Three times a year, I run a free challenge called Nail Your Niche for qualified coaches who are struggling to find clients who can, and will, pay a professional rate for their coaching. One of the things that strikes me at the start of every challenge is how many participants arrive not as beginners, but as people who have already tried to solve this problem, sometimes repeatedly, and still don’t have an answer. They’ve read the books, followed the advice, worked through other programmes, and quite possibly spent hours prompting AI tools to help them figure out who they coach and what they offer. They’re not stuck because they haven’t tried. They’re stuck because nothing they’ve tried has actually worked.
That exhaustion is worth taking seriously, because it shapes how people show up to the challenge, and how much they trust that this time will be different.
Multiple Failed Attempts
The feedback from our January challenge was striking on this point. Several participants mentioned arriving having already done LinkedIn programmes, read widely on the topic, or spent time with AI tools trying to generate a niche. One person described having tried to identify their niche using AI and all the available advice from other coaches, and still not having a conceptual framework that made sense. Another had completed a previous iteration of the challenge without fully engaging, and came back specifically to do the work properly. A third had changed their niche and wanted to go through the process correctly this time, having read my book but not being sure they’d got it right.
What connects these experiences is the feeling of having put in genuine effort and still not arrived anywhere useful. That’s a particular kind of frustrating, because it starts to feel like the problem might be with us rather than with the approach. It isn’t, but that’s where our minds tend to go.
The Usual Advice Isn’t Relevant To Coaches
Most of the guidance available on niching is either too abstract or too prescriptive for coaches. The abstract version tells us to follow our passion, work with people like our former selves, or choose the clients we most enjoyed working with. These aren’t bad starting points, but they don’t give us a framework for making a decision we can actually test and build on. The prescriptive version hands us a formula – pick an industry, pick a problem, done – without helping us understand why the formula works or how to apply it when the obvious answers don’t feel right.
What’s missing from both approaches is the logic. Niching isn’t about self-expression and it isn’t about filling in a template. It’s about understanding where your potential clients are and what they need, specifically enough that you can reach them and speak to them directly. Once that logic clicks, the decision becomes much less agonising, because you’re no longer asking “who am I?” and instead asking “who needs what I can offer, and where are they?”
The Relief Of A Framework
This is what participants in the January challenge described as the turning point: not inspiration, but structure. One person said the niche grid provided on the first day was a light bulb moment. Another said they finally understood the conceptual framework that had been missing from everything else they’d tried. Several people described their minds being blown, not by new information exactly, but by a way of organising information they already had that suddenly made the path forward clear.
If you’ve tried to define your niche and come away more confused than when you started, the problem almost certainly isn’t that you’re a difficult case or that your background is too varied or that your coaching is too holistic to pin down. Those are the stories we tell ourselves when a process hasn’t worked. The more likely explanation is that the process itself was missing something, and that with the right framework in place, this is a more straightforward problem to solve than it has been made to seem.
An Opportunity
If you’d like to understand more about where your niche might be, may I offer you a way to learn a bit more for free? Why not join my next free challenge, Nail Your Niche?
We run it several times a year and 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 provides us with time for a lot of robust conversations about how ethical marketing works.