Once your coaching certification is completed, common barriers to success in coaching include confidence, a willingness to promote your services and what you offer, planning and preparation, consistency, time, and using the process.
Explore options for moving past these barriers:
- Confidence: during coach training I am sometimes surprised to have an experienced, educated individual question their own ability to coach. While this is a positive because it indicates caring about the quality of the work, it can prevent people from effectively moving forward. Things that have worked well include trusting in the coaching process, building confidence with various exercises or activities, and recognizing that instead of the coach having the answers it is the client who comes up with the answer.
- A willingness to promote your services: it is often easier to promote someone else and sometimes the hesitation to promote yourself is from subconscious bias against selling. Ultimately, moving past this barrier means recognizing that being available to provide services by promoting them helps the people who are looking both to find you and also to access the coaching services.
- Planning and preparation: as with any profession or business, being a coach involves preparing with your coach training and coaching processes, and then also preparing and planning your business and marketing efforts.
- Consistency: building a coaching business successfully calls for consistency and that means committing time, whether daily or weekly, to work on your business.
- Time: building a business is a process over time and is a demand on your time too so moving past this barrier means organizing, prioritizing, and scheduling.
- Using the Process: coach training provides a coaching process that works and using that process is a commitment to professionalism as a coach. Additionally, coach training organizations may provide resources and tools both for your coaching and for your business. The irony is that sometimes getting caught up in finding resources prevents you from seeing what you already have available.
Some of the ideas above revolve around your mindset as a coach and as an entrepreneur. Others involve doing the work required. In all cases, identifying barriers then planning how to move past them empowers your success. Plus, this is exactly what coaches do for their clients so doing it for yourself too makes sense!
