatever gets rehearsed the most, in the most vivid detail, on the most repeat, tends to start feeling less like a possibility and more like the plan.

So here’s a question worth sitting with this Halloween week: when it comes to the parts of our coaching business that matter, are we picking the movie? Or just leaving the remote lying around for whoever grabs it first?

Where This Shows Up in a Coaching Business

This isn’t about forcing positivity or pretending a “no” never happens. Real risk is real. It’s about noticing which script is currently running, and choosing, more often, to write a different one on purpose. A few ways this tends to show up for the coaches we work with (and, honestly, for us):

• The website that’s been finished for months and still isn’t live, because once it’s live, people can see it. And once people can see it, they can have opinions about it.
• The Discovery Session invitation we’ve written in our head a hundred times, and never once sent, because we’ve already imagined them saying no.
• The price we lower by a few hundred dollars right before we say it out loud, not because the program is worth less, but because we’ve pre-lived the sharp intake of breath on the other end of the Zoom call.
• The workshop we’d love to teach, quietly shelved because we’ve imagined every empty chair and never once imagined the full ones.
• The post we wrote, reread four times, and deleted, because somewhere in the rereading we started hearing a voice say, “Who are you to be talking about this?”
• The “no” we got once, two years ago, that still gets replayed more often than the twenty yeses that came after it.

Here’s the thing fear never mentions in its sales pitch. Fear will sell us the misery we know over the miracle we can’t picture yet, and it never shows us the person on the other side. The one who’s been looking for exactly what we do. The one who reads that post at 11 p.m. and finally feels understood. Fear can’t picture that person. Neither can we, yet. That’s not a reason to wait. That’s the whole reason to go.

None of that means ignoring real risk or real feelings. It means giving the possible version of the story equal screen time to the worst-case one, instead of running the disaster reel on a loop and calling it realism.

The Trailer Swap

Here’s a small practice we use around here when we catch our imagination writing horror instead of hope. We call it the Trailer Swap:

1. Catch the scene. Notice the movie currently playing, and name it plainly. “I’m imagining this person saying no to a Discovery Session” is enough.
2. Ask who’s directing. Is this based on something that’s actually happened in our business, or is it a script our imagination wrote entirely on its own?
3. Cut a new trailer. Picture one specific, realistic version where it goes fine, or even goes well. Not a fantasy. Just a fair one. They say yes. Or they say “not right now,” and we’re completely okay, and the next person says yes.
4. Run it a few times. The scary version got rehearsed into feeling true through repetition. The possible version deserves the same number of viewings.

It takes about ninety seconds. It’s not magic, and it doesn’t erase every legitimate worry. It’s just redirecting a tool we’re all already using constantly, toward something that actually serves us instead of something that just keeps the website in the .zip file.

There’s a reason actors run a scene dozens of times before it feels believable on stage. Repetition is what turns a script into something that feels true, a kind of muscle memory for the brain. The brain doesn’t seem to check whether the script was ever a fact. It tends to run whatever’s been performed the most, which means the version we practice is the one that starts to feel real, whether we meant to rehearse it or not.

Whatever we imagine on repeat, we start preparing for. Our nervous system, our choices, how we show up on a call, all of it responds to the movie we keep replaying. We already teach this to our clients. This week is just a reminder that it applies to the coach, too.

When the Movie Won’t Turn Off

One honest note before the credits roll. For some of us, the scary movie isn’t a Tuesday-afternoon habit we can swap out in ninety seconds. It plays all day, it plays all night, and no amount of imagining a better trailer seems to touch it, maybe it’s time you let a counselor, a mentor, or a trusted person into the theater with you. Coaches are allowed to have a coach too. Reaching for that kind of support isn’t giving up on the story. It might be the bravest action move we ever take.

And for the rest of us, this is maintenance. A little practice in pointing the imagination somewhere kinder, so that when a genuinely hard scene arrives, and they do arrive, we already know where the remote is.

Picking the Pen Back Up

The power to imagine a version of our coaching business we’re genuinely excited about has been here all along. It’s the same imagination that’s been running the show the whole time, just pointed in a different direction. We spend our days reminding clients that they’re more powerful than any circumstance, situation, or condition. Something in us already knows that applies to the person holding the pen, too. We just don’t always remember it applies off-camera.

This Halloween, enjoy every bit of the fake fear: the costumes, the candy, the neighbor’s alarmingly ambitious inflatable lawn display. And then, when it comes to the story we’re actually living, and the business we’re actually building, consider picking the pen back up.

Tell us below: which movie are you ready to stop rerunning? The unlaunched site? The unsent invitation? The price you keep rounding down? We’re in this too, and we’d love to hear yours.

Get Going. 💙