13 - The challenge of visibility for executive coaches

Welcome to the business of executive coaching. I'm Ellie Scarfe, an ex lawyer turned executive coach. Over the last 17 years I've coached in house, I've been an associate coach and I've run executive coaching businesses with teams of coaches around the world. My clients have ranged from global brand names to boutiques, startups and organizations doing good in the world. I now run the Impact Coach Collective, a community of executive coaches who want to level up their business skills and take action in a community of like minded peers. I'm a traveller, a reader, a mum, wife and dog parent and I know firsthand that our stories have a huge impact on our businesses. The executive coaching business is tough and I've learnt all the lessons through plenty of mistakes and also with some great mentors. This podcast is all about growing a thriving executive coaching business. You can build a coaching business that is profitable, sustainable and that supports your personal goals, whatever they are. I'll be sharing tips and ideas translated for your context, as well as stories from the field with brilliant coaches and mentors. If you want to level up your executive coaching business skills, then this is.

The place for you. Hello. So today I want to talk about visibility and many coaches find visibility to be a challenging subject. So if that's you, if you find yourself perhaps putting off some of the things that you know, you need to do to grow your profile, you are not alone. Certainly I'm in that category and most of the people that I work with, most of the coaches I work with are also in that category. So, you know, don't judge yourself by those coaches that you see who are out there posting every five minutes, you know, on video at the drop of a hat. Most people find this hard, right? So if you do, you're well, well normal. And you know, I wanted to say that off the bat, but I think it's interesting to dive into why we find visibility challenging as coaches. And the first is I think the very nature of the work that we do means that we are much more likely to find visibility hard. And firstly, it's because I think, you know, we, we do this work because we want to make a difference. We generally have a purpose so we want to, you know, have a positive impact on our coaches, their communities, the world. And, and that, you know, building a profile or building visibility isn't, isn't really something that we focus on. We don't go coming out of coaching school, we don'. Gosh, I hope everybody knows that I'm, I'm the best at coaching or hope everyone knows Who I am and recognizes me walking down the street. It doesn't go like that. In fact, at coaching school, we're taught that it is literally not about us. One of my lecturers that you may have heard of when I was at coaching school at Sydney University in the Coaching Slack program, was Tony Grant, Anthony Grant, and he was quite famous for saying that as coaches, we are the guide on the side and not the sage on the stage. So literally, we are defined as not the person who is on the stage. And I think that professionally, that's absolutely right. Right. That's. That's who we are as coaches. That's a really important part of what it means to be as a coach. But that can be problematic for visibility. So we define ourselves as enablers, as supporters, as guides. You know, there's not a lot of main character energy about that. And as well as the sort of the. The training and the role definition for coaches, often the identity that we have and the reason that we're drawn to this work, it comes from a lifetime of, you know, a tendency or preference to meet other people's needs rather than our own. And generally, we may have learned that it was either not safe nor desirable for us to promote our own ideas or our own agendas. And everyone has a different story of why that is the case. And then if you are a woman, you can overlay that with some cultural conditioning that it is not attractive, it's not acceptable to be perceived to be pushy or loud or visible. And, you know, our culture applies a lot of those same expectations to anyone who isn't white as well. Right. So no wonder so many of us have baggage around visibility. And also, we might find visibility challenging if we are equating our visibility with our physical appearance. And if we have any insecurity around that, that is going to impact how willing we are to show up both literally, right, here's my physical appearance showing up on a camera or a video or a picture, you know, literally and also figuratively right. For our business and in my community, the Impact Coach Collective, we have so many discussions about this. In fact, a lot of the time, concerns about visibility only come up when we notice that we're putting things off or that we're not doing something, because it is so norma and because it is an experience that, that we all have. And it's so caught up in, you know, all of our baggage from. From our story, from our past. So I totally get this now. For me, I think that visibility has required me to let go of a Lot of fear. So some of the fears that I've had to work through to grow my visibility have been things like fear that people wouldn't like me if they got to know me if I put myself out there. Fear that people might think I'm a show off, which is, you know, anathema. You know, if you're. I'm Australian, obviously, and, you know, we have this thing called Tall Poppy syndrome. And that means that you don't put yourself out there, you don't want to be the tall poppy, you know, waving your hand, saying, look at me. How good am I? Because we'll literally cut the top off it. You know, I was a fear that people