What is the role of a coach? Essentially, they support you in your quest for outward success that reflects your innermost calling. Here’s how working with a good coach can help you find your niche, your voice, your ‘why’ and lots more…
Through active listening, a coach can draw out areas that make you come alive – and reflect these back to you to help you develop a personal brand that’s aligned with your values. A coach can help you identify what’s dearest to your heart (which may be hidden from your own awareness by contradictory or sabotaging thoughts). In this way, they can be a ‘mirror of truth’ to help you get clear about your direction.
Find your ‘why’
As an entrepreneur, it’s important to understand the ‘why’ behind your work. So a coach may help you identify the biggest challenges you’ve faced and the scariest dragons you’ve slain to get to where you are today. You may not realise the extent to which life’s tests have shaped you into the unique human being that you are. That’s why a coach will ask about defining moments, hurdles you’ve overcome, principles you’ve always stood by, etc. Even if your passion has gotten a bit lost or compromised along the way, a coach can help you rediscover your raison d’être.
Find your niche
Do you ever have a sense there’s a hole in the world you need to fill – a fundamental problem you yearn to mend? A coach may look for your ‘yearning intelligence’, in other words, your longing to be of service. Once you get in touch with a pain or difficulty that your tribe is experiencing, there’s a wonderful intersection between their problem and your vocational calling. If you can modify your offering to fit the needs of your tribe (aka your customers) without losing the essence of what you love to do – then you’ve hit that sweet spot and found your niche in the world.
Find your voice
Many people become entrepreneurs or solopreneurs because they want freedom, autonomy and to be their own boss. However, we are all in service to something – be it a company, an employer or (if we’re self-employed) our customers. To run a successful business, it’s essential to understand your target market so you can be utterly useful to them. A good coach will support you in identifying your customers and staying in constant communication with them.
Once you understand your worth to your particular tribe, you don’t have to sell anything; you just need to show up and talk about what you do via blog posts, status updates, articles on LinkedIn, etc. If you can share your thought leadership in a way that’s authentic, compelling and consistent, your tribe will find you. They will recognise your essence through your tone of voice and feel a resonance with your personal brand.
Find your origin story
There’s currently a strong market for unique, bespoke merchandise. Rather than buy mass-produced items, many people are happy to pay extra for homegrown, handmade pieces – and they want to know all about the person behind the product they’re buying. Fans of your work will want to know how it came to exist in the world and what motivated you to create it. They’ll buy into the human angle and become loyal customers and advocates of your brand.
Like many creative entrepreneurs, you may struggle to know what aspects of your ‘origin story’ to share (or not). A coach can support you in overcoming your fears about ‘blowing your own trumpet’ and help you see that you don’t need to present a perfectly polished persona as the face of your brand. In fact, you just need to be you and speak in a conversational way as if you’re talking to a friend – after all, your customers are kindred spirits.
And as well as sharing your triumphs, share your vulnerabilities with your fan base and admit your struggles. People love this because it gives them permission to do the same. A good coach will help you to find strength in vulnerability and to realise how powerfully this can connect you with your tribe and build rapport.
Find your values
To enjoy success as an entrepreneur and fulfilment as a person, your brand needs to be aligned with your core values. These may be so close to your heart, they’re hard to identify – but a big clue is that when you honour them, you have a deep sense of peace, as if you’re coming home.
A coach may use the following method to help you identify your values. Why not team up with a colleague or friend to try this on each other?
A coaching technique to help people identify their key values:
1. Sit opposite your colleague and ask them, “What fires you up? What matters to you most? Who are your heroes? What did they do in the world that you so admired?” (and any other questions like these you may think of).
2. As they speak, make notes on what they’re saying. You will notice a repetition of certain words, e.g. ‘inspiring’, ‘authentic’ and ‘courageous’, etc.
3. After about 15 or 20 minutes, read back to them the list of words they kept repeating. They will say, “Yes! Those things are most important to me!”
4. Now you can ask them, “On a scale of zero to ten, how much of ‘inspiring’, ‘authentic’ and ‘courageous’, etc. are you living at the moment?” Then ask them, “What would you be doing in your life, to live each of those values more fully?” Note down their answers.
5. Now swap roles and have your partner return the favour.
Find your moment to leap
Another area a coach can help with is overcoming your inner critic. You may recognise a judgmental part of you that slams the brakes on your enthusiasm with thoughts like, “No, it’s not ready yet – it has to be perfect!” This is a very human trait that stems from our innate fear of being shunned by our tribe – which, in ancient times, would have meant certain death (e.g. being eaten by a tiger). The fact is, your business/exhibition/website/blog is never going to be completely perfect. And that’s OK because your tribe won’t shun you over a typo or a fluffed sentence – and even if they did, there are no tigers waiting to eat you.
Once your coach has helped you to quell your fear-based perfectionism, you will be more confident to make yourself visible when you’ve reached a good enough rather than perfect standard. Once it’s out there, you can iterate your product in response to your audience’s feedback and use their comments as a positive to help you develop and fine-tune your offering.
This how-to guide was inspired by one of our Zoom Dives with Phil Askew, coach and photographer for entrepreneurial creatives.
Our Zoom Dive events are deep-delving discussions between our founder, Carolyn Dailey, and a handpicked creative business expert. You can listen to Carolyn and Phil’s full discussion here.
Fancy catching our next Zoom Dive, live? See our Events calendar and sign up for free.
Meanwhile, feel free to plunder our Knowledge bank for all sorts of tips, toolkits and templates to help you launch and grow your creative business.