Attracting the Right Coaching Clients through Successful Storytelling

Posted by Feb Paquera | March 15, 2019 | Comments (0)

Building a coaching brand is like navigating a ship in a stormy sea—of skepticism, cliches and dispassion—to reach the shore of significance where future leaders await release. The journey can be exhilarating if you track the soil of stories in your niche.

Organic success stories align you with a market uniquely yours and report ROI without overshadowing the client’s voyage.

Hollywood film consultant, John Truby, unearthed the secrets to writing a gripping story. By adapting his six story elements to your coaching stories, your case studies will resonate with the right customers.

Theme

Enduring stories sing a central theme. According to Truby, a theme is not just a topic, but a moral argument—“your view of the proper way to act in the world.”

Scan not just your coaching niche, but also your moral compass. What guiding principles and values undergird your coaching effectiveness?

Without universal principles that herald human nature and the human condition, your coaching stories can entertain but not equip, persuade but not penetrate. Stories that don’t reach universal touchstones become a marketing ploy.

Prescribing a principle in prose can also make your story preachy, thereby putting off readers. Humans prefer themes in story structure, which unfold naturally through characters’ riveting drive, turning points and struggles—as opposed to themes thrown in description or dialogue.

Sphere

Showing where and when your market operates can help you pinpoint challenges, limitations and opportunities for them. The times and places a client inhabits, and how those times/places reflect their inner world, are the spheres in stories.

Your story world is more than a description of your character’s setting. Without a richly represented

world, readers can’t relate with a character. A client’s arena helps you incorporate scenes and subplots to fuse your theme, character and plot.

Far from turning off busy buyers, relating an interesting setting will save them time searching for your gem of wisdom.

Arc

Protagonists are defined in relation to other characters. They develop as they learn from others how to fight an opponent with their strengths and weaknesses. They reach success by climbing the ladder of maturity. Coaching stories must model moral expansion that push readers beyond their limits.

Client stories that depict service providers (instead of clients) as the hero leave readers feeling sold to rather than inspired. How can you make the client—not the coach—the exemplar, the one exuding the answer?

Structure

Do you ever wonder why some stories render heroes worthy of a standing ovation while others only remind readers of their geeky sales agent? The answer lies in who the hero is and how authentic their pains and struggles are.

“Much of the quality of your story is based on the quality of (the hero’s) self-revelation. This stripping away of the facade is not passive or easy. Rather, it is the most active, the most difficult, and the most courageous act the hero performs in the entire story,” says Truby.

As in coaching, knowing when to introduce readers to a reality is a science and art. Organic plot—a set of tools placed in the right stages of character arc—is what makes stories engaging. A good plot follows a sequence of organic revelations. But all throughout, it is the character that shapes the plot; not the other way around.

Authentic character is the rich soil that gives way for an organic plot to grow. This structure is what makes a success story bear fruit that delight readers.

Origin

If you’ve written various success stories, you probably know the pain of accumulating content waste following a market change. To craft memorable client stories that people love to share in perpetuity, coaches must create their unique market and wield distinctive symbols or metaphors to introduce a radical perspective—an element of masterful storytelling that Truby associates with “designing

principle.” He says all stories have a premise, but only good stories have a designing principle—an abstract, covert purpose, a unique seed that when planted, grows organically into concrete plot points.

Designing principle = story process + original execution

Premise

One question marketers ask is whether to write for businesses or for people. If you can craft a

premise that resonates with people, business will follow. Because every organization is run by people who make decisions based on their values. Human stories with a good premise do not weed out buyers.

A premise, sometimes called logline, is your entire story told in one or two sentences that, as Truby puts, “allow you to explore the full story (character, plot, theme, symbol), and the many forms it might take, before you actually write it.”

Connecting highlights of a success story with a pitch perfect premise can help you deliver a compelling case. Your premise is your promise!

The most powerful coaching stories are a reflection of the storytelling coach. If you take time to align your marketing with your deepest essence and your personal brand, you can raise the standards of client acquisition/development in the coaching world.

Whose voyage do you bolster with your guiding principles, shared contexts, team dynamics, courageous feedback, radical insights…and stories?

Feb Paquera

Feb Paquera is a corporate communications trainer and peacemaking language developer, who's served Fortune 500 companies in multicultural contexts. In the past, she participated in a B2B mobilization project for the Direct Marketing Association, and she is now working on piloting a client story optimization program to raise the global standard of corporate storytelling. Feb's also been involved in building bridges and promoting values alignment, to meet the training and development needs of marginalized-religious groups, and people in prison. To promote social responsibility, Feb designs strategic benchmarks for coaches, talent developers and content marketing teams through framework from Gifts of Connection™, with a focus on storytelling that promotes sustainable public relations, diversity and inclusion, collaboration and innovation.

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