As you grow and evolve so too does your coaching. But how do you proceed if you and your coaching methods take different routes? What’s your bag?

How long have you been a coach? Ten years, 15, 20 even? I’m imagining there have been various incarnations as your interests and experience evolved over that time, and you’re skilled at delivering them.

But what about if you get bored? Or you notice your usual business is just not flowing to you like it did? You might be starting to wonder if this is it – it’s all going well but, you know, it’s just not what it used to be.

Perhaps it is time to pivot.

What do I mean by this? Perhaps it is time to turn away from your traditional market and focus on something really quite new – consciously and purposefully. Pivot away from your traditional business streams.

This is happening in my coaching community: coaches who have largely been doing corporate one-to-one work, facilitation and group work.

 

What are they shifting to?

  • Projects they have always dreamed of but shelved because they weren’t commercial. In revisiting them they worked them differently, with more experience – and it’s been successful
  • Away from one-to-one and formal leadership development work into supporting groups in a more integrated, less formal manner
  • Writing – taking time out to write the book that’s in them
  • Living overseas and working virtually from a full-time face-to-face business
  • Keynote speaking to spread their message
  • Deconstructing the big business to become an independent again.

 

One way to know if it’s time for you to pivot is to consider the following questions:

  • Does the business climate support the work I do (ie, is one-to-one coaching still a great intervention – has anyone challenged this in the last 20 years; lots of assumptions around it)?
  • How is everything I have learnt coming together for clients and me – could I be much more effective in a different way?
  • What am I frankly done with in what I do?
  • What would I love to say ‘no’ to right now and what do I want to do instead, if I thought I could?
  • Am I bored? Where can I go to play with ideas on what is possible for me now?

I pivoted about 18 months ago. I knew the writing was on the wall for the way I had been working for a long time. I was talking to a new contact; they asked me if I wanted to get involved in a new leadership development programme opportunity. Pound signs briefly flickered – they are global players.

I don’t know what it was. Maybe the informal setting of our meeting, maybe because it was close to Christmas, but I said, “No, thanks, that’s not my bag.”

He said “What is your bag?”, so I told him what I believed in. It was new for me to talk like that. I had no idea what that could possibly lead to – there was no structure or follow-up in what I said, but I knew I was done with leadership development programmes.

Fast forward to today. I am working with them on the most innovative, exciting work I have ever done, and almost didn’t even know existed. It’s a full 180 from what I was doing before. I had grown out of that and now this is a perfect fit.

Might it be your time to pivot?

 

  • Next issue: Working practices of profitable coaches – what they do, read and think about 
  • Ginny Baillie is a very experienced senior coach. She works with aware leaders in the UK, Europe, Middle East and East Coast US
  • www.ginnybaillie.com
  • www.thegoodassociate.com