Why a Coaching Community Matters
This week (Monday 19th July), we hosted the first episode of our Monday Masterclass sessions on ‘Why a Coaching Community Matters’ with Lucy Bramley.
We talked about the power of Community in sharing your ‘Why?’, Community ‘mindset shift’ and why holding space for people to share ideas can foster new opportunities when we least expect it. You can listen to the full episode here.
Using the Masterclass as inspiration, we’ve put together three reasons why a Coaching Community matters, and how it can be used to deepen your marketing practice:
1) The Power of Community to find your ‘Why?’
Lucy talked about a framework for understanding our Why? – looking at our ‘Circles of Belonging’. To inspire your own Why?, others can help you discover your identity, find what brings you energy/joy, and help you ‘niche’ (what makes you stand out), so that everything you do aligns with your values. Community is both a playground for ideas and a grounding space for you to seek support, grow confidence and ignite that spark.
When we get clearer on our Why?, we get then inspired by a Community to create Bold action. For Lucy, this has enabled her to explore coaching and use her network to apply coaching in tech, sustainability and working with young people. Similarly, we (Frances and Simon) have become clearer on our own personal and collaborative work and continue to gain confidence and get bolder in our action thanks to being part of The Happy Startup School community together, and are already feeling the force of our new community, Better Bolder Braver.
Community creates a space for accountability to give life to your ideas. We ask our members, ‘What is the work you want to do? Who do you want to surround yourself with?’ Having a clear goal and a willingness to let others help you achieve it will boost your chances of success by a whopping 95% (says The American Society of Training and Development (ASTD).
2) How our sense of Community can lead to mindset shifts
Lucy talked to us about her own ‘Ecology Framework’, which she uses in her coaching to identify blind spots in our ‘Internal Ecosystem’ – where we imagine what people are talking to us about, and what feelings arise when we focus too much on our internal monologue. This reminded us of Brene Brown’s concept of identifying ‘what story are you telling yourself’, which she talks about in her well loved talk, The Call to Courage. Lucy says, ‘your ‘ecosystem’ is your brain’, it’s how you formulate thoughts, actions, attitudes … Challenging these hardwired thoughts is an ‘essential component’ to growth and mindset change and helps us get clearer on who we want to serve, knowing how interconnected we are in thought and feeling.
The live responses in the event chat were a ‘real life’ example of the value of community in offering a new paradigm of thinking altogether – one of our founding Better Bolder Braver members, Michelle – supported by another audience member, Rachel – said, “I’m new to coaching and thought it was stand alone but very quickly [am] learning it is so connected to everything else including my existing networks”. And Nisha said, “community helps you test your own thoughts and answer questions, which you may have thought were self-explanatory”.
3) How holding space for discussion facilitates new ideas
Lucy touched on her new coaching model – the ‘grow your own ideas’ gardening concept. She talked about identifying your own budding ideas, to nurture and foster [habits] whilst they grow in ways that you might not expect and having the courage to face the outcome, whether you succeed, fail fast or try again.
In response, Rachel shared, ‘the lesson I remember from this is once the seed is planted you wouldn’t keep digging it up every day to check on it, you need to trust’. And Tracey quoted Henry Ford, ‘Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right!’
How we built our community
We couldn’t create this community space without the platform MightyNetworks, whose CEO, Gina Biachini, you can listen to talking about the power of Community in connecting with the right people in this video. Watch out for Simon’s forthcoming blog post that shares our ‘Why we chose MightyNetworks as a platform’, which we hope will help any coaches out there who are looking to build their own communities.
Our Monday Masterclass is designed to hold space to share new ideas and inspire others to join the conversation. Our first Masterclass session, we think, showed nicely that community injects confidence and inspires others to share ideas. By acknowledging the space for input and ideas, we can all become catalysts for individual and broader-scale change. Importantly, when you’re clear on what you desire and the outcome you want to see in the world, community can be that helping hand to shape what Lucy called, your ‘legacy’.
We invite you to consider how Community can help you in being able to cement your thoughts and put yourself out there with great confidence. If you would like to carry on the conversation and learn more about our community then you can join us here.
