Strengths and Your Personal Brand as a Coach

In today's episode, we dive into building your personal brand as a coach. You’ll hear about "Connected Kelly," a coach who initially felt pressured to conform to an analytical persona in her big tech job, only to discover that her true strength—Connectedness—was what truly set her apart. You’ll learn how she transformed her approach, leading to a more fulfilling and energized coaching practice.

 

We also explore practical tips for building your personal brand, including how to identify the challenges you can help solve and how to communicate your unique value effectively. Whether you're an independent coach or working internally at a company, it’s important to be specific in your messaging to connect with your ideal clients.

 

So, if you’re ready to make sure your coaching brand aligns with your personal brand, this episode is packed with insights and actionable advice to help you shine!

🌟

 

Work With Us!

BREA Roper Communication | Woo | Activator | Futuristic | Connectedness

If you need a Strengths Hype Girl, for yourself or your team, connect with Brea at brearoper.com. She’s ready to deliver an inspirational keynote, empowering training, or transformational workshop. If you’re looking for an expert guide to support your internal Strengths efforts, reach out today!

LISA Cummings

Strategic | Maximizer | Positivity | Individualization | Woo

 

To work with Lisa, check out team workshops and retreats at the Lead Through Strengths site. For 1:1 strengths or life coaching, check out the Get Coached link. For independent coaches, trainers, and speakers, get business tools support with our Tools for Coaches membership.

 

 

Takeaways

●      Your differences are your differentiators: Don’t shy away from what makes you different. Like Connected Kelly, who initially suppressed her connectedness, recognizing and embracing your unique strengths can lead to a more fulfilling coaching practice.

●      Be specific in your messaging: Vague statements like "I help you live your best life." are unclear and uninteresting. Instead, focus on clear, compelling messages that resonate with your audience, such as "I help get your emails get read." This specificity helps potential clients see the value you offer.

●      You are your brand: Your personal brand is a reflection of who you are. By aligning your strengths, values, and messaging, you’ll create a cohesive brand that resonates with your audience and showcases your unique contributions.

●      Narrowing your focus can attract more clients: When it comes to marketing, less is more! Don’t fear that specializing will limit your opportunities. Instead, it can help you attract clients who are specifically looking for the solutions you provide, ultimately leading to a more successful coaching practice.

Take Action

●      Identify Your Strengths: Reflect on your unique strengths and how they contribute to your coaching practice. Let your differences be your differentiators – in your brand, your business model, and beyond.

●      Identify the Challenges You Solve:: Determine the specific challenges you want to address as a coach. Consider what problems your ideal clients face and how your strengths can help solve those issues. This will help you create targeted messaging that resonates with your audience.

●      Craft Your Messaging: Develop a clear, concise, and compelling answer to the question, "What do you do?".

●      Utilize Your Online Presence: Update your LinkedIn profile and other online platforms to reflect your personal brand. Incorporate your strengths and the specific problems you solve in your headlines and descriptions to attract the right clients.

●      Engage with Your Audience: Actively communicate your value and the unique contributions you bring to your coaching practice. Share insights, tips, and success stories that highlight your strengths and the impact you can have on your clients' lives.

This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in building their personal brand. Join us as we explore the power of aligning your personal brand with your coaching practice.!

🎧 Listen now and let us know your thoughts! We’d love to hear from you!

#PersonalBrand #Coaching #PersonalDevelopment #Podcast #Leadership #CoachingTips #StrengthsBasedCoaching

Let’s Connect!

●      LISA: Website | LinkedIn | Facebook

●      BREA: Website | LinkedIn | Instagram

AI-Generated Transcript

Lisa: Hi, I'm Lisa.

 

Brea: I’m Brea.

 

Lisa: And today's episode is strengths and your personal brand as a coach.

 

Brea: Yes. Oh my gosh. I love this topic. Let's just dive in.

 

Lisa: I'm so excited. Okay, let's dive in. I want to dive in with an example of something that happened with a coach who was building a personal brand as a coach and she didn't know it and it wasn't at all what she would have done on purpose. Ooh, I'm intrigued. Tell us more.

 

Brea: Because I think that so many people fall into this trap.

 

Lisa: Yeah. Heck yes, we do. I imagine most of us have done this where we unintentionally built a reputation on something that we just became skilled at because we practiced it a lot. And this person, I'm going to call her Connected Kelly. I made up her name because I want to keep her anonymous. But she led through connectedness, hence Connected Kelly.

