How to Present Yourself and Your Work as a Coach 3 Principles Coaching

When I work with coaches nowadays, especially those who are using social media to share content and create coaching conversations, I’ll often look through their feed – whether on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn – to see how they are presenting themselves as a coach out in the world.

Something I found most coaches do is they try to appear like an authority or an expert, as if they’ve got their life together.

I did this too, by the way, I used social media to try and look impressive when I was starting out as a coach because that’s what I thought I needed to do to create clients. I thought I needed to impress people enough that they would want to have a coaching conversation with me and hire me. It made absolute sense to me.

However, what I didn’t fully understand at the beginning of my coaching journey was that coaching is a relationship business and being impressive or being an expert made it less likely that people would want to open up to me and have a coaching conversation. Because people would feel like I didn’t relate to or understand them.

When I looked at my own journey of hiring coaches, I realised I often didn’t hire the most famous coach. In fact, with the first coach I hired in 2007, I was his first coaching client.
The reason I hired him was simply because I was part of his online community for a couple of years and he was authentic and really helpful to me when I met him in real life. So even though when he started coaching he was unknown and untested, I signed up with him.

As I started to be more open, to worry less about being impressive and simply share what I was up to, where I was going, what I was reading and what I was learning, I found that I connected much better with people. Those who followed my work also became more engaged with my content on social media, but more importantly, they were more open to having a coaching conversation with me.