The Coach’s Survival Guide

The Coach’s Survival Guide gives you all the tools that you need to become a successful coach and make the biggest positive impact on your clients.

The idea of leaving your current career to become a coach is exciting. One man named Simon was particularly motivated to leave his local government job because of the high hourly rates he’d heard about.

He knew that executive coaches made a lot of money, but he hit an unanticipated snag after finishing his certification course. The only clients he was getting were people from local government agencies!

The reason Simon struggled to break free at first was the same reason you might also have trouble gaining traction as a new coach. He didn’t have the right credibility.

While getting certified is a form of credibility, it wasn’t what the clients he wanted to bring in were looking for. They wanted to see that he had experience in the field they were in, just like anyone you’ll coach wants.

One way to get this kind of practice is by offering free coaching sessions to people in your target group in exchange for testimonials. Another is to look to your own life and see what you’ve been through that you could help others with too.

One coach named Doreen wanted to focus on coaching people in Higher Education positions. But she soon discovered that she was better at helping people with relationships on account of her experience of getting divorced, dating, and re-marrying later in life.

In the author’s mind, Lauren is a coach that is great at helping her clients overcome even the toughest difficulties. But Lauren wouldn’t agree with this conclusion about herself. While she’s been certified for three years, she’s not had very many paying clients. She struggles to get them because she’s always sending them to another coach that she knows. Lauren believes that her other coach friends are more qualified to help than she is. This is called imposter syndrome and is something that all new coaches deal with. In this mentality, you consider yourself unworthy to do any amount of work that you’re clearly qualified for. People that deal with imposter syndrome often work harder to make up for their “lack of skill.” But this just brings them more success and makes them feel even more like a fraud. To beat this, start by recognizing that everybody feels this way at first. You aren’t alone, and you can reach out to others for help through it. Next, identify the source of these feelings. You might have always dealt with self-worth issues, in which case it would be best to get your own therapist. Not everybody has self-esteem problems, however.…