 

Brea: And alliteration. We love alliteration. OK. I mean, who doesn't?

 

Lisa: OK. She's a real client. She works in big tech. And she felt like I need to be analytical. That's what I need to be, to be believed, to be credible, to be desired in this company, to be found useful in this company.

 

I mean, we could go on and on, but analytical was the thing that she really grabbed onto as important for her to be. So she spent a lot of years really honing it, doing analytical actions, showing analytical skills, and showing up that way.

 

Brea: And probably because she's surrounded with people who are acting like this or who are showing up that way. She feels like she has to be that too. Yeah. Okay. I'm with you.

 

Lisa: Yeah. And I can, I mean, my individualization loves that in many ways because I'm thinking, well, she's being palatable to the people that she's around. So she's thinking, this is who I need to be for them. Otherwise they won't value me. And specifically when we talked about connectedness, she was like, oh, that's for my friends.

 

Brea: She's like, that part of me doesn't belong at work. You know, that's my at home or my with friends. Okay. Yeah. Interesting.

 

Lisa: Yeah. She really felt deeply like it didn't belong there. Like it would get shunned there. It would get made fun of there. She said it felt like people would perceive it as woo woo, that it would just not go over well. So she just shut it off, like put up the wall, anything. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

 

So what's the results of it now? She it's not like she was faking it. She legitimately built analytical skills and she legitimately used them with her clients, but the repercussion is She was completely wiped out. It was sucking the life out of her because it wasn't fun. It was just something she could do

 

And I think this is a really important lesson for building a personal brand as a coach, because if you do what you're competent at, you're going to get more of that. She's great. She's an amazing performer, an amazing person. So she kept getting more of the work she didn't want because she showed up and she was good at the work she didn't want.

 

Brea: That's the worst, the worst.

 

Lisa: It's a bad cycle.

 

Brea: Digging your own grave, you know.

 

Lisa: Yes, yes. Now we did some things with it so I can tell you what I did with her and then I want to switch over to things that you might do with her after she's to the point where she's ready. She feels good about her personal brand aligned with her strengths so that her personal brand as a coach is making her feel alive. It's bringing her clientele that she loves.

 

So I have this personal branding page. It's leadthroughstrengths.com slash personal dash branding. We started there. We started looking at her top five. We really honed in on connectedness because it was one she said she was squashing. And we just use it as a starting point because she's like, OK, genuine. Well, that's a good thing for me to be as a coach. Being present with people, that's a good one. Okay.

 

And then we start talking about things like, Oh, I see downstream effects. I understand how parts are connected. I have good rapport across departments. Okay, like all these things could be useful internally. I just shut it off. Because I thought it was the woo-woo strength.

 

So first pass through, it was really cool, because she realized What a fool! Why am I shutting all this off? There are actually things that I believe people in big tech would value.

 

And in fact, she's realizing people are like, oh, wow, you're an intrapersonal genius. And they're seeing these elements of her that she didn't show before. And they're things that the clients wanted from her and really valued because they don't know how to do that at all. So that was cool.

 

Brea: Yeah, it's the lie that we tell ourselves that when we are different, the talents that we might have that are different than what we see around us, we believe that it won't be valued or that it won't be wanted.

 

And sometimes that is true, but most of the time it is very valuable because other people don't have it. They don't have that capacity, they don't have that ability, and when they saw that in her, that uniqueness, it became her differentiator, right? That's the word that you like to use, Lisa.

 

Lisa: Yeah, that your differences are your differentiators. Exactly.

 

Brea: Yes, yes. I think Gallup's focus on naming, claiming, and aiming is what's coming to my head here.

 

When she was able to look at connectedness and really name it, really understand what that talent is. Maybe it had been called the woo-woo strength, but it was so much more than that.

 

So when she was able to start finding new definitions for that talent theme, I think that opens up so much potential for us to then claim it, for us to love it in ourselves, you know, for her to see how it could be beneficial at work and how she could love working. How her life at work could actually energize her instead of draining her energy and sucking her soul. She could come to work and thrive and it could increase the connection that she makes with her employees.

 

And so then when she was able to better understand what it is and what it could be and she could get excited about it and really own it, then she started to aim it and that's where all the magic happens. So what a great example.

