Stickability. The Only Real Choice.

On a Monday evening, at 8pm UK time, we Coaching Revolutionaries get together for an hour on a Zoom call. It's informal - bring wine if you like - yet informative.

The purpose of that call is for us to learn the things about running a coaching business that every coach needs to learn. The reason we separate it out from the mentoring process is because the mentoring hours are designed to be bespoke and personal. They are about the coach and their business, and specifically about marketing that coaching business to best effect.

General Knowledge

There are things that all of our mentees need to know, that we could teach in the mentoring sessions, but that would mean that our mentors are repeating the same things to lots of different mentees.

Far better, we believe, to have a community meet-up on a Monday evening.

It's not compulsory of course, we're all grown ups and words like 'mandatory' and 'compulsory' just get peoples' backs up. However, those who attend regularly always benefit enormously, and say so. We record every session and we have a back-catalogue of sessions going back to October 2017.

The reason that I'm telling you this, is that a couple of weeks ago, we had 'repurposing content' as the topic for the night.

Repurposing Content

To demonstrate how to repurpose content, I took one of my LinkedIn articles and turned it into 10 other pieces of content. Some were memes (images with words), some were short-form posts, others were longer posts and podcasts.

By the time I got to the end of the session, one of our mentors Liz O'Neill reassured everyone that although I made it look easy to repurpose content, and that the newer mentees were probably mind-boggled, they could rest assured that they too would be able to create content and repurpose it. She added that when she started with us, she would never have believed that she would be able to write the things that she regularly does now.

Stickability

Liz's comments got me thinking. Was I always as eloquent as I am now? Was I always so able to nail exactly what I want to say? Was it always so easy for me?

The answer to that is that no, it wasn't.

If I look back to my earliest posts and articles, they are far clunkier than how I write today. They are focused less on what our potential clients need to hear from us, and far more on what I wanted (needed?) to say.

How did I change that? By showing up. By consistently writing, and posting. By doing it every single day, I have honed my writing skills over the two and a half year's I've been writing for The Coaching Revolution.

Burn Bright, Burn Out

We've all seen those coaches who appear as a bright, shining star. They seem to land on our social media feeds, sometimes via sponsored posts on Facebook, and burn brightly. For a brief time, they are everywhere! Then they disappear for a while, sometimes forever.

What happens in the disappearing is that they lose credibility.

Make no mistake, 80% of success is, as Woody Allen famously said, just showing up.

Showing Up Is Hard

Let me be more specific than that, showing up every day, with interesting things to say is hard. It's also essential.

Having a day sitting on your bed with the cat might feel like you're 'replenishing yourself' - which is important, right? - but that's a cop out. Show up first, then sit on the bed.

Everyone has off days, but you still need to show up. It doesn't take hours to show up, but it does take grit. Once you're in the swing of things, you can create content and schedule it, which helps. Until then, if you want to create a trustworthy brand, you show up. Every day.

Show Up Intelligently

What I mean by this is that writing and posting in itself isn't the showing up I'm referring to. What I'm referring to is writing and posting intelligently.

What I mean by that is making sure that your solid, consistent and reliable writing contains the message that your clients need to hear. That it looks at exactly what problem they have, and offers potential solutions to that problem.

Random writing isn't good enough.