I have been a coach for 10+ years and I’ve seen too many great coaches give up in a major way. They may abandon coaching completely, going into a different profession, or going back to what they were doing before they became a coach. They may let their coaching business become much less than the dream that they had when they decided to become a coach. Perhaps they become a ‘hobby coach’ rather than a full-time professional coach.And it’s all because they become frustrated with the business part of coaching, not the coaching itself.
Over the years, I’ve seen many plausible explanations for why this happens. However, none of the explanations have satisfied me completely in explaining what I believe to be a first-rate tragedy in our profession.
The most prevalent explanations that I have seen are:
- While coaches are great at coaching, they either don’t know how to run a business or aren’t skilled at it.
In our infancy as a profession, maybe we didn’t have the knowledge and skills training available to support development in the business side of coaching, but that just isn’t true any more. There are many excellent practice management and business development training programs out there, and most coaches have taken some of this training. This may be part of the issue, but I’m sure it isn’t all of it.
- Coaches, by their nature, are more talented at the ’soft skills’, so maybe they just aren’t cut out to be great business people. I’m sure there are some good arguments to be made for this, but I just don’t buy it. That’s holding coaches way too small. Coaches are exceptionally smart, creative, disciplined people. We are capable of being great business people.
- There’s a natural attrition rate, especially in a new profession, as people explore whether the profession is right for them. Again, this may be part of the story, but it cannot even account for all of the cases that I have seen personally. It certainly doesn’t explain the large number of great coaches who are earning a substandard living and then dropping out or settling for a hobby-level involvement.
So, I have continued to ask myself what is going on. What is the root cause of - let’s face it - such an obvious division between the “have’s” (coaches with mega-thriving businesses) and the “have not’s” in our profession?
Bottom line: I don’t believe that these common explanations are the real reason why this is happening. I think the real truth runs deeper.
There is a critical time ‘window’ that runs roughly between years one and three of a new coaching business, when coaches are focused primarily on business start-up. I think that during that time, these new coaches are so focused on skill-building and on the business side of coaching that they lose touch with the feeling, passion, and intrinsic motivation of the inspiring dream that they had for their coaching business originally, when they first decided to become a coach.
We can all remember that wide-eyed wonder that we had when we discovered coaching. I propose that when we have a singular focus on making the business work, we have shifted gears and we lose the power of our day-to-day connection to our visions and dreams. It’s a rare coach in the business start-up years who still has that sense of awe and wonder filling their days, as they build their business infrastructure.
Now, some of you may be saying, “Come on, Lynne, get a grip. The honeymoon can’t last forever.” Maybe none of you are saying that. We are coaches, after all, right? We know that we can keep the honeymoon feeling. It isn’t either/or, it is both/and. That’s the whole point of ‘right work’, isn’t it?
So what happens? We coaches lose the internal power and spark as we try to make our businesses happen. Not all of us, but a criminally large percentage. Then, discouraged, we try to find role models, Very Successful Coaches, and we follow their established paths that have led them to proven success.
This seems like it would be a good approach. But, once again, I have seen many coaches get even more discouraged and frustrated when they did this, because while they have now found some good skills and strategies, they still haven’t reconnected palpably with the passion of their own unique dreams. They still haven’t re-accessed the real underlying horse-power that will sustain them through building their business structures, ironically because of their singular focus on the business of coaching.
And, the loss of confidence can get even worse when we have the benefit of a Very Successful Coach’s formula and we still cannot make it work for us.
I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with the programs and formulas for success from Very Successful Coaches. Far from it. I started my coaching business when coaching was in it’s very infancy and I didn’t have the benefit of that wisdom available to me. I think it is a fantastic resource, as long as we are rooted in our own vision and dreams.
What I am saying is that I don’t think it is enough. It’s just not the whole picture. It isn’t sufficient, and we are kidding ourselves to think that it is.
I am putting out a call to all coaches, especially those of you in years one through three of your businesses, to step up and reclaim the real source of your creative power, your passion and your bliss: your unique visions and dreams that you personally have for your own coaching business.
I’m challenging each of you to re-connect to this power and engage with it every day, and to not settle for less than full engagement with it. Ever.
And to let that connection, that whole-hearted commitment, drive the business side of coaching for you. Let it inspire you daily, so that you remain a bright-eyed visionary and believer of possibility and human potential, particularly your own, not just your clients’. Believe in the power of your soul and spirit to soar and to thrive, in your coaching business as much as in your coaching.
It is time for each of us to retrieve the power of our own personal vision of how we can impact the world in a positive way through coaching. To be it, and live fully connected to it every day, not just when we are coaching, but when we are setting up our phone systems, creating our websites, developing service packages, marketing our services, and doing all of the myriad of activities that build the engine that actually gets our coaching out into the world.
At the International Coach Federation Annual Conference in November of 2006, Lynne Twist was an incredibly inspiring speaker. In her keynote, she said:
“I have been coached since I have been born.
When you live what I call a committed life, you are coached by your commitment, the stand you take.
It gets you up in the morning.
It tells you what to wear.
It tells you where to go.
I was lucky enough to find my stand very early in life.
It guided me.
It trained me.
It shook me up.
It had me drop things that were not useful.
My life became so much more than a life about me that you could say it was an arena for me to be coached.
And when I began that journey I committed myself to ending world hunger.”
What would be possible if every one of us took her message to heart and re-discovered our own whole-hearted commitment, to coaching, and felt the power of it every day, and insisted upon staying connected to it?
What if we allowed it to tell us what to do, and where to go, and what to wear every day?
We would be unstoppable. We would love our businesses as much as we love coaching, because it is our blessed businesses that are the vehicles that allow each of us to get our unique contribution of coaching out into the world. It’s our businesses that allow our dreams to be realized.
Then, our coaching businesses become powerful, sacred containers and vehicles, rather than the bane of our existence. Where they have been something that we don’t feel we are very good at and really don’t want to do, they are now the engines that drive our dreams. We now thrive as business people as much as we do as coaches.
- What is the wide-eyed, awe-inspiring dream of coaching that you may have lost contact with? How can you get ‘on fire’ with it?
- How can your whole-hearted commitment to that dream inspire the practical details of all of your business activities?
- How can this true source of power be the flow that brings you to your own wildly successful coaching business?
Sincerely,
Lynne Fairchild, PCC, MBA
Lynne Fairchild, PCC, MBA, works with midlife reinventers, to help them navigate the rapids of change. She also works with professional coaches who want to reinvent their coaching businesses. She challenges coaches to redesign their coaching businesses so that the business sizzles as much as the coaching does.
Lynne has had an international coaching practice for over 10 years. Ninety percent of her clients are coaches. She offers individual and group coaching. For more detailed information on her experience and credentials, see About. To contact Lynne, see Contact.