As an experienced independent coach, is it increasingly hard to find words for what you do? Is it perhaps time to drop the word ‘coach’? asks Ginny Baillie
What are you doing that’s no longer well described by ‘coaching’? And how would identifying that help you?
I was avoiding calls from my friend Rachel – she kept banging on about ‘benefits’ not ‘features’ in my business marketing. It was driving me nuts, mainly because she was right. I found I could no longer talk easily about what I do. This is because it’s morphed into something much wider than purely coaching. My skills are much more flexible and experienced. How I apply who I am as a coach, and the inherent skills, has changed.
I could talk for hours on why what I do works and why it’s so good for the business but I haven’t reached brief and pithy. When she and I were in a sales meeting she’d expertly and swiftly cut me off when the client glazed over.
I was struggling to talk about what I do without spending lots of time on it and I didn’t really like having to categorise my work. I felt the energy drain out of my body when I thought about it.
What changed all this was when I started to go much further out than benefits, a bit like panning out to consider the whole landscape. What are the problems organisations have that I help them with? What are the products or services contributing to in the bigger picture? It’s then I started to think about the landscape of what I do, and the broader view. The answers, and my bigger vision, have come from that thinking process.
What is it that you have never thought of yourself as, but that you are now are? For me it’s being a culture change specialist. I’ve never thought of myself in that way but that is what I’ve become. More importantly, it is something that organisational clients can relate to in a way they can’t to my individual bits and pieces. I was relying on them to see where my jigsaw would fit, rather than really doing
that for them.
This leads to me to wonder about the category of coach. We can’t control the thoughts triggered in the other person when you tell them you are a coach. I’ve never nailed the elevator speech. I used to say ‘coach’ and then who I helped. Yet just saying I’m a coach seems to massively undermine the work I do; it doesn’t do justice to the incredible experiences I have.
When I consider the landscape, I am able to articulate the scope in a completely different way that feels really ‘me’. Now when people ask me what I do, I talk about being involved in culture shift, in helping organisations fundamentally be far healthier, interesting and connected places to be. I love saying it – and I don’t even need to mention coaching; it’s part of it, but actually, there’s me and what I bring and it’s not all coaching. It’s conversations, relationships, mentoring, experience. It builds.
When I think about shifting culture, and the unique way I believe I support that happening, it starts me thinking about who I want to talk to, who I want to be with – then I get to Google Campus talks, TED talks, radio conversations, conferences, panels and, most importantly for me, movements.
It’s no longer just about the coaching. What will it be about over the next period of time? It’s by aiming for that clarity, having those conversations, that I will find out.
What is it you have become brilliant at that would encompass coaching but is actually far greater than the sum of its parts? Where might that take you that you would find really interesting? What would it do for your business if you did?
- Next issue: How to make your ideas ‘travel’ inside the politics of global organisations
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Ginny Baillie specialises in ‘shifting cultures, one meeting at a time’
She also helps coaches build their businesses through a strong associate portfolio