You're at the Coaching Inn, 3D Coaching's virtual pub where we enjoy conversations with people who engage in the world of coaching. Welcome to The Coaching Inn. today, well, I'm Claire Pedrick. And today my guest is Sarah Short, who's come back for a second go in the pub. Sarah works for The Coaching Revolution and we had such an amazing conversation outside the pub before we got in our cars and drove away after the last conversation that we agreed straight away to get another date in the diary.
Welcome, Sarah. Thank you very much, Claire. Lovely to be here. And there's been quite a lot of cross fertilization since our last podcast, I think. There has. I've had some really interesting conversations with with coaches who fit into two camps, and I'm absolutely thrilled that both kinds felt that they could come and talk to me. So the one kind was, gosh, you talk a lot of sense. Can I have a chat with you about perhaps having some help building my coaching business?
And those are the kind of people that I normally talk to. But then on the other camp was the I listened to the podcast and it made me furious because you were contradicting everything that I believe to be true about how to build a coaching business. And the person in question actually said, you know, true coach said, so I went away and reflected on why I felt so angry and then decided to book a chat in my diary. And I'm always very happy to talk to people whether or not they I I'm talking sense.
anyway, we had a chat and I think it's fair to say that by the end of the conversation. He certainly wasn't angry when he arrived in the conversation, but he was sort of seeing why, even though I appear to contradict, well, I do contradict a lot of the... They, they're not even myths on, are they?
What is this thing that's out there about if your coaching is good enough, your clients will find you and that all you've got to do is lift your eyes from the floor and look around and all the clients that you'll ever need surround you. It's like one of our coaches lives in Levensham in Manchester. She said, Mr. God, if I lift my eyes up, I'll get somebody awful to sell me some dope.
We don't all live in places where if you lift your eyes up from the floor, you're surrounded by potential clients. Yeah. If you're cringing, you know who you are. We are going to, I am going to invite you to come on the coaching in in a year or 18 months time and tell your story of what happened and you know who you are. So. We decided, didn't we, Sarah, that we wanted to dig more into the idea of simplifying and simplicity.
Yes. And understanding as well, understanding that it can be simple, it doesn't have to be hard. And speaking plain English. this is one of my favourites. Let me get the hobby horse out.
So, Listeners, you'll know that we had last week, we had Martin Carter on after his amazing post on LinkedIn, where he really challenged the idea of calling yourself, you know, the kick-ass coach or the coach who does some words that nobody understands and actually describing yourself in plain and simple language. So we're building really on that conversation now. And of course my passion is about simplifying. It's really funny.
We've had 15, well actually we started 21 people this week, mental coaching in groups. And I am hosting one of the groups and I started off one of the groups with Colleen. So I've seen 12 people new to coaching this week and they're all asking questions. And my answer, to most questions that coaches ask about their coaching, the technical side of coaching is ask them. So I get a question, what do I do if this happens? And I go, ask the thinker.
And they look at me and people who work with me know by the time I've said that 20 times, actually they know the answer themselves. But it really astonishes me that that ask them as an answer to a question, don't ask me, ask the client, ask the thinker, is such a piece of rocket science. What have we done as a profession to make people think that it's more complicated than that and that we need to know what to do?
That we need to know, because there's an implication there that we should know an answer. Yeah. When, of course. It's not about us. On the coaching side of your business, it's not about us. And yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? It is interesting. Ask them to actually a really good question all around, whether you're on the marketing side or the coaching skills side. Absolutely.
In our shop, we've got these lovely little postcards with my version of the ICF core competencies and they're all little postcards and the most I'm looking for the one just to show you Sarah, because I'm not able to show this to our listeners. The first principle of coaching is ask them. Yes, there are there are others and we've just taken them out of the complexity of the competencies across any professional body. what we do in coaching is really simple. Isn't Indeed, indeed.
I think this is where we got into this last time, isn't it? I think there is an element of the coaching world, coaching fraternity, coaching profession, that is very concerned with how clever they are. Yeah. they, I'm not, I don't mean that quite as disparagingly as it sounds, but that they need, like, for example, the ICF, the way that they write things, you look at it and you think, who, what? even know what that means.
