Published in Kingstown College Coaching Magazine 2019/2020
By refining the kind of client you can best serve – and will best serve you – you will give yourself the greatest opportunity to develop signature packages, and bring your best to the experience.
Alana Kirk is a successful author and coach and she offers some direction for those who are new to the coaching profession, (or veterans who need to restart their marketing plan!), on how to make the transition from learner to practitioner.
“I’m no longer held back by that crippling belief that everything – in this case, beginning my coaching practise – has to be exactly right before I begin.”
What does success look like? As coaches, isn’t this one of the most important questions we can ask a client? But it’s also one we need to ask of ourselves too.
For many new graduates of the Kingstown College coaching courses, building the skillset of listening and questioning is front of mind when training in the various techniques and models. Focus is also directed towards garnering the experience of converting theory into practise through peer and external coaching. But being a successful coach practitioner doesn’t stop at skillset and experience: the holy grail of a successful practice is a calendar full of clients. Coaching is one thing; running a business is something else entirely. Clutching newly acquired diplomas, staring at a calendar full of blank spaces, how do graduates leap into the space from learner to practitioner?
For those with no business experience, it can be fairly daunting prospecting for prospects. We know we have to put ourselves ‘out there’, but ‘out there’ seems like a very large, unknown space, filled with experienced practitioners already providing valuable content on websites, building client bases from referrals, testimonials and marketing, and providing successful services to companies, teams and individuals.
Coaching is about listening, questions, and proven models. Running a business? Doesn’t that mean marketing, branding, ROI analysis, standing out amidst the competition, logos, spreadsheets, budgets, and invoicing systems? And where does a calendar full of clients come from? If that’s not the background you know, where do you start? Well, you start by coaching yourself.
What does success look like as a coaching practitioner? If you were to wake up in six months and have the perfect business, who would your clients be? There are two ways to find clients: the ‘dive into the ocean and hope you can grasp some slippery fish with your bare hands’ way; and the ‘sit on a boat with a spear, knowing exactly which fish you want to catch’ way. The spear is your niche, and the target fish are your ideal clients.
Knowing what kind of coach you want to be, and who your ideal clients are will make so many of the other business questions easier – the who, the where, the how and the what to market yourself. One of the easiest ways to do this is to cultivate your niche, based on your own unique offering. What do you bring to the table along with your coaching credentials? What authenticity makes you different from other coaches? What experiences and background adds to your own credibility? What style do you deliver and respond to best? Where do you feel most energetic and engaged?
From humble beginnings mainly associated with sports, coaching has risen to a multi-faceted global activity that spans a multitude of areas: life, health, wellness, career, sports, dating, education, business, executive, leadership, performance, team, parent, interview, sales … the list goes on. Which sphere you sit in, depends very much on your own interests, experience and skills. Perhaps it would seem sensible that the broader your arena the more clients you’ll get, but the more strategic and focussed you are, the better your offering will be, and the more likely you’ll be to attract the ideal client. By refining the kind of client you can best serve – and will best serve you – you will give yourself the greatest opportunity to develop signature packages, and bring your best to the experience.
I was lucky that I knew early on exactly what type of coaching I wanted to do, and who my ideal client base would be. As a writer and journalist, I’m currently interested in, and writing a book about, the issue of mid-age, and how this generation of women in particular, are redefining it in a way no other generation have been able to do before. In just 50 years, we have been given an extra twenty years of life expectancy, but rather than them being added to the end of our lives, they are being experienced in the middle. The signposts that most of us have been encouraged to follow – education, career, partner, mortgage, kids – suddenly run out, but old age is still decades away. Women (and men) are often left in a place of change and uncertainty, but also unprecedented opportunity, and from my own life experiences and coaching skills, this is where I feel I can make the biggest impact. I want to help women learn to live intentionally, and to find the potential this time of life holds for them, often during great change. So I’ve taken life and career coaching and niched it down to ‘midlife coaching for women’. That’s where I sit on the sphere of coaching opportunities; those are the clients I want, because they are the clients I will serve the best.
