Is it ethical to teach your coaching clients?
The hallmark of coaching is asking powerful open-ended questions that draw out the wisdom of your client so they arrive at their own solutions.
If you are selling coaching then that’s exactly what you should deliver. Keep it clean and co-creative.
One of the reasons why I suggest to some coaches that they not sell coaching sessions is to allow room for a more hybrid type of service that fits the genius of the coach.
Having your own knowledge capital can help you attract clients and raise your credibility. Your knowledge adds structure to your offer so you can charge a higher ticket price and get it.
Many of my clients who are all trained coaches are also what I call the Teacher Archetype. That’s what I am and why I shifted my coaching business to a hybrid model.
Have you ever wanted to teach your coaching clients skills, techniques and insights to help them leap over learning curves?
Let’s explore how to do that ethically.
Do You Sell Coaching or Do You Use Coaching in Your Services?
That’s an important distinction.
As I said before, if you are selling coaching in the form of coaching session packages, you need to deliver coaching. Period.
But, other approaches to your business as a coach are not only possible but, in my mind, preferrable.
Your business is your business and you get to create what you most want to do that fills an important gap in the marketplace.
I saw that, early on in my coaching business, it was ineffective to sell coaching session packages. With that approach I was pushing the idea of coaching and found that it was a hard sell with many prospects who just couldn’t get behind the idea of hiring a coach and having sessions. It seemed too much like therapy in their minds.
So, I tried a unique approach which began with narrowing to one niche for a unique audience, discovering their BIG PROBLEMS while trying to reach their BIGGEST GOALS in that niche.
Then, instead of selling coaching and talking about coaching, I used words that land with them to describe specific milestones I help them reach faster and with less stress on the way to their big goals. The language is very specific and benefit rich.
Almost immediately, I experienced a sea change in my business where I attracted and enrolled more clients easily and did the work I truly enjoyed. I was coaching them but just not making an issue out of selling coaching. And I was incorporating my expertise.
This is at the center of Prosperous Coach and what I talk about in all my Prosperous Coach Podcast episodes.
So many coaches are so relieved when they hear they can have a hybrid business and do more than coaching.
Don’t get me wrong PURE COACHING is so valuable and effective! If that’s what you want to do or are doing and selling that is financially lucrative for you, I support you 100% in doing just that!
But what if you want to do more than coaching? Where does that come in?
Do You Have Something Worth Teaching?
First, do you have something worth teaching? I’m guessing that you have to truly love teaching and something to offer your clients along with your coaching. ; )
I love to help other coaches awaken their Teacher Archetype
and then tap into what they know that’s of value to their target audience.
As we get to know each other and their genius is revealed, I point it out to my clients. Often, they’ll say something like:
“Well, that’s so easy for me.”
But it’s important to realize that what’s easy for you might be an area of great struggle for others. And those areas are a good clue to your niche within your niche. Niche choice and development are the niche within my niche but I do so much more with my clients.
The exciting thing is that it is not difficult to uncover you own unique insights and create your own systems & processes related to a big problem your target audience faces. That’s knowledge capital! It’s a way to stand out and add value. And it feels good to leverage all the life and experience that’s come before your business!
Let’s break down some ways you can add teaching to a coaching offer.
3 Ways Coaches Can Teach in Their Programs
As an example, let’s say you are a trained coach who has 20 years of experience in corporations where you have excelled. You’ve decided to target corporate team leaders for your business.
You’ve amassed smart mindsets, habits, skills and systems that center around the nuances of effectively leading teams.
You might think that’s nothing special but it is! There are corporate leaders out there who are not good at leading people and they are being evaluated for their ability to develop a cohesive high-performance team.
Here are 3 different business models that incorporate coaching but don’t limit you to pure coaching:
Method #1 to Teach Coaching Clients
Create a Signature Program of 5-6 months long that is custom made to help YOUR audience overcome all the BIG PROBLEMS and smaller problems associated with their ultimate goal—and in the case of my example, that goal of developing and effectively leading a high-performance team.
You’d decide how many sessions they get and take the full value of the program into account when setting your price, which should be high-ticket and not based on dollars per hour of the coaching sessions alone.
After a coaching session where it becomes clear a specific challenge your audience has, such as delegating, you develop a quick pinpointed guide with applicable knowledge and your unique insights related to that. Send that out as a reading assignment prior to the next coaching session.
You could even create a quick assessment to uncover their specific strengths and weaknesses related to delegating.
If you just sit down and think about it with all your experience you can do this!
Then in session, help the client formulate a clear agenda related to delegating and coach around that. Refer to the guide as it fits into the conversation.
In this way, any teaching is left outside the coaching conversation except for quick references to the guide and/or assessment and helping the client set a goal or assignment to complete over the next week at work that applies to delegating.
This is the least complicated way to create and provide your knowledge to a client without interfering with the actual coaching sessions.
And, once created, your guide and assessment are available to your next client too. Over time you develop your knowledge capital.
By the way, publishing a weekly podcast episode, as I do, has a similar effect. Your knowledge capital is OUT THERE as episodes for the public and you can point clients to specific episodes already aired to support them before or after a coaching session.
Can you see how having guides, assessment and/or your own podcast would help your clients take bigger leaps in their abilities towards specific goals?
And YOU get to put your knowledge out there as a value add to your program.
Once you’re used to tapping into your own knowledge and wisdom, it becomes easy to amass more knowledge capital.
I’m thrilled to see how with my clients, the more we work together the easier these things are for them. They become masters at creating their own intellectual property, which can be leveraged in so many ways.
Method #2 to Teach Coaching Clients
Create a Signature Program that bundles online training and a set of coaching sessions. The online content would be created in advance in its entirety and get dripped out each week.
Coaching sessions could be focused on the client’s challenges related to that portion of training. This does set the agenda for the client but gives them some wiggle room on the angle of the topic as it applies to their real life/work.
This could work as an offer for private individuals or groups.
Method #3 to Teach Coaching Clients
Create a training program and sell that program on its own then offer an upsell of private coaching sessions your clients can add on for an additional fee. It wouldn’t be required of them but they could add it on as they so choose.
There are all sorts of details and ways to configure this type of offer. It takes a large leads list to sell these programs.
I did this for two online programs I sold for 10 years. Later, I decided I wanted to do deeper work with my clients so I stopped selling the online training and simply incorporated into my Signature Program offer of VIP Business Mentoring for coaches, which is a private offer called Coaching Business Breakthrough.
How would YOU like to incorporate teaching into your Signature Program so your coaching and teaching can both be high integrity?