 

Lisa: So, one of the things she named it as was Integrator. She was working with a bunch of software developers, hardware engineers, and what happens is the engineers speak in specifications. That's what was important to them.

 

But At some point, somebody has to translate that to the non-technical people, whether that is to the marketing team so that you could talk about that to a customer audience and they could actually understand it or otherwise.

 

So she started thinking of herself as an integrator because she could see all the connections, because she could speak human. They felt like she was a complete genius in this area, but that never got exposed until she started looking at connectedness as this great element of herself and it really became key in her personal brand as a coach.

 

So, okay, Bria, I know you are a StoryBrand coach and that you keep it under the covers all the time and people don't even know this about you. Let's get some of this magic out of this brain you have on StoryBrand.

 

Brea: Yes, I was trained in StoryBrand. That’s true.

 

Lisa: Yeah, OK, so now let's say she wants to work her personal brand as a coach now and connectedness and being an integrator and being perceptive, being a connector. These are some parts of her messaging.

 

If she came to you and said, OK, now what? How do I build this reputation? How do I begin to change it? How do I do the messaging? What kind of things come up for you and what could be valuable that you could bring? Because I think you have this unique lens because you have story brand and strengths mixed together and it's so cool and I want the audience to get it from you.

 

Brea: Yeah, thank you. That's why I call my business Strength+Story. I use both of those things all the time. So this is a fun conversation to have.

 

So if you've never heard of StoryBrand, it's a marketing framework that is built on or let's maybe even say adapted from just general framework of story because there's so much scientific proof and just I think all of us have experience of how story it connects with our brains in a very powerful way.

 

and there's a framework to it. It's not by accident that the blockbuster movies or the best-selling books are blockbusting or best-selling. That's not by accident. It's by design.

 

So essentially, if you are adapting this to your brand as a coach, there's a challenge that you help people overcome. So most good stories start with a bomb going off, you know, something that's like really challenging, a problem that needs to be fixed, right? That's what grabs our attention and locks us in from the very beginning, the, the bomb ticking away, right?

 

So what is that challenge that you as a coach, want to solve for the world, for a particular client, for your company, if you're an internal coach like Connected Kelly, what is the challenge that you have a personal mission to overcome? If you can identify that for yourself, then you can build your messaging around that.

 

Because when you're communicating that challenge in your messaging and in your branding, in the way you talk about your services, if you're leading with that challenge, you're going to attract the people who need that solution, right?

 

So it's not a marketing gimmick. It's not a way to manipulate people or to scare people into working with you. It's a real way of connecting with the people who need your services. So I would say that's a great place to start.

 

And it sounds like Connected Kelly did that where it was kind of a backwards on accident way of doing it. So the challenge is to figure it out first so that you can put that out there in your messaging and your branding.

 

Lisa: on purpose. It is funny that you say this because there's something really simple that was going on with the problem that linked to her brand which was just no one reads my emails.

 

And it's because they were boring speeds and feeds, they were not compelling, they were not written from the perspective of the reade: an internal person who's really busy in back-to-back meetings all day. and she's offering coaching services to people who don't really know what a coach is or how a coach can help.

 

When she realized the thing that would grab them: ‘I can help your emails get read. I can help you get responses, get noticed by your peers so that you become the collaborator.’ So the kind of things that they were having problem with and frustration with, like, ‘hey, I sent an email off and it goes into a black hole.’ Now it doesn't.

 

Now she is helping them. because she's the integrator, she's helping them communicate with their colleagues in a way that helps them get noticed. And it's because of her connectedness. It's because she can think beyond the analytical.

 

So I really love that because she was solving that problem for them and loved solving that problem for them. And it was easy for her to do that. And they thought she was a genius.

 

And she never thought about messaging like this. She was just like, hey, we're here. We can help you live your best life. This is something that we're guilty of as coaches. We're like, oh, everyone needs a coach. It's so powerful. It's amazing. You want to feel good again? You want to live your best life? But inspiration like that actually doesn't drive people to action the way that solving a problem for them does.

 

Brea: That's right. That's right. And this is where it can be so interesting because You can approach the problem from two different ways. You can look at the problem that your client or your potential client is facing, like no one reads my emails, and make that the problem that you solve.

 

That's a great way to do it because your client is the hero of their own story. So when they hear your messaging, it needs to be their story that they hear or else they're not interested, right? so many other things pulling for their attention, right? So make it easy for them.