How to Answer the Question “What is Coaching?”

This week, we’re doing marketing Q&A with members of the ICF community. Here’s a question from Laura Reichert in North Carolina.

Q: What is life coaching? Seriously I know, you know and the ICF knows, but potential clients are scratching their heads. I find it difficult to answer this question in 30 seconds.

A:

Listen here and/or read below:

In short, people don’t need to know exactly what life coaching is. I know that sounds counterintuitive—if you’re trying to grow your coaching business and get more clients to invest in coaching, surely, they need to have a full understand of what coaching is, right? Not exactly.

Think about it this way:

Let’s say you’re experiencing back pain, and you’re talking with a chiropractor (for this example, let’s say you have no idea what a chiropractor does). If the chiropractor wants to land you as a client, I guarantee you he’s not going to spend his time explaining to you the details of what he does in his practice.

He’s not going to say, “Chiropractors use hands-on spinal manipulation and other alternative treatments to help patients. It’s a nonsurgical way to properly align the body’s musculoskeletal structure, particularly the spine.”

Sure, that’s exactly what he does in his practice. But if he said this to you, you’d probably be scratching your head and be no closer to understanding what chiropractic medicine is all about.

Instead, he might say something like, “I help people with back pain become completely pain free without surgery or medication.”

Now he’s got your attention. As a person experiencing back pain, you’d automatically be interested in working with him, even without having a complete understanding of the intricacies of what a chiropractor actually does taking up your brain space.

Here’s the critical distinction: in the first example, he’s telling you what he does. In the second example, he’s telling you what he can do for YOU. There’s a big difference here.

In general, potential clients don’t want to know what you do—whether you’re a chiropractor or a coach (or any other similar service provider)—they want to know what you can do for them.

Therefore, there’s no real need to explain what coaching is to people in your marketing material. It’ll just confuse them. On the other hand, you do need to do an excellent job of explaining what coaching can do for your prospects. That is, how coaching will improve their lives, enable them to overcome a problem, or help them reach a goal.

This is the real question you need to answer: What tangible outcome, goal, or result will they achieve by working with a coach?

Coaching is simply the VEHICLE that gets the person from where they are in their life now to where they want to be—the DESTINATION. The vehicle itself is not the exciting part and not what you want to dwell on.

Think about it this way: say you just got back from a tropical island vacation, and you’re telling your friends all about it. Would you be describing the airplane that you took to get there? Absolutely not! Instead, you’d be telling them about the destination—the hotel, beach, food, warm weather, etc.

When you’re marketing your coaching business, focus on telling your prospects about the destination in their life that coaching will help them arrive at—not the coaching itself. This is the only thing they’re really interested in and what will make them want to invest in a coach.

How do you do this? Well, the first step is to choose a specific niche for your business. A niche is an area of coaching that you specialize in. Examples include helping people to find a better career, improve their marriage, lose weight, make more money, de-stress, etc.

Once you choose a niche, then you can tell others what your coaching can do for them. For example:

• “As a career coach, I help people find the perfect career that matches their talents and passions.”
• “As a life coach, I work with couples to reignite the flame in their marriage and make them feel like newlyweds again.”
• “As a health coach, I help women lose weight permanently without dieting or regimented exercise.”

As you can see, when you specialize in something, you’re able to share with your prospects the specific destination or outcome that you can help them achieve in their lives. Now that’s going to get their attention!

Taking this approach to answer the question “What is coaching?” in your marketing material will enable you to land more clients without having anyone looking confused or scratching their heads over the term “life coaching.”