This Is Me Building a Life Coaching Business from the Ground Up
Updated: 2 days ago
Some days, building a business feels less like freedom and more like standing alone in a field shouting into the wind.
That may sound dramatic, but anyone who has started something from nothing will know the feeling. The silence can be loud. No phone calls. No emails. No enquiries. No steady queue of people waiting to work with you. Just you, your hopes, your doubts, and the work that still needs doing.
I started Green Green Grass Life Coaching because I believe in what I have to offer. I believe there are people at a crossroads in life who need someone who understands what it feels like to be knocked down and still get back up. Redundancy. Bullying. Job loss. Feeling different. Hating the work you do but not knowing how to escape it. Mental health struggles. These are not just topics to me. They are lived experience.
Still, I would be lying if I said this has been easy.
Building a life coaching business from the ground up has tested my confidence, my patience, my energy, and at times my mental health. There is the workload, the networking, the constant pressure to be visible, the strange expectation that you must always smile. Sometimes it feels like putting on a show. You take to the stage, perform confidence, and hope nobody sees how tired you are behind the curtain.
This is not a polished success story. Not yet.
This is me, bruised but still here.
Starting a business can feel far lonelier than people admit
When people talk about starting a business, they often talk about freedom.
They talk about being your own boss. Choosing your hours. Building a brand. Creating something meaningful. All of that can be true, but there is another side that is not mentioned as often.
It can be lonely. Deeply lonely.
There is no team around you cheering every small step. There is no manager giving you a clear list of tasks. There is no guaranteed pay at the end of the month. There is only the next thing that needs to be done, and then the next thing after that.
When the phone does not ring, it can feel personal.
When nobody replies to an email, it can feel like rejection.
When a post receives little response, it can feel as if your whole message has been ignored.
The rational part of the mind knows this is part of the process. People are busy. Trust takes time. Businesses grow slowly. Nobody owes you an instant response.
But the emotional part of the mind does not always care about rational explanations. It asks harder questions.
Am I good enough?
Do people trust me?
Have I made a mistake?
Why does everyone else seem to be doing better?
That last question is dangerous. Comparison can turn a difficult day into a spiral. You look at other founders who appear to be run off their feet. You see commercial success, confidence, opportunities, and applause. You do not see the quiet panic behind the scenes. You do not see the bills, the doubt, the sleepless nights, or the moments when they wonder if they can keep going.
So you compare your inside to someone else’s outside. That is rarely fair, but it is very human.
The pressure to be visible can become exhausting
Starting a coaching business means people need to know you exist. That means networking, speaking to people, showing up, making connections, explaining what you do, and explaining it again.
On paper, that sounds simple.
In real life, it can be exhausting.
There is pressure to be positive. Pressure to look confident. Pressure to smile even when you feel anything but cheerful. Pressure to sound certain, even when building something new is full of uncertainty.
It can begin to feel like performance.
You are not just offering a service. You are being asked to be the face, the voice, the values, the marketer, the administrator, the planner, the creator, and the person who keeps the whole thing alive. When the business is new, there is often no one else to hide behind.
That is a heavy load.
I knew that creating Green Green Grass Life Coaching would take hard work. I did not expect a walk in the park. I did not expect everything to land neatly in my lap. But I was not fully prepared for the emotional impact.
It is not only the tasks that drain you. It is the meaning you attach to them.
One quiet week can start to feel like failure.
One unanswered message can start to feel like proof you are invisible.
One conversation that goes nowhere can feel like a door closing.
That is where self-esteem can take a knock. Not because you are weak, but because building something personal makes you exposed. When the business is attached to your name, your story, your face, and your values, every silence can feel like it has landed on you personally.
The work is much bigger than the work people see
People often see the visible parts of a new business.
They see a name. A logo. A post. A website. A friendly conversation. A short description of a service.
They do not always see the rest.
They do not see the hours spent thinking about what to say. They do not see the doubt before pressing publish. They do not see the admin, the planning, the learning, the rewriting, the trying again.
They do not see the moments when you sit with a cup of tea and wonder what else you can do to make the business work.
A new business asks for emotional labour as well as practical labour. That is especially true in life coaching, because the work is built around trust. People need to feel safe before they reach out. They need to believe you can understand them. They need to sense that you are not just repeating textbook language.
That trust cannot be forced. It has to grow.
I am learning to respect that. Some seeds take longer to break through the soil. A lack of visible growth does not always mean nothing is happening underneath.
That does not remove the pressure, but it does help me breathe.
There is also the challenge of carrying your own story while offering support to others. My brand is not a detached business identity. My brand is Edmund O’Leary. It is my name, my experience, my scars, my survival, and my belief that people can rebuild their lives after painful change.
That level of honesty can feel risky. Yet it is also the very thing that makes the work real.
My experience is not a weakness
I may not have some of the fancy letters after my name that some of my peers have. I respect training, study, and professional development. They matter. I am not dismissing them.
But I also know this: lived experience matters too.
I know what it is like to suffer.
I know what it is like to be in a job you hate.
I know what it is like to be bullied in a small organisation and feel there is no one safe to turn to.
I know what it is like to be sacked.
I know what it is like to feel different.
