When we qualify as a coach, we do it alongside a cohort. We go through training together and finish at the same time. We stay in touch as we step into practice, swapping numbers and creating WhatsApp groups, occasionally meeting for coffee. It feels like the obvious place to go when we’re stuck on something, so we ask them for advice when we’re struggling to find clients. The problem is they’re also stuck.
Our coaching cohort consists of coaches who are also trying to figure out how to find paying clients and very few of us have solved it. The ones who have, have the privilege of monetiseable credibility and they offer advice like “just have really good conversations” because that’s what they did – but it’s not working for you. For the rest, the advice they give is an educated guess and more often than not it’s simply hope dressed up as strategy. We can feel the warmth in the conversation, the genuine support, the lack of judgment, but none of that changes the fact that we’re getting guidance from people who don’t know the answer either.
What makes this worse than working alone is that it feels productive. We finish these conversations feeling understood and heard, and this is genuinely valuable for the emotional side of being a new coach. However we’re no closer to having paying clients, and over time that gap creates a quiet certainty that this won’t actually work. The support we’ve been getting was real, but it hasn’t solved anything.
You Can’t Be Coached Across A Knowledge Gap
The fact is that our colleagues, the intelligent, well-meaning coaches we’re asking, are statistically likely to become part of the 82% whose businesses fail because they haven’t learned how to find clients who pay the kind of fees we talked about when we were training. When everyone in the conversation is struggling with the same thing, “how do I find clients” becomes “at least we’re not alone” becomes “the profession must be saturated” becomes “maybe this was never realistic.” The talk stops being about solutions and starts being about commiseration, and that feels good because it stops us having to figure it out alone.
Peer support is genuine and necessary because we do need people who understand what it’s like to be a new external coach, who get the imposter syndrome, who remember what it felt like to step away, or start to move away, from a fifteen plus-year career and have to figure out who we are without that identity. Go to your peers with that – go to them with the emotional complexity and the real confusion. When you’re asking about client acquisition however, about pricing, or positioning, or how to articulate the value of coaching in a way that non-coaches can assimilate, you’re asking people who haven’t worked that out themselves. They can’t help you solve something they haven’t solved and – most importantly of all – you can’t be coached across a knowledge gap. The conversation we need isn’t one our coach training cohort can give us because the fact is that we have a knowledge gap.
A More Useful Conversation
The conversation you need isn’t happening in your cohort. It’s happening in the upcoming Coaching Revolution Circle community, which is free to join and opens on 11 May.
Inside you’ll find coaches who’ve already figured this out, there are free resources as well as truly useful and very low cost resources. Best of all, there are actual conversations about what works and what doesn’t from people who have mastered the science of articulating the value of coaching and built successful coaching practices as a result.
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