In this exclusive guest post for Coach Factory, Milana Leshinsky reveals incredibly down-to-earth advice for boosting your confidence as a coach. These tips work whether you’re just starting out or are an established coach who sometimes struggles with imposter syndrome.
To get coaching clients, you need to get yourself out there in the world, share your business with everyone you know, and market your coaching services. But that can be really difficult if you aren’t confident in your coaching skills, you lack proof that you can coach people successfully, you’re winging it and making things up as you go, or you’ve got a bit of design or copy shame because your messaging, copy, or design aren’t as professional as you’d like.
Feeling confident, professional, and proud of your brand, business, and skills is the secret to attracting the clients you want, leading sales calls like a total pro, and actually enjoying marketing your coaching.
When clients see your confidence as a coach, they wholeheartedly believe you can help them get from where they are to where they want to be. So how do you build confidence as a coach?
Confidence Booster 1: Coach Beta Clients
One of the biggest causes of imposter syndrome for coaches is a lack of experience and proven results. When you work with clients and they see real results, you create a proven track record of coaching clients to successful outcomes — even if it’s just a few clients — and that elevates your credibility, earns you testimonials, and naturally boosts your confidence.
New coaches can gain experience, build credibility, and get testimonials quickly by working with a set number of coaching clients (3-5) for a set amount of time (8-12 weeks) for free.
Removing the financial barrier removes risk and helps prospective clients say yes. It also removes a lot of pressure from your shoulders. With beta clients, your only focus is coaching and helping your clients achieve transformative results.
The trick to ensuring the beta client strategy pays off is to set crystal clear expectations up front and clearly define the value exchange. You are providing coaching services for free in exchange for feedback on the client experience and a testimonial about coaching with you.
This approach gives you the opportunity to gain valuable coaching experience, elevate the perceived value of your coaching services, and build confidence in your ability to get clients from where they are to where they want to be. That leads to:
- Better understanding the type of clients you want to work with and the type of challenges you want to focus on.
- Attracting new coaching leads who want to work with you to achieve similar results.
- Showing up to sales calls as a confident leader and capable coach.
Confidence Booster 2: Create Your Systems
As your coaching business grows, your offers expand, and more clients come into your business, you might find that behind the scenes, your business is a bit chaotic, stressful, and messy. But the more clients you coach the better your coaching skills become, and over time, you’ll start to notice patterns emerging in your coaching engagements — things you’re doing, saying, and providing over and over.
Those repetitive patterns lead to the second way to build your confidence as a coach: bringing order to your chaos by establishing repeatable, dependable systems.
- Standardizing your business systems and processes helps you organize your business so it runs smoothly and nothing falls through the cracks.
- Creating your own coaching methodology, framework, or signature system gives you a proven and validated roadmap to follow and gives clients more value and support beyond your coaching skills.
- Establishing your offers and outlining how you work with clients and clarifies all the details clients care about, like what they get, what they can expect, what level of access they have to you, and how working with you or moving through your program will work.
Investing in your systems and processes — even if they’re simple, like a checklist — makes you a better business owner. It means no longer winging, relying on what’s in your head, or reinventing the wheel every time you land a new client. It also enhances your professionalism, trustworthiness, and reliability, and gives prospective coaching clients extra reassurance that you can help them reach their goals.
Confidence Booster 3: Level Up Your Tech
Sometimes, when your business grows fast, it gets a little out of control and you’re almost penalized for that growth. You have more administrative work, more clients to make happy, more details to keep track of, and more work to do. Business, coaching, and client systems reintroduce control.
Those same systems are also the key to leveraging technology to:
- Position you as an experienced professional.
- Reinforce credibility and build trust.
- Streamline your coaching services.
- Provide a premium-level experience for clients.
All sorts of solutions power coaching businesses — membership platforms, learning management systems, client portals, email, video conferencing services, asynchronous communication tools, document delivery tools, and more. And I know first-hand that when they’re not working, set up incorrectly, or too difficult to use, or you send clients access to the materials they paid for and the link is broken, it’s so embarrassing!
