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 most consistent things I observe across every challenge, regardless of who’s in the room, is how many of us arrive convinced that our situation is uniquely complicated. Our background is too varied, our coaching is too broad, or our circumstances are different from everyone else’s. We are, we believe, a special case.
The good news is that none of us is a special case, and understanding why that’s genuinely good news is one of the more useful things the challenge does.
The Special Case Story
The special case belief takes different forms depending on who’s holding it. For some of us, it’s about our background. Perhaps we’ve worked across multiple industries, or held an unusual combination of roles, and we can’t see how to distil that into a single niche without losing something important. For others, it’s about our coaching style. We work holistically, or intuitively, or in a way that doesn’t fit neatly into a category, and a niche feels like it would flatten something that’s actually complex. For others still, it’s about geography or culture. One of our January participants noted that some of the points discussed didn’t feel applicable in their country, which is a real consideration, but also a version of the same underlying belief that the standard framework won’t work for them specifically.
None of this is dishonest, these are genuine concerns, and they come from a real place. The problem is that the special case story, however well-founded it feels, functions as a reason not to make a decision, and that’s where it becomes costly.
What’s Happening
The belief that our situation is uniquely complicated is almost always a symptom of not yet having the right framework, rather than evidence that the framework can’t apply. When we don’t have a clear way of thinking through the WHO and the WHAT, we fill the gap with complexity. Every variation in our background becomes a reason why the decision is harder for us than for someone else and every nuance in our approach becomes an obstacle.
One participant in our January challenge said that they thought they had their niche before the challenge began, only to discover during it was nowhere near tight enough. They arrived with confidence and left with a more refined answer. Another came in believing that their target group (mothers) was too broad to niche further, because a mother is a mother regardless of profession. Both of these are versions of the special case story – “my situation means the usual rules don’t quite apply.” In both cases, working through the framework resolved it.
This Is Good News
If the problem were genuinely that some coaches are too complex or too holistic or too internationally situated to niche effectively, there would be nothing to do except accept it. Fortunately, that’s not the problem. The problem is a missing framework, and a missing framework is fixable. That’s a much better position to be in than the alternative.
The participants who arrive at the Nail Your Niche challenge most convinced of their special case status are often the ones who leave with the sharpest clarity, because the framework gives them something concrete to work with rather than a feeling to follow. Their background, their nuance, their geographical context – these stop being obstacles and start being inputs. The decision doesn’t get made in spite of their complexity, it gets made through it.
If you’ve been holding onto the belief that your situation is too unusual to niche clearly, it’s worth considering whether that belief is protecting you from a decision that’s actually more available than it currently feels.
An Opportunity
If you’d like to understand more about what effective client acquisition involves, 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.
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