Part 2: There isn’t one way to build your coaching practice
Ankush Jain speaks about his realisation that there isn’t one way to be a coach.
Contact Details:
To find more resources for coaches, please visit https://ankushjain.co.uk/coaches/
To grow your own coaching practice and become a more impactful coach, check out Ankush’s online course with Dr Mark Howard: https://ankushkumarjain.podia.com/building-the-impactful-and-sustainable-3p-coaching-practice
Full Transcript:
We don’t know what opportunities are going to come our way, we don’t know what obstacles are going to present themselves, and we don’t know what we don’t know. But we also don’t need to know.
It’s a complete falsehood that we need, as you, say, “all the traffic lights to be green.” Or we need to know a plan. Again coming back to your original question, one of the things I wish I’d known when I started out, is, there isn’t one way to do this, and I was thinking back to, when I thought, “Oh I want to be a coach, there’s probably going to be one way of coaching.” And I was very naive, I thought there’s one way of doing it or, it can’t be that varied, and I’ll go through, I’ll get properly qualified as a coach, and I’ll know the way to coach, and then that’ll be it.
It just doesn’t work that way, that there are so many different ways of coaching, there are so many different methods people use, there are so many different paths people have taken. And some people coach fulltime and then talk a little bit and write a little bit, and some people do it the other way around in a complete mixture and different variations. I actually really enjoy that, at first, it can seem really daunting because I wanted a map or just tell me how to go down this road and become a coach, but what I found over the years is, it’s been really helpful because it means I can be really creative, and there are no rules.
So, there’s nothing to say, which is what I thought, “well you need to write a blog or a newsletter, you need to get an email list, then you need to do webinars, and then you need to fill events and whatever else,” but it’s really nice, because if that’s not what you enjoy doing, if that’s not what you are really drawn to do, you might just think, “well, I actually want to just go and talk in my corporation that I’m working in at the moment, and I want to work with the HR guys and talk about specifically one issue.” Or you could say, “do you know what? I can see what I’m learning and I really think it could be helpful to share this with my family.” There are no correct ways and it’s amazing how then that, you might think, “well how’s that going to lead me to have a successful business?”
And what I’ve found is that opportunities are just everywhere. Some people who have been my biggest advocates have been people who haven’t been my clients, per se. But maybe people that I’ve shared something with that’s helped them. They’ve maybe been family or friends. And then they’ve gone telling everyone, “oh you need to go talk to Ankush, because he could really help you with whatever issue they’ve been having. And that’s not in any book, that’s not in any qualification, talk to people who won’t be your clients so that they could get you clients. But it’s just amazing how it all works out.
