Episode #192 - Bet On Your Strengths and Find Your Community with Nathan Ingram - a podcast by WordPress business specialist Troy Dean featuring Seth Godin, Michael Gerber, Guy Kawasaki, Joe Pulizzi, Andrew Warner, James Schramko, Brian Clark, Ed Dale, Dan Norris and many more.
from 2018-11-25T23:00
One of the best things about WordPress is the tight-knit, supportive community of designers and developers that has sprung up around it over the years—so how can you make the most of it for your business? Nathan Ingram, WordPress business coach and head of training at iThemes, is here to tell us.
Appearing on this episode with a wall of lanyards from past WordCamps behind him, Nathan is a familiar face at WordPress community events all over the US these days. Even though he fell into WordPress somewhat by accident, and his rise to becoming one of the most respected trainers and coaches in the business is a story of adaptation, overcoming impostor syndrome, and learning to play to his own strengths and let other people play to theirs.
How It All Started
As a child, Nathan wanted to be a scientist, although he was never exactly sure what kind. While he ended up going a different way when he grew up, he never lost his sense of curiosity, and he still considers himself a full-fledged geek and a “magnet for useless information”, all things that have served him well in the world of web development.
Having spent a number of years in ministry as a pastor, Nathan already loved teaching and public speaking, and he also did a lot of web design work for small nonprofits. Becoming a WordPress trainer wasn’t the plan, but as it turned out, his curiosity, geekiness and love of sharing knowledge made him the perfect candidate for the job.
The Advent Of WordPress
Nathan started out building websites in 1995, and did a lot of work prior to the CMS revolution. He used tools like Dreamweaver and Fireworks for a long time, and saw himself as more of a visual designer than a developer. When WordPress first came along, he was heavily resistant to it, for a couple of reasons.
First off, he found that every WordPress website tended to look more or less the same, and it was hard to use it to develop the unique designs he could make with other tools. Second, he thought it would kill his business model. Working primarily with small clients who kept him on retainer to make periodic changes to their sites after he’d built them, he wasn’t sure how something like WordPress’s simplified content management would impact his livelihood.
Obviously, though, he changed his tune, and it happened around version 2.9, when Nathan first became aware of the huge array of plugins out there and how useful they really were. By the time 3.0 rolled out, he was sold.
Teaching
After a chance encounter with Cory and Lindsey Miller at a WordPress event in Oklahoma City, Nathan was offered the chance to do a training webinar (his very-first one) in 2012. It seemed easy in theory; he loved public speaking, and his background as a pastor, he thought, would be all the preparation he needed.
But it turned out webinars are a completely different beast from conventional public speaking, and Nathan felt more than a little lost without being able to gauge real-time responses or body language while just talking into a webcam. When it was over, he says he was sure at the time that it was the worst thing he’d ever done.
The viewers—and his hosts—disagreed, and they gave him lots of encouragement to keep at it. iThemes asked him to do more and more webinars, eventually making him a regular instructor on their site, and at the beginning of 2017 he became iThemes’ official host, where he does regular webinars, courses and live events.
The Key To Confidence
Moving into the training and coaching space was a bit of a learning curve, and Nathan dealt with his fair share of self-doubt. “It's impostor syndrome, right? We all have it,” he says, “and the more you do something, particularly something niche, you think it'll go away, but it just gets worse.”
So if practice doesn’t fix self-doubt, what does? “The antidote to that whole syndrome is community,” Nathan says, “and that's why I love WordPress. The WordPress community is fantastic.”
Positive community feedback was what got him to stick with the webinars in the beginning, something he’s now more than comfortable with, and that makes up a major part of his business. He also stresses that while positive feedback is great, you need to be able to get authentic feedback from people you trust. Getting knee-jerk compliments from people who aren’t really evaluating you isn’t helpful, and ultimately waters down the power of that feedback in convincing you that you’re on the right track.
You need a trustworthy support network to give you confidence boosts and reality checks, and you also need to check in with yourself to make sure you’re actually doing the work and honing the skills to create output you can stand behind.
Advice For Younger Self
What would Nathan tell a younger version of himself? A variation on that same theme: learn how to rely on the people around you instead of expecting to have to do everything yourself. He stresses that the benefit of a community is that you can play to and develop your own strengths, while enlisting others around you for help to support you in the things that you’re weaker at. He says he’d have been much better at avoiding burnout if he’d learned to trust others to handle the things he couldn’t instead of beating himself up about having weaknesses at all, which is a lesson a lot of freelancers and entrepreneurs might benefit from.
Coaching
These principles are strongly reflected in Nathan’s coaching approach. One of the coaching options he offers is a program called “Advance”, where clients have their needs addressed partially one-on-one, and then partially in a small group of six or less. In this group environment, they each bring one issue to the table, and together they look at potential solutions. Also key to this approach, Nathan says, is opening every group meeting with celebrating successes. He thinks this is something that WordPress folks especially need in their lives, since so often the specific victories that come with web design are hard to explain to the uninitiated, something that can be isolating, especially for freelancers.
He also says that sharing issues with a group can help overcome impostor syndrome, since not only does it let coaching clients know they’re not alone in struggling, but it also gives them the opportunity to realize that while they have problems and weaknesses that others don’t, they also have solutions and strengths that others don’t, and by sharing those they can gain confidence through community.
Common Ground
“There are probably some people in this room, probably people listening to this podcast perhaps, who are one more bad client or one more bad month away from throwing in the towel. And I was there! I've been there! The thing is, all those problems are fixable."
Feeling frustrated, isolated, or like you’re the only one having a tough time with your business? You’re not alone—far from it, in fact! Here are the most common problems Nathan sees with coaching clients:
- Stabilizing your financial world with recurring revenue and other income fixes.
- Detecting and fencing in bad clients so they don't wreck the rest of your business.
- Improving your personal productivity so that you’re actually getting stuff done when you need to.
Be sure to tune in to hear the details of Nathan’s work with iThemes, some stories from his days as a pastor, some of the strangest industries he’s learned about through his clients, and more, all in this episode!
Links:
Nathan’s training webinars at iThemes
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