What Is A Coaching Community?

There are literally hundreds of coaching communities online. Whether your training provider has created the community, or perhaps a guru you follow, or simply a collection of coaches; these coaching communities are legion.

What these coaching groups have in common is that they’re all about, well, coaching. Even the ones that are supposedly about business are actually mostly about coaching.

The Content Of Coaching Groups

Most of the business-focused coaching groups I belong to are about the coaches in the group selling to each other. There are threads each week like ‘share your facebook page’ and ‘promo Wednesday’ in which all the members hop into the group and share, share, share their wares.

Other threads in these business groups are questions like ‘I’m a new coach and I want to find paying clients, how do I do that?’ followed by hundreds of answers, containing conflicting advice and sales pitches (for example; ‘I offer a $300 package especially designed to help coaches figure out their niche!’ or – even better – ‘I’ve PMed you’). 

Honestly, I rarely see anything of real value in the answers.

Coaching Groups In General

Coaching groups without a business focus tend to be full of questions about how to help clients through specific mental barriers etc.

This is useful advice if, of course, you actually have paying clients to help with these challenges.

Other questions in these groups tend to be of this ilk; ‘what are the main issues that you have in life that you’d like to be coached on?’. This type of question leaves me gasping for breath! This coach is looking for someone else to do the work for them in identifying where best to place their marketing efforts and that, dear reader, never works.

The Coaching Revolution Community

Our community is different. 

Our online group is a place where we talk about business development. All our mentees, plus all our mentors are in this group. We are all available to answer questions and to offer advice.

The kind of questions we get are things like; ‘Can I ask what ‘call to action’ you use in your social media marketing please, and the results you’ve had?’ and ‘I’ve had my first three enquiries this week and need to catch up with them to chat. Do you find Skype is better than a phone call for this kind of thing?’

We also meet on a webinar every Monday evening for an hour. In that hour, we don’t look at coaching materials, or talking about coaching problems. What we do is learn, and discuss different aspects of business development. We even have guest presenters sometimes, most recently a marketing consultant did a whole workshop on branding.

The Critical Difference

I have never belonged to a community like ours. Every single member of the community is on the same journey – to build a coaching business. The only difference between the newest and the most seasoned of us is the distance we have travelled on this road and the time it has taken us.

What this means for our new mentees is that they find – finally – a place where they actually get real support, round the clock (we have mentors and mentees around the globe!). 

Here are some answers from our members to the question ‘what’s do you like about our community?’:

  • Knowing there are several people going through similar experiences and being able to receive suggestions and advice from others who are making progress
  • Coaching can be a lonely business and it’s good to be in contact with a group of friendly coaches, who understand me and what I’m doing
  • It’s comfortable to express thoughts before going live with my marketing and to get feedback from fellow coaches
  • The weekly webinar to keep us involved in the Coaching Revolution mindset every week and learning extra stuff alongside the mentoring sessions; terrific added value

Do you feel supported in your journey towards creating your coaching business? If not, would you like to talk?

This is our diary.