I'm an English teacher for goodness sake and I'm struggling to understand what that means. And it does make me wonder if it comes from a place of feeling like you have to appear clever, not just be clever but you have to demonstrate that you're clever. Yes and I think it also comes from a place where pretty much in every profession Knowledge is, is, and, and, and the acquisition of knowledge is the thing that demonstrates credibility. So I need to know a bit more in order to be credible.
I need to know a bit more than that in order to be a little bit more credible. Can I add to that? Yeah. I can't find any clients, so I'm going to take another coaching qualification because then I'll be even more credible to the clients that I don't have. You should hear me going to people. Please don't read any more books. Please don't go on any more courses. Use well what you've learned already. Because you've got loads.
Yeah. I suppose, I suppose one of your postcards should just say, I am enough. Yeah. Yeah. Actually one of the philosophy postcards says you are the material because it's, it's who we are and what that looks like in the dialogue that is at the heart of great coaching. It's the presence. It's funny. We also started a course this week called Simplifying Coaching, which is like a conversion course for people who've trained elsewhere who want to simplify the work that they do.
And I did a coaching demo. This is a pilot course. We're going to run it again, but we're going to make it three hours longer because I did a coaching demo and then it took us the whole session to even begin to have a little look at the bits of it. But all the bits that we were looking at were about how little I did. Which is great. And how did I know to do that little? And how did I know not to speak then?
And one of the questions I've had a few times this week is how did you know not to speak then? And I said, because they looked away and were clearly thinking. So the coaching was doing great stuff. And if I'd spoken, I would have stopped the great stuff happening, which is a very pragmatic thing, I think. You know, it's not a big secret. It's just that if you've hired me to do some good work, and you're doing some good work, then I need to let you do some good work.
Yes, because alternatively, won't be coaching, you'll be interrupting and that's not what they're paying you for. And I'll be interrupting them thinking which is what they're paying me for. Absolutely. So, I even ask myself if it's really that simple. And then I talk back to myself and say, it is, because I know deep down in my Noah that it is. But even I lose confidence sometimes and go, is it really? But it is, it is. I just want, I want people to understand what they hear.
And I want us to speak in a language that is accessible to everybody. Yeah. I'm thinking about what you said about credibility and acquiring more knowledge is, increases, sorry, I'm looking for a word there, increases credibility. And I was thinking of it in terms of what I was saying about the language that our August professional bodies, all of them and the higher echelons of coaching academia use.
And I think that the effect of that is the actually I was going to say is the absolute opposite of what they want to achieve because what it actually does is it's difficult for the reader, the listener. But as I was saying that, thought, actually, maybe that is what they want to do. Maybe they do want to kind of, you know, the old thing about jargon is designed to keep people out, not to bring them in. Because a lot of sort of high brow coaching, I think that's the thing.
When did coaching suddenly become this terribly intellectual pursuit for which we do lots and lots of academic study and stop being about the person in front of you? I don't know. That's the thing, isn't it? It's interesting because research is a really useful thing. Of course. And understanding and having some good solid stuff.
And if anyone wants to do a PhD in coaching and wants to talk to me about some great things to research, I've got a long list of things that would be really interesting to research in a PhD that would actually really bring some brilliant stuff to the practical experience of what happens in the room. And I think that's where. there's a danger that we lose connection. Yes. Because knowing a lot doesn't mean we're good at it. You I could read endless books about driving.
You know, I could read books that tell me how to drive in an ecologically friendly way, and I could read books about how to do all sorts of things. But if I don't actually get in the car. and use it and drive and I won't need to use all of it all the time and sometimes I won't need to use any of it. Yes, that's really interesting that you said that because I have an analogy that I use with drivers and having a driving license and my analogy is this.
If you take your driving test and you pass it and somebody gives you a driving license and there you've got it in your hand. And you never set foot in a car ever again. Are you a driver or are you a person with a driving license? Yeah. I would argue that you are the second.
