PODCAST: Season 7, Episode 35
If you’ve ever felt stuck rewriting your offer, your messaging, or your entire business model, this episode is for you. Mills unpacks the coaching principle that’s quietly underpinning all of her client work: better questions create better thinking, and better thinking creates better strategy. Using real client examples around imposter syndrome, health scares, and offer doubt, Mills shows how the “obvious” problem is almost never the real one, and shares the exact questions she asks to get to what’s actually going on. The episode closes with a five-question audit you can run on your own business right now.
Why Better Questions Create Better Business Strategy
Mills opens with the belief driving her coaching work: breakthroughs rarely come from better answers, they come from better questions. She explains why strategy on its own so rarely creates change unless the thinking behind it shifts first, and why she now goes into what she calls “detective mode” with clients rather than jumping straight to solutions.
The Coaching Questions That Change Everything
A recap of the core questions Mills returns to again and again with clients: Who told you that? Where’s the evidence? What keeps happening? What’s that protecting you from? This section explains why these questions change the whole frame around a problem, and why once the frame shifts, the right strategy tends to become obvious.
Better Question Business Audit
Take five to ten minutes with a pen and paper to work through these questions properly. Don’t rush them.
- What problem are you trying to solve right now, written down exactly as your brain says it?
- What makes you so sure that this is a real problem, and what evidence do you actually have versus what you might be assuming?
- What keeps happening? Look for the pattern in your decisions or behaviour that keeps repeating.
- What is the story you have attached to that pattern, and what have you started believing because it keeps happening?
- If this was not the real problem, what else could be true?
If you reach question five and genuinely don’t know the answer, that is often exactly where real coaching begins.
How to Find the Real Problem Behind Imposter Syndrome
A client came to Mills convinced she wasn’t good enough to teach, despite lighting up every time she talked about it. Instead of working on confidence, Mills asked what the inner voice was actually saying. The real fear underneath wasn’t a lack of ability, it was the fear of being exposed and failing publicly. This section walks through how naming the real fear changed the entire coaching approach.
Why a Health Scare Can Make You Doubt Your Business
Another client, a hands-on practitioner, had a health scare and became convinced she couldn’t return to working with clients. Rather than rebuilding her confidence, Mills kept asking “and then what?” until the real fear surfaced: not the health issue itself, but letting clients down and losing their trust. The section explores how years of putting clients first had trained her nervous system to associate success with danger, and why the real work was rebuilding safety, not confidence.
What to Ask Before You Rewrite Your Offer or Messaging
When clients say “I need a new offer” or “my messaging isn’t working,” Mills doesn’t start rewriting. She asks what made their brain go there and where the evidence is. Nine times out of ten there isn’t any solid evidence at all, just a quiet week, a comparison to someone else online, or tiredness. This section covers how to tell the difference between a genuinely broken offer and a thinking problem disguised as one.
Let’s Connect
Come say hi in the DMs on Instagram @mills_gray , especially if any of this resonated with you. You can also join the conversation over in the Facebook group Mind Your Mindset, or head to www.millsgray.com to find out more about working with Mills. And if you want more on the thinking behind all of this, check out Mills’s book, The Rebellious Leader.