I know what it is like to be made redundant, because I have been made redundant.
I know what it is like to struggle with mental health.
These are not lines on a sales page. They are parts of my life. They shaped me. They hurt me. They changed me. They also gave me a depth of understanding that cannot be learned only from a book.
When someone is at a crossroads after redundancy or another significant life event, they may not need perfect words. They may need to feel seen. They may need someone who can sit with the discomfort of uncertainty because they have been there too.
That is what I bring.
Not perfection.
Not a shiny, untouchable image.
Something more human.
I have attended the school of hard knocks. I did not choose every lesson, but I learned from them. I am still learning from them.
Rejection hurts, but it is not the full story
There is no point pretending rejection does not hurt.
It does.
Even when no one has directly rejected you, silence can feel like rejection. No calls. No enquiries. No new client. No response. It can creep into the mind and whisper that the whole thing is pointless.
That whisper can be powerful on hard days.
But silence is not always a verdict. Sometimes it is timing. Sometimes people are watching from a distance. Sometimes they are not ready yet. Sometimes they need to hear your name several times before they trust themselves to reach out.
A new business asks for patience that can feel almost unfair.
You plant seeds without knowing which ones will grow. You have conversations without knowing where they will lead. You keep showing up before there is clear proof that showing up is working.
That is difficult, but it is also part of building.
I remind myself that the absence of immediate success does not erase the courage it took to begin. I have created something that did not exist before. That matters.
Green Green Grass Life Coaching exists because I decided to build it. I gave it a name. I gave it meaning. I gave it part of myself. That is not small, even if the growth feels slow.
There is strength in continuing when the applause is missing.
I am learning to protect my mental health while building
Building a business should not mean destroying yourself in the process.
That is a lesson I am still learning.
When you care deeply about what you are creating, it is easy to keep pushing. One more message. One more post. One more networking event. One more attempt to be visible. One more smile.
Then suddenly, the thing you built to help others starts to weigh heavily on you.
I do not have all the answers, but I am learning that I need boundaries. I need rest. I need days when I am not performing. I need to remember that my worth is not measured by enquiries, calls, or bookings.
That sounds simple. Living it is harder.
A business can matter deeply without becoming the whole of your identity. Even when your name is part of the brand, you still need space to be a person. A human being. Someone who gets tired. Someone who sometimes feels rejected. Someone who does not always have a polished answer ready.
There is no shame in that.
If anything, it makes the work more honest.
This is especially true when mental health is part of the story. I know what those dark spirals can feel like. I know how quickly low self-esteem can creep in when life feels uncertain. I also know that speaking honestly about those struggles can help remove some of their power.
This writing is not medical advice. It is one person telling the truth about what it feels like to build a business while carrying real human pressure. If anyone recognises that pressure in themselves and feels unable to cope, reaching out to a trusted person, GP, or mental health support service can be a vital step. My local mental health trust is Surrey & Borders Partnership and they offer a Crisis line which is 0800 915 4644. It's free to call and open 24 hours a day every day of the year. Epsom has a service called The Safe Haven which is open 6pm to 11pm, 365 days a year is located at The Brickfield Centre, Portland Place, Epsom KT17 1DL. I helped to launch the pilot phase & it has proved to be a great success. Jane is the manager & she and the staff will make you feel very welcome and safe.
I still believe the right people will find me
Despite the hard days, I have not given up.
That sentence matters.
I have not given up.
I still believe that, given time, people who are standing at a crossroads will get to see or hear of me. People who have lost a job. People facing redundancy. People who feel stuck. People who are tired of pretending they are fine. People who have been knocked by life and need space to think about what comes next.
There will be a call for action. A moment when someone thinks, “I need help with this.” A moment when the message lands. A moment when the work starts to make sense to the person who needs it.
I cannot force that moment.
I can only keep becoming visible in a way that feels true.
That means I do not need to become a polished copy of somebody else. I do not need to pretend my story is smoother than it is. I do not need to hide every bruise to be credible.
In many ways, the bruises are part of the credibility.
They say, “I know what pain can do.”
They say, “I know what it means to start again.”
They say, “I know how hard it can be to hope when life has knocked the hope out of you.”
That is the heart of my work.
This is me
This is me building a life coaching business from the ground up.
Not from a place of perfect confidence. Not from a place where every day feels easy. Not from a place where the diary is overflowing and every risk has paid off.
From here.
From the hard days. From the quiet days. From the moments of doubt. From the lived experience. From the belief that pain can become purpose, if we handle it with honesty and care.
I am bruised, yes.
I occasionally feel rejection, yes.
I sometimes compare myself with others and have to pull myself back from that spiral, yes.
But I have created a brand new business. I have put my name, my story, and my heart behind it. I have chosen to stand up and be counted, even when my voice shakes a little.
That matters.
The success story is still being written. It may be slower than I hoped. It may be messier than I imagined. It may ask more of me than I expected. But I am still here, and I am still building.
My brand is Edmund O’Leary.
My work is rooted in experience, empathy, and survival.
My message is for people who have been knocked down by life and are wondering whether they can stand again.
And if there is one thing I know, it is this.
I have been through hard things.
I have not disappeared.
I have not given up.
THIS IS ME!
