What worked for them

It’s easy! You just flap your wings and fly on up. (Image by Marc Derndorff)

A couple of years ago, I was at a crossroads in my career.

I had just spent a few months working full time in one of my schools in order to close it down gracefully. This left me with only a handful of coaching clients and no real pipeline — but a lot more time to build my business.

On the recommendation of a trusted friend, I met with an established but relatively new coach. I asked him about how he got started in coaching and built up his roster of clients. Had he done any marketing?

Not really. He had reached out to everyone he worked with in his corporate career, now at a variety of different companies, and arranged meetings with many of them to update them about his career change. The referrals rolled in.

I had to laugh. I had just spent 20 years working in education. There were no well-connected former coworkers I could reach out to for referrals. I had spent my time mostly with children. This guy’s strategy would never work for me.

So that week, I got on TikTok instead. Within a few months, my coaching practice was robust again.

There are so many people out there who will offer advice and step-by-step instructions, for free and behind paywalls. It’s important to remember that some of this may be grounded in a very specific set of circumstances that are not necessarily replicable.

What’s more, that fact may be invisible to the person giving the advice because she takes her own situation for granted. That’s a key factor in the dreaded “you’re not trying hard enough” feedback that an inexperienced coach or teacher will dole out when they don’t really know what they’re doing or how to help you.

On the other hand, you may be taking your own strengths and advantages for granted. You may be reaching for something that is misaligned with the investments you’ve made so far and the things you naturally are good at. One way to get better results is simply to follow the easier path — the one where you already have a head start. There’s no shame in that. In fact, I’d argue that it’s the key to success for a lot of people.

What you don’t want to do is start beating yourself up when you can’t seem to make someone else’s approach work for you. If it seems like things are much harder for you, well, maybe they are. That’s not necessarily a reason to quit, but it could lead you to try a new strategy.

I will never suggest that you don’t have what it takes to reach your dreams (remember, I spent those two decades in education). But your plan and your expectations may need to be adjusted based on your specific profile. What worked for them might not work for you. And that’s not a failure on your part. Just another challenge to overcome.