#181 You must know your coaching strengths to find your ideal clients
Myth: You will find your clients at the intersection of your coaching skills and your niche
Many coaches start out believing that their coaching skills will be enough to build a coaching business.
The ones who win clients sustainably have realised they need to niche. Niching is simply understanding who your ideal client is. Ideal clients have a problem where your coaching can help, and they are prepared to pay to be helped.
Many marketing businesses can help coaches learn the skills to discover their niche and to build a pipeline of potential clients. I’m not talking about the ‘Follow my quick, easy process and make $$$ this week. One client made a six-figure sum in their first year!’ businesses, but the genuine coach marketers that know what they are talking about. However, this article is not about that aspect, which is necessary, but it is still not enough.
Fact: You will find your clients at the intersection of your coaching strengths and your niche
This article is about the supply-side. Having coaching skills is not enough. You need to understand who you are as a person (your values) and as a coach (your Coaching Signature). I’m going to leap here and suggest that coaches tend to know their values. It’s often why they got into coaching in the first place.
But can you articulate your Coaching Signature?
My work as a coaching supervisor supports coaches in discovering who they are and who they are becoming as a coach. Coaches learn the skills and study coaching modalities, and then develop their own coaching process and philosophy as they begin to practise. This requires hours of practise and reflection on practice, and is a never-ending journey of discovery, of becoming.
A key aspect of this discovery is understanding the coaching postures you might take with different clients, your preferred postures, and how one or two of these postures represent your Coaching Signature. These are your strengths. The intersection of your coaching strengths and your niche is where you might sustainably find clients.
Based on Human Ecology Theory (whereby you can be viewed through your relationship with your environment), the Coaching Signatures process invites you to create a visual landscape in response to a series of cues, generating a report that highlights your most developed coaching postures (CSP Self Report) and how your style might shift with different clients and contexts (CSP Client report).
The profile explores three dimensions that sit at the heart of people development work:
Empathy – the distance you naturally establish between yourself and your client
Sensemaking – how you recognise patterns and process information
Control – how you manage the emotional space within the coaching relationship
Coaches who have used the tool often describe it as creative, revealing and practically useful - particularly in supervision - because it brings to the surface patterns, preferences and areas for development that might otherwise remain implicit.
Discover your Coaching Signature Profile (CSP).
Two CSP reports (Self + Client) + 90 minutes individual supervision to explore them: £295. Contact me, and I’ll send you more information.
