Discover Your Coaching Niche

In terms of getting clients, coaches mentioned a large number of personal blockers which ranged from self-sabotage, a lack of confidence to not knowing client needs.  It also encompassed being unclear on your proposition, and having a lack of personal organisation, a lack of appropriate systems or business processes.

These seemingly large variety of problems stem from two or three common causes.

Lack of Commitment

Some are related to a lack of commitment to coaching or to a particular target market.  This in turn may be due to not being clear on the reasons you are coaching in the first place.  The symptoms tend to include self-sabotage, procrastination, a lack of confidence, a lack of passion for either coaching itself or your chosen target market.

The remedy here is to have a target market that you are passionate about and to ensure that coaching is the right discipline for you.  When you’re passionate about your target market and what you can do for them, self-sabotage, procrastination, and a lack of confidence are unlikely to occur.

Lack of Personal Organisation

Other issues are more to do with personal organisation, and establishing systems for regularly occurring situations like billing, scheduling coaching appointments, sending out welcome packs and the like.  Symptoms here include a feeling of overwhelm, of not having enough time and being event-driven rather than being proactive.

The solution to these issues is the implementation of processes and systems that are appropriate to your coaching operation.  These needn’t be complex, and don’t all have to be computerised.  They do however need to be simple to operate.

You don’t have to invent all your own systems.  You can ask more experienced coaches what systems or procedures they use, or how they deal with specific operational issues.  There are several coaching forums online that are very useful for newly established coaches.  The one I recommend is the Eurocoach List .

Lack of Belief in your abilities

This frequently manifests itself as self-talk such as “I’m not good enough”.  This is much more common in newly qualified coaches.

The solution to this is to get out and coach anything that moves.  There is nothing like focused action to render beliefs such as this as meaningless.  Then when you get good results, make sure you obtain a testimonial.  Publicise these testimonials on your website, your blog, newsletter, PR, brochure and anywhere else that’s relevant.

powered by performancing firefox

powered by performancing firefox

Comments are closed.