We’re human. Humans are social creatures. Humans like other humans. They like community.
We’re also coaches. Coaches are also social creatures. Coaches like other coaches (we speak the same language).
However…
Coaches end up working alone. This is madness and fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way.
Brave New World
When we start our coaching businesses, we are excited and delighted. It is such a great time for us.
As time goes on, we find that we start to feel isolated. Coaches are usually people-people and isolating people-people is a fast route to unhappiness at best and mental ill-health at worst.
What coaches need is community.
INCROWD
When we started The Coaching Revolution, we wanted to create a vibrant community where coaches could share, collaborate and generally hang out together. We realised that this community would be secondary to our mentoring programme, it would be a nice add-on.
I also believed at that time that our community could become something much bigger than an add-on, and I was determined to grow it into the most exciting place that a coach could be.
I wanted our community to be exciting in terms of coaches finding their tribe. For coaches to understand that this tribe was made up of people just like them and for them to want to join us. That our tribe is made up of coaches who support one another (rather than compete with one another), who spend time together because they want to, and who collaborate.
It’s taken nearly three years, but I’m delighted to say that we’ve achieved it!
INCROWD is vibrant, it’s full of professional coaches; we share, we collaborate and we even pass enquiries to each other.
Lockdown has cemented working relationships and grown friendships because we have set aside an hour a day, every day to hang out together. We have run our Zoom cafe at 5pm on weekdays since 23 March. Everyone in the community is invited, but there’s no obligation to come. We might talk work, we might not. We’ve laughed our heads off and we’ve been sad with each other. We have grown to know each other and out of that, a wonderful thing has happened.
INCROWD is now the number one reason that our mentees give when I ask them what’s best about The Coaching Revolution. Learning how to get paying clients is high on that list too, but once you know how to market yourself effectively and you’re into the rinse and repeat phase, community and support is what it’s all about.
This is the sort of thing that our members say:
INCROWD kept me sane during lockdown!
I’ve got a group of people who are both friends and colleagues and who have my back 100%
I’m so glad I found you, I was working alone and it was hard!
I realised almost immediately that this was something really special.
I didn’t think the community would be important for me, but actually it’s become the most important
Face-To-Face Too
Three times a year, we meet up face-to-face. Tomorrow was supposed to be that day.
Rather than simply cancel, we’ve moved online. What we haven’t done is charged for the day. That’s not who we are.
I signed up for a face-to-face training event in January that was supposed to happen last week. I paid handsomely for it too. When the event couldn’t go ahead, it was moved to a Zoom day – but there was no refund. Not even a percentage refund. I didn’t like that.
Our training days are about getting our coaches together to deliver a fantastic day of high-quality training. Could we charge £££? Yes, of course we could – we deliver a full day of fabulous value. Do we? No, it’s not who we are. We charge under £55 and that means that everyone can come.
Try Us Out
Our community was originally only for our mentees. However, it became apparent that those who were not able to access our mentoring programme also wanted to be able to join the community. They wanted to benefit from a supportive and accepting group of people, who pool experience and solve problems together. They are working alone, but they want to be part of our team.
So now all coaches can take advantage of our community by subscribing on a month-by-month basis. For just £59pm, you can become one of the INCROWD. You can join here.
There’s no ongoing commitment, but we hope you’ll stay forever.