As coaches, we know that reframing our thinking is the best way to change our lives. We help clients shift perspectives daily, guiding them from limiting beliefs to empowering possibilities. We understand the transformative power of accepting reality rather than fighting it.
Yet on one topic, we find it very hard indeed to follow our own advice – accepting that we need business skills beyond coaching delivery.
I often wonder why that is.
The Emotional Sequence
When coaches first realise they need to learn an entirely different skill set in addition to their coaching skills to run a successful coaching business, the emotional response is interesting. I regularly have conversations with coaches who are struggling with disbelief, frustration, and sometimes even anger. When I see this, it’s not mild disappointment – it can be a deep-seated feeling of betrayal towards their training providers. Coaches feel they have been misled by organisations they trusted deeply. When I do see this, it’s particularly painful because the level of trust and loyalty we give to our coach training providers is extraordinarily high.
We’ve usually bared our souls during coaching sessions, made ourselves vulnerable, and invested emotionally in ways that go far beyond typical educational experiences. To have this trust waver is hard.
Some coaches become trapped in resentment. Some of us spend years being sceptical about the idea of investing in learning how to build a coaching business. I see this kind of coach adding bitter comments to client acquisition threads in professional groups, their anger still as raw as if they’d discovered the gap in their skills only yesterday.
When I do see it, this resentment is particularly acute for highly intelligent and professionally successful people. Feeling like you’ve been fooled when you’re used to being competent and knowledgeable is a hard feeling to process.
Eventually, coaches reach a point at which they must make a choice. Do I want to coach for a living, or do I want to stay angry and resentful? Some coaches get past the resentment and realise they can either stay mad or get even by mastering the game. Others remain stuck, their coaching careers stalled by their refusal to accept reality.
The coaches who move forward make a crucial mental shift: from I was fooled to there’s a gap in my education that I need to fill. This reframe preserves their competence whilst acknowledging reality.
Why This Reframe Can Be Difficult
Several factors make this particular mindset shift exceptionally challenging for some coaches:
- Professional Identity Crisis: We’re used to being the experts, the ones with answers. Accepting beginner status in something we thought we could do can threaten our professional identity in ways that feel fundamentally uncomfortable.
- Counterintuitive Principles: Marketing works differently than we expect. The need for extreme focus is counterintuitive. When we’ve relied on our intelligence our whole lives, accepting that client acquisition operates differently from what we believed can be genuinely hard.
- Trust Betrayal: Unlike other learning situations, this feels like a betrayal of trust from organisations we opened ourselves to completely. The emotional investment makes the disappointment more acute.
‘I’m A Special Case’
Even when coaches commit to learning business skills and join The Coaching Revolution, many spend their time with us with a special case mindset. They believe it’s different for them for one of many reasons, which can include their background, the type of clients they want to work with, or their particular coaching approach. Thankfully, for most, there’s a moment when they realise they can either accept that what they believed to be true isn’t, or they can waste time and money trying to prove the rules don’t apply to them.
The irony is that as coaches, we excel at helping others reframe their thinking and accept difficult realities. We guide clients through resistance to change daily. We understand that fighting reality is futile and that acceptance is the first step toward transformation. Yet, we often struggle to apply these same principles to our own business development needs. We resist the kind of mindset shift that we facilitate all the time in our coaching.
The coaches who succeed are those who eventually apply coaching principles to their own situation.
- They recognise that being angry about needing business skills is as futile as a client being angry about needing to change their behaviour to get different results.
- They accept that coach training equipped them with 50% of what they need – excellent delivery skills.
The other 50% – client acquisition and business development – requires different learning from different sources. This isn’t a failure of our coach training, which did an excellent job of honing our coaching skills. Let’s face it, that is what we paid them to do.
The path forward requires the same principles we teach our clients. An acceptance of reality, a willingness to learn new skills, and recognition that growth often feels uncomfortable. We can choose to remain angry that business skills weren’t included in our coaching training, or we can channel that energy into mastering the skills we need. We can stay resentful about the gap, or we can fill it.
The coaches building successful practices are those who choose to get even rather than stay mad. They applied their own coaching wisdom to their business development needs.
I often wonder why we find it so hard to take our own advice on this particular topic. Perhaps because accepting that we need help with something so fundamental to our success requires the same vulnerability we ask of our clients. Maybe it’s time to model the courage we encourage in them every day.
An Opportunity
If you’d like the opportunity for a robust conversation about this, why not join my next free challenge, Nail Your Niche? There’s even an option to upgrade to a VIP version, which gives you 3 x 60-minute group mentoring sessions with me for just £99 (inc VAT) – that gives us time for a lot of robust conversations!
Are you ready to let go of resentment and find our how effective, ethical marketing works? Register for the challenge by clicking here.