How to Find Your Coaching Tribe (and the Words That Make Them Listen)

Imagine a woman going through a divorce. She's scrolling her phone late at night, half-numb, and a hundred messages slide past her without registering. Be present. Love yourself. Step into your power. Nothing. Then one line catches and she stops: Going through a divorce? Here are three things you need to know. She taps it. She reads every word. She signs up.

Nothing about her changed in that moment. The only thing that changed was that someone finally said the word she'd been saying to herself all day. And that, more than any amount of wisdom, is the difference between a coach nobody hears and a coach who gets booked.

Why helping everyone makes you invisible

Here's an uncomfortable truth most new coaches need to hear. You probably could help most people with most of their problems. The things you know really would solve a great deal of what people struggle with. And that belief, true as it is, is exactly what keeps you invisible.

Because "everyone" can't hear you. "You could help eighty percent of the population with any problem they have," I tell my students, "but eighty percent of the population is not going to work with you. So you have to think: who are my people, the ones who would actually listen?" That smaller, clearer group is your tribe. Not defined by how they look or where they live, but by a heart connection: the people you genuinely understand, the ones you'd happily talk to for an hour, the ones whose particular kind of suffering you know from the inside. Getting truly clear on those people is the single most important piece of the business training we do, and the part almost every new coach is tempted to skip.

Once you know who they are, there's a sharper question, and it's the one almost everyone gets wrong.

The problem they have versus the problem they know they have

When you sit with someone, you'll often see their real issue clearly. It seems obvious to you. And when you name it, they deny it, because it isn't the problem they're aware of. There's the problem you can see, and there's the problem they already feel and have a word for, and those are rarely the same thing. People won't come to you for the deep diagnosis you can see. They'll come to you for the word they're already using at night.

That word is what I call the trigger word, and naming it is everything. "If someone's going through a divorce, the trigger word is divorce," I tell coaches. "You can talk to them about love and unconditional love and they won't listen. Say the word divorce and they think, 'Ooh, what does this person have to say about divorce?'" It works the same with cancer, with burnout, with anxiety, with weight loss. The legendary copywriter Robert Collier described the whole art in a single line a century ago: enter the conversation already taking place in the customer's mind. A trigger word is how you walk through that door.

I watched a coach realise on a call that her tribe was people carrying abandonment. So we found the words they would actually use. Not the clinical label, but the felt experience: Do you feel alone? Do you feel like the people who were supposed to be there for you left, and now you're carrying everything by yourself? That's the language that makes someone stop scrolling, not because it's clever, but because it's theirs.