So if you go all the way through a coaching program, know, as in training to become a coach, not being coached, but training to become a coach and you fall out the end with your bright, shiny certificate and your heart full of joy, And then you struggle like mad to find coaching clients. So actually you never really coach anybody. Are you still a coach or are you a person with a coaching qualification? Because I would argue that you're a person with a coaching qualification.
But that doesn't go down very well when I say that. I'm not trying to make anybody cross. It's just a thought that I had quite some time ago. And some people with a coaching qualification do it. to make them better managers, leaders, whatever. And they're using bits of it in different ways all the time. Absolutely. I would argue that we're all using bits of it in different ways all the time.
But if what you thought you wanted to do was be a coach and what you're actually doing is using coaching skills in your everyday life, is that the same thing? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe it's the same thing. Interesting question, isn't it? So what does simplifying marketing look like, Sarah? It looks like not being shouty and not being, to use a good old Northern expression, gobby and obnoxious and braggy and all of the things that coaches that I speak to fear that marketing is.
Yeah, and it absolutely isn't. You know, good professional marketing, excuse me, is becoming visible to the kind of clients that you want to work with and articulating to them the benefit of working with you. That's it. I think that, and I'm going to name a name here and I hope it's okay with you, Sarah Klein, because Sarah's been a guest here. And in fact, I think it Sarah who first talked about you, Sarah Klein first talked about you, Sarah Short. One of our clients.
And the thing I most love about Sarah Klein is that her bio on LinkedIn says, I work with knackered public sector women or something like that. That's exactly what it says. And even if she never did anything else, and even if that's all it said. There's a lot of people who are going to go, that's me. Absolutely. And that is the purpose of it.
And I think the thing, Sarah Klein, that I really love about that, and I know you're a listener at The Coaching Inn, but the thing I really like about it is that that phrase in itself... even without doing any other stuff is a game changer. And I heard, since I started talking to you, Sarah, here in the room, I have noticed things in a different way. And I'm in a Facebook group for aspiring and qualified coaches, just as a sort of see what's going on thing.
And somebody put on yesterday or the day before, what's your niche? And somebody put, I'm a business coach and I heard you shout, Sarah. But actually I heard that differently because I looked at it and I thought, but that doesn't give me any idea if I want to work with you or not. Because it doesn't give me any idea if I want to work with you or not. Yeah. One of the things that we get our coaches to do, speaking of simplifying, is to write what I call a golden sentence.
So now this golden sentence, it seems so easy, but actually it has to come after a lot of work because what it is, is a distilling of your entire marketing message into a single sentence. It's really easy to write a golden paragraph. It's so hard to write a golden sentence. So the golden sentence says, I work with X to help them Y. so that they can Zed.
So in Sarah Klein's case, and I'm not gonna get this right because it's a, you these things are a work of art when they're done, I work with NACA public sector women to help them, Sarah's is to do with just the level of overwhelm and what have you, I won't get the words right, so that they can basically carry on through the next part of their lives less overwhelmed. I put that really, really badly, but that's, X is the kind of client you work with.
Y, I can hear Sarah laughing at how badly I put that actually. Y is what it is you're helping them with. With Sarah it's burnout. And Z is what it is that they will be able to do when they've removed that problem from their life. And I've done workshops on golden sentences and people say, well, I work with, I don't want to work with a particular kind of person. I want to work with a character traits. So for example, chronically shy people. That's great. But well, hey, where'd you find them?
Chronically shy. But the thing about having the important thing about having a niche, you can start at a niche and then kind of filter down to getting more and more clarity. is that you have to be able to spot them in a crowd for argument's sake. shy people, okay, what's their job title?
Well, I don't know, anybody who's shy, no, no, no, no, no, we need to focus down because if, for example, on LinkedIn, like Sarah works with public sector women, she knows what job title they'll have, she can connect with them, she can build an audience of people who look like her ideal client so that when she talks about the work that she does, the people who are hearing it are the ones who are going to go, She's talking about me.
