How to Find Your Real Coaching Niche (When You Already Think You Have One)

May 20

Why your real coaching niche is usually the version of you from five years ago.

The session that started this

I had a session last week that I keep thinking about.

She came in frustrated. She'd been working on her elevator pitch for weeks. Rewriting it. Tweaking it. Reading it out loud in her car. And every time she said it to a real human, she watched their face do that polite-but-confused thing. The slow nod. The "oh, nice." The subject change.

Her pitch was something along the line of "I help action-oriented women build their dream lives."

Nothing wrong with that sentence, technically. It's grammatically clean. It's positive. It's inclusive.

It is also completely invisible to the actual person who needs her.

The question that unlocked her real coaching niche

I asked her one question.

Who is the woman you keep pulling toward you, even when you're not trying?

She thought about it. Then she described, in great detail, a very specific person. Mid-to-high level manager. Small to mid-sized company. Running point on everything. Quietly exhausted. The one who gets all the work done and never gets a thank-you. The one who says "I'm fine" when she's not.

Then she paused.

"That was me. Five years ago. That was exactly me."

There it was.

Her real niche had been sitting in her own story the whole time. She just hadn't named it yet, because naming it meant admitting two uncomfortable things.

One, she was no longer that woman. Two, she could help her in a way nobody else on Instagram was offering.

That's the moment the niche stopped being a phrase she had to memorize and started being something she could say without flinching.

Why most coaches have a niche problem (that isn't really a niche problem)

She is not the first.

Three out of four coaches I've worked with this month have come to me with a niche statement that sounds great in a vacuum and lands flat in real conversation. Every single one of them had the real niche hiding inside her own backstory.

Most coaches think they have a niche problem. They almost never do. They have an identity problem.

The real niche is right there. They've just been describing it with words designed not to leave anyone out. "Women looking for freedom." "High-achievers ready to step into their power." "Anyone tired of playing small." They don't want to be perceived as judging by labeling someone.

The fear of narrowing comes from a really understandable place. If you name one specific person, you might lose the others. If you describe her too clearly, she might be too small a group to build a business on. If you claim her, you might be wrong about who you actually are.

So you stay broad. You stay safe. You stay invisible.

3 signs your coaching niche is too generic

If any of these sound familiar, your niche is doing too much work being kind and not enough being clear.

1. Your elevator pitch feels like an elevator pitch

You can tell it's a pitch when you're saying it. It doesn't sound like you. It sounds like a sentence you wrote during a workshop. If you have to memorize your own niche, that's a sign it isn't yours yet.

2. People ask follow-up questions you can't answer cleanly

"Oh, what does that mean exactly?" "What kind of women?" "What does 'dream life' look like?" You find yourself stumbling, adding qualifiers, walking it back. The pitch was supposed to start the conversation. Instead it's stalling it.

3. You attract everyone and convert no one

Comments. Likes. Saves. DMs that say "this is so good." And almost no paying clients. That gap usually doesn't mean your content is wrong. It means your audience has no idea who you're actually for, so nobody self-selects in.

The shift that changes your coaching niche

There's a question I ask every coach who tells me her niche is too vague.

Who is the woman you used to be, who needed exactly what you now teach?

That answer is almost always the real niche.

Not always. Sometimes the answer is a sister, a friend, a former client, a version of someone you watched up close. But more often than not, it's the woman in the mirror from a few years ago.

She is specific because she was you. You know what she reads, where she scrolls at 11 p.m., what she's tried that didn't work, what she would never admit out loud. You know her objections because they were your objections.

You don't have to invent her. You just have to name her.

Why claiming your real coaching niche feels so uncomfortable

Here's the part most niche advice skips.

Claiming your real niche is not a marketing exercise. It's an identity exercise. You're saying I am no longer her, and I now know how to help her. That sentence sits funny in the chest the first time you say it.

It can feel arrogant. It can feel premature. It can feel like you're putting yourself above a woman who was you very recently.

You're not. You're doing the most generous thing a coach can do. You're saying I see her clearly, and I have a path.

The discomfort of claiming her is usually the discomfort of admitting how far you've come.

Sit with that one.

A 10-minute exercise to find your real coaching niche

Open a doc. Write your current niche or elevator pitch at the top.

Then answer these three questions in plain language, the way you'd talk to a friend at a coffee shop.

Who is the woman I used to be, who would have paid me for exactly what I now teach? Be embarrassingly specific. Age, life stage, work, what she had tried, what she was secretly tired of.
What was she searching for at 11 p.m. that nobody was answering well?
What does she get from working with me that she could screenshot and send to her best friend?

Now write a new niche statement using those three answers. Read it out loud. If it sounds like you, keep it. If it still sounds like a brochure, cut another layer.

The bottom line on finding your coaching niche

The coaches who try to sound like every other coach don't get your clients. The coaches who sound like themselves do.

You don't have to sound sexy. You don't have to sound like the loudest voice in the room. You just have to sound like the woman who has actually been where she is, and can name it back to her better than she could name it herself.

That's the whole job.