Small Business Talk
The Podcast to Grow your Business Faster
Who Do You Need to Be
Show Notes
Who do you need to be? What is your identity? I do. I coach. Have you recently moved into being a coach? What do you do? Something else? Before, when you were lawyer and accountant and there’s a business development officer. What was your previous identity? Now that you’re a coach and you’re making a business out of that, are you finding it hard to give up your previous identity with somebody else?
Identify Yourself First
What do you do? Do you say I’m a coach? Or do you sort of fumble around a bit and go back to I’m an accountant. Sometimes it’s not as easy to give up your previous identity as you might have thought in the beginning. Transitioning into a coach is not just learning the skills. You have to reshape your identity.
You also have to learn business and marketing skills as well. If you want to turn this into a business for yourself as a coach, we need to build trust. We need our clients and our potential clients to trust us. But how are they going to trust us if we don’t believe our statements ourselves? If we say I’m the coach, I’m the coach, I’m the coach.
That’s not very clear. So we need to make sure that we believe the statement ourselves. So who do we need to be to be that coach, to be this focus and sign up? Be clear on your mission, your vision and your values is essential, but you have to believe that before anybody else will understand gaining the value, the unique insights that you bring based on your personal experience.
Believe in What You Do
It’s really important. As in a new coach, you are experienced. You have had that life experience. What can you bring to the chosen field that you’ve got now? So I bring 22 years of marketing to my marketing coaching. So what is it that you bring? You also have to have the courage to change, to be vulnerable, to learn, to adapt and to grow and really lean into it and believe that yourself before other people will.
What is this new identity and how can you use it? Make sure that you are setting that relationship the time that you want to continue with. What is it that you need to bring for your clients and your team? You need to be genuine and clear and courageous. You need to be a bit vulnerable.
Who Are You?
What are the stories that you can bring? We all want to know that. Stories how we remember, stories how we connect. But what is it that you have to bring to the picture? What are you hiding? We all love to do business with businesses that we know a little bit about the owner. Now, I’m not saying I don’t charge too much. And if you’ve got children and you don’t want to share that, that’s perfectly fine as well, whatever you’re comfortable with.
But you do need to say something. So if you’re a dog lover, you might share about your dog or you might be sharing a little bit about your children, particularly if you’re in the family space. If you’re doing something with relationships, it might work well to share that, if that’s what you’re comfortable with. But you do need to be vulnerable and have that courage and make sure that people can see you as a person.
What is different about you to somebody else? Why would they use you as a coach as opposed to ten or other coaches that are out there? So what is it that you can bring? What story can you bring to help your clients to get to know you would be to understand your values, to know that you’ve got the experience and that you can help them.
Be Who You Are
Not just the skill set skills, the grind. And we’ve done lots of podcasts on skills and making sure that you’ve got the right skills, but you also need to bring what you really want to do. How can I be vulnerable with you if they don’t trust you? And trust is built on that likability, that personality. And that can be very polarizing.
And that’s a good thing. You don’t want to have to be people pleasing, pleasing people that don’t like you anyway. So if they don’t like it right, they’re not your people. But you also need to build your tribe of the people that do like you, the advocates, the ones that are going to go out there and spread the word.
You need to build your tribe and don’t try to mold into that perfect coach. Nobody’s perfect. And you won’t be so trying to be the perfect coach. Looking at where somebody else’s and trying to be. You’re chapter one to their chapter 20.
You don’t know what things they had to do to get there, to make sure that they were, in your eyes, the perfect coach. And no doubt they’re not either. They don’t try to mold into that. Perfect, because that’s going to keep you stuck and you’re never going to get there.
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Who Do You Need to Be
As a coach, you do need to embrace the change and you do need to make sure that you believe it so that your clients can take transformation. It will enrich both your professional journey and your personal growth. We don’t stay stagnant and we shouldn’t. And as coaches, that’s what we’re telling people, that we want them to teach it. We want them to have that transformation to change. So we need to embrace it ourselves. So if you don’t believe it and you can’t say I am a coach, then how are they going to say, Who do you need to be?
Listen to the full episode of Small Business Talk episode 215.
You can also find the video versions of the Small Business Talk Episodes on YouTube.