I feel that to give you credit, Sarah, if you're listening, I'm going to read out what it actually says. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It says, helping knackered female public sector leaders avoid burnout and find their midlife mojo. There you go. And how beautiful is that? And I love that it's A very simple sentence and it's not perfect English or fully grammatical because it says something about who you are as a coach, Sarah. Absolutely.
And somebody said about not not particularly about Sarah's LinkedIn headline, but somebody said to me, you know, you can't use the word knackered. That's not professional. But the thing is that Sarah's clients use that word. That's how they see themselves. And it's not about professional sensibilities, it's about simplicity. It's about using the language of the people that you want to work with.
Because this is where we started, wasn't it, with coach speak and client speak, and us coaches loving to talk about holding space and thinking partners and limiting beliefs. And all of that belongs in the coaching conversation. It does not belong in your marketing. Can I just say, I'm not sure I agree with that either. I'm happy for you not to agree. If you say to somebody, what are your limiting beliefs?
Somebody who's read a book on limiting beliefs probably has thought about what they perceive to be a limiting belief. And the person in front of you is going to go what? Because what it does is it makes you look like an expert again. Absolutely. Makes you look superior. Whereas if you say to somebody, I wonder if that's getting in the way, they'll go, yeah, it is. Is it useful if we do a little bit of work around that?
Yeah. Well, one of the things, one of the, so I used to go to a lot of networking events in the days before the pandemic when we did those things. And I would see coaches in the room and in the, minute to introduce yourself, I'm a coach and I can help you reach your business goals, overcoming your limiting beliefs and mental barriers. And I'd go, and then subsequently, I would hear them talking to people and they'd say, I can help you remove limiting beliefs.
And the person that they're talking to would say, haven't got any. And the coach would go, ho ho ho, of course you do. And immediately, that's a patronizing conversation. And the person that they're talking to really quite upset on occasion. And I remember having a conversation with a coach and saying, do you remember the Truman show? Do remember the Truman show with Jim Carey where he lived in a dome? He was born in a dome.
lived in, until the moment that his boat hit the edge of that dome, as far as he was concerned, it was all real. It was his reality. And so it is with a limiting belief until the moment that you go, yes, that's not true. until that instant, it's just your reality. And so telling people they've got limiting beliefs is kind of saying, well, you know, I understand your reality better than you do because I'm very clever and I'm a coach. like, it's so disempowering.
Yes. And they don't mean to be very earnest. These coaches, you know, they don't mean, I think that one of the biggest issues in coaching is how much people get accidentally disempowered. And it is so not the intention of the coach, but all those tiny little things that we do. where we take a little bit of more power and the partnership is a little bit out of balance. If we've taken a little bit of power, as my friend Mads Morgan used to say, we can only have taken it from the other person.
And if we've taken it from the other person, then we must disempowered them accidentally and with such good intention. Yes, I think that's really important is that I... I was going to say I've never met a badly intentioned coach, but I think coaches are lovely people. We are nice people. We are people people, aren't we? I've never met a coach I can't learn from. I've never met a coach that I don't find interesting.
to accidentally disempower, that's a very interesting concept, accidental disempowerment. That is very interesting concept. Yes, because it's absolutely not the intention of the coach. No, and it's not what they set out to do and it's not what they intend to do. And they're actually trying to do exactly the opposite. And yet the accidental outcome of accidentally disempowering.
is that you start leading and the client starts following, the thinker starts following and then the whole balance in the coaching space is out of sync. Yeah. So can I say something controversial about plain speaking? Yes, please do. I think coach isn't a job title. I think coach is the most horrendous word in the same way that as everybody knows already, because I'm very out about it. I don't think that client or coachee is a great word either. And neither do I think thinker is a great word.
We are a person who supports the thinking of another person for a little while. My grievance around calling ourselves coaches, well, there are a few, but the main one is that there are two problems with being called a coach or calling yourself a coach. Problem number one is that nobody knows what we do. And problem number two is that everybody thinks they know what we do and they're wrong. And so that's where your golden sentence comes in. So when somebody says, what do you do?
