Learning how her dad – the late great mountaineer Rob Hall – set out to achieve his entrepreneurial goals at a young age inspired Sarah Arnold-Hall to reach for the stars.
Many of us have goals, dreams or projects we want to get off the ground. But it can feel hard to come up with a plan, take action, and get the job done. After all, there is no school on how to follow through with dreams or how to harness motivation. Most of us get stuck in procrastination or “indecision confusion”.
Or we get distracted by the non-stop washing-machine-like-cycle of “the daily grind” i.e. all the things we need to do daily – usually for everyone else, but not ourselves.
Meet Sarah Arnold-Hall. She is a high-performance coach who helps people all over the world to achieve goals by overcoming procrastination.
Speaking with Sarah Arnold-Hall via zoom from her Wellington home, it is easy to see her coaching style is confident, motivating, uplifting, empathetic and powerfully informed by her own personal success at goal-crushing. She also has a strong depth of education that underpins her thinking including a degree in psychology and philosophy from Wellington’s Victoria University and a course in performance coaching from the High Performance Institute in Arizona.
You could call her an action girl. This may conjure up ideas of leather-clad celebrities in Hollywood movies with superpowers. But Arnold-Hall is more of a real-girl, beauty with brains, behind others’ strategic thinking. She lives on a high of sky-high confidence and is not afraid to strut confidently in sky high heels too.
She helps others to take bold, gutsy action on their goals by giving them a plan. She also helps to change clients’ performance mindset or guide them on how exactly to make career transitions.
She inspires clients on how to gain momentum by taking action. This is more important than trying to do things with perfectionism.
Here is a tile from her instagram, which shows the reality of showing up daily. It does not always feel like we do things fully and perfectly, but you keep gaining momentum over time.
Women particularly put a lot of pressure on themselves to do things perfectly. “We end up burning out much more quickly.”
Sarah Arnold-Hall helps women prioritise what they need to do and shift their thinking into believing in themselves to get things done. She works out the best steps and skips the rest. She helps women stay away from thoughts that “derail them” too and instead find evidence that everything is working and is on track.
The 26-year-old is achieving some remarkable results in the business world. She works with Silicon Valley leaders, YouTube stars, ordinary clients wanting a career pivot, to Olympians.
Among the inspiring client testimonials on her website is Olympian Apurvi Chandela, a former World Number 1 Rifle Shooter, who won a gold medal in 2019. Chandela writes in her testimonial that Sarah Arnold-Hall helped her through a phase of stagnancy in her career. Through their work together she lives with more self-confidence which keeps her focused.
The performance coach says she cannot give names of the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs she works with but reveals that one runs a self-drive truck company, while another creates robot arm technology.
A YouTube star (with half a million subscribers) whom she has helped to transform to become a relationship coach is Katrin Berndt.
Part of Berndt’s testimony reads: “You won’t be able to go through her program without becoming the next best version of yourself.”
Another success story on Sarah Arnold-Hall’s website includes helping a client open a bookstore in 9 weeks during the pandemic, at which she made her sales target goal in just one day.
Most of Sarah Arnold-Hall’s clients are in America (60%), while the rest are in Europe, India, Britain, Australia and New Zealand. This is due to the success of her followings on Instagram and her podcast, How to Take Action. The podcast continues to have high engagement on Spotify.
Clients join in on her online weekly Action Academy chats from around the world. Sarah Arnold-Hall reckons her superpower is specialising in helping clients overcome procrastination and to take action. She shares how to break through five key emotions which lead to procrastination.
5 Key Emotions that create Procrastination
1. Confusion.
Most people do not know what steps to take to achieve their goals. Arnold-Hall simplifies the steps to non-negotiable things to do, called “The All it Takes Plan”.
2. Overwhelm.
“I help people shift that thought that there is not enough time to execute the plan”.
3. Self-Doubt.
Women suffer from this more than men because we tend to question if we are good enough and get imposter syndrome. Sarah Arnold-Hall uses strategies like getting her clients to focus instead on how they might be helping others by putting their plan into action. This shifts the focus from self-doubt to empowering clients to help.
4. Fear.
This is usually based on a question of “what if I fail?” Sarah Arnold-Hall helps clients to steer their brains in a different direction and answer questions around what they are going to do to avoid failing.