Finding yours is the important first step in deciding how to start practising. Mastin Kipp, the American trauma coach and best-selling author of Claim You Power, highlights how important it is to pursue the ideal client, what he calls the ‘all-in client’ – one who is invested in the process, and self-motivated. Not only will you be able to target your marketing better, you’ll be more confident, you’ll work more efficiently and ultimately be more successful and likely get more recommendations.
What are you selling?
So once we’ve decided who we are talking to, we then have to decide what to say. Part of being a practitioner is knowing what you’re selling. (Hint: it’s not coaching!). It’s important to remember, we are not selling the process; we are selling the outcome of coaching. Clients don’t care about the frameworks, or the dynamics of our fabulously logo’d models. They care that we will help them out of a rut, or see what their purpose is and navigate how to get there. There aren’t many people out there who go to bed at night worrying about how SMART their goals are. I’ve yet to meet someone wring their hands and ask me what are the seven steps to success. They’ll be worrying about real and important personal and professional problems – the boss they can’t get on with, the money that just won’t stretch, the promotion they can’t seem to get, the self-esteem they can’t find, the confidence they just need to start over.
As practitioners, we know coaching works. We know we can make a real and lasting difference to people’s lives. That’s what they need to hear; what will they be able to do / have / be once the coaching work is done. Listening to the language our clients and the people we have coached to date use, then translating what we do into what it does for them will be our marketing message.
So, knowing our client and message, it’s time to get on with the business of starting the business. Another important lesson I learned from my own life, reinforced by Kipp’s advice to coaching practitioners, is that there is never a perfect time to start, in this case setting up our businesses. Well, there is actually; it’s now.
I consider myself a ‘recovering perfectionist’ which means I’m no longer held back by that crippling belief that everything – in this case, beginning my coaching practise – has to be exactly right before I begin. I’m setting up a business, not launching astronauts into space – that actually does require a certain level of perfect precision. With coaching, it’s better to have a website we can change and improve over time, than no website at all. It’s better to get moving, than stand frozen in decision-making over the colour of our logo; we can coach without one. Starting our business / practise / career / freelance side-job is not a moment in time, but rather an on-going process that will constantly change, adapt and grow as it develops.
Some things may work, others might not, and things may need fine-tuning as we get experience. Taking a ‘trial and correction’ approach rather than a ‘trial and error’ approach, means we can get going and start our coaching career from where we are now, rather than a perfect point in the future when all the stars are aligned (because they rarely are.)
We don’t look at a toddler who can’t walk on the first attempt as a failure. We see it as a naturally progressing work in progress and offer constant support
and encouragement. As coaches, we know from goal setting that identifying what we want, helps us design the path to get there. We need to also remember, that the path is also full of valuable lessons. Apparently 99% of the time planes are in the air, they are off course. Yet the pilots know their destination and their job is to constantly course correct to get there, adapting to weather, air currents, and flight paths.
As founder of Amazon Reid Hoffman famously cites, “If you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you shipped too late.”
The point is, just begin. Now. As you are. You’ll never be ‘ready’ but making mistakes and learning from them, being proactive in your success rather than reactive means you’ll get there sooner. As coaches we know how easily we can be limited by beliefs that aren’t necessarily true – as practitioners we need to identify them in ourselves, and work to overcome them. One of the benefits of becoming a coach through a supported programme like Kingstown College, is that there is no shortage of mentors, teachers and peers to help coach you on your coaching business journey.
So go, grasp your new certification and begin. Coach and make a difference to people’s lives. As Mary Kay Ash, a revolutionary and iconic businesswoman said, “If you think you can, you can. And if you think you can’t, you’re right.”
By Alana Kirk
Alana Kirk works words for a living, as a campaign writer for the non-profit sector, as a journalist, and as a coach. Her bestselling memoir, The Sandwich Years dealt with love, loss, dying and living. Her curiosity for people’s lives, and helping to tell their story has been the cornerstone of her career, from her work with UNICIF in countries such as Iraq and Sierre Leone, and then with Barnardos, to the everyday stories and subjects she covers as a freelance journalist for the UK and Irish media. She is currently working on her second non-fiction book, The MidLife Manual, and practises as The MidLife Coach. She lives in Dublin with her three young daughters and a menagerie of animals.
www.alanakirk.com
www.themidlifecoach.org
