This Listener’s Choice episode has meant so much to hundreds of coaches and if you’ve heard it before, it’s worth another listen. I’ve given it an update.
When I work with coaches to help them nail their niche, I ask lots of powerful questions, which uncover clues to a natural audience and niche for them.
Over time I’ve witnessed 4 major patterns with coaches — what I call ARCHETYPES — that influence how a coach could become successful in their niche.
These archetypes are a subconscious leaning and not necessarily a conscious choice. Two caveats …
- You might not relate to any of these archetypes. After all, these 5 come out of my experience.
- One clear archetype might not yet be awakened until you launch your business and something blooms within you.
I’ll explain each. If you relate to this concept, allow just ONE ARCHETYPE to rise to the surface like cream so it can guide your coaching business rather than diluting it with 2 or more.
Meet THE TEACHER Archetype
I’ll start with my archetype, which is THE TEACHER.
I had no idea when I decided to become a coach that I’d be tapped by Coach Training Alliance to develop coach certification curriculum.
Five years and 500 coaches trained by me later, I developed Prosperous Coach to help coaches choose a smart niche and launch their business with confidence because the business side of coaching is much less intuitive than the process of coaching.
I thought I’d be offering coaching sessions in packages to hundreds of entrepreneurs each year. It goes to show you that you never know the wonderful places life will take you if you keep moving forward courageously.
Now, I know that The Teacher archetype is where my particular genius comes from. In hindsight, I can see that even before I created Prosperous Coach, my professional roles always had an element of teaching in them.
If you fit the Teacher Archetype …
- You have a strong leaning towards teaching and what you teach is born out of your own ideas, concepts and systems, not someone else’s. That’s a key distinction.
It might happen like this …
- You struggle mightily with something and your sense of wanting to understand the best approach step-by-step kicks in full force.
- You don’t find other people teaching this thing in a way that you can relate to so you decide that you’re going to study this problem from all sides. It becomes a bit of an obsession.
- You fall on your face a few times but it doesn’t matter because you’re like a dog after a bone. You’re going to figure this out!
- While transforming yourself you’re also continuing to study the problem and develop a system or a model and you begin to look at things from a meta-level.
- You perfect your system and put it out into the marketplace. It grabs attention and wins you a steady stream of clients.
- Often, but not always, the services you offer will be B to B — Business to Business.
That’s the teacher archetype. The DRIVE TO SOLVE is a big part of the teacher archetype. And a natural offshoot of that is to teach others.
1. It starts with a personal journey of transformation around a key problem.
2. From sheer grit and your own experiential study, YOU create the solution.
3. Then you offer it to others.
The awakening of my own Teacher archetype started with me trying to figure out what my own coaching niche was and how to be financially successful in coaching. The solutions put out there by other mentors for coaches didn’t work for me.
At first, I wasn’t thinking about helping others solve this problem. I simply wanted to solve it for myself. But when my system worked so well for me … other coaches asked me to help them do the same.
My skills blossomed beyond just coaching. I realized that I have a gift for breaking complex things down into easy-to-follow steps.
I know what you’re thinking … but Rhonda, coaching is not about teaching. And, you’re right.
I’ve seen many people train as coaches and realize that coaching, in the pure sense of the word is not actually what they want to do. They want to develop a hybrid business that has aspects of teaching and aspects of coaching, which is what the current form of my business, Prosperous Coach, is.
There’s nothing wrong with learning the skills of coaching and applying them to other things. You get to decide what your business is and what skills you use.
There are ways to separate coaching sessions — where you are your client are fully in the co-creative mode — from teaching experiences.
Meet THE PURE COACH Archetype
This is someone who loves coaching in its purest form and wants to only coach. The majority of trained coaches start this way. I did.
The Pure Coach craves learning and often falls in love with the tenets of a specific coaching model or a system that someone else has created. For example — IPEC or John Maxwell.
Some Pure Coaches realize that they have ZERO DESIRE to run a business of their own and so they may find coaching firms to represent them or be hired by a corporation to coach internally. Many leadership and corporate coaches fit THE PURE COACH archetype.
But others in this archetype will create their own business and the way they will serve their clients with that coaching model they love so much.
Meet THE HEALER Archetype
Similar to the Teacher Archetype, the Healer Archetype is born out of a personal health or wellness challenge.
If this fits you, you’ve experienced something deeply personal and possibly even traumatic in your life —either in your youth or adulthood — and it has dramatically affected your body, mind or both.
And, similar to THE TEACHER ARCHETYPE you struggle to find the right resources to help you. Not finding them, sends you into a period of study, trial and error to develop your own solutions.
Healing yourself, sparks a strong desire to help others who have felt similar pain, disfunction or dis-ease and your business develops from there.
In Episode 17, I interviewed Tami Stacklehouse. Check that out at ProsperousCoach.com/17.
Tami struggled with fibromyalgia and, after much personal study, ended up coaching others with fibromyalgia. In time, that snowballed into the Fibromyalgia Coaching Institute where now she not only coaches people with fibromyalgia but also trains some of them how to coach others with fibromyalgia using her approach.
Wow, right?
If you’re THE HEALER archetype, you don’t have to create an institute. You may only want to coach and not have any teaching/healing element to what you do, but you will support others who have struggled with a specific malady you’ve faced.
The Healer Archetype’s business is usually B to C — Business to Consumer.
Meet THE ICON Archetype
This fits a person for whom coaching is only a small part of a much larger, and often more grand, business vision and model. In fact, the individual might not even be a trained or certified coach but has natural coaching and motivational skills such as Tony Robbins and Marie Forleo.
These people have a BIG extroverted personality and a strong desire to be a publicly recognized figure. Someone might discover them, recognize their star factor and back a venture where they are the face, voice and personality of the company.
These people are likely to write books, speak on big stages for high ticket prices, do TV interviews and other high profile media appearances.
Some coaches may end up in the Icon Archetype only after starting from one of the other archetypes.
Have you heard of Ali Brown? She’s been on ABC’s Secret Millionaire and several other TV channels. She was once named “Entrepreneurial Guru for Women” by Business News Daily.
For decades she has put on large, glitzy, well known events, one of which was called ICONIC. Perfect, right?
Most people don’t know is how Ali started. I met her back when she took the coach training, that I co-authored, at Coach Training Alliance.
Close after that, she did a very smart thing. She wrote an ebook — which was a cutting-edge thing at the time — to help entrepreneurs create an ezine (which is basically a blog).
That was the humble beginnings of her own, now significantly huge empire.
If you have aspirations to be a big name and own the big stage, you might fit the Icon Archetype.
So, do any of these 4 archetypes feel like you?
THE TEACHER
THE PURE COACH
THE HEALER
THE ICON
No worries, if not. Allow yourself time to blossom into your business and find your sweet spot.