[music] If you're a coach, no doubt somewhere along the way you've heard this advice. Just pick a niche. Picking a niche is not the problem. You should have a niche. A niche is simply who you help and what you help them with. My personal gripe is with that word just. Just pick a niche. as though 20, 30, 40 years of your life are just going to be discounted into the next step of what you're going to do. As though 20, 30, 40 years of your life
no longer matter when it comes to the work you're about to do next. Because you didn't arrive here empty. You arrived here with a life. Maybe you've built a career, raised children, led people, earned qualifications. Perhaps you've fallen in love. Maybe you fell out of love and got divorced. You've succeeded at things that you were terrified to try and you failed at things that you thought would always certainly work. You've said goodbye to people that you thought would be here for a lot longer. You've walked
through seasons you didn't choose, seasons you wouldn't wish on anyone else. Sometimes you've had to crawl through those seasons. Those things have permanently changed you. And somehow you're still here. Maybe somewhere along that journey, you discovered something. Personal development, coaching, and finally after all those years, there's something that feels like you. And you're not alone. According to the International Coaching Federation, there are now 123,000 professional coaches around the world. That's up 54% in just the last 3 years. Twothirds of coaches in their latest global study
hold advanced tertiary degrees. This means that people aren't arriving at coaching with nothing. They're arriving with a life, experience qualifications and maybe coaching woke something up in you. Perhaps for the first time in years, something felt like you. So, you trained, you studied, you got certified, and you asked the obvious question. So, how do I actually make money out of doing this coaching thing? And somebody said, "Easy. Just pick a niche. Make an offer and talk to people about it." Except you don't have just one
thing. you have 50 things and somehow you're supposed to distill all of that down to one sentence on Instagram by lunchtime. So, you pick something. New niche, new bio, new canva colors. And apparently, yeah, this is the one. It's definitely you until it isn't. Something feels off. And here's what I've watched happens next. Because you were really under pressure to pick something without really understanding why it was yours. You struggle to talk about it with conviction. Your message changes. Your offer changes. You don't make sales
quickly enough. So you wonder, did I pick the wrong thing? And you start again. Every time you start again, you lose two things. Two things that are really important to your coaching business. One is trust. The second is traction. If you don't stay in one place long enough for your confidence and your competence to build, somebody is going to hesitate paying you because they don't trust that you're going to be doing the same thing in a few months time. Eventually, you start wondering, "Hey, what's wrong
with me? Why can't I just choose? Why isn't this working for me? Why do I keep sabotaging myself? Maybe I should just give up. Hey, maybe you're not confused. Maybe you're not lazy. Maybe you're not even a master procrastinator. Maybe you're full. Perhaps nobody ever taught you how to make sense of everything you've already become. And today, I want to give you five places to start. But first, there is something that I want you to be able to recognize. If you are able to seriously ask,
what is it that I would love to do next in my life? Don't take that privilege lightly. If you woke up this morning in a bed under a roof where you were able to lean across to your bedside table and get some clean water to drink, you didn't probably celebrate that, right? Of course you didn't. You just carried on with your day. There are times in life where our seasons are going to be different, though. They're going to be how will I survive? How will I
pay my rent? How will I pay the groceries this week? and how do I provide for my family? So when life gives you enough security, stability, safety to be able to ask what do I actually want? I don't think that's a small question. I'm not one to be taken lightly. And I don't think you should hand that responsibility over to someone else. I know because I almost did. Years ago, I paid a coach $80,000. Now, I don't know what happens to you psychologically when you give
a coach $80,000, but apparently I decided his opinion was worth more than mine. I put him on a pedestal, which is a terrible place to put someone else and a very expensive place to put yourself under. By then, I'd already been coaching for 18 years, and I had client results, evidence. But on this one particular call in just one hour, he told me what I was doing was wrong, that I had to change direction. He gave me another niche. He gave me a niche. And I
remember trying to say, "But I'm already doing this." My throat tightened up. My voice became smaller. Not like a woman with decades of life and business experience. No, like a little girl asking permission to disagree. He shut me down. He told me I would fail. And he criticized the way that I looked, my energy, and even my intelligence. And I just sat there small, humiliated, ashamed. And you know the worst part? I believed he had to be right. I started doubting myself. I had spent years
helping other people to believe in themselves. And in just one conversation, I had handed another human being the authority to tell me who I was and what I was allowed to do. Thankfully, the call was recorded and later when I watched it again, I saw myself confused, then humiliated. And then there was the anger. So much anger. Yes, I was angry at him, but I was more angry at myself. How how had I allowed somebody else's opinion to become more important than mine, more important than
