Wondering what goes into becoming a successful and impactful coach? It’s having a coaching process that leans on your unique strengths and arsenal of tools and techniques curated for your targeted area of expertise. So that means it’s time to get a little touch-y feel-y. As in get in touch with your dream client’s feels!
How to do that? Why to that? Read on or listen to the podcast episode below (and subscribe to the show on Itune or Stitcher while you’re at it):
Dive into your ideal client’s life, mind and heart.
This is where you will figure out how you can support them to get them, with your unique coaching style, to where they want to be.
The key to becoming a successful coach is to develop the ability to empathize. And this takes awareness and practice and it looks like your ability to be able to get into your client’s shoes, as smoothly and lovingly as Mr Rogers putting on his indoor shoes, so you can understand the struggles they’re striving to overcome.
This will bring clarity, and confidence, to exactly how you can help.
Choose a niche.
This begins with getting clear on who this ideal client is, and that means choosing the niche that you want to serve.
Getting clear on the coaching niche that you want to serve is also going to make everything in your coach biz that much easier. Things like your marketing efforts, and gaining confidence in your coaching skills. And the best part of choosing a niche is that you can always change your mind. So don’t put too much pressure on yourself here!
Start somewhere, then you can home in on your eventual coaching niche as your experience builds and you see who it is that you most enjoy serving.
Research their struggles.
Begin sleuthing. Delve into your imagination or get more scientific about it and research the struggles your ideal client is trying to overcome. Imagine or ask them where they want to be.
You could send out a survey. Start hanging out in Facebook groups where they are hanging out and see what they are venting about, what are they frustrated with, and what questions they ask their peers. Then begin planning out how it is that you can help with your skills, experience and tools at hand.
Get clear on the outcomes you deliver.
Based on these struggles you unearth, and which ones you can support with your particular set of superpowers, you want to make sure that your coaching packages, and any other income streams built upon your coaching platform, are very specific on what outcomes they can promise. You can have more than one coaching package and more than one e-course, more than one book, built on all all the mini-struggles that they are going to experience along the way – and the mini-victories they will savor along the way. Voila -you have yourself several coaching packages for each phase of the journey they’re on.
But to begin with, choose just one of these obstacles they’re experiencing to be the starting off point of what your first coaching offering is going to be.
See the patterns that emerge.
From that first coaching offering, you and your client will organically experience a hint of the process that you are going to use over and over again. Now that you have some clarity on what they’re struggling with and what that dream is in their heart, then you can imagine and experience what you will do to get them over that struggle, how you can get them to your point B in all these specific situations.
With time, you’ll see, hey, this is turning into my signature coaching process, and that is what you are going to be known for.
To help you with just that, I created a freebie to help you dive into the first part of this process. It’s an exercise to paint a picture of you holding the hand of your ideal client as you support them through point A to point b.
Hot tip: Choose a niche before you dive into it. Don’t sweat it, you can change your mind tomorrow, before you begin the meditation and worksheet that makes up this mini-training.