‘The support of others’ for the purpose of this blog is the support of like-minded others. Even more specifically, I’m talking about the support of other coaches.
Unique Situation
Within the coaching profession, there is little general understanding of what the work involves.
There are a variety of ideas about what we do and they range from those who think a life coach is someone who lives a great life and tells you how to live yours, to those who get angry at the thought of paying to be asked questions. One intelligent professional woman I know gets spitting mad about the idea of coaches. She said to me ‘I pay for a transfer of knowledge, not just some airhead asking me questions!’. You see, she thinks she knows what coaching is, but has clearly never been coached or she wouldn’t talk like that, would she?
It’s easy to see how coaches tend to flock together, isn’t it?
Coaching Communities & Support
There are thousands of coaching communities offering support. Probably tens of thousands of them. However, I would argue that there isn’t another one like the one we have at The Coaching Revolution.
Let me explain.
Coaching communities are almost always focused on coaching technique On how to be an even better coach than you already are. They exist around coaching ‘types’ think co-active, agile, intuitive, ICF, NLP…. I could go on.
Each of these groups contains coaches who are absolutely besotted with their particular kind of coaching – and with very good reason! Coaching is amazing. It’s a superpower.
There’s a ‘but’ coming – I suspect you guessed that?
But…
Being a master of your craft is very satisfying. It is a great feeling to be at the top of your game. To get feedback from those in your community about how wonderful you are at what you do.
However, being a master coach doesn’t bring you clients. It means that once you’re in front of clients, they’re in for a life changing experience for sure. But actually getting in front of them isn’t anything to do with how good a coach you are.
Marketing A Professional Services Business
As I’ve said before, the skills you need to find clients who want to pay a professional rate for your service are an utterly different set of skills to the ones you need to be a fabulous coach.
They are marketing and sales skills.
There are no shortcut to these skills. In the same way that there’s no shortcut to gaining your coaching skills. The work you put in to the delivery skills side of your business is 50% of the work you need to do. The other 50% are the skills you need to create the opportunities to do the delivery.
Coaches join The Coaching Revolution to learn how to market their coaching skills, they need that support. They join to fill a knowledge gap. However, in joining us they get so much more than simply knowledge, they find support, champions, colleagues and the company of professional coaches who are working on learning the same skill set.
Monday Night Live
A single example of how this support manifests itself is Monday Night Live. For one hour, every Monday, we meet together for a training session. The topics vary enormously, but they are always linked to growing your client base.
Some of the classes are ‘how tos’ like how to use Twitter, or how to write to sell, how to podcast.
Other classes are far more interactive and are concerned with increasing your understanding of your client, the problem they face (that your coaching can help them solve) and what they need to hear in order to understand that you can help them.
Last Monday for example, we did the first of a two-part series. During the class, we all went into breakout rooms in twos or threes and took it in turn to talk about our clients and be asked questions about them. It’s the great thing about us all being coaches – we’re phenomenal question-askers!
The feedback from this first session was amazing. Everyone agreed that the questions they’d been asked had given them additional insight into their client and therefore into the direction their marketing should go. Next week, we’re going to make sure that the others get a turn to be quizzed about their client.
We get dozens of attendees at these classes because they are effective. Specifically, they are effective at getting inbound enquiries for our coaches and that in turn leads to paying clients.
The classes work, and the community that they’re built for also works. We support one another in our endeavours to find clients. Not looking at coaching techniques – that’s not what we’re for. We look at helping you to increase your client base one client at a time.
Other Ways In Which Our Community Works & Supports
We also hang out together every day in an hour-long ‘Zoom cafe’. Just to be clear, not everyone comes every day, but most coaches nip in and out of the daily cafe over time. You don’t have to stay for the whole hour, you can just stay for 10 minutes, but however long you stay, you’ll find your fellow coaches there, chilling out.
‘It’s like having colleagues again, except I actually like everyone’ is one of the best things anyone said of our community!
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