If you’ve found identifying a niche for your health or life coaching business tricky, then you’re definitely not alone. There’s many reasons why niching can be difficult, and perhaps you’ve even wondered whether or not you have to have a niche in your coaching business at all.

That’s the question I’ll be exploring in this blog post.

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What is a Niche for Health and Life Coaches?

A niche is a section of the market your business is set up to serve. The way I approach niching, is by getting clear on the set of problems you help people solve, the aspirations you help them achieve and therefore, the transformation you support them with.

Often, when this is clear, you don’t need to go further and identify a specific ideal client type, as many different types of people may face those problems, however you can also add into this the people you’d like to work with whether that’s identifying them via demographics such as age, or other means.

As simple as that may sound, niching as a health or life coach can still be very hard, and here’s why…

Why is it Hard to Niche as a Health or Life Coach?

You’re Multi-Passionate

If you recognise that you may be a naturally multi-passionate person who has lots of ideas and is super creative, the idea of having to narrow down the work you do in the world and the people you do it with can feel incredibly stifling.

There are ways you can create a niche that allows you creative freedom, but is definitely a reason why niching can feel hard!

You can learn more about how to approach niching as someone who is multi-passionate here.

Mindset

Your mindset can create a number of issues when it comes to narrowing down your niche. Simply the act of identifying a niche and then working within it means you need to own the fact that you have some skills and expertise in that area, and that in and of itself can be triggering.

You may also feel that by niching in one area you are missing out on income in another area, this is an example of how scarcity mindset can keep you stuck.

Stage of Business

If you’re a newer coach it can be more challenging to niche simply because you haven’t had enough time to figure it out and allow your niche to develop organically.

All of these reasons are totally valid, and while it’s a good idea to challenge ourselves around some of these areas, you may still simply find it hard to niche.

Niche Procrastination

The bottom line is that for various reasons, not least because of our late stage capitalist, consumerist society requires us to box ourselves into a neat package (even though, for some it can feel uncomfortable as it goes against the desire to be authentically multifaceted) having a niche does give us a business advantage.

You can learn more about creating a Profitable Niche here.

However, the biggest issue with finding it hard to niche, isn’t the fact that you don’t have a clear niche, it’s that you don’t take action.

Niche procrastination where we can’t fully show up and move forward in our businesses because we haven’t niched, is more damaging to our business success than not having a niche in the first place.

The good news is, you can still move forward even if you haven’t yet, or may never wish to niche in a very specific way.

What to Do if You Don’t Have a Niche?

Sell Coaching for Coaching’s sake

One simple thing you can do to get ‘out of the starting blocks’ is to just offer generic health or life coaching in a similar way that counsellors and therapists offer their services. The downside of this is that coaching is not yet as commonly understood as either counselling or therapy. However if you can explain the way in which coaching differs to these other modalities and have the right marketing strategy this option can work for a while.

Just bear in mind that your businesses profitability may be impacted if you adopt this business model which is more focused on selling sessions at an hourly rate.

You Are the Niche

Another option if you don’t want to, or can’t yet identify a niche is to adopt an ‘I am the niche’ mentality. With this outlook, you’re focusing much more on what you bring to your work in terms of your own interests, skills, experience and personal journey. With this option, you’re more likely to ‘call in’ clients who deeply resonate with your individual ‘thought leader’ style approach. However you still need to be confidently sharing what you’re all about somewhere online for those people to find you.

Create Your Content

Finally, you can simply get started by creating content that lights you up, rather than spending time overly strategising about it. When you take this approach, what you might find is that your niche naturally reveals itself as you go. It will still be important to make sure that people can find this content if you want to grow your business with it.

Take the pressure off

Finally a reminder that when it comes to sharing your niche or narrowing it down, take the pressure off whenever you are creating a single piece of content or a single page on your website. Generally speaking, we want to be creating sales systems and marketing environments where people are interacting with several facets of our businesses at once.

It’s this multi faceted interaction that gives a potential client the fuller picture of not just your niche but your overall messaging and who you are as a coach and that is what will influence who reaches out to book in those discovery or connection calls.

I hope this blog post has helped give you some ideas for moving forward if you don’t have a clear niche yet, or even if you decide that having a narrow niche will never be right for you!

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