…if I must market myself…
That was said. Out loud. By a coach. In my hearing!
I was stunned.
How on earth has the coaching industry got so f**ked up that coaches can believe this nonsense?
This is the flip side of the adage that if your coaching is good enough, your clients will find you. It follows then that if your clients aren’t finding you, then your coaching must not be good enough, right?
The adage is wrong, and the belief that your coaching isn’t good enough if your clients don’t somehow deduce what it is that you do is also wrong. Coaching skills and marketing skills are utterly different and both are required in equal quantities to build a financially viable coaching business.
The Only Profession That Thinks Having To Market Means You Must Be Failing!
If you speak to a lawyer, an accountant, an architect, a financier, a consultant, an engineer – any of them who own their own businesses and tell that them that if they have to market it means that they have failed, they’d look at you in surprise. I asked people I know in these professions who have their own businesses what they think about the idea that marketing = failure of their professional skills and without exception, they looked perplexed.
These are some of their comments:
- How are my clients supposed to find me if they don’t know where I am or what I do?
- Marketing my area of specialism stops allcomers knocking at my door. I don’t do family law for example, and I don’t want potential divorcees filling up my diary!
- When I’m specific about what I do in my marketing, it makes it easy for others to refer clients to me – they know what I do and what I don’t do.
- My clients are grateful that they found me, they wouldn’t have found me without my marketing
If you look at that list and imagine that it was a coach talking, there’s nothing here that doesn’t make sense, is there?
New Reality
I believe strongly in the concept of accepting reality. If your current reality doesn’t have enough clients in it, accept it. If you want your future reality to have more clients in it, then get out of your own way and learn how to market.
Professional marketing is not scuzzy, or dirty. It doesn’t cross any core values. Will it feel weird to begin with? Of course it will, it’s a new skill and like all new skills it currently exists outside your comfort zone. Once you’ve learned it and embraced it, you’ll have welcomed it into your new – larger – comfort zone. And you’ll have clients.
Think of learning to market as a bridge to your new reality – because I can promise you, that’s exactly what it is.
Should we talk? This is my diary.