The temptation when setting up in business is to try to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Experienced coaches and marketing specialists warn however this is not the path to success but a fast route to frustration and ultimate failure.

Defining your niche and speciality is crucial to your financial success as a coach. A niche or target market, is one well defined group like small business owners, stay at home mums, parents, female executives or retirees.

You can see that by trying to attract all these different groups your marketing would be scattered and ineffective, whereas if you market consistently and persistently to only one group, offering services and resources that interest them, you’ll attract clients more easily. You have to choose a target market that you can relate to and have some knowledge about.

Contrary to popular opinion, narrowing your focus will result in more not less clients. A good niche will give you between three and 10 times more clients than general or unfocused marketing. It will also provide you with a long term, sustainable advantage in your marketing that will position you apart from all the competition and attract an endless stream of prospects.

The key to finding a great niche is identifying where your passions and strengths allow you to package coaching as a tangible solution to your target market’s biggest unmet needs.

One of the biggest mistakes is trying to find your niche too early on in your coaching career. Unless you know exactly who you will target you are encouraged to explore as many possibilities as possible.

Students come to the coaching academy with one main question in the forefront of their mind; ‘how will I find my niche’. The answer is simple… your niche will find you. Throughout all of your sessions you will attract a certain kind of persona, and would prefer coaching them to anyone else. This is your niche.

Once your niche has found you it would be time to focus on ways to target that market effectively. You must reject the ‘all things to all people’ model and adopt a narrow scope for prospecting. Do not fall in to the trap of the “trawl net” method of marketing: they drag their net over a huge area and hope they catch someone – anyone.

Sadly, casting a huge net costs a lot of money and the catch is normally bottom-feeders not trophy fish.

This is where becoming a specialist comes in. when you focus on being the best at one thing you gain credibility. For example; would you trust your GP to do brain surgery or would you prefer to be in the hands of a brain specialist?

If you truly want to become attractive, and have credibility you need to stand for something. If you’re a generic life coach then know this: people want to be able to turn to someone for a specific area of life – this could be relationships, health, or wealth etcetera.

So ditch the shopping list right now – you can’t be the best at everything and even if you are no-one will believe you.

By focusing on providing solutions to customers’ problems, you’ll be able to make a strong, targeted promise. The result? People will seek you out.

When considering a niche you need to have the following:

Burning Need – is there an intense, perceived need for the niche in the minds of your prospects? Are they truly concerned with the issue that you can help them solve with your coaching?

Underserved – is your niche underserved? One of the factors to consider is how much training / consulting / coaching is already being offered to the niche. A coaching business will grow faster in an underserved industry than in a highly developed one that has many vendors trying to meet the given need.

Precedent – are there already successful businesses operating in this niche? If so, it suggests that people will pay to have a specific need addressed. Coaches can be more assured that there is a need that will be responsive to marketing than if the niche had never been defined and addressed before.

Some of the risk is reduced if you know that there are others who are successfully targeting the niche at a local level.

Being the first – take a successful niche and narrow it further. For example, if you are coaching youths in London, you could be the first to offer coaching specifically to public school youths currently doing their GCSEs in London.

Narrow focus – It’s much better to offer business coaching to a narrow professional industry. For example instead of targeting lawyers, which is very broad, what about targeting only divorce lawyers?

Industry focus – are members of your niche from a single professional group or industry? If you focus on a subset of a specific professional group, the niche is much easier to penetrate. You can email a specific newsletter to your target group.

You can make the niche group through its local, national and even international professional organisations. You can forge alliances with suppliers who serve the same niche.

Establish your niche – once you’ve decided upon a niche, you’ll want to launch it. Follow these steps to establish your coaching niche:

1. Research your niche – interview at least three prospects to identify what their needs are, how best to communicate with the niche, learn more about the competition, how to quickly position yourself as an expert, and how best to package your coaching as a solution to your niches greatest unmet, tangible needs that they are prepared to pay to resolve.

