How Coaching Others Contributes to Your Self-Development Coaching helps clients with achieving their personal or professional goals. But it's an immensely fulfilling exercise for the coach as well. Here's how.
By Shubham Sethi Edited by Chelsea Brown
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The coaching industry has risen in recent years and continues to rise as the years go by. This occurred because people saw the value in getting assistance from someone with an outside perspective — whether it be for individuals or organizations.
The reality is that coaching works. Former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, says that tech giants such as Apple and Google owe much of their global success to their "trillion-dollar" business coach, Bill Campbell.
Campbell worked with companies to show them that coaching is all about trustworthiness and perseverance. Schmidt went on to say that once trust was established between himself and his coach, "then [they were] working together to solve problems."
Coaching is often looked at as an exercise where the coach is aiding a client with achieving their personal or professional goals. But it's an immensely fulfilling exercise for the coach as well. It builds them as individuals and helps them become stronger as a leader and mentor within the market. Here's how:
Related: 8 Reasons Coaching Is the Perfect Solo Business
You get to share your expertise
Coaching helps you share your expertise and experience with clients. This doesn't mean you need to have many years of coaching experience. Instead, you should have a business, health or life experience (depending on what coaching niche you choose to focus on).
Finding your coaching niche is one of the first and most crucial steps when planning your business. Performance Coach University shared a diagram showing all the aspects you need to consider when finding your niche. There are four pieces to the puzzle:
What you love
What people will pay for
What you're good at
The problem you help people solve
Coaching is all about taking your personal experiences and using them to help others. Here's an example: Suppose I have previous experience working as a manager in a large company and didn't have sufficient support from my executives. In that case, I can use my learnings to help coach other managers who are struggling similarly.
This is why you often see people who have gone through experiences like weight loss start to train other individuals. They're experienced and knowledgeable, and prospective clients respect that.
You build confidence and self-esteem
Many clients sign up for online coaching sessions because they want to build their confidence and self-esteem. This often occurs because they have experienced something that has lowered their confidence level at work, at home or in a particular community.
As a coach, you will spend a lot of your time attempting to build this confidence in your clients for the long term. But the fact of the matter is that you'll also build confidence in yourself the more clients and interactions you have online.
Once you have your first few clients, they may spread the word about their positive experience with you, and you may gain more clients via word-of-mouth. This also means that as time goes by, more people see you in a positive light. This can boost your confidence and self-esteem, and before you know it, you may be speaking at conferences and events as a coach.
Related: The 5 Steps to Building Unshakable Confidence
You build relationships
Word-of-mouth is still one of the strongest marketing tactics in the world. We've just spoken about how it can help you attract more referred clients. But it's more than that — attracting and coaching clients is about building valuable relationships.
Some coaches see their clients once a week; each session ranges from 45-90 minutes, depending on your preference. This is extremely frequent, and it means that you will likely naturally build relationships with your clients and form a strong bond. You know a lot about their personal and professional lives and there's a high level of trust between coach and client.
Coaching allows you to meet new people, understand them on a deep level and be their pillar of support while they put your coaching strategies to practice in their life. Time, patience, determination and support are what they want from you — all key aspects of a great relationship.
You become an industry expert
Thought leadership is defined as the delivery of authentic content which leverages the insight and experience of the author (or, in this case, the coach) with the goal of educating others.
SEMrush shared an interesting report revealing that people see thought leadership as "inspirational content that drives changes" followed by "educational content" and then "content exploring industry trends." It shows us that people want to see inspirational content from business owners — and starting a coaching company can achieve this.
Once you have a few years of experience and start to write about your passions and expertise, you will soon see people engaging with you and looking to you for coaching advice. More clients will know of you and refer you to friends, families and colleagues.
At this stage, you've become an expert that people look up to. It's an incredible feeling to have because you are actively engaging with people and doing what you do best – assisting them every day.
Becoming an industry expert also means that you start to produce more content, host more live sessions and talk at more workshops and conferences. Think of the greats, such as the Simon Sineks of the world. These are the types of people we look up to, and coaching can get you to this level of admiration and liberation quicker than you may think.
Related: How to Turn Your Expertise into a Profitable Executive Coaching Business
Whether you're looking at coaching as a way of starting something new in life or as a way to meet new people, it doesn't really matter. All in all, coaching is an empowering business to get into. Helping people achieve their goals and overcome their hurdles is a gratifying thing, and everyone should have the opportunity to practice that according to their skill set.
With careful planning and implementation, your coaching business can become an inspiring place for people to go when they need it the most — and as a bonus, it can greatly boost your personal development as well.