would think that I was. I was selfish or egocentric. Fear that people would think I was ugly, that they would look at me and judge how I physically appear, that people would find me embarrassing. There was also a fear that I would do all this stuff and work on visibility and it wouldn't make any difference anyway, right? That it would be a waste of time. And then there was a really a fear. And when I dig into it, you know, a fear that people that I know, which is different to, you know, people that I don't know where I can feel a little freer, but fear that people that I know would be judging me for. For putting myself out there. For showing off. For showing off. So plenty of fears. So, you know, for many years in business, I was pretty proud that I didn't do marketing, right? So my brand was developed purely by doing good work, by word of mouth. I was really proud of that. And, you know, if you'd told me back then that I'd be putting copious amounts of photos of myself on the Internet, I would have been absolutely horrified. And now, God, look at my. Look at my website, look at my LinkedIn page. I'm everywhere. But you know how nai I was. And like, to some degree it was true. Like, a lot of my business was grown off the back of referrals and word of mouth. And, you know, I hope that's as a result of the good work I did. But I also have to check my privilege there, right? So this was the sort of the early ish 2000s, you know, and I had a great mentor who connected me with people. In those days of coaching, there weren't that many of us. So I think to some degree it was easier. And LinkedIn wasn't a thing, social media wasn't a thing. So really, you know, we didn't have so many choices. But you Absolutely. Can't grow business easily that way. Now, even to build an associate practice, you need a level of profile and a level of visibility to allow people to connect with you and see who you are. And I really wish that I knew then what I know now because I would have done things differently a long time ago. So what I know now is that in today's coaching market, you know, to build our base of clients, we, we need people to know who we are. We need them to understand and trust in our credibility. And part of that is them feeling like they have a connection with us. And connection can only come when we're more visible. And you know, I mean visible in the sense of physically visible, right? So they can actually literally connect with our face, but also visible in terms of showing who we are, right, and what we care about and, and you know, who we are as people. So honestly, we have to be on show to some degree in order to be able to do that and to be able to make those connections with people. And that's what I mean when I talk about visibility. Firstly, I want to normalize though that it will be uncomfortable, right? And I think a bit of comfort with discomfort is the biggest step, the biggest growth edge that we can have as coaches and as business owners. So if we normalize that, this is just going to feel uncomfortable and you can just do it anyway. The next thing to ask yourself, and I think that will allow yourself to sit with that discomfort, is to ask, how would more visibility be a good thing for you? So specifically, how would it help you to achieve your higher order goals? So would more visibility potentially help you to get more clients? Would it help you to create a greater impact in the world? Would it help you to build a more sustainable business and support your family? There has to be something compelling because if we have all these fears, all this discomfort with visibility, then where it's going to be hard to connect that to our intrinsic motivations, right? So we need to figure out, we need to figure out how do we take this from being a, should I should be more visible, I should post every week on LinkedIn? We're going to have to connect it to something we care about or we're going to continue to procrastinate. And so one of the ways that I suggest, you know, getting at this visibility piece, well, firstly we need to reflect on why is it important to us. But then we need to go into, you know, what I call exposure therapy, right? We need to take tiny steps and tiny actions that show us that it is Safe to be visible. And so let's use an example of posting on LinkedIn, right? That's, that's a really good example of visibility and one that comes up for a lot of executive coaching. So I would suggest starting small. And this is, you know, the way of fear of visibility often comes out when it comes to posting on LinkedIn is overthinking, right? So going, oh, I need to post, but now let me overthink that for, for, you know, a few weeks and wordsmith and overdo it and then end up posting nothing because we can't possibly make it perfect. And everyone, you know, we might be afraid of people having opinions. So I think what we need to do is we need to start small. The first thing you can do is start small by sharing posts or articles that are interesting to you and that you think could be interesting to others, specifically people that are your target market, right? So just share things. Share things. You don't even have to comment on it. Share a post, share an article. Anything that you think could be of value to your target market or the people in your network keep doing it, right? So set yourself a sort of a target or a metric of how often you're going to do that. You might start with once a week, then you might make it twice a week. The third step I would suggest is then adding a statement to your sharing that is your perspective on what you're sharing. It doesn't have to be long. In fact, don't, don't write long things on LinkedIn. Generally it's not necessary, nor