Coaching with Stefan
Walking Beside Coaches
Coach training taught you how to coach. Building a life where you can keep doing it can be a very different journey.
You’ve trained as a coach. Now what?
You may have finished your training with energy, ideas and a real desire to coach.
Then a different set of questions began.
Where do the clients come from? Does accreditation matter? Do you need to be more visible? And how do you know which of the many things you could be doing are actually worth your time and money?
Learning to coach and building a life in which you can afford to keep coaching are not the same thing.
Recognition before explanation
You might recognise…
- “I've trained as a coach. I thought I'd feel clearer about what came next.”
- “I know I can coach. I don't yet know how to build a practice around it.”
- “I'm spending so much time trying to be visible that I'm wondering when I actually get to coach.”
- “Everyone seems to have a formula. I'm not sure any of them fit me.”
- “I don't know whether I need more training, more confidence or simply more conversations.”
- “I want this to become financially sustainable, but I don't want to lose why I began.”
- “I keep comparing my beginning with somebody else's established practice.”
- “I'm not sure what kind of coaching life I'm actually trying to build.”
Learning to coach and building a practice are different things.
Coach training can help you listen, ask better questions and create a meaningful space for another person.
It may not show you how to build a working life around those conversations.
There are choices about money, time, relationships, visibility, accreditation and the kind of work you actually want to do. What suits one coach may be completely wrong for another.
The first question may not be, “How do I grow this?”
What are you actually trying to build?
A lived connection
Something can look successful without doing the job you need it to do.
When I launched Ginger Camel in 2011, my instinct was to make enough noise that businesses could not ignore us. Back then, that approach worked.
By the time I began building a coaching practice, the landscape had changed. Almost everyone had access to the publishing tools that once made a business unusual.
I discovered TikTok and started going Live for around an hour every day. It suited me because I could have real conversations rather than simply publish content. My following grew to around 75,000.
On the surface, that could look like extraordinary marketing success.
I can trace approximately one paying coaching client directly to that audience. Most of my clients came through conversations, relationships and referrals.
That does not mean social media does not work. It means the thing that looks most impressive may not be the thing producing the outcome your business actually needs.
Something can appear to be working brilliantly while not producing the outcome the business actually needs.
The doors you are trying to open.
I finished my coach training without believing accreditation was particularly necessary.
I had the tools. I wanted to coach as many people as possible.
Later, I approached my children’s school and offered to create a coaching drop-in space for teachers. The school was interested in coaching for its leadership team, but accreditation was needed for the proposal to pass through its governance process.
I resisted at first and continued trying other routes.
Eventually, recognising the possibility of organisational coaching and feeling financial pressure at home, I pursued it. I rushed my first assessment and failed. I prepared properly for the second, passed and became an ICF ACC coach.
I was proud of it. It felt like recognition of how far I had come.
The value of accreditation depends partly on the doors you are trying to open.
Making coaching available.
Accreditation eventually led me back to the school.
An early arrangement gave teachers a predetermined number of sessions. It did not unfold neatly. Some used all the space available to them; others needed something different.
I began wondering whether it made more sense to make coaching available than to try to move everybody through the same predetermined journey.
That raised another question. If potentially hundreds of people could access my coaching, how could I serve them well?
While rebuilding my website, I began creating what became Your Life, Your Call: a home around my coaching where people could receive coaching, reflect, journal, think alongside a Thinking Partner, explore wisdom from other people’s journeys and decide for themselves where they wanted to go next.
I incorporated Your Life, Your Call Ltd. Together, the accreditation, company and platform gave organisations something more substantial to engage with and gave my family tangible evidence of what I was trying to build.
None of this caused clients to suddenly arrive.
I’m still building it.
The business is growing gradually through conversations, relationships, referrals, pilots, organisational work and paying clients.
I am not standing at the end of a successful coaching-business journey telling you how I did it.
I am still walking it too.
That does not give me a formula for your practice. It gives me a lived connection to the uncertainty between qualifying and making it work.
The life around the business.
Stories about successful coaching businesses do not always say what financially sustained the coach between qualification and a viable practice.
That part matters.
Amanda’s income has helped give me the breathing space to build. I am grateful for that. It also leaves me with a real responsibility to show that what I am building can become financially viable.
Another coach may have employment, savings, freelance work, a pension, investments, another business, a partner’s income or very little financial runway at all.
None is a better or more worthy starting point. They are simply different realities.
The business you can build is affected by the life you are building it within.
Your own shape
What are you actually trying to build?
What success means to you
A small private practice, organisational coaching, coaching alongside employment, a portfolio career, workshops, groups or occasional coaching alongside another profession can all be meaningful.
You get to decide what success needs to mean in your life.
What you already have
You don’t have to start from zero. You already bring a life of experience, relationships and ways of connecting with people.
What the evidence is showing you
Where are your time and money going? Which activities are bringing you closer to the people you want to coach? Which only make you feel busy or visible?
What fits your life
The way you build relationships, the pace you can sustain and the practice you can shape are connected to the life around them.
Not another formula.
Some programmes, methods and marketing approaches work extremely well for some people. This is not an argument against them.
The question is whether they fit you, your circumstances and what you are trying to build.
I am not offering a business course, a client-acquisition system or training in how to coach. I cannot promise clients, income or success.
I will not tell you how I built my coaching business as though your answer should be the same.
I can walk beside you while you work out what yours could look like.
A conversation first
You don’t need a business plan before we talk.
A conversation with Stefan. Somewhere to think honestly about the coaching life you are trying to build and the reality you are building it within.
An unhurried twenty-minute conversation. Nothing needs to be decided.