My own coaching business grew fast and eventually, I struggled to manage all of my clients effectively. By the time I reached my breaking point, I had piecemealed seven different tools together and it was just too complicated. I was also sick of constant technology challenges and spending all day sending emails.
It’s what drove me to create Coaching Genie.
I needed an easy and fast way to manage private coaching clients, courses and training programs, and group coaching programs in one place. I also wanted it to be super easy for my clients to use.
It changed the entire trajectory of my business and I’m proud to say that today, the thing I hear most often from Coaching Genie customers — other than how easy it is to learn and use — is that they feel so much more organized, capable, and professional now that they have a reliable technology platform powering their coaching business.
- When they get a new coaching client, they know exactly what to do and where to send them.
- A welcome page greets their client and helps them get started. Everything that client needs is accessible, organized, and ready to go.
- The client can access materials and forms, communicate, track their progress, manage their homework, and share updates right in their client portal.
- Nothing gets lost or slips through the cracks and accountability is built in.
- At any time they can log in and see where their client is at, which means preparing for coaching sessions is practically effortless.
As you can imagine, Coaching Genie not only makes coaches look amazing but also confirms that hiring them was a good decision. And this dynamic is true for any software you use that fits your business model and works the way you need it to.
When you have the right technology to support you, your clients, and your business, you feel like a rockstar — as if you can tackle any challenge that comes your way and help every client achieve incredible transformations. It also helps you automate and delegate administrative tasks, client support, marketing tasks and more, which helps you scale up and grow your business with less stress and without doing more work.
Confidence Booster 4: Prioritize Client Experience
There is a lot of talk across social media these days about premium coaching and high-ticket coaching programs. Most of that talk focuses on adding features, adding value, giving clients more resources and tools, and packing on the bonuses. But that’s only one part of the premium puzzle. What’s often missing is the client experience.
Designing the experience you want clients to have ensures every client has a consistent experience that leads to fantastic testimonials, inspires referrals, and keeps them coming back for more coaching — and when that’s your reality, you can’t help but radiate confidence.
Putting your clients first and being intentional about every interaction they have with your brand can turn your coaching into a premium experience without you needing to do more or provide more. And for many coaches, this means leveraging software and technology to deliver your materials, customize client touchpoints, communicate with clients, and level up client care.
Confidence Booster 5: Elevate Your Brand
When you show up in the world as a smart, experienced, professional, and you are proud of your visual brand design, marketing materials design, website design, copywriting, and content, marketing your coaching services and selling your packages and programs becomes so much easier. Investing in the messaging and design for your coaching brand also makes it easier for you to differentiate yourself, stand out from competition and online noise, get noticed, and attract new opportunities.
Position yourself as the perfect coach for your ideal clients with:
- Clear, relatable messaging that speaks to their hearts about the challenges they’re facing, the obstacles in their way, and the frustrations they’ve experienced, as well as their desires and dreams, goals, and wants/needs.
- Professional, polished, clean visual design that contrasts with your direct competition and naturally guides people to the action you want them to take.
- Copy and content that positions you as a knowledgeable and helpful expert, makes it clear you’re the best coach for your ideal clients, removes obstacles, and guides the right clients to take the next step.
If design, messaging, copywriting, and content creation aren’t your specialities, add hiring a creative partner to your monthly business budget. Don’t sabotage your potential success with design and content that doesn’t reflect your brilliance, passion, and skill.
Confidence Attracts Coaching Clients
When I think about all of the conversations I have had with my own coaching clients and Coaching Genie customers, one truth stands out. When you feel like something in your business isn’t up to par — your systems, your client experience, your coaching skills, your branding and marketing, or your technology — you hold back and play small.
And that’s not serving anyone.
There are people out there looking for your help right now. They need your coaching and they need to find you, and not putting yourself out there robs them of the chance to work with you and robs you of the opportunity to gain experience and help more people.
If you’re lacking confidence in any part of your business or coaching skills, make a list of things you can do to feel more qualified, professional, trustworthy, capable, and credible (like checking out Coaching Genie). And it’s okay to start small because lots of baby steps add up to big leaps forward.
