We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Shane Kohler a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Shane, thanks for joining us today. Often outsiders look at a successful business and think it became a success overnight. Even media and especially movies love to gloss over nitty, gritty details that went into that middle phase of your business – after you started but before you got to where you are today. In our experience, overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work laying the foundation for success, but unfortunately, it’s exactly this part of the story that most of the media ignores. Can you talk to us about your scaling up story – what are some of the nitty, gritty details folks should know about?

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned and continued to learn in growing my business is that there is no substitute for putting your heart and soul into your work. Whatever strategy you use, that needs to be at the core of it. Otherwise, you’ll exhaust your energy and resources without making it far. Customers connect with people, not companies. And consumers are getting smarter. They want to connect with brands that care, have purpose, and are doing something good in the world. People who are out to only make a paycheck are starting to stand out in the marketplace like a sore thumb and it is becoming harder and harder to sell to people from that place.

I was always someone who cared and wanted to do good in the world but in the beginning I didn’t realize how much that mattered. I read all the top marketing books, spent thousands of dollars on ads, tried hosting really salesy webinars, using all the tips and tactics to manipulate people into buying and I thought I had found some kind of secret sauce until none of it worked. I thought if I could manipulate people into my programs, I could care about them later but it didn’t work.

The thing that transformed my business was getting committed to serving people and making a personal difference in their lives and that had to be conveyed in every piece of content, every ad, every webinar, every trick, every tactic. My motive can’t be to make money or sales, that simply can’t work. My motive has to be to make a difference for people, show them how much I care, and use every opportunity to serve them even if I only have 30 seconds to do it. When I learned to put my focus there, the money and sales followed on levels I couldn’t even imagine before.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m a conscious love and dating coach and I specialize in helping women heal their relationship with men and their emotional wounds to be open and receptive to deep lifetime love.

I offer private 1-1 coaching on a very limited basis but my core offer is my Inspired Love program where I lead a deeply personal and transformational process over a period of several months. The program is designed to bring about healing and integration in all four dimensions of human experience: body, mind, emotion, and spirit. From this healed and integrated place, we understand ourselves and our inherent worthiness, we feel connected to our power and creative ability, and we are lead by our passion and truth. Once this shift has taken place, we are more attractive than we’ve ever been before, we are able to uphold standards and boundaries with others, we present ourselves as high-value in the dating world, and we attract much higher quality potential partners.

In the program, we explore themes like understanding the true nature of being human, our relationship to our parents and early caregivers, bringing awareness to the limitations in our belief systems, healing shame, somatic release of traumas held in the body, inner-child healing, being led by our passion, and navigating the dating world from a conscious and empowered place.

I think what sets me apart from others is that I’m not focused on teaching tips and tricks to get a date. I’m focused on healing the part of you that thinks you need tips and tricks to get a date. The truth of who you are is so beautiful and amazing that love will easily find you. All we need to do is heal all the limiting impressions you’ve built up throughout your life that makes you feel you need to hide your truth and put on a performance to be loved. Nobody will fall in love with that but they will love the real you. The complex, dynamic, imperfect, sometimes messy, standard-upholding, respect-commanding, passionate, deep, authentic, loving version of you will have no problem finding love. All we need to do is let THAT you out into the world without restraint.

How did you build your audience on social media?

The best thing you can do is get really clear on who you want to serve, what their problems are, and make solving their problems your obsession. You want to know by heart the internal conversations they are having in their own minds all the time and be able to tell them about these conversations in their own words. You want to be able to offer them advice and perspectives that makes them feel truly served, and on social media, you need to be able to do this in less than a minute. Get really good at that and your social media will blow up!

Another thing to consider is you need to bring through your own personality and showcase what sets you apart. If you’re funny leverage that. If you dance, if you’re controversial, if you curse or if you don’t. I’ve set myself apart by directly sharing tough truths, being slightly controversial, bringing an element of spiritual wisdom to the conversation, and vulnerably sharing my personal experience. Everyone has different gifts and you have to discover what yours are and use them to stand out from everyone else.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

Social media has been an amazing resource to connect with people and generate business. Coming from your heart with a desire to serve is #1. #2 is using the incredible tools we have to our advantage. AI is an incredible tool that can help you learn and create content, building automated systems to connect and nurture the audience while you’re sleeping is miraculous, running ad campaigns gives you the power to literally get yourself in front of as many people as you want to, and creating high quality content that people love can get you in front of them for free. It’s really amazing what’s available with with social media and technology. It’s not easy. Building these systems is very intricate and complex and doing everything I’ve mentioned above can easily fill a 60 hour week but if you take it one step at a time, learn as you go, and keep improving on what you’ve already built, your effort will eventually hit a tipping point and everything will snowball from there.

One other thing I would mention is I started a podcast last year and it has truly been amazing. It’s given me a way to take people who found me on social media and build a much deeper relationship with them. It drastically increased my influence and sales.

Contact Info:

• Website: thelivingrelationship.com
• Instagram: @the_living_relationship
• Facebook: The Living Relationship
• Youtube: The Living Relationship
• Other: Podcast: The Conscious Love Show theconsciousloveshow.podbean.com