Almost every coach I’ve ever worked with has resisted choosing a niche, and almost every one of them has read that resistance as a sign that niching is wrong for them. I believe they’ve been reading it backwards. The discomfort we feel when asked to get specific isn’t evidence that specificity is a mistake; it’s evidence that we’re facing a decision with real weight – resistance tells us the choice matters. What it cannot tell us is which choice to make.
The Cage
The same pattern appears in every Nail Your Niche Challenge I run. I’d say that 99 percent of us resist choosing a niche for one reason above all others: it feels like we’re building ourselves a cage. We can see the walls going up, the options disappearing, and the door closing on all the people we’ll never get to help. We’re all trained to be able to work with anyone, and that means that we often experience specificity as loss, and the feeling is so strong and so common that I’ve stopped being surprised by it. What does surprise me is how rarely we (as professional coaches) question what the feeling actually means.
A Marketing Decision, Not a Coaching One
The cage is an illusion, and I think it survives because we’ve confused two entirely different parts of our businesses. A niche is based on the side of our business that’s focused on client acquisition. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the delivery side of our business – our coaching. We can still work with anyone who finds us, but we stop trying to market to everyone at once. The truth is that we can’t market to everyone at once because all marketing is focused. Let me be really clear: if it isn’t focused, it isn’t marketing.
The same confusion appears in a different guise when our lived experience enters the conversation. Coaches with years inside a particular sector will say something like, “Oh, I don’t want to go back into working in pharma.” Choosing that sector as a niche doesn’t send us back into it. What we’re actually doing is taking our knowledge of the human beings who work there, their pressures, the rhythm of their lives and their language, and using it to market to them. We already understand these people better than any other group on the planet, which makes them our lowest hanging fruit. The brain reads all of this commitment as danger and keeps us safe through vagueness, but safety and growth don’t coexist.
When The Feeling Is Right
This does not mean that the discomfort is always meaningless. Occasionally the resistance is pointing at a commercial flaw rather than ordinary fear. For example, we may be considering a group we can’t find, people who can’t pay professional rates, or a sector in which we hold no credibility at all. Those objections might deserve attention because they’re about the niche, not about us. The skill lies in telling the difference between a feeling that says “this is uncomfortable” and evidence that says “this won’t work”. (I have to say that there are far more coaches who have told me that their intuition was fact, not feeling, than were actually correct 😉)
Choosing For Now
The objection I hear most often is the fear of choosing wrongly, as though a niche were a tattoo. A niche is chosen for now, not for life, and plenty of successful coaches have refined theirs once they’ve learned what works commercially. Refinement, though, requires having something to refine, and the perceived risk of picking a niche that needs adjusting later is far smaller than the certain cost of staying generic and invisible. So acknowledge the resistance when it arrives, because it will. Write it down, examine it against the commercial questions above, and then make the decision anyway. The feeling is information, it isn’t an instruction.
An Opportunity
If you’d like to understand more about how to choose a commercially viable coaching niche, 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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