Life Coach Ramblings

I stepped away from the coaching world for a while and shut the door on all of it — the subreddits, the Slack channels, the endless conversations about building a coaching business that dominated most of what was out there.

Part of it was personal. I had other things going on in my life that needed my attention. But part of it was also that I had grown tired of the conversation itself. Very little of it was actually about coaching. It’s mostly about the business of coaching.

Have we gotten so good at coaching that we no longer need to talk about frameworks, techniques, opportunities for learning, etc.?

Removing myself from the conversation allowed a truth to become clearer: I like my tiny coaching business. I enjoy growing it at a pace that would probably horrify the hustle crowd.

I do not want to be a “fully booked coach.” Honestly, I don’t have the bandwidth to be fully booked — “booked enough” is good enough. I like my me time, thank you very much.

In a lot of coaching spaces, there’s an overwhelming push to turn coaching into your main source of income. Six figures in a year. Scale your practice. Fill your calendar. When you’re constantly surrounded by that messaging, you start to feel like you’re doing something wrong if you’re not following it.

The coaching industry often oversells success. The exceptions often get mistaken for the norm.

Coaching is like any other business. It takes time to build. It depends on the market. And there are no guarantees (despite what a lot of webinars, business-building bootcamps, and workshops might suggest). You don’t see people talking about starting a restaurant or opening a small shop as if it’s easy money that anyone can turn into six figures in a year, do you? So why are so many treating coaching like it’s easy money?

But in some corners of the coaching world, that’s exactly the impression that gets created because a small percentage of coaches have done it.

Those folks are not the norm. The circumstances that produced their outcomes are often very different from the circumstances most people are working with. You might become one of them. Then again, you might not. That’s the part of the coaching industry people don’t talk about as much because it’s not sexy to talk about uncertainty.

Stepping away from the noise gave me the space to ask what I actually want from this work. It isn’t a scaled practice, a packed calendar, or a race to six figures. It’s a small coaching business that grows slowly, supports my life, and leaves me enough space to actually enjoy it.

The coaching world spends a lot of time talking about how to grow faster. I think we should spend more time talking about what “enough” looks like.