I was chatting to one of our clients this week about her experience across the two years she’s been working with us. When she first joined us, she was concerned that learning to be visible and build influence in her niche might ask her to become someone else. Two years on, she’s not only built a recognisable presence in her space – she’s discovering wonderful things about who she is in that space. The way she articulated how that’s happened makes me really proud of what we teach.
Let me explain what I mean.
Same Skill, Different Conversations
Her breakthrough started with a reframe that is obvious once you understand what you need to do to find clients who pay a professional rate for your coaching, but isn’t obvious at all when you’re the coach sitting in doubt at the beginning of your journey to having professional level client acquisition skills. Coaching and the various aspects of client acquisition, she reflected, aren’t different skills. They’re the same skill applied to different conversations. In coaching, you centre the client. You listen, you reflect back what you’re hearing so they see themselves in your words and their own thinking becomes visible to them. In marketing, the work is identical. You describe the specific problem the people in your niche are wrestling with in language they understand, because they speak it. You reflect their reality back to them. They see themselves in what you’ve written and think, “she understands what this is actually like.” That’s not manipulation (which is of course what we all worry about when we think of marketing), it’s respect and it’s a skill we use often in coaching.
Clarity Before Resentment Sets In
From there, she mapped what she’s learned onto the contracting work we do in coaching. Contracting, she said, is what stops the resentment cycle before it starts. When you’re clear about your fees, what the client will need to invest, and what transformation might be possible for them, the drama triangle never gets a foothold. She doesn’t offer free sessions disguised as discovery calls and there’s no unspoken resentment on your side because you’ve delivered unpaid work and the client didn’t somehow magically “get it.” When you contract clearly, whether in coaching or when you’re finding clients, you treat people as adults capable of their own decisions and the relationship stays between equals. That’s empowering for both sides.
The Values Align
She went on to explain that she doesn’t experience any tension between this clarity and the values that coaching stands for. The contracting she is doing to find clients is ethical and the reflection she is practising is ethical. The autonomy she is supporting in potential clients – treating them as capable people, not victims needing rescue – is ethical. The skills she’s learned and is continuing to learn aren’t at odds with her coaching values, they are an expression of them.
Introducing Yourself, Not Losing Yourself
What she was really afraid of, when she started, was that she’d lose herself. She told me that she worried that building visibility would mean becoming a version of herself she didn’t recognise, not least because she’s an introvert. That’s not what’s happened. She isn’t losing herself, she’s introducing herself more fully. She’s rediscovered a side of her professional self that’s always been there – a capacity to see patterns, to notice what people are struggling with, to reflect that back in language they can hear. In her previous work, before coaching, she had those skills and was doing that reflection in corporate settings. She just hadn’t connected it to coaching, and she’d certainly never thought of it as the foundation for building a coaching practice.
Two years in, and I’m delighted to say that she is indeed still her wonderful self. She said that she feels ‘more herself’, actually. That she’s bringing her full experience into her coaching practice, and that shared experience is what makes her potential clients want to work with her.
An FAQ
Coaches – especially introverted ones – ask me this same question in different ways: if I learn to market myself, will I have to compromise who I am? And even though I promise them that they won’t have to, I watch them relax when they experience what I’m talking about and realised the opposite is true. Learning to be visible and build influence in your niche isn’t learning to be someone else, it’s learning to show up as yourself, completely, in a way you haven’t done before.
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