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In coaching we talk about using power tools to help our clients reach their goals. Although many power tools are discussed, what they all have in common is the intent to break old mental, emotional, or behavioral patterns, and establish new ones.
For example, one power tool discussed in training is that of Trust vs Doubt. Many coachees start their growth process with a lot of doubt that they can have the life they truly want. We live in such a cautionary environment and have such little support for learning how to deeply trust ourselves, that doubt gets beaten into us from a very early age.
But trust is perhaps THE essential ingredient for living large -- that is, for having shining confidence needed to take the risks necessary to succeed at our goals. We must be willing to trust our instincts, judgments, perceptions, knowledge, training, and skills. And perhaps more importantly, we must be able to trust our ability to recover well from choices made with incomplete information, bad timing, or even too much trust in others' opinions and persuasion that lead to undesired outcomes.
In part, trust is developed by taking small risks and having small successes. And, trust grows by reflecting on the track record one accumulates in having recovered from less than optimal choices. But also, trust is an exercise in faith -- a belief in something unknown, unseen, or unprovable at the moment of making a trusting decision.
Trust fuels personal empowerment. The more trust you have in yourself and your ability to make things turn out better than just okay no matter what, the more empowered you truly are.
Coaching question: How will you exercise your trust in yourself today?
Coaches often wonder about the difference between coaching and counseling. A recent forum post captured my interest and prompted this response.
I take as my role the job of helping clients not just see the light at the end of the tunnel and figure out how to get there. As a coach, my job is to help the client jump the tracks and take to the air -- in other words, to leave altogether the paradigm of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and building the track to reach it.
My job is to help coachees envision a completely new view of themselves and their possibilities.
In other words, (and switching metaphors) a fish never imagines it can gallop because it has no frame of reference for being a horse. As a counselor, my job is to help the fish adjust to the disappointment and sense of loss it may experience if it happens to see a horse and want to be one, to teach effective coping tools for the inner urge to leap out of the fish tank, to tame the post traumatic stress of being nearly stepped on by a horse, to heal the depression or anxiety about the inevitability of being a fish, and to reintegrate its identity as a fish with a sense of belonging to its pod or school of origin.
As a coach my job is to help the fish imagine how horse-ness might work in the fish tank, to help the fish identify what it would need to be more horse-like within the parameters of obvious physical limitations, and to guide the fish in creating the action steps for experimenting with incorporating selected horse traits into the fish's world view and behavior patterns.
In other words, my job as a coach is to help clients think big, act brave, take the next leap, and discover they can not just gallop, but fly.
The essence of coaching, I think, is in helping clients reframe perspectives that no longer serve your highest purpose or greatest need. Often that will call into question ways of thinking and feeling that you have held as true or real. For some, re-ordering these beliefs can be temporarily unsettling.
Truth and reality have many levels and colors. As children, many of us were taught that there is only one Truth, and one Reality. As we grow into adults we learn that what was presented to us as the one Truth or Reality was our parents’ or society’s explanation, but that what was unknown when they formed their truth and reality has since been replaced or augmented by new knowledge.
If we’re lucky to be well educated or if we are naturally open to the process of critically thinking for ourselves, we easily reframe the perspectives about truth and reality we’ve been taught in our early years.
But if we’re committed to sustaining a certain explanation, it’s much harder to reframe old, outmoded, dysfunctional views into new, more growthful, more healthy perspectives.
In coaching, we ask: what belief or assumption are you committed that might no longer be the version of truth you want to invest in? What reality have you been committed to that you now see has to change?
Change itself necessarily implies that there is an old version of reality and a potentially new one, an old truth and a new one. If this were not so, there could never be any change at all.
Growth by it’s very nature is change.
What is the central truth you are committed to right now? How does that commitment shape your choices, your current reality? How might you need to change that explanation of truth in order to have the choices and reality you really want?
I'm hearing coaching students voicing reluctance to declare a niche in the same way that my counseling colleagues are reticent to do so. In the coaching spirit of reframing and shifting perspectives, I offer these thoughts:
What A Niche Is
A niche is a magnet. It's a way of presenting yourself as a specialist in helping an identifiable set of people with a defined range of problems, and drawing those people to you to aquire your help.
A niche is a focusing tool. It helps you determine how to put the range of your skills into language that people who will want them can recognize.
What A Niche Isn't
A niche is not a description of you. You are not the niche. Your clients and their problems are the niche.
A niche is not a way to limit who you work with. It's a way to better ensure that some if not most of the people you work with will be ideal for you -- ideal as in, have issues you really like to work with and feel exceedingly expert at, and who perfectly match your preferred way of working, your personality, don't blink at your policies, and think you're worth every penny.
A niche is not about the work you do. It's about getting clients so that you can DO the work you do. Despite believing that a good coach can coach anyone who is coachable (or that everyone is coachable by a good coach), that idea is not helpful in marketing. In fact, it's counterproductive because it promotes vague, overly general, and confusing messages.
Prospective clients will not care or be impressed by the fact that you can coach everyone on everything. That actually may sound implausible and therefore suspect. It will make your marketing backfire.
We all feel special and unique, and when we need help we want the specialist who is expert at our unique problem. We don't want the jack of all trades.
Ironically, holding yourself out as a specialist in one area will make you seem more client attractive to others in other areas. They psychology is that if you are an expert at one thing, you're probably pretty darn good at a few other things. Whether that's true or not, it works for the purposes of marketing.
And that's why niche marketing works for coaches like it does for counselors.