Instead of saying, I'm a coach, Sarah Klein can now say, I work with NACA public sector women. That's the answer to the question. And I remember the day that I realized, well, in fact, I can tell you exactly the day that I realized I didn't want to be called a coach anymore was when somebody said, you're a coach, what? Netball. And I thought, So I took the word coach from everything. And my business card in the days when we had them just said, Sarah Short, and my contact details.
And people would look at it and say, that's interesting. What do you do? And I would say, I work with to help them so that they can. And it transformed my business. But of course, to get to the point where you can say, I work with this kind of person to help them with this so that they can achieve that, there's a lot of work that has to go in before you can actually get to that sentence. Rather like, there's a lot of work has to go in before you can realize.
that if you do that, you're going to disempower the person in front of you. Seems so easy, but actually it's from a position of knowledge. And I think the only way to address the accidental disempowerment thing is to watch recordings from, not all the time, that would be really obsessive, but from time to time. Because as much as I think that there's huge value in reflective practice, you get your journal, you think about what happened. You can't see that.
and you see it from your own point of view. You can only think about it from your own point of view. Whereas when you can see it and if people want to look at that partnership piece, there are two ways, there are two great ways in. One is watch a video and now all of us are doing some of our work on Zoom, I think probably, or some kind of video platform. If you video it, two questions. One is, is the thinker thinking?
And the other one is, when I said that, honestly looking at their face, were they ready for it or did I speak too early? And those two things can really help begin to address the journey to working in full partnership. Yeah, those are good questions. Those are very simple questions, which rather wonderfully fit the theme of the conversation. And hashtag notice the silence. For the benefit of listeners, I was watching Sarah and Sarah was visibly in her eyes doing some good work.
So I didn't say anything. Yes, yes, I was. was thinking. I was thinking about those two questions and how many times you could apply them in your life. Can I tell you something about great coaching? Yeah, if it's that great, which is what we all aspire to, we don't need to ask very many things or do very many things because surely our hope is that the last great question we asked that seems to be doing some good stuff, let it do its work. I think...
And I think this more and more when I watch coaching and, you know, in this season of my life, that's what I'm doing mostly. Because I love it, because I want to create, I want to be part of creating the next generation of people who do this work so that they do less work, so that the people that they are actually in conversation with do more work. That's my dream. And I've completely forgot what I was gonna say. I got lost in the passion of that.
yes, usually every coaching conversation is building up to a moment where transformation happens. And that piece of transformation is usually the thing that's the game changer in the conversation. And usually that's enough. And we don't need to then try and do another big piece and another big piece and another big piece. And sometimes that is quite quick. Sometimes it takes a lot longer. Sometimes it doesn't happen. But it's not about how many good things can we do in this conversation.
It's actually about what is the thing we need to do today and then let's just do it. And there will be a build and the magic moment or whatever you like to call it is never the one you planned. It's never using the clever thing you thought it was gonna be. It usually just randomly happens when you're keeping out the way. Yes, when you're letting the person in front of you do the work. Exactly.
It's interesting what you said about this season of your life and your life's work, because I have a life's work too. I think that coaching is a superpower. I think that we should all have our knickers on the outside so that we can be identified easily in the street. And I think that everybody, everybody should be able to access good coaching.
However, there are a number of people, significant number of people who will never be able to access good coaching or rarely be able to access it because of their financial situation. And I know that a lot of coaches would, a lot of coaches do pro bono work and they do it instead of building a coaching business because they try and build a coaching business. They can't really figure out what they're doing wrong.
And so they end up doing a lot of pro bono coaching and kind of going, I don't quite understand what went wrong here, but hey, this is good. But my why is I want those people coached, those people who can't afford to be coached. And I'm talking, you my particular thing is homeless people, the people who can't afford to be coached, who need it more than ever. If I can get enough coaches covering their financial basis with coaching.