Package in this sense means arranging your coaching in some tangible parcel: six months of one-on-one coaching with specific content, workshops, and teleseminars for example.

2. Test market your solution – create a programme to try out your coaching solution, gain testimonials and learn more about your niche.

3. Roll out your finished product – seek every opportunity to speak, write, present or share you knowledge with your target audience to increase your exposure and solidify your position as an expert solution provider to this niche.

The greater the ‘expert’ profile you have with the group, the more responsive they will be to your innovation to participate in your programme.

4. Identify your speciality – your speciality describes the benefit your coaching will offer the target market. With both your niche and speciality clearly defined and articulated, you can come over as credible and knowledgeable rather than foolish.

To begin, create a hub statement, one short statement that demonstrates who you work with and what and how you can help them. All of your marketing materials, your articles, your workshops and public speeches should all be created with your target market in mind.

Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day, so why is it that successful people are able to achieve so much, when many others are left struggling to complete a few tasks.

As children most of us would have learnt to tell the time by the age of nine but we may spend a lifetime trying to master it. Ultimately, the story of your life would depend on how you use the time you have been given.

Your success in life depends on how you manage your own and other peoples’ time. It is our most precious resource.

Time management is of course self-management. It is a combination of planning, realism and self-awareness. But to control time we first need to understand our relationship with it.

It may seem harmless to say time and time again (pardon the pun) ‘I don’t have time’, ‘I can’t make time’, ‘Time just runs away’, or ‘Time is not on my side’ but these phrases betray a belief that time is in control of you, rather the other way around. Instead, try saying ‘I can always make time’.

Think about time as if you can manufacture it at will and you will always have enough.

Feel-good stories often start with ‘Once upon a time…’ the future is always rich with possibility and your time can be filled with anything you choose. Here are seven questions to focus your time management:

1. What decision would make the biggest difference in your life right now?

Whatever you do for a living you probably wish that there were more hours in the day. Investing money or resources in outsourcing can be an excellent way to free yourself up to focus on the elements of your life that need more of your attention, skills and vision.

2. If you stay on your current path, where will you end up?

Is your life heading in the direction you want it to? What is going well? What can be improved? How can you spend your time most effectively? Take 10 minutes to plan your day first thing in the morning and make sure you are not busy being busy.

3. What are you tolerating or putting up with?

Most people are ‘putting up with’ something that they feel would be too time-consuming to sort out. It might be the leaky tap, the over grown garden or even a puncture in the tyre of the family car. Whatever it is, there will come a point where there will be a cost involved in putting off the moment of the decision.

4. How different would your life be if you followed through with some of the things you are ‘putting up with’?

Take one at a time and consider the steps you need to take so that you regain control of the situation. There’s no time like the present, so take small steps to complete the tasks ahead.

Remember you don’t have to be complete it straight away, but by breaking the task down you will be managing your time more efficiently. Many people get caught up with the view that they need to complete one project before they can move on to the next.

5. What will you regret not doing in your life in later years?

Few of us give ourselves enough time to reflect on the whole life picture. A common coaching exercise invites people to write their own obituary, highlighting past and future achievements. This is ‘starting with the end in mind’ in a very real sense and can wake people up to the time they have to achieve their true goals.

6. What has lack of confidence or self-belief stopped you achieving?

It’s only human to have self-limiting beliefs of some sort. I once had a self-limiting belief about being able to talk to large groups of people; now I am not fazed if I need to speak to 1,000 people. If your beliefs are getting in your way, you can choose to make time to take advice on tackling these beliefs.

7. What is your life’s purpose? What are you passionate about?

If you identify your life’s purpose you can plan every decision to take you closer to achieving your goal. Every choice you make – from actions and reactions to promises and excuses – provides clear clues as to where your true motivation and priorities lie.

There is little point in aiming for something, if every time you are faced with a time choice you are diverted towards doing something else.

