In today’s guest post Kaitlyn Hatch shares some lessons she learnt after deciding to set up a coaching business.

Showing the way

by Kaitlyn Hatch

In 2012 I completed an NLP practitioner course and began marketing myself as a life coach. I put myself out there as much as I could, self-promotion being a skill I’d picked up from founding a not-for-profit and working as an artist, and waited for the clients to come.

I was told repeatedly that this would take time. Yes, people wanted to change, but most of them would have to mull it over for six months to a year, or have something significant occur in their lives, before they finally took the step.

In the end I had a total of two clients before I packed it in.

This is not, however, a story of failure. The reasons I didn’t establish a professional coaching practice were clear:

1. I had a nebulous niche. I put myself out there as a ‘Creative Life Coach’, someone who wanted to help Creative Polymaths tap into and express their inherent creativity. While this may seem specific, it was problematic because my ideal client’s biggest problem was they didn’t identify as creative and therefore wouldn’t see me as marketing to them. Also, there was no promise of money, love or sex – three of the biggest sellers going.
2. I put way too much pressure on myself to make it financially successful. I love helping people realise their own potential but I became too focused on how to generate the income I’d need to survive. Obviously income is important but it shouldn’t have been my key motivator. Which brings me to point three…
3. I didn’t like charging for what I wanted to help people with. I’ve always been able to see the potential in others. I love helping them see it too and when I started marketing myself as a ‘professional’ I began suppressing my very nature on the grounds that if they weren’t paying, I wasn’t offering.

This experience was very painful for me. I was inhibiting my very nature and the added stress of trying to support myself financially got to be too much – which was why I closed my coaching business at the end of 2012.

Throughout this entire experience I was seeing (and continue to see) a psychologist. She was an immense support as she had already been through all the trials and tribulations of establishing a private practice.

Her tips and ideas, reflections and resources all helped me during that year. And when I decided it wasn’t working the decision was made after much discussion with her.

It wasn’t that she told me any of the above points. She didn’t have to. I already knew them. She just helped me unpick my thoughts to find the wisdom that lay within. As someone reading this blog I’m going to assume you provide a similar service to your clients. Helping people see their own wisdom is a challenging but also very rewarding process. In my experience, as someone who enjoys doing this for friends as well as for myself, the key is in asking questions. I don’t even think it’s a matter of the ‘right’ question because that implies there’s a correct answer. Most of the time the answer that fits a situation today will not fit in a few weeks or months. But the very process of inquiry is what engages a person in realising their own insights.

As a coach the role you play can be pivotal in a client’s life – you can be the one who engages them on a path of curiosity about their experiences. This is a great honour to be trusted with but also a great challenge.

The more we can support a client to question, to embrace life with a sense of great curiosity, the more they will come to trust their own instincts and internal wisdom.

– Kait

About Kaitlyn Hatch

Kaitlyn Hatch is a Creative Polymath, which is a quick way of saying she writes, paints, draws, sculpts, makes costumes, and has been known to dance in public.

In 2013 she published ‘Wise at Any Age’ – a handbook for cultivating wisdom. This is her first of what will be many published books. Writing it was a practice in recording the wisdom she has already discovered.

You can follow Kait on Twitter @faunawolf or check out her Facebook page.