5. Lethargy.
Sarah Arnold-Hall gets clients to understand that it is hard for us all to take action and this is normal. She steers clients on a route that is more “fun” and so the tasks are easier to action. Arnold-Hall’s entrepreneurial skills are in her blood. She is the daughter of the late legendary Kiwi mountaineer Rob Hall, who was awarded an MBE for mountaineering.
She was not yet born when her pioneering father tragically lost his life on Everest in 1996. He made five ascents of the Earth’s highest peak, Mount Everest, and made headlines doing seven of the world’s highest summits in seven months.
Arnold-Hall says Kiwis tend to know her father for his mountaineering, but his entrepreneurship is what she connects with the most.
She draws on her famous father’s lesser-known business and entrepreneurial philosophies (shared with her via her mother). These skills have helped her build her own globally successful performance coaching business.
“I have the same spirit and energy about making the impossible possible”.
She says learning how her father set out to achieve his entrepreneurial goals at a young age inspired her to become one of New Zealand’s only experts in overcoming procrastination.
“My dad left school at 16 and began working for AlpSports, where he learnt how to sew and manufacture. Then, when he was 24, he started his own business, called Outside – making outdoor equipment. Outside quickly grew, and he had several people working for him. Then at age 30, he co-founded a Himalayan guiding company that made it possible for skilled climbers to attempt peaks that were previously reserved for professional mountaineers. It’s a part of his life that is less well-known, but I feel most connected to my dad through our shared love of entrepreneurship and helping people achieve their goals.”
Today, she is focused on helping people simplify their “impossible goals” to make them achievable.
“My coaching philosophy is that if people can get themselves to simplify their plan and then actually follow through with it, they can hit any goal they set. We often make things harder for ourselves than is necessary when aiming to achieve big goals, which is why we end up procrastinating even on the things we most love to do.”
Arnold-Hall says she has not always had sky high confidence. She had to overcome imposter syndrome when she started coaching at age 21.
“I had some imposter syndrome about not being ‘old enough’, but over time I discovered that it’s not age that makes someone a great coach; it’s the depth of understanding of the tools”.
Arnold-Hall believes the same goes for entrepreneurship, something she started engaging with as a teenager through blogging. At 16, she realised during a school career day that she wanted to be in business for herself. She started a t-shirt line, a travel blog and a social media management business before discovering her aptitude for coaching.
She has built an unshakable trust that she can achieve her own goals too because it all comes down to one thing: Action.
Some goals she has proudly hit include:
- Climbing Mt Kilimanjaro.
- Building an audience of 30,000 people.
- Quitting her job to become her own boss full-time.
- 50 consecutive push ups.
- Meditating for 365 days in a row.
- Hitting $200,000 yearly revenue in her own company. The next target is $1 million by 2025.
Specialising in group coaching, Arnold-Hall has helped a string of business leaders push through their barriers and simplify the path to their goals.
“You don’t need to give it 100% energy every day to move closer to your goal. Showing up matters more than showing up perfectly, so I encourage people dealing with overwhelm to ask themselves, ‘how might I be making this task harder than it needs to be?’”
In the aftermath of Covid, she is working with a lot of people who want to achieve big goals but feel overwhelmed by the huge tasks ahead of them.
“In 2023, people are feeling the pressure to ‘do it all’, but that pressure often ends up having the opposite effect, and procrastination seeps in. It’s an issue that affects even the most ambitious people, but you can overcome it if you learn how to consciously create your thoughts and feelings instead of letting them control you”.
Sarah Arnold-Hall says everyone can take back control of their goals and aspirations by learning effective techniques and tools to attain them.
“Being resourceful and able to ‘figure it out’ is what matters. My dad was extremely resourceful and great with people – he could always figure out how to create a situation where everyone felt like they had achieved what they wanted. I’m proud to help people achieve some truly incredible things – a passion I think aligns with my dad’s,” she says.
5 Tips to Set Bold, Gutsy Goals
1. Don’t be afraid to set impossible goals.
2. Take a small action daily that pushes you forward.
3. Simplify your goal as much as possible.
4. Intentionally show up to discomfort. This is part of the process – for everyone.
5. Time management is important. Schedule things into your day including fun stuff – so you know you can get it all done.
Related article: How to create your own wellbeing goals that actually work
