Curiosity is the foundation of our profession. We spend entire careers helping clients question the assumptions they’ve mistaken for facts, and we’re skilled at it. Yet the moment the subject is our own client acquisition, that professional curiosity evaporates and certainty takes its place. We already know how marketing works, we think, because it’s common sense. I believe that certainty, the knower’s mind, keeps more capable coaches broke than any lack of talent, effort or qualification ever has.
The Pattern
After years of working with qualified coaches, the pattern I see is unmistakable. When our marketing efforts produce nothing, we rarely get curious about why, and the response is remarkably consistent from coach to coach:
- We blame ourselves and buy another qualification to be able to offer even more value to our clients.
- We blame the algorithm, a saturated market, or an audience that just doesn’t get it.
- We double down on the same approach, tweaking the website, creating new offers, posting more quotes.
- We chase silver-bullet solutions from lead generation experts promising ten warm leads a week.
Our websites are the giveaway – pages about our coaching philosophy, our qualifications, our careers to date and the wide variety of people we can help. We think that’s marketing to a wide audience, when in fact it’s really words on a page that nobody is searching for and nobody cares about (apart from us of course, we care very much indeed).
Certainty Wins
Every one of those responses defends the same underlying belief, that our approach is right and something external is interfering. The knower’s mind filters each new idea through what it already believes, keeps whatever confirms the existing approach, and discards the rest, which is why more effort keeps producing the same result. It survives because client acquisition feels like it should be common sense, but the fact is that it’s not. We would never allow a client to sit in front of us insisting they already know why nothing is changing while changing nothing, and yet we extend that challenge to everyone except ourselves.
None of this is a capability problem, and the certainty is understandable. We’re highly skilled in one domain, many of us have had long professional careers before we became coaches, and it’s reasonable to assume that competence transfers. The mistake isn’t arrogance, it’s a reasonable assumption that turned out to be wrong.
A Test
The obvious objection to the idea of us having a knowledge gap is that marketing really is common sense and so learning is unnecessary. I think the most brutal test is the results we get. If what we’ve been doing worked, it would have worked by now – something would have changed.
May I offer you a practical step, and the opportunity to bring the curiosity we offer every client to your own business?
Bring a Learner’s Mind
We run our free challenge for professional coaches several times a year. We run through the fundamentals of niche marketing for coaches helping you to FINALLY find your coaching business niche; who it’s for, what you do, what to charge, and where to find your clients. Why not join the next challenge to see what you might learn?
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