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If you’re subscribed to our weekly email – Personal Success Online, then you’re likely to be well aware of the exciting world of coaching. Wherever you are in your coaching journey, it’s always a good idea to revisit the fundamentals of coaching. It’s often the basic principles that can be forgotten.

What is coaching?

Coaching is about helping a client achieve their potential in life. It is about taking an idea or a dream and turning it into reality. It is about focus, intent, commitment and enthusiasm from both sides (the client and the coach). Above all, coaching is about results. It is about results that can be seen, experienced, measured and quantified.

A coach is not there to provide advice or answers. Instead they have a belief that everyone has the answers within themselves and the skill and practice of coaching is to help the client to find those answers within and bring them to the surface where they can be converted into positive action.

How is it different to counselling and psychotherapy?

It is distinctively different to counselling and psychotherapy where patients typically have a problem arising from a specific incident, condition or trauma. A therapist or counsellor will invariably look to the past to find solutions to an existing condition. A Coach is not concerned with the past.

Coaching is exclusively about where a client is now and where they want to be in the future.

There are 2 things that a coach must never be in sessions…

1.) A coach is never judgemental

2.) A coach is never critical.

In coaching there is no success or failure, there is only the result of an action. Remember coaching is about results.

The GROW model of coaching…

There are many approaches to coaching but here at The Coaching Academy, we favour arguably the most well-known model – GROW.

G represents GOALS or what you / the client want to achieve.

R represents REALITY or what is happening now.

O represents OPTIONS or exploring what could be done.

W represents WILL or the WAY FORWARD. In other words the what / when / how for taking actions forward.

This is a very simple breakdown of the GROW model of coaching. During a coaching session a coach will work through each stage of this process to aid a client’s desire to move forward in their lives or work situation.

Coaching is a progressive process where stumbling blocks are converted into stepping stones and where each step brings the client closer to the fulfilment of their desires and potential.

There are 2 key elements or values that must be at the heart of the coaching process…

1.) Awareness

2.) Responsibility

If you know of anyone who would be interested in discovering more about coaching and gaining coaching skills then they can apply to attend our free 2 day coaching course –

www.the-coaching-academy.com

‘All problems are difficult before they are easy’ Proverb

Problems arise when an obstacle prevents us reaching a goal. An objective is something we have decided we need to achieve; an obstacle is anything that prevents us achieving an objective.

Objective + Obstacle = PROBLEM

We encounter a huge variety of problems during the course of our work, with objectives and obstacles of different types and importance. Being able to solve these problems efficiently is essential. So here are my top 10 tips for problem solving:

1. Define the desired outcome.

2. State the problem clearly — half the solution of a problem is understanding what it is.

3. Explain the problem to someone else, or write it down — this will force you to clarify it, and solutions may start to present themselves.

4. Make sure that you have gathered all the information necessary.

5. Identify the part of your day at which you are most productive, and allocate some of this time to the problem.

6. Start with the parts of the problem that seem easy or obvious.

7. Identify apparent solutions, and dismiss those that, for whatever reason, are not feasible.

8. If you are sure that you have all the necessary input, and cannot see the solution, make a conscious decision to leave it for a while — your subconscious mind will work on it.

9. Beware of procrastination — often any decision is better than no decision.

10. It is legitimate to decide not to decide — some problems will solve themselves or subsequent events make it clear what course should be taken.

Graduate of The Coaching Academy, Nelia Koroleva, helps her clients overcome their personal challenges on a regular basis as a professional performance coach. Here she shares her experience with managing personal influence and bias for the better.

What you say

What you say says a lot about your personality and your influence.

Many people focus solely on negativity and criticism, when they communicate with each other. It is a quick way to disengage and damage your reputation. Your influence would be proportionally diminished to the intensity and level of your negativity.

For example, you’ve delivered a feedback, appraisal or performance review. Your words were judgemental, harsh and overly critical. You were looking for errors and jumped to conclusions by passing judgment. The problem is, the more you stew in the negativity, the deeper the pathway becomes.

