The Coaching Confessional

[This post was written in June 2008 but only appears on this weblog, now that the coach has given up dithering.]

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reflecting on coaching as an ‘industry’ but more particularly on how I conduct my work with clients within this industry.

I’m one of those coaches who hasn’t turned her back on ‘pro-bono clients’ and is now, not unexpectedly, feeling the impact of this on her own practice. I think many of us, including those who’ve already been coaching informally as an extension of their job rôles, coach during their training on a pro-bono basis. However, when pro-bono clients outnumber the paying ones—well to thriving coaches, that’s a sure sign of a stagnant, unsuccessful business.

I believe in contributing social capital, and, because I work in my day job with adults whose education has been interrupted, perhaps detrimentally affected by learning or social issues, my colleagues and I do a lot of informal coaching. I know it works, and not only in changing lives or outlooks. Because I’m exploring ways of using positive psychology techniques to build positive emotion, it’s helping to foster successful learning experiences.

But in the coaching community, well, I’m someone who hasn’t really made it in the industry.

And won’t.

Someone who doesn’t — indeed who can’t — go for the kill in that first free session.

To top that, my itty bitty shitty committee rattles away in the background.

I like to think it’s not incompetence. Perhaps I am missing the commercial gene. Perhaps I'm not committed to making coaching a fully-fledged business.

I tuned in online to a coaching session with Dave Buck on Live Coaching Friday last week, during which the coachee realised that her need to be nice was affecting her game. Instead of using her insight as an opportunity to hook a client, she jumped in to help fix the problem.

My need to help people is greater than my need to make money from them. I’ve been tactfully reproached by my coaching ‘network’, such as it is, for making that same mistake i.e. recognising issues and ‘fixing’ them in the first free session. True, I also find it quite a challenge to fix that financial deal with someone I barely know, who is at the other end of the phone.

When has it not been like this? When our family’s income dropped, I was able to be entrepreneurial, building up a modest home industry whose profits more than covered a drop in our income and which could, had I not preferred teaching, have become a successful business. I frequently spot gaps in markets, but have too many projects to do anything about them, and whoops, two, three years on, somebody else is making a packet from a product.

My perspective could change. I think that means, with coaching, deciding that I don’t need coaching to be my cash cow, but that I can enjoy the fact that I’m doing the kind of coaching that I am. And stop feeling that what I’m doing, i.e. building resilience and developing skills, as opposed to building and promoting a business, is somehow less acceptable.

Perhaps a better alternative is to re-assess what I really contribute through pro-bono coaching and why I need the gratification of doing it! It's not hard to think how I could re-direct that energy in a way that ringfences it.

Think I just used this blog as a confessional...