Being a life coach these days means standing out from a sea of hundreds of other coaches in the industry. In this episode, Christy Whitman shares the key fundamentals you need to know to get started as a coach, including choosing your unique coaching niche. She also reveals what you can do to create a fun and thriving coaching practice that’s in perfect alignment with who you are, what you value and what you most want to contribute to others.
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Quantum Success Coach: How To Choose Your Niche As A Life Coach – Endless Possibilities
Coaching is an extremely rewarding profession on so many levels and it’s also one of the fastest-growing industries in the world. I’m going to teach you the key fundamentals that you need to know to get started as a coach and to create a fun and thriving coaching practice that’s in perfect alignment with who you are, what you value and what you most want to contribute to others. In our first segment, we explored what coaching is, what it means to be a coach and how many different specialties or niche markets are available for you to choose for or invent for yourself within this diverse field. To recap that segment, some of the most in-demand coach niches are life coaching, wellness coaching, leadership coaching, career coaching, relationship coaching, spiritual coaching, business coaching and executive coaching.
There are many variations of all those themes and even more that are popping up and coming up. What I want to share with you is what happens after you’ve discovered your unique niche and you can have more than one. There are endless ways to expand on the services that you offer within that specialty in order to serve different segments of the population and in order to create multiple income streams for yourself at the same time. Here’s a very common scenario that I’ve seen play out many times. First, with myself and with coaches that I’ve trained. You start out coaching one-on-one, whether in person or as much more in common over the phone or Skype. This one income stream can easily generate a salary of $60,000 to $75,000 per year if you’re doing it part-time and much more if you decide to coach full-time.
As your practice becomes more successful, the next logical step is to extend the services that you offer on a one-on-one basis to groups of people through leading group coaching classes. Facilitating group coaching classes is surprisingly similar to leading a client through a session one-on-one. In fact, the only real difference is that you need to allocate a little more time for a group coaching call, both because it’s important to provide time for a Q&A period following whatever topic you’re presenting that week. Also, it’s to provide time for participants to share the action steps that they’re taking and the discoveries that they’re making.
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This sharing is often more valuable for participants in terms of helping them to integrate new principles and behaviors into their daily lives than the coaching distinction itself. With the addition of facilitating group calls in conjunction with coaching one-on-one, you have not only added another income stream in your practice, but you’ve also significantly reduced the number of hours that you need to work in order to generate that additional income. I’ve seen something else occur time and time again when coaches begin to add group coaching calls to their individual practice, and that is their confidence and leading groups of people through transformation goes through the roof.
People who have had a lifelong fear of public speaking or who could never consider themselves articulate or charismatic enough to stand in front of a group suddenly have the experience of doing it week after week. Because this evolution happens so gradually, it doesn’t occur like a big stretch. For a lot of coaches, the combination of these two modalities, one-on-one coaching and facilitating group courses provides work that is fulfilling and is a lifestyle that works for them. That may be more than enough for you. Of course, there’s also the added benefit that those who learn about you as a result of participating in one of your group classes will choose to go deeper with you by doing one-on-one work or vice versa.
A handful of coaches and you’ll probably have an intuitive sense if you’re one of them, have the creativity and the drive to add yet another dimension. Yes, it’s another revenue stream to their practice. The possibilities and variations are endless. Some may decide to put together a press kit and begin marketing themselves to deliver keynote talks or day-long workshops in their local communities. Some will be called to develop a workshop whether online or in-person that addresses the needs of a certain segment of the population such as those transitioning after divorce, couples striving to improve their relationship or teens or young adults wanting to improve their self-confidence. The cool thing about taking your coaching practice to this next level and what I’m about to describe is precisely the progression that led me from being a part-time coach to becoming a New York Times bestselling author twice.
Choosing Your Coaching Niche: The more you can define what you can provide to what niche of people, the greater the momentum you will generate.
In that, in the course of developing your own lecture or workshop material, you automatically generate content, both the content that you plan to deliver and the content that your participants contribute as they strive to understand it. The growing number of coaches will choose to use this content as the basis for developing their own original material, whether in the form of a DVD, recording of a live seminar, guided visualizations or manuscripts that eventually gets picked up by a publisher or that the coach decides to self-publish and market on his or her own. As you can see, not only are there endless specialties to choose from within the field of coaching in terms of the particular topics you focus on and the target market you serve, but there is an endless possibility in terms of how you package your services and how wide an audience you want to serve.
The sky is truly the limit and it all begins with finding your unique niche within this vast industry. In the QSCA, we not only train our coaches in the most effective cutting–edge methodology and techniques, but we also guide them through a three-step process to discover their unique niche within the field. I can’t tell you how big an advantage this gives them compared to coaches who try to market themselves to everyone under the sun. The more specifically you can define what you can provide and to what niche of people, the greater the momentum you will generate. Author Mark Victor Hansen said, “Pick a niche and grow rich.” I’d love to know your thoughts or questions on what we’ve discussed. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your friends and colleagues. To get even more coaching tips and insights, subscribe to this blog and we’ll keep you posted as soon as we publish something new.
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