Shrink or Grow

The Approval Series — Part Three of Three

The industry rewards agents who make themselves smaller. Character rewards those who refuse.

The coaching industry gives agents a choice — though it would never frame it that way.

Adapt your pitch. Widen your appeal. Follow up until they respond. Add more value. Be more available. Sand down the edges that might catch on someone. Become acceptable to the broadest possible audience — and in doing so, become essential to none of them.

Or don't.

Jay Acunzo has spent years studying what separates the people and brands that earn genuine loyalty from those that merely earn business. His conclusion cuts through the coaching industry's entire value proposition in a single line.

Don't be better. Be their favourite. - Jay Acunzo

Better is the coaching industry's game. Better scripts. Better conversion rates. Better follow-up cadence. Better objection handling. Better personal brand. The entire industry is built on the premise that what agents need is improvement — and that improvement is measurable, teachable, and for sale.

Favourite is a different game entirely. You don't become someone's favourite by being better than the competition. You become their favourite by being more fully yourself than anyone else in the room. By standing for something specific enough to matter — which means specific enough to exclude.

This is what coaching cannot sell, because it requires the opposite of what coaching teaches.

Better: Outperform the competition on their terms

Different: Play a new game with new rules

Favourite: Be so fully yourself that the right people can't imagine anyone else

The choice between them is not a strategic one. It's a character one. And it's made not in the training room, not on the course, not in the coaching call — but in the moments that don't announce themselves as significant. The valuation where you could soften the price and probably win the instruction. The follow-up call you make because the script says to, not because you mean it. The personal brand content that performs vulnerability rather than expressing it.

"It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped." - Tony Robbins

The irony of that quote is not lost here. Robbins is the coaching industry at its most scaled — the grandmaster of the idea that transformation is available, purchasable, and just one decision away. But the sentence itself is true, and it doesn't belong to him. It belongs to every agent standing in a seller's kitchen, deciding whether to be what the seller wants or who they actually are.

The agents who shrink — who adapt, who follow up, who chase the reason for the ghosting so they can fix it — are making a decision in those moments too. They're deciding that approval is worth more than identity. That the instruction is worth more than the cost of earning it. Coaching didn't force that decision. But it built the conditions that make it feel like the only sensible one.

Polarising is not a risk. It's the proof that you stand for something.

The agent from the first article in this series — the one who was ghosted, who posted the video, who said he wasn't bothered — he's at that decision point. Not about the sellers who didn't call back. About himself. Does he follow up and find out why? Does he adjust the pitch? Does he take the coaching industry's implicit advice and become more of what they might have wanted?

Or does he stay exactly as he is — alive, opinionated, unafraid to sing in the car — and accept that some sellers will choose someone safer, and that this is not a problem to solve?

The sellers who ghosted him chose someone else. That's real. But it also means they chose someone else, not him. And the potential clients who are his kind of people — the sellers who'd find his energy clarifying rather than too much, who'd want that in the person selling their home — they're out there. They just can't find him if he keeps making himself smaller to be found by everyone.

Self-worth is not what you feel after you win the instruction. It's what you carry into the room before the conversation starts. It's not a reward for performance. It's the foundation that makes performance irrelevant to identity.

The coaching industry sells a version of self-worth that is entirely conditional. Win more, earn more, close more — and you'll feel it. It is, in this sense, no different from every other form of approval-seeking it claims to cure.

The real thing is unconditional. It doesn't require the instruction. It doesn't require the explanation. It doesn't require the seller to call back.

It requires you to know, before any of that, that you are worth knowing.

Chris Arnold The Brand Within — Character before competence.

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https://thebrandwithin.me/blog/why-dont-you-like-me

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Originally published on LinkedIn.