So covering, you know, financially viable means whatever you want it to me. It means a different thing to everybody. But if you've got your financial basis covered with the coaching that you're getting paid for, that leaves you. the emotional bandwidth and the time to get on and do some pro bono coaching with people who couldn't afford to pay you your professional rate. And, you know, I can't coach the whole world. I tried. I couldn't even coach our town. It turns out it's far too many people.
But the more people who are up and running with a proper coaching business who can then go and share their great coaching skills, the better. It's ripples in a pond. For both of us, it's ripples in a pond. We drop the pebble in, our pebble, and it goes outwards. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but let's keep on that thing about active, actively building, because actually you need to take action to build your business, don't you? And it's about taking action that's useful.
It's about understanding what you have to do. Because there's a lot of nonsense out there. Lifting your eyes up from the ground isn't going to find you a coaching client. And the other thing that I... And again, here we go. Might be upset people jumping into my diary. The other thing that. Well, a niche doesn't choose you, you choose it. You are not the niche being a mindset coach or a business coach or a transformation coach.
Well, a mindset coach, transformational coach, change coach, isn't that what we all are? And and B, that's not a niche. It's a job title. A niche is a demographic. It's a target audience. and understanding that powerfully serving and having meaningful conversations all over the place. If you could do that for a couple of years and then with a bit of luck somebody that you had a conversation with will come back to you. That's great, but the people that I work with need to make a living.
They don't have all this time for this wonderful serving. They're very happy to powerfully serve in a coaching conversation, but honestly they need to get paid for it. I think that goes back to, know, it's just marketing is a very pragmatic thing. It's like coaching. It's a process. And if you do it properly, if you know what you're doing and you do it properly, it's not hard. And it works in the same way that coaching always works. If you do marketing right, marketing always works.
And you can trust the process once you know what you're doing. It's not hard. In fact, it's simple. doesn't make it easy, course, but then exactly not accidentally disempowering isn't easy either, it? Yeah, and simple isn't easy because I think, you know, when I do development with people, the thing that we need to do the most of is unlearning. Yes. Because somehow in the world of, well, in the world of work, complexifying, which I just made that up, think, but you know, making, gives us status.
Yes. Well, yes. And back to these big words that we use to describe coaching processes and ethics and et cetera. All these big fancy words make it seem important, don't they? Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, We can't underestimate the fact that coaching is a monetizable profession. And if you come up with a word, then you can try and get people to pay money for that word.
But what I noticed from quite a lot of the people I talk to around the place, some who I work with, some who just are having a chat about something, is that they'll go on something that's got fancy words in the name, and then they'll discover that actually at its heart, it's the same. Absolutely, absolutely. And also there are weasel words, aren't they? Like, you know, high ticket clients or high paying clients, you know. Do we even know what that means?
But, know, if I'm going to have clients, let's have high paying ones. It's like, why don't you just have proper clients who pay a professional rate for your coaching that you can attract on a daily basis without being, and this is where we came in, shouty, loud, grubby. sleazy, any of the things pushy, all of those things that people fear that marketing is. Yeah. Yeah. And it's my intention at some point in the coaching in.
And if this is you and you want to guess, then do send me an email to info at 3dcoaching.com. But I'd love to do a round table with some people who work for the, for the, the big coaching hubs, you know, coach hub, better up and stuff, and to hear what their experiences of of working with them. Because one of the things that I know is that the fees, so you're working with high status individuals often, but the fees are quite low.
But I know that there's a few people who really love that, because they're not putting any time into the other bit. Yeah. associate work is great. Associate work is fabulous. But it's only fabulous as some of the eggs in your basket and not all of them. And the reason that I say that is I had a conversation a couple of years ago with a distraught coach, an executive coach who'd been being paid a really good rate. And she'd had her coaching business as she thought of it.
All her associate work came from one organization. She was doing very well indeed, thank you very much. And then all of a sudden, personnel at the organization changed and the person who came in brought their own little black box. coaches with them and her work dried up like that. So associate work is fabulous. mean, our mentors work for me on an associate basis, but it should only be part of your business and not all of it.