the evidence of my own life? Eventually, I stopped asking, was he right? And I started asking, what does the evidence of my life actually say? And that's when something unexpected came back to me. My father's advice. Years earlier, my dad had encouraged me to study computing. I hated computing. I hated programming and my parents, just to put this into perspective, were immigrants to England. And like many immigrant parents, their dreams for me were incredibly practical. Be safe, be secure, have some stability, earn money, save some
money, buy a house, get married, have a good life. Nobody was ever saying live your love, live your passion, do what you want to do, right? And my dad kept saying things like, "Computers are the future. Study math, physics, chemistry, science." I hated that stuff. However, incredibly annoying. He was right. It turned out that he was incredibly right, but he's not here anymore for me to tell him just how right he was. Because computing didn't just give me a career, the safety, the security, and the
stability that he wanted for my successful life. Decades later, when my confidence had been completely crushed, it gave me a way back to myself. I had worked in investment banking trading systems and that taught me to collect data. Data helped me to see patterns and I began bringing that systems thinking into human behavior. If I couldn't trust how I felt about myself, I could just look at the data, look at the evidence. What had I been repeatedly good at? What did people naturally come to me
for? What had life taught me? What had I got right? What had I spectacularly blown up? What had I survived? And what fascinated me? What did I keep returning to? And what connected all of it? And eventually there it was, the genius of my own life. And I cried not because I'd found a niche or a way to make money. I cried with relief because in black and white there was the evidence of my life and I realized I could trust myself again. That was the
gift. Self trust, self-approval self-permission. And I decided that day I was never going to outsource that again. So I started taking other coaches through the same questions and there were tears. I recognized those tears. Those tears were not about niching or marketing or money. It was all their disconnected pieces of life suddenly making sense. Them saying, "Finally, someone sees my worth. Finally, I can see my genius." Now, over time, those questions became the five places that I started looking for evidence. And conveniently, they spell the
word niche. Natural genius. What do you naturally do? What do people come to you for? What feels so easy but you barely count it as a talent? I identity. Who have you been? Who have you become? The professional mother, father, brother daughter nurse teacher accountant, doctor, banker, the parent, everything. Now even things that you want to step into going forward. What have been the challenges? What went wrong in your life? What humbled you? What broke you? What did life make you learn? because there was no
other way aside a aside from just walking all the way through it. What were the highlights in your life? What did you do spectacularly right? What did you become exceptionally good at? And what did you build? What did you learn? And then we have E for evolution. Who are you becoming? Now you might be almost unrecognizable to yourself because in our one lifetime we've had many deaths and rebirths of identity. So you from 10 years ago or 5 years ago may not be the person that
you are standing here today. So that's why advice like pick a problem you solved five years ago or coach a younger version of yourself doesn't always make sense because that's not the energy you want to keep staying in. Maybe your niche isn't something that you randomly pick. Maybe it sits at the intersection of who you've been, what you've lived, and what you're naturally brilliant at, who you want to become. And that brings me back to the privilege of choice. If you're standing here today wondering, "What
do I want to do next with my life?" I'd like to invite you to consider one more question, this is the question that coaches who make multiple six figures and seven figures ask. How can I serve? I was raised seek and in seekism there is a beautiful concept called sa and that is selfless service. If you walk into a guru which is a seek temple, you will see people peeling potatoes, cooking, making rodi, serving food. And at that moment, you don't know who is rich and
who is poor. For that moment, it doesn't matter. You just serve. And the service itself can be like an act of devotion. Whatever your faith or values are, I think there's something profoundly human in that idea. Perhaps the greatest expression of having freedom isn't simply choosing what you want to do next. Perhaps it's asking, "What will I do with what I've been given?" So, if you're standing here at the beginning of a new chapter and you want to know what comes next, but you don't know
yet, Instagram can wait. Take a notepad and get a pen. Look at the evidence of your life. Okay? What's your natural genius? Your identity. the challenges that you've been through, highlights of your life and evolution, and then look across them. Look for what repeats, what intersects, the thread that has been running through your life while you were busy living it. Perhaps you're not looking at 50 different pathways. Perhaps you're looking at 50 dots and you just haven't found the line between them yet. My computing degree
was not a detour. my years coaching, all the mistakes I made, even that crushing $80,000 conversation, none of it was a mistake. Everything was connected and the intersection became my genius, my niche. And maybe that's true for you, too. Even the chapters that you rather nobody knew about, they shaped you into who you are now, into how you see the world and what you might be uniquely equipped to give. Your life has been leaving clues. So yes, pick a niche. Choose who you want to help
and what you want to help them with. But please don't just pick a niche. First extract your genius and ask what does my life uniquely equipped me to do for someone else? And yes, you deserve to be paid for it. And then go do it.