Coach Coaching, and I understand it is a very lucrative way to make money as a life coach. Life coaches of course know the value of life coaching. They search for things like finding their authentic self, work life balance, productivity hacks, and help reaching their goals.
They are easy to find online as they have drunk the marketing koolaid, and hence there are a lot of Facebook groups started by coaches on things related to coaching. They know who is already primed to spend the money on some dubious coaching.
If I believe in life coaching so much, you would think that I would eat my own dog food, that I would go ahead and get my own life coach, a guru on the way to help me set goals that I have set out to achieve. I would find one of the many many life balance, career, business and productivity coaches, sign myself up for a sample session or a program, and then hire that wonderful person to be my mentor and guide on my small business journey to successful marketing just like the successful coaches.
I haven’t done so yet, but I haven’t entirely ruled it out for the sometime future. You see, I realized along the way somewhere, that most life coaches do not make a living from coaching, and the ones that do either do coach coaching, selling “marketing” packages, or some lucrative combination of the two. There are always the dubious life coach academy sessions, where you can for a few thousand, (to presumably much more) sign up to take classes in life coaching and learn how to help others achieve their goals. It sounds like a scam to outsiders, and while that is not exactly the truth, it isn’t exactly one of those types of classes where when you complete it, you are guaranteed to go out into the world and make tons of money, the mythical “six figure income” that some people have apparently achieved, but the vast majority of those people taking those classes have not.
Of course this is true in any sport. It doesn’t matter if you have the top coach ever in a sport, if you don’t have the talent, you won’t end up being top in the sport, no matter how much you practice, how many hours, how much time and effort you put into something. People like to say that it is all about the time and effort put into something that determines how well you will do with it, and that is true to a certain extent, but what is also true is not everyone is destined to be the top at some sport no matter how great their coach is considered to be.
The same in true for life coaching classes. Just because you go through life coaching class, there is no guarantee you will turn out to be a great life coach who helps people achieve their goals and propels them towards the success they are so craving.
Ah, but marketing, you mentioned marketing, it isn’t so much about coaching is it, it is about convincing people to try life coaching in the first place, that it is a service that will benefit them and their lives, and not as, it appears at first glace, a waste of time, money, and most likely a scam.
The problem comes with the fact that people waste time and money every day on things that are obviously wastes of time and money. I hate to think of how much money people waste on things such as clothing that will be out of style next month, just to keep up with the latest fashion trend, five more seconds on the arcade machine, gyms and exercise programs and fitness gear they don’t actually use, because, it turns out it wasn’t as much “fun” as it claimed in the advertisements. Or maybe they thought it wasn’t fun, but they thought they could plow through it day after day and have a six pack abs and now they are left with all this fitness gear and a gym membership to a gym they never go to.
So what induces someone to go out and try something rather than merely dismiss it as a scam peddled by someone of dubious trustworthiness? How does one decide what things are worth trying even if they turn out to be a total waste vs things to just dismiss out of hand and not even bother to look at again.
In my life coaching class, they talked about two things that you need to market yourself as a life coach. Viability and Credibility. Visibility is the easy (or hard) part. You just have to put your name out their and get people talking about you, good or bad. Of course a lot of people aren’t going to like you and think you are a total waste of time. Viability can also include buying ads and other ways of grabbing peoples attention when they would really rather you not grab their attention and waste it.
Credibly is the harder part. People actually have to believe that if you promise them the moon sun and stars, yes, you are actually going to be able to deliver them the sun moon and stars. If they have a belief in the hard sciences that is a hard sell, because first you have to overcome your prospects belief in the hard sciences before you can convince them that you are capable of selling them the sun moon and stars.
With other coaches, you have already overcome the hurdles of visibility and credibility. Visibility because they are already looking for you, and credibility because they have already experienced the aha moment, that moment in the coaching session when they finally know what they need and take it as a call into action. So, you sit there, going like wow, that is just the sort of people I need to sell my services to, a coach, someone who already understands the value of what I am selling so I don’t have to do any of the real work on viability and credibility.