An ICF PCC coach asked me last month why her profile attracts other coaches instead of clients.
I read her About section back to her aloud. It named her credentials, her methodology, her fifteen years of experience, and her passion for helping leaders grow.
Every word was true, and every single word was about her. Her ideal client appeared nowhere in it.
Whoever describes the problem best owns the solution
Picture that client for a moment, a director in her forties, lying awake at 2am rehearsing a conversation with a chief executive who interrupted her twice in the last board meeting. She is capable, she is respected on paper, and she has started wondering whether the problem is her.
That woman could read the coach’s entire profile and never once see herself in it. Whoever describes the problem best is presumed to own the solution.
Read that line again, because it decides who gets hired on this platform. Your ideal clients cannot evaluate your methodology, your supervision hours, or the difference between an ACC and an MCC. They can only evaluate one thing, whether you appear to understand their Tuesday. The coach who describes the 2am rehearsal wins the enquiry over the coach with the stronger credential, every time, and it is never close.
Describing the world your client actually lives in
I learned this with a camera before I learned it with words. I spent years photographing brilliant people, capturing their leadership and their story, then watching them disappear back into the scroll because nothing around the photograph described the world of the person meant to be looking at it.
This series exists to practise the skill in public. Each week I will take one corner of your world, the empty pipeline anxiety, the emotional shower after a day of sessions, the referral that dried up without warning, and describe it precisely. When an issue stings, that is the recognition doing its work, and it is also the demonstration. Whatever I do here for you is what your profile should be doing for your ideal client.
You can learn to do this for your own audience in my live workshop, “Describe Their World”, where we rebuild your profile around the person it is meant to reach.
We refuse to let brilliant coaches stay invisible because their profiles describe the wrong person.
Fields of Growth Media makes excellent coaches visible, in their own voice. Start with The Profile Review, or see the ways to work together.