is it read. Just add a little statement that's your perspective on what you're sharing and you know, why you think that's interesting to the people who are in your market. The next stage is to then just write a short sentence or a reflection without sharing someone else's content. So something that is your opinion, it may be that you read an article and you think, huh, this is what I have to say about that. Just post that, right? Just, here's my thoughts on leadership. Here's my thoughts on, you know, how people can cope with a redundancy, you know what, whatever the subject matter is, but just one short sentence or one quick reflection put that out there. The fifth step is to keep doing that, right? To sustain a practice. And I would suggest don't overdo it. Just maybe give yourself a goal of posting once a week or, you know, whatever your current pattern is, just do it more frequently than that with a minimum of once a week. Then you might want to make it a little bit longer. So step six, make it a little longer. Post something a little bit more thought or a little bit more meaningful. Now, I would say this is not compulsory. People like short and sweet on LinkedIn. But, you know, maybe what it is is you write three or four sentences about a topic rather than one sentence, right? So just think it through. You might put some bullet points in, you might put some tips, you might have a reflection and then a, you know, a suggestion, just something a little bit longer. The next step is probably the hardest, and that is to start adding images. And so you could start with images that are related to what you're posting, stock images, or if you take photos, and then I want you to start adding photos of yourself. Now this is a big one. So, you know, use whatever filters you need to feel comfortable, but know that any post that has got a photo of you, and the more unfiltered, the less edited, the better the post will do. So use whatever you need to feel comfortable, but know that paradoxically, people want to see the real you and those posts will do better. And then the final step is start to engage with people who are liking and commenting on your post. So rule of thumb is let no comment go unresponded to. You don't need to do it immediately, but you know, make sure you respond to people within a day or so. And you can do that by direct message if you prefer, rather than putting it in the comments. Now, exception to the let no comment go unresponded to is don't bait the trolls, don't feed the trolls, just ignore them. But you might say, huh, Anyone who is in my target market, who likes my post, I'll just send them a direct message and say, hey, thanks for engaging on my post. And I'll ask them a relevant question and then, you know, make sure that you start a conversation. Because our goal here is to engage with people and to build real connections. And so, you know, we want people to see us so that we can build a real connection. Because if we don't show ourselves, then there's no way of using that platform to be able to build a real connection. So I thought I'd share a funny, a funny story about the unintended upside of visibility is that I was helping my daughter with something on her school computer. I can't even remember what it was. And as she flipped up a website, I saw that one of the tabs that was open was my website, my work website. And I asked her, you know, how come she, she was looking at that and she told me that she just likes to have my website up because it's got a lot of photos of me and it just allows her to check in with me when she needs to and sort of feels like I'm there with her. And I thought that that was extremely sweet and it made me, you know, realize that there are all sorts of upsides from visibility. Of course with visibility in that regards, you need to have boundaries. So only share what you are comfortable sharing. I'm, you know, don't share identifying information, you know, all the basics, don't get scammed, none of that. This is more about, you know, your views on the work we do, some information about who you are and what you care about. So, you know, I would encourage you just take these steps and no matter how comfortable you are with visibility now, you can get a little bit more comfortable. So I encourage you to take the next little step for you now. If you are coming across challenges with visibility as you grow your coaching business, it's highly likely that you would be a great fit for my program, the Impact Coach Collective. We are opening the doors in May, on 7 May specifically, and during the launch window where we open doors just for one week, I'm going to be running a webinar on the eight foundations of a thriving coaching business and that's happening on Thursday 9 May in two time zones, which one of which might be 8 May in the US but do come along. I think it'd be, I'd love to meet as many of you as possible. In this webinar masterclass, I'll be sharing what the eight foundations of thriving coaching businesses are. We work through a self assessment for each of the eight foundations which will allow you to then say, okay, I need to prioritize my attention on this foundation and I've got loads of tips. So, you know, depending on what comes out as your priorities, each of the foundations will be offering a tip or two or three to help you take action to, you know, really focus on that area. You can register for that webinar@elliscarf.com, and that's eight with the number, but I'll put that in the show notes as well. And you know, I look forward to seeing some of you there and other than otherwise, I'll be back next week and look forward to speaking to you then.

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