Outgrowing Your Niche Doesn’t Mean Starting Over

Helping Women and Non-Binary People Stand in Their Power

Being a coach means our job is always about growth. Whether helping people grow as writers or grow their confidence, coaching is guiding people become more themselves, in whatever area they desire that to be. Career, creativity, confidence or life itself.

As coaches, we grow along with our clients. We grow from our life and coaching experiences and with that we expand our confidence. We take on more challenges and grow as people.

This also means that we can outgrow the work we do.

Niches exist for us to attract the right people. But never forget that coaching means growing. This means we as coaches can outgrow our niche. There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, it’s inherently a great thing.

But what do we do if we don’t actually want to leave our work behind completely, because we still care about it?

What we do is expand.

We make our box bigger, the seed from which we grow becomes more expansive, and we build it so it can be expanded further still.

That is exactly what I’m doing.

I built a box for myself that was entitled: helping people with chronic illness write.

When I started on my book coaching journey, I was a person with chronic illness who wrote. I knew the specific challenges that came with it and I can say with confidence that I struck a chord with many spoonie writers.

But as I coached, I learned so many new things. I learned what it’s like to run a business and what it’s like to push yourself in your work. I noticed I was good at that too and I noticed I was growing immensely as a person who had previously been stuck in the ‘spoonie identity’.

I slowly grew to understand what I needed to do – even though doing it was hard, my mind and body not always cooperating: I had to expand my niche to keep growing as a coach. Not because I no longer care about my niche – I perhaps do more than ever as I see the power of it -, but because I now know intimitately how to do it, and I am now ready to learn more and push myself further still.

I love helping. I love helping women and spoonies and people in the queer community and fellow neurodivergent folks and basically anyone who’s ever marginalised by the patriarchy. I know how to run and grow a business, how to help someone build their confidence and how to write an excellent book. So how can I combine all these things and still attract the right people? This I have been mulling over for a year.

I finally found what it is all about for me: helping women and non-binary people build a meaningful life amid ongoing challenges.

Why?

Because of my lived experience.

I know this stuff, because I know it, intimately. I have lived it. The worry, the anxiety, the lack of confidence, the doubts, the silenced voice, the silenced being, the whole shebang. And I worked through it.

This doesn’t mean these emotions and thoughts don’t still show up. They totally do. But I have the tools now to choose differently when it happens. To act differently. And that’s been the game changer.

I want to share that with other women and non-binary folks. Because I know what a marginalised life does to you as a human and as a creative.

I want to empower people. Women who know they are capable but feel stuck. Stuck in overwhelm and self-doubt. Who don’t know which next step to take in their creative life or in their business. They are scared to choose wrong. Scared to lose time and energy. Fear is holding them back because mistakes mean failure and failure means feeling horrendous emotions such as shame and sadness.

Those are the people I am here to help. Because when you and I stand in our own power, the world around us gets a direct hit from the good that we do.

I want to help women and non-binary people become confident, gain clarity around their wants and desires, and help them achieve them through writing books or building aligned businesses.

Imagine what the world would look like if all of us stood tall, knowing our power and strengths. That we trusted ourselves to make the right choices for us and by extension our loved ones. If we wrote the books we wish we could and build businesses that are aligned and created around doing good work. The world would be a much better place.

And that starts with you. So sign up to this Substack if you haven’t yet. Because together, we got this!

Sandra Postma

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