You know, having your own private clients means that when odd things happen, like pandemics and stuff that you just couldn't predict, you still have your income stream. Yeah. One of the things that I noticed in the work that I've done know, over the 30 years or whatever it is that I've done it, is that we have a diverse organizational base. So we work in two or three different organizational sectors. And the benefit of that is that when one is rocky, another one isn't.
And actually when the pandemic hit, our customer base of coaches, they were all at home. Yeah. So we were able to, you know, to put some stuff on, we got this podcast going, we did all sorts of things because that was another, another egg. And if you've got, if that diversity covers different sectors, then, then that moderates the rock. Yes. And, and with, with an individual coach who's, mean, if we're talking corporate coaches, that's a different thing.
And we do, you know, we do have a program for corporate. coaches, but with coaches who coach private clients and who want to coach more private clients, it's you, you only, you don't, you don't actually want that many clients. I had this conversation. Somebody said to me, can you niche too much? answer's no. If, know, if you think about, you know, I I'm 56, how long am I going to coach for? Well, I don't coach anymore, but if I was, how long am I going to coach for? Maybe another 10 years.
How many coaching clients can I reasonably, you know, do I need to keep my head above water and can I reasonably coach in the course of a year? Give me a number Claire, how many? How many coaching clients? Well, that, I mean, it depends on how long you see them for. Well, yes. I mean, if you see people four times and you know, how many people can you coach in a day? Well, exactly. And, people come and they say, well, I want all these clients and I will need this nation I'm going to bring.
It's like you don't. At the outside, 50 clients a year. Yeah. Because if you do, I mean, I think six sessions in a day is too many. I can't do more than three, but they more experience than me. Three and I'm absolutely knackered. For me, it depends whether people are bringing things that are different or things that are same.
Because if people are very similar, so if you are working in a very specific niche, then you're going to see less people in a day because you've got to make sure that you're really able to give them your full attention. And that depends on how old you are, whether you're tired in the morning or whether you're tired in the evening or whether you're never tired. And whether you could do two days coaching in a row, what else are you doing with your life?
I mean, I only work 36 weeks a year, only ever have. So that massively reduces the number of people that I can see. Because if you then, if you then extrapolate that number across the next 10 years, it's not a massive number. So worrying about niching because not enough people are going to hear you is crazy. Can I just pick up on something you said?
You said, if you're going to work with people in the same sector, they will bring, that's not actually quite true from what we found with our coaches. Because a really common thing is I don't want to niche because I don't want to only ever work with the same kind of people with the same kind of problem.
And what actually happens is if you have 10 people who will think that this is the problem they want to work with, by the time you get to session three, you have 10 individuals with utterly different situations. absolutely. I agree with you. And also, we need enough space to be really clear that we are being absolutely fully present for this person. with the thing that they're bringing in this moment.
Yeah. I always strongly recommend to our coaches that when they're sitting down and thinking about what they want their businesses to look like that they don't put any more than three clients a day in. Because apart from anything else, you need to market. It does, it becomes part of what you do. You become a coach marketer and I can feel coaches coming out in hives when I say that, but honestly, It actually, when you know what you're doing, it's a creative process.
You've got your message, it's simple, and your job is to be creative with the words that you use, crystal clear English words that you use, or whatever language you speak, to help the person that you want to work with understand why they should want coaching. That's it. So keep it simple. Yes. And let's finish with the words of Charlie Chaplin who said, simplicity is not a simple thing.
Indeed. So I'm off to go on a train, big expedition, and I'm going to be listening to a book about simplifying your business, which I might talk about on a future podcast. So Sarah, how do people contact you? And they can go to thecoachingrevolution.com and every single button on that website that says book a call takes you to my diary. Fantastic. And if you want to talk to me, I'm Claire at 3dcoaching.com and I think I might steal Sarah's good idea about the website. So I'm Claire Pedrick.
I've been in conversation with Sarah Short from The Coaching Revolution. Have a great day. Bye bye. podcast channels. We look forward to welcoming you next time.