Building Your Coaching Practice

So, you’ve just completed your coach training and you are newly minted Life Coach. Now what?

This is something I have thought a lot about over the last 12 years – both for myself when I was starting out as a just-certified coach in 2007, and for the many new coaches I have mentored and supported over the years.

Here is my advice on how to take the next steps to go from certified to having a sustainable and sustaining coaching practice…

I think there are two main things you should be focusing on at the moment: community and consolidation.

Coaching can be very lonely. Because it is a largely solo pastime we can feel a bit untethered and uncontained at times. Finding or creating a community will help you to feel connected, to share your worries and triumphs and to support each other and your ideas. There is a special synergetic energy that is created when two or more people come together. You may even come up with some joint offerings like workshops of webinars that draw on the pools of both or all of the coaches involved.

You don’t have to spend money on creating a community; you can start your own Mastermind group, or a support group, or a reading/learning group that meets for coffee once a month. Anything that brings you together with other coaches will be helpful.

Consolidation also doesn’t need to be difficult or expensive. I always recommend that new coaches resist the urge to sign up for course after course until they have mastered what they have already learned through practicing it. It is a waste of precious resources to keep piling new learning on when you haven’t fully internalized the last learning. The information overload can also be very confusing.

Allow what you have already earned to percolate, and you are comfortable with applying the knowledge and using the new tools and skills. Only then, when you have a sense of what areas are interesting to you and that you specifically need or want further skills in, be discerning about where you spend your training budget. Only then, when you have a sense of what areas are interesting to you and that you specifically need or want further skills in, be discerning about where you spend your training budget.

Your training has given you all the skills you need right now. Use them, play with them, adapt them…the important thing is to get confident with them and to spread the word about your work.

You might want to develop your own 4 or 6 session coaching programme that you can offer at a discounted rate to the first [insert the number that works for you] people who sign up. Or find a local charity that you can do some volunteer coaching at. Anything that gets you practicing and visible is useful and powerful for you at this stage.

In time, both your consolidation efforts and your community will start to bring in the clients. It is like a slow burning fire that smoulders for a while before it bursts into flames. It requires patience and perseverance to take your practice from zero to hero.

If you do have the resources, signing up a with a coach or mentor is very helpful and it ticks both the consolidation and community boxes. Being coached helps you to get a sense of the coaching process and what does and doesn’t work for you as a client, as well as providing a safe and confidential space to work through your worries.

Consolidating my skills and building my community helped me (and the coaches I work with) to build a solid practice and develop an area of specialization that sees me being recognized as the go-to person for burnout coaching.

You can do it too!

Enjoy the ride.

Tags: coach | coach training | coaching | life coach | life coaching

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