| To grow a thriving coaching practice, you’ll need to cultivate your presence, program and propellant. Strength in all three area makes you unstoppable as a coach. Without even one of them, you'll need a day job.
Presence Clients hire coaches because they consciously or unconsciously recognize qualities in the coach that they desire for themselves. A client may be searching for deeper meaning and desires the spiritual groundedness she witnesses in the coach she hires. Another client may feel overwhelmed and hire a particular coach because he senses that coach has successfully sorted through overwhelm. Yet another client may want to learn solid business skills for her new venture, and she hires a coach whose business sense she admires.
Cultivating your presence as a coach requires that you stand firmly in the center of yourself, allowing your unique radiance to shine. It calls you to own, name and use your specific strengths and natural gifts. It also requires that you “do your own work,” consistently moving beyond your own self-imposed limitations with your coach or spiritual teacher.
Radiant presence insists that you stand tall, with your head held high, speaking fully, from deep within you. Radiant presence shines, neither humble nor arrogant. Radiant presence doesn’t try to adjust to what you think a coach “should” be. Radiant presences allows you to joyously support a client in going well beyond where you have personally gone in any particular area.
Radiant presence never asks for perfection, but rather full humanness, with deep, consistent compassion for yourself and your client. Radiant presence calls you to model that connecting humanness, rather than isolating perfectionism. Radiant presence does not know self-consciousness. Radiant presence would rather fully engage in life and with the client than worry about bringing enough to the table.
To cultivate more presence -
Begin by acknowledging that cultivating presence is essential to growing a thriving coaching practice. -
Commit to tending your presence every day. -
Engage in the specific activities that you know support your most radiant presence. Unique as each coach, they could include activities as diverse as yoga, teaching art classes for kids, journaling, taking a personal growth class, napping, dancing, drinking more water, meeting regularly with your coach, training for a marathon, knitting, making love, walking, chopping vegetables, learning improvisational comedy, fasting, playing piano, meditating, taking amino acids, cleaning the house, skiing, etc. You get the idea . . . Every one of these ideas comes from a coach who swears by them!
Program “I can coach anybody to achieve anything,” does not fill a coaching practice. There are three problems with that idea. First, most people still don’t understand “coaching.” Second, no one likes to think of themselves as “anybody.” Third, “achieving anything” means nothing to real people with specific concerns and aspirations.
The best way to quickly fill a coaching practice involves creating a program that supports a very specific group of people who share similar concerns and aspirations. This works for three reasons. First, people understand “programs” better than coaching. And, of course, your program will involve or include coaching, but you don’t necessarily introduce yourself with coaching.
Second, when you “support a specific group of people,” those people naturally gravitate to you. And, so do the referrals from others not in the group because they can easily identify which of their friends and colleagues might benefit from your program. These referrals will happen automatically when you get specific enough.
One of my clients supports women who have lost a spouse to chart a new course. As she speaks, I automatically scan my mental rolodex because I would love to offer her as a resource to any woman I know in that position. I don’t know any at the moment, but should I meet a woman in that position next week, I will remember to refer her to my client’s program. Another of my clients just tightened her target market to spiritually-searching mothers with young children who balance family, a part-time career and themselves. As my client became clear and told me for the first time about this target market, my sister automatically popped into my mind. My client had just described her perfectly. And, I want my sister to have that kind of wonderful support!
Third, when you support a group of people who “share similar concerns and aspirations,” not only can you support those people, but they can also exponentially increase the power of the support by supporting each other. Also, people more readily gravitate to a program that has proven helpful to others in a similar situation.
To develop your program
Choose a target market about whom you feel passionate (a specific group of people). Interview 10 or 12 people from your target market about their most pressing concerns and greatest aspirations to clearly define your specialty (what you help your target market with). Once you have established a target market and a specialty, together they make up your niche. (Target market + Specialty = Niche.)
Invite people in your target market to participate for free in a high-value opportunity that begins to address those concerns and aspirations (Ideally a weekly or monthly tele-gathering or in-person gathering supported with weekly invitations or ezines which include a supportive article). Create two to five products and/or services with price tags from $10 to thousands of dollars that further address those concerns and aspirations.
Propellant
Propellant moves your potential client to take the first step toward you and your program. If you create a naturally propelling sequence, potential clients will move through the sequence seamlessly, from knowing nothing about you or your program to feeling excited about your free offerings, to enrolling in your fee-based opportunities, to telling their friends with similar situations about your fabulous, life-changing program.
When you define your target market and niche so well that people who aren’t in that target market say to you, “My friend Rita needs you,” you know you have created powerful propellant.
You ignite propellant when you extend a compelling invitation or a clear call to action. Make your business card an invitation to one of your free offerings. Conclude your free offerings with an “If you’d like to take the natural next step . . .” invitation to one of your fee-based solutions. Directly invite people to begin coaching at the end of sample coaching sessions. If they need time to think it over, ask them if setting a follow-up appointment to talk about their decision would be helpful to them. If so, schedule that appointment. If not, ask them what will help them make that decision and by when they want to make it. Invite them to email you at that time.
Propellant keeps people moving in your process and program so that they get the most from however they choose to participate. To successfully propel potential clients and clients, you have to set aside your self-consciousness about “asking for the sale.” You must keep your focus on them and their needs and off you and yours.
To develop your propellant -
Create an invitation or call to action for each of your products and services. -
Continually refine the invitations and calls to action, based on feedback from those who respond and those who don’t respond to them, making them more and more relevant, clear and compelling. -
With your coach, work through any self-consciousness about easily and enthusiastically issuing invitations and calls to action. Become comfortable in your “sales consultant” role. -
Consistently practice focusing completely on the potential client or client and their needs rather than you and yours.
As coaches, we have the honor and privilege of offering our clients a sacred, intimate and transformational experience of themselves. To fully serve in this capacity, we must surrender and commit to our own on-going personal and professional growth and transformation. With our willingness to continually strengthen our presence, program and propellant, we strengthen our capacity to serve and increase our fulfillment from that service.
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