Some difficulties in building a coaching business are temporary. Others are permanent. Most coaches can’t tell the difference, and that confusion costs them their businesses.
The Temporary Difficulties We Avoid
Learning how to market a coaching business properly is difficult. It takes time, it requires investment, and it means admitting we need to learn something we thought we could just wing. Many of us feel genuinely duped when we realise this, even angry that our coaching qualification didn’t prepare us for it. We often feel quite sure we can figure it out ourselves, that we don’t need formal training in something that seems like it should be straightforward.
The thing about winging it in a professional area where we have zero knowledge and expertise is that it’s ineffective at best and futile at worst. We wouldn’t take someone’s appendix out having read a book about how to do it, would we? Yet somehow we think we can build a successful business by cobbling together random advice from social media and Seth Godin books and hope something sticks.
We avoid learning proper client acquisition because we think the difficulty will be permanent. We imagine ourselves forever having to do marketing, forever having to be visible, forever having to put ourselves out there. That feels overwhelming, so we convince ourselves there must be an easier way. We keep waiting for something magic to happen, for our businesses to suddenly take off, for the silver bullet to appear that will make it all simple.
The difficulty of learning client acquisition properly lasts about six months to a year if you commit to it properly. Then it becomes competence. Then it becomes second nature. It’s front-loaded difficulty that transforms into capability.
The Permanent Difficulties We Don’t See Coming
What we don’t realise is that by avoiding the temporary difficulty, we’re signing up for something far worse – permanent difficulty that just gets worse over time.
There’s the feeling of being inadequate, of failing when it seems that everyone around you is succeeding. Of feeling foolish month after month, year after year. That doesn’t get easier with time, it gets harder. It chips away at your confidence, your energy, your belief that you can make this work.
If, when you speak to other coaches about what you’re doing to find clients, you’re woolly about the detail, you need help. If, when someone asks you what you do, you go all waffley, you need help. You can’t answer in concrete terms what your marketing efforts involve, or even what it is you actually do, because you’re not doing the right things. You’re doing random things and hoping they’ll work, but you don’t have a process or a strategy other than ‘hope’ and deep down, you know that hope isn’t a good strategy.
This permanent difficulty doesn’t stay at the same level, it compounds. Each month of no clients makes the next month harder. Each failed attempt at “putting yourself out there” makes the next attempt more daunting. Each conversation where you can’t clearly explain what you do or how you help them makes you feel more lost.
The average coach stays stuck in this permanent difficulty for about two years. That’s as long as most people can carry on before they run out of energy, momentum, ideas, money, or will to live. Then they give up and tell themselves the profession is saturated, that they missed their chance, that it just wasn’t meant to be.
What Changes When You Choose Temporary Difficulty
When coaches finally decide to learn client acquisition properly, something shifts immediately. It’s not that results appear overnight – they don’t – but the experience of running their business changes completely.
The biggest feeling is relief – there’s a process to follow, a strategy to implement. They know what needs doing and in what order. Compare that to having a list of hundreds of things with no way of prioritising because you don’t know what’s important. The relief of having a clear path forward, even when that path requires work, is immense.
They’re also always amazed by how much more there is to consider than they imagined. Client acquisition isn’t just “be visible and have conversations.” It’s a complete professional skill set with frameworks, principles, and counterintuitive knowledge that needs to be learned properly. But once they’re learning it, the difficulty has a purpose. It’s building towards something rather than just being difficult for no reason.
The temporary difficulty of learning gets progressively easier as competence builds. The permanent difficulty of not learning just gets progressively worse as time passes and nothing changes.
The Two-Year Question
If you’ve been trying to build your coaching business for a while now, ask yourself this: what does your marketing involve, in concrete terms? Can you describe your process clearly? For example, do you know exactly who you’re marketing to (if the word ‘anyone’ appears in your answer, it’s not focused enough). Do you have a strategy you’re implementing systematically? Do you know what effective marketing actually looks like?
If you’re woolly about it, if you’re waffley, if you can’t answer those questions with clarity and confidence, you’re living in permanent difficulty. You’re experiencing the kind of hard that doesn’t lead anywhere.
How long have you been doing this? Six months? A year? Eighteen months? The average coach gives up at two years. Where are you on that timeline, and is what you’re currently doing showing any signs of working?
Difficult Now or Difficult Forever
Learning how to find clients properly is difficult for about six months to a year. Having no clients while your confidence erodes and your bank balance dwindles is difficult for as long as you’re willing to endure it – typically about two years before you give up entirely.
Both are difficult. Only one is temporary. Only one transforms into capability and results. Only one leads to the coaching business you actually want.
You’re already experiencing difficulty. The question isn’t how to avoid it – you can’t. The question is whether your current difficulty is the temporary kind that’s building towards something, or the permanent kind that’s just keeping you stuck.
Most struggling coaches are living with permanent difficulties because they’re avoiding temporary ones. They’ve chosen the pain that compounds over time over the pain that transforms into competence.
Which one have you chosen? And more importantly, is it getting you what you want?
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