If you are putting yourself out there as a life coach and talking about life coaching on your website and socials, you may face some or all of these common challenges:
- Potential coaching clients have trouble justifying your fees.
- You aren’t earning enough to even cover your costs.
- Your friends and family don’t really understand what you do.
- You’re getting too few referrals.
- Your groups don’t fill.
- Networking isn’t working.
- Your social posts about life coaching topics don’t get much traction.
I want you to know I hear these complaints from new coaches all the time. It’s heartbreaking. And, I always encourage them to refine and pivot instead of quitting.
Let’s look at these 7 challenges as symptoms of one root cause — it may surprise you what it is and also be a big ‘aha’ that helps you realize there’s nothing wrong with you or your coaching. It’s something else.
The Root Cause of All the Big Problems Life Coaches Face
I want to take a moment to thank you for listening to Prosperous Coach Podcast. ❣️ This is my 250th episode and I just hit 250,000 downloads! That’s because you binge listen and also share this podcast with your coaching cohorts! Keep doing that and I promise you people will share your pinpointed content too.
Okay, let’s get back to this sticky bunch of problems …
The root cause of all 7 problems I mentioned for Life Coaches is that life coaching is something few people KNOW they want. Strangely, life coaching has a questionable reputation with anyone who has NOT yet experienced results from life coaching.
I was listening to an audiobook recently when a bunch of characters were laughing at another character who was calling herself a life coach. The snide characters just couldn’t understand why anyone would pay for it. “What the heck is life coaching!” they chortled.
Defining it for people doesn’t help them lose their perception.
You and I know how valuable it is, but life coaching seems to be something people love to make fun of. And you know that people make fun of things they don’t understand. So, I tell my life coach clients, why push a boulder up a hill if you can roll it down instead?
Having been a coach for a long time now, I see Life Coaching can come off as the baby of all the other tracks like Career Coaching, Executive Coaching, Relationship Coaching. Can you guess why?
Life covers everything. In business, lack of specificity in the niche is only good for discount stores who try to sell it all. Not good for you as a coach wanting to earn well.
This world is oriented around specialization. And coaches who specialize earn more. There are good reasons for that.
A Small Pivot Could Mean a Much Better Coaching Income for You
Here’s the interesting thing … just a little pivot and many of your problems would dissolve because you would be much more credible to prospects. The pivot is this: Don’t call yourself a life coach. Instead specialize.
In the next episode, I have the pleasure of interviewing one of my recent VIP clients — Sharon Ehrlich — a coach who helps women executives in IT gain more control over their careers and carve out time to care for themselves and family.
When we developed her Signature Program, we realized that it is basically life coaching, but I advised her not to call herself a life coach and she was already savvy about that. Nowhere in her social profiles, posts or website do the phrases “life coach” or “life coaching” show up, but she does help her clients set boundaries, learn to say ‘no’, prioritize — some life coaching topics.
Be sure to tune into Episode 250 for Sharon’s interview. She’s such a professional and will be a top coach in her space very fast!
If you are calling yourself a life coach and you are dogged by some or all of those 7 problems, let’s have a Nail Your Niche session and I will help you finesse that into something more specific and profitable. There is no use pushing a boulder up a hill with people smirking at your services because they don’t understand them.
Now just a bit more about these 7 specific problems life coaches face …
Potential coaching clients have trouble justifying your fees & You aren’t earning enough to even cover your costs. When you specialize you can easily charge more for your services and get it. That also means you can market less, do less enrolling and work less while earning well.
Your friends and family don’t really understand what you do & You’re getting too few referrals. These are the same problem. It’s difficult to refer people to a general coach. People just don’t know what to say about you that will inspire action.
But when you put powerful words describing a specific audience and the specific problems you help them solve into your benefit statement, suddenly you become a go-to resource for that audience and it’s easy to get referrals. Plus your friends and family will grasp what you offer.
Your groups don’t fill. To enroll people into groups who will also show up to the group each time requires a tightly focused topic about a specific and acute enough pain point. Often, the topics life coaches choose are not acute enough or urgent enough to inspire enrollment.
Networking isn’t working. Networking works best when you are with a group of people in one specific target audience who have common challenges, interests and goals. So specializing is the solution here too. And if you stand out rather than appear to be just another coach, you’ll get more respect.
Your social posts about life coaching don’t get much traction. Have you ever done a Google search on the topics you post about? Of all the topics on the Internet, generalized coaching topics are a dime a dozen. But hone the audience and niche to something much more specific and viola! You get follows, likes, comments and curiosity about your offers.
So you see the thread here. Don’t call yourself a life coach and offer life coaching. That’s way too general. Instead focus in, specialize, stand out and speak directly to your single audience about their most acute problems and urgent goals.
Ahhh, that’s a relief for everyone involved, especially you. ; )
