Personal Coaching With Confidence For Rookies

When will I be confident in my personal coaching ability? For most new coaches this is the question they don’t even want to ask they are afraid of the answer. Months? Years? Decades? Of course the answer is personal and coaching skills do take time, but take heart. There is one thing you can start doing now that will improve your confidence in your ability to successfully coach just about anyone.

The Secret Ingredient To Coaching With Confidence

One of the reasons new coaches have trouble enrolling new clients is not really lack of confidence. Most coaches have confidence in at least one area of their life or they wouldn’t have taken on the goal of starting their own life coaching business. It’s lack of belief that personal coaching really can make a difference in someone’s life. One of the biggest reasons new coaches lack confidence in coaching is because they look at the distance between where they want to be and where they are in their own lives and it seems like the Grand Canyon. The unspoken fear they express to their potential client is, “Coaching is great, but I’m not sure if it really makes a difference.”

Stock Your Pantry With Personal Coaching Success Stories

Personal coaching success stories are the staples of your business. Of course when you’re first starting out you may not have many of your own. Feel free to borrow some from other coaches and especially from your mentor. Ideally you should have at least one example for each client you are likely to meet. Making up stories doesn’t work, because that is basically lying to your potential clients. Are you a relationship coach? Borrow a story. One of my favorites is a woman who really wanted to improve her relationship with her husband. They had been separated for over a year and when they started working together, the couple literally hated each other. The only thing keeping her in the game was that she didn’t want to lose custody of her son. Within 6 months not only had they renewed their vows and moved back in with each other, but they started an entire new basis for their relationship with a newfound love and passion. Even better than the movie, “When Harry Met Sally.”

Of course, you’ll want to stock up on as many different stories as you can so you can relate to as many different people as possible. But once you get started, you’ll probably find these stories almost as entertaining as watching a reality TV show.

Colette Seymann
JTS Advisors Designated Accountability Coach