One of the things that strikes me most consistently, across every conversation I have with coaches who are struggling to find clients, is how many of us arrive with a firm view of how marketing works – and how rarely that view is correct. This is not a criticism, it’s a description of a very specific and very human problem, one that has a name, and understanding it is the first step to getting past it.
Four Stages
The four stages of competence are a well-established model in learning theory and you may well already be familiar with them.
We begin in unconscious incompetence – we don’t know what we don’t know, and as a result we don’t know that we’re getting it wrong. From there we move to conscious incompetence, where we can see the gap between where we are and where we need to be. Then comes conscious competence, where we can do the thing but it takes effort and attention, and finally unconscious competence, where the skill is so embedded that we no longer have to think about it. Most learning conversations start at stage two, because that’s where the person knows they need help. The problem with marketing, for most coaches, is that we’re stuck at stage one without realising it.
Unconscious Incompetence In Practice
I had a conversation last week that illustrated this with unusual clarity. A coach – I’ll keep him anonymous – had spent his career in a sector that no longer aligned with his values, and had decided he wanted to work with leaders in the charity sector instead. He was, by all accounts, a skilled and experienced coach. He was also, understandably, passionate about the work charities do and convinced that his coaching skills would translate directly into that world.
When I suggested that marketing to charity leaders would be difficult without lived experience of that sector, he was angry. Not mildly resistant – genuinely angry and indignant. From where he was standing, my suggestion felt like a dismissal of his coaching ability, which it absolutely wasn’t. His coaching ability wasn’t in question at all. What was in question was whether he could make a charity leader feel understood, whether he could speak their language, demonstrate that he knew what it meant to operate under those specific resource constraints and value tensions and accountability pressures. The answer, without either having lived it or having had a front row seat to the life of someone who had, was no – and he couldn’t see it, because he didn’t yet know what he didn’t know.
Lived Experience Matters In Marketing
This is the part that surprises most of us when we first encounter it. We tend to think of marketing as a communication skill – if we can write clearly and show up consistently, we can market to anyone. In reality, effective marketing is always focused – if it isn’t focused, it isn’t marketing. This means it requires something very particular – the ability to describe our potential client’s world back to them in a way that makes them feel genuinely seen and understood. Not described, understood and there’s a significant difference between those two things.
That level of understanding comes from one of two places. Either we have lived the experience ourselves – we’ve been a charity leader, or a first-time manager in a particular sector, or a founder navigating a specific kind of pressure – or we have had such close proximity to someone living it that we’ve absorbed the texture of it. A coach whose partner has spent twenty years in the NHS, for example, may well have had a front row seat that gives them real insight into what that world feels like from the inside. What doesn’t work is deciding we’d like to work in a sector we find interesting, without that foundation, and hoping that good coaching skills will be enough to bridge the gap.
From Unconscious Incompetence to Conscious Incompetence
The transition from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence isn’t comfortable, but it’s enormously valuable. Once we can see what we don’t know, we can start to do something about it. For the coach I was speaking to last week, conscious incompetence might look like recognising that he’s in a genuinely difficult position. The sector he knows from the inside is one he can no longer work with in good conscience, and the sector he wants to move into is one he hasn’t lived, nor does he know anyone else who has lived it. That’s a real dilemma, and it deserves to be treated as one rather than papered over with optimism. What it doesn’t change is the underlying problem – that researching your way into a niche you haven’t lived is incredibly difficult. We’ve seen coaches try it, and it hasn’t succeeded. The more honest starting point is asking what other worlds he has proximity to, through his personal life, relationships, history and places where his understanding is genuine rather than acquired.
An Opportunity
Why not join my next free Nail Your Niche challenge?
The challenge won’t take you all the way to competence in four days. What it will do is move you, reliably, from not knowing what you don’t know to having a clear picture of the gap and a framework for closing it. For most of us, that shift alone is worth more than we expect.
We run it several times a year and there’s an option to upgrade to a VIP version, which gives 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 niches.
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