In the Long Run…

We’re coming up to a year since I finished the teaching portion of my coaching course and it’s natural to look over the past year and reflect on where I am and how things have been going. During the diploma and coming out of it, I was confident that my coaching practice would catch on immediately, that I would have new clients coming forward each week and I’d be so rushed off my feet, I’d need to sort out a waiting list. Coaching is so helpful, so brilliant and such a good thing to do for your own wellbeing and career, why wouldn’t people want to do it?

The reality has been very different. I have struggled to find new clients, and when I’ve had intro calls with potential new clients, they’ve generally not been interested in working together in the end. Those expectations of success were set by the course I was doing. I do not blame the course leaders for that at all. It was a brilliant course run by brilliant folk. I understand that you need to leave your students feeling optimistic and ready to take on new challenges. Nearly a year ago now, I attended a social for the course I did with people who had already completed the course in previous cohorts, after chatting with them it seemed clear that a lot of them were not coaching full time, a lot had a handful of clients and they all said it was difficult to find more. The buzzy excitement of being rushed off my feet with new clients as soon as I finished was definitely not the reality for these people. Most were happy about it all, but I did find hearing this a disappointment, one that I swiftly swept under the rug, assuming I’d, of course, be different.

At the moment I don’t have any active clients and to be honest it’s incredibly upsetting. I have one or two potential clients starting soon, but I’m not coaching anyone at the moment. I love coaching and I love working with people and right now, I just don’t get the opportunity to do that. I’ve trained for over a year to do this job and I’m just not able to do it. To fit in with my portfolio career, I recently managed to land a permanent part time job at the University I’ve been working at on and off for a number of years. This role has been the holy grail for me, in the past they’ve either not wanted to make anyone permanent at that time, or not been willing to consider taking on part time staff, so I feel like my luck has finally come through. It’s not a hugely well-paid role, but I enjoy the work and I feel a valued part of the university and I have some absolutely wonderful colleagues. I wasn’t too worried about the lower pay, I could make up the shortfall with coaching, maybe I’d even end up bringing in more than I would have if I were full time!

That’s just not the case at the moment.

I’ve been going through a lot of self-doubt, a lot of stress and anxiety and a lot of feelings of inadequacy. Disappointment as well. There’s something in the wider coaching community where people tend to assume that if you’re having issues getting clients, it’s your fault for not believing in yourself enough. That by believing it will happen, you’ll magically bring new clients to you, your perfect unicorn clients, they are engaged in coaching, they turn up to every session and they’re willing to pay you for your time. That is the dream! Where I appreciate and cannot always explain how self-belief definitely does yield results in things within your control, my instinct is that I’m not sure just believing would work here.

A lot of the time people don’t know what coaching is, they can’t afford it, they don’t have time, they don’t want to be on another zoom call. I understand all of those factors. It doesn’t make it any less frustrating for me though as I keep myself busy on my coaching days doing other things, considering when I’m going to pull the plug on coaching entirely, close it down and ask my day job if they’ll have me for more hours.

Sadly, that’s what I’ve been considering at the moment. I feel let down, not by clients or potential clients, but by these sky-high expectations I had when I started this journey. I’d left another horrible job where the office environment was massively toxic I had this strong sense that I’d rather work for myself instead of have to deal with all of that negativity and bullying again. I was in therapy trying to find a clear path for myself, trying also to break this cycle I had been enacting for years of doing full time jobs for a few years and then burning out and needing to quit. I resolved that committing to training as a coach and setting up my own business would be the solution. I was breaking the cycle. And maybe I’d need a part time job in the interim to get me by. I know now I swung too far the other way by wanting to go it totally alone. As I mentioned, I really appreciate my colleagues in my day job, I love having an office to go to each week, I even enjoy commuting in a weird way. I did break the cycle, for sure, but not exactly how I expected to and it’s still very much a work in progress.

So where are we, then?

I’m in that place where I’m reassuring myself that continuing to work on coaching as a part of my portfolio career is worth doing. I love it, I’m passionate about it and I just don’t want to give it up. In the long run, I hope my fortunes will turn around a bit and I’ll start getting new clients in.

Coaches who trained us on our course and coaches who I’ve listened to talk about their careers on podcasts always tend to say that at the beginning of their careers they couldn’t give their coaching away. Naïvely, I thought ah that won’t be me though, surely? But here I am. I literally can’t give my coaching away. But I have to continue with it, in the hope that when I retell the story of my career way down the line, I’ll mention this time as that time when I couldn’t get any new clients in, and I couldn’t give my coaching away for free. But I kept working on it, and slowly it turned around. In the long run, turned out, there was no use in going that far and quitting something you love. And maybe there will be naïve students listening, I hope, who listen but don’t take it too much to heart, and believe that they’ll be different.

I hope you enjoyed this article, I’m taking a leaf out of the wonderful Brené Brown’s books and being vulnerable about my situation. I feel much better having written this, so thanks for getting to the end!

My books are obviously open for new coaching clients, you’ll have the first pick of timeslots as no one else is interested right now! Have a look on my website for more details. I’m also free to write articles about coaching, wellbeing, poetry and LGBTQ+ life. Get in touch here: hello@edgarveylong.com