I found that as a coach – and the same goes for my clients – that no matter how good I’ve become, there will always be some people who won’t want to work with me.
I used to speak to my own coach Steve Chandler about this and sometimes ask him what I’ve done wrong when I’ve been talking to a prospective client and they didn’t sign up. Sometimes there were things for me to learn and sometimes he simply said “Not everyone’s gonna hire you”.
What Steve was more interested in was looking at patterns. Was this a one-off or is this something that is happening over and over again?
The same is true if people aren’t replying to my emails or messages. If this is a trend then there’s probably something for me to look into in the way I’m communicating. (The same is true for the coaches I mentor). But if it’s a one-off I don’t want to read too much into it.
When I work with coaches to build their practices, one of the things we might look at is their communication with potential clients including email. Because there’s often a gap between what they’re currently doing and the kind of communication that compels people to respond to them. I know because I’ve been coached around this over several years and I can see now that my emails have a lot more heart in them and are more impactful than they were before.
Steve Chandler once said in reference to a potential client: “Write an email that he will read over and over again and will show his wife”. That was a great pointer for me to really write from my heart and not my head. The potential client did exactly what Steve said would happen – he read the email several times and read it out to his wife because he was so moved and touched by what I wrote. I held nothing back.
If you want to grow your coaching practice without gimmicks or tricks, check out this great interview I did with Lian Brook-Tyler about how to create a successful heart-led business.
With love and appreciation,
Ankush
Coach and Author of Sweet Sharing – Rediscovering the REAL You
