Over all the years I have been involved in training coaches and helping them build their coaching business, there is one area that seems to be the biggest stumbling block. This one thing can keep coaches stuck for months, even years, in a holding pattern in which they don’t move forward and create a sustainable coaching practice… This one thing is the coaching niche!
Coaches agonise over it. Should they have one? Do they have the right one? And how do they find it in the first place?
Now, I am not the biggest advocate of niches. Unlike many people, I don’t think they are essential and if finding a coaching niche is going to hold you back, I’d encourage you to let go and just find people to work with of every type!
However, if you feel that having a niche will help you focus, gain clarity, forge a strong message, do the work you love, create long-term sustainability and impact, then there are some core areas to look to find your coaching niche.
In this article, I aim to lay out the 8 lenses you can use to cast your eye over your life and interests to find where a niche might lie.
As you might have guessed by the title of this article, I have an acronym that not only covers these 8 areas but does so in a way that will leave you inspired!
Guessed it yet? Yes, it’s INSPIRED.
Firstly, it’s important to say INSPIRED is not a step-by-step approach in which your final, chosen niche must map to every part of the acronym. Think of it more as a map, or a set of lenses, to explore your life and experience that you can look at to find inspiration.
Each element presents an area of your life that you can explore to find out whether it offers a possible route to a coaching niche. After all, who is going to focus on a niche that doesn’t in some way come for their life experience and interests.
So let’s take a look at the 8 areas if INSPIRED.