Even though you might have a position of  authority, you do not have the right to be negative Critical Parent to your employee, colleague, associate, friend, partner, child, etc. You verbally attacked the person who challenged your way of thinking, doing and being. Change it!

Always make sure that you choose appropriate words, whether you’re a parent, a boss, a colleague, or a friend. Your words are incredibly important for your own well-being. When you focus solely on negativity and criticism, you cannot be happy.

You can’t neglect words that bring you and others motivation, encouragement, development and growth.

Focus on what you are saying, and remember, when you pass judgment, you immediately lose the ability to establish a rapport with others and influence them. It’s much more liberating to take responsibility for your own feelings and encourage people than to criticise and blame them.

Challenging Exercise: Banish Your Negativity Bias.

If you don’t like your own image, and you are unhappy /cannot accept yourself, you will often feel unsatisfied/ unable to accept and like others.

Look at yourself in the mirror and speak with yourself for about one hour. YES, ONE HOUR.

And just like any strengthening exercise, the work requires activity and repetition to reinforce the new learning. So, every time you want to criticize someone, find a room with a mirror, speak honestly to yourself about your frustrations by looking at yourself.

I promise, you will discover many new things about yourself, i.e. acknowledge your own shadows.

I believe, you will understand more than you ever did.

Do you need to break your behaviour patterns?

How you behave

How you behave is extremely important. Have you ever seen a healthy adult behaving as a child or as a teenager? It might be funny, shocking, sad, depressing, embarrassing and even tragic.

Consider your behaviour, and be smarter than 5-7 year old. Consider the effect your behaviour would have on others. You must do it, as too many seemingly simple habits can have a huge impact upon your influence and your rapport with your team, friends, colleagues and family.

For example, every morning after coffee you walked over to Elena’s desk and told her about her mistakes in front of the team. Would Elena feel pleased at your attention? Would she look forward to seeing you? Would she feel motivated and encouraged?

Would she prepare simple questions to clarify aspects of her work? Or would she develop a Pavlovian hatred for coffee and be busy elsewhere whenever you pass by? Of course, you would never be so destructive – provided you thought about it.

Research by the centre for Creative Leadership has found that the primary cause of derailment in executives involve deficits in emotional competence. The three primary ones are the following: difficult in handling change, not being able to work well in a team, and poor interpersonal relations.

Do you have such problems at work, which usually described in terms like: ‘Jack is just lazy’ or ‘Jackie is a bad-tempered old has-been’? On the one hand, such people can poison the working environment; on the other hand, these descriptions are totally unhelpful. Are you feeling tired, frustrated and ‘over it’?

Deeply frustrated person, who internalises secular values and dread change most, usually demonise those who disagree with them, attacking anyone who challenges their thinking and unaware reliance on antiquated instincts, out-dated traditions and destructive ideologies.

Many frustrated people waste so much time and energy resisting change rather than adapting that they fail to win satisfaction and success.

It is your responsibility to ensure that your influence is a positive one. Devote some time to changing this, and you will complete life tasks and enjoy rewarding personal and professional relationships with consistent satisfaction within your home, communities, companies, etc.

You are the only one responsible for your personal growth and professional development.

Exercise: Break your pattern!

This exercise will help you build rapport with someone, enrich work environments or ease tension in personal relationships.

Remember situations in the last two weeks when you behaved inappropriately, and answer the following questions:

• Does your behaviour affect your personality? How?

• How your behaviour has an effect on the behaviour of others?

• What situations generally create such behaviour tension and stress for you?

• What negative thoughts play over and over in your mind on a regular basis?

• Are these a true picture of reality?

• Are you afraid to share your needs and feelings with others?

• What is holding you back?

• How you can handle these situations /behave differently?

You (and others) deserve to have happiness and success in life and work.

You (and others) deserve to do what you (they) truly want – unless it’s not against the law or other human dignity.

You (and others) deserve to be what you (they) want and dream to be – successful, happy, full field and satisfied.