Your confidence in your coaching ability is the number one thing that will blow up your business in the best possible way. No matter where in your coaching journey you are. Whether you’re a beginner just starting out or have a decade of experience under your belt. Increasing your confidence will help you shatter that ceiling that has been holding you back. But how to gain confidence in your coaching?
In this post, I’ll dive into some specific steps to help you gain confidence in your coaching and take your business to the next level.
You Always Have One Client
No matter the size of your business, you always have at least one client — yourself. Being a willing participant in your own coaching is the first step to solidifying your confidence in your coaching ability. You need to believe in your own medicine, you need to practice what you coach and you need to be your own ideal client.
Because when you see how your advice and approach interacts with real life, you’ll have a clear sense of what works and what needs tweaking. And the stories you’ll be able to tell will have the type of detail that only true lived experience can generate.
Look back on the specific details of your journey from pain to bliss. Where did you begin? What pain did you experience, what resistance did you face? Then, what were the crucial moments or key revelations that moved you forward? Pull out those critical components of your journey and systematize them. If you can sequence the journey properly for your clients, you will be able to smoothly move them from stuckness to nirvana.
Gain confidence by demonstrating the process
Your clients don’t want a jack of all trades. They need a thought partner who has been through what they’ve been through and come out the other side. They’re willing to pay big money to release their pain, and in order to do that they’ll need to work with someone they trust has the lived experience to help them. But they won’t know that you’re that person until you clearly demonstrate your process to them.
It doesn’t have to be showy or complicated. You don’t need a complex website or series of videos. Sometimes, it can just be a simple explanation that clearly shows how you get your clients from point A to point B. It’s not enough to say, “Oh, I’m an amazing coach and can definitely help fix your problems!” You need to show your audience how you do it. If you can describe the process in a way that makes someone want it, then you’ve done your job.
Connecting stories to what you do helps you understand it better
Once you are able to describe the process, then you need to give concrete examples to illustrate it clearly. We once had a client who was struggling to make money in her business. She was a business coach, and she helped her clients building very successful income streams. But she was unable to create it in her own business.
We sat her down with our mindset coach who helped her unearth a very specific memory regarding money and guilt from childhood. The most interesting thing about this memory was that the client had completely forgotten about it for almost 3 decades!! But the pattern the memory created, of, “I don’t dare ask or receive money because it will make the people I love sad” was stuck in her subconscious.
Once this story was revealed, we refined the messaging and she began telling that story in public. She immediately started filling up her program and even had to delay her launch because she had a waitlist.
Demonstrating your process and illustrating it with real stories will not only draw more clients to you. It will also continuously reinforce your coaching abilities. By telling the tale of your transformative coaching, you’ll be building momentum, taking you further and further.
Gain confidence by demonstrating your ability to listen for the truth
Building your confidence in your coaching ability means learning how to see what’s actually going on. The vast majority of people who come to you for help are going to bring you the wrong problem. If you don’t learn how to listen deeply, you’re going to compound the problem instead of solving what’s really going wrong.
I once had a client who came to us wanting to grow his audience. I asked him a few insightful questions and realized he had a very different problem on his hands. The problem was not the size of his audience. It was that he didn’t have an effective way to monetize his audience.
If I had helped this client grow his audience, I would have compounded the real problem and both he and I would have felt like total failures. Thankfully, I was listening deeply and asking the right sorts of questions, so the real problem was revealed very early on. And then we were able to focus on fixing it.
We tweaked his messaging and made his offer significantly clearer from a client perspective. Now his prospects were able to understand what was in it for them and how his skills pertained to their issues. That same client made $100K within 8 weeks of us starting. Watch an early interview with him here.
Learn to hold space for yourself.
Finally, if you want to grow your confidence in your coaching, get yourself a good coach. If you want to up your coaching game, be the client of a coach who knows what they’re doing.
A good coach can help you fix and shift the root issue holding you back. It’s going to be difficult to gain deep confidence in your coaching abilities without working with a coach yourself because you have not lived that kind of transformation. It’s like learning to give a massage from a book. It is useful up to a point, but if you’ve never gotten a life-changing massage. It is going to be really difficult to be a life-changing massage therapist yourself.
Nothing will give you confidence in both the process of coaching and your own coaching abilities like living the transformation yourself. Because then you are proof that it works. You have felt the shift in your body and you aren’t going to have any fear or shame or doubts holding you back. You’re going to be excited to share it and that’s what will draw people to you.
Looking for help to grow your coaching ability while you grow a successful and life-changing coaching business? Watch this 27 minute video that maps out our process. It also shows you the only growth levers you need to focus on.
