You Are Not Starting from Zero
- by Jackie Jarvis The Walking Business Coach
One thing I often emphasise to the newly qualified executive coaches that I work with is
You are not starting from zero.
This is especially important to remember if you are moving into coaching after a successful corporate or professional career. It can be easy to focus on this new coaching qualification, all the new learning, tools and techniques along with a potential new identity working as a coach and forget everything that has already been built.
Many admit to feeling naked when they start thinking about building their coaching businesses.
There is an important thing to remember:
Your coaching qualification may be new. Your credibility isn’t.
You bring years of experience with you
Many of the executive coaches I speak to bring years, sometimes decades, of leadership, business and professional experience.
They have:
- Led teams
- Made difficult decisions
- Navigated change
- Supported people through challenges
- Built expertise in their field
And have experience working in specific sectors
That experience does not disappear when you become a coach. You are not naked, you have clothes.
What you have been before and what you have experienced before can become part of your coaching foundation.
Your career will have given you insight into the real challenges leaders and their teams face. The difficult conversations, decisions, pressures, the uncertainty.
This understanding is very valuable. And it will give you empathy.
The challenge starting your coaching business is not credibility.
It is clarity.
The challenge I often see, is that experienced professionals often underestimate what they already bring. Their coaching qualification is an add on to the richness that is already present.
They think they need to create credibility. Usually, they don’t.
What is most needed is clarity.
Clarity around:
- Who they want to help
- What challenges they understand deeply
- How their experience connects to their clients’ needs
Your experience becomes powerful when potential clients can see the connection between your background and their challenges. You are a good fit. The best fit.
You don’t need to reinvent yourself
A common question I hear is:
"How do I stand out when there are so many coaches out there?"
Often, the answer is not to become someone completely different.
It is to understand what makes you uniquely valuable. This comes from:
- Your experiences
- Your perspective.
- The situations where people naturally came to you for support.
- The challenges you have helped others overcome.
These are the foundations of your coaching proposition.
The next step is bringing it all together
Building a coaching practice does require both thinking strategically, learning new skills and a mindset that recognises opportunity, opportunity to bring it all together in a way that meaningfully connects your past and your future.
It is important that you understand how to position yourself as a coach, create a proposition that solves a problem, communicate your value and create opportunities to work with clients.
But remember you are not starting again.
You are building on everything that came before.
Your qualification gives you the coaching skills.
Your career gives you credibility.
Your perspective gives you something unique to offer.
The opportunity is to bring those things together in a way that helps the right clients understand the value you can provide.
A question to reflect on:
What experience from your career gives you the strongest foundation as a coach?
And how could that experience become part of the value you offer your future clients?
Next step
If you have recently qualified as a Coach and want to explore gaining some Strategic Business Development Coaching and Mentoring to help you to get set up to take your back story forward, please book an initial complimentary clarity call.
