EP 354 - Why Coaches Don't Know What to Say (And How to Stand Out in 2026)

MarketingCoaching Lifestyle
Written By Debbie Shadid
 

If you're a coach who knows you need to be marketing but you freeze because you don't know what to say, this video is for you. There's a little-known strategy that'll help you figure out exactly how to talk about yourself, and it starts with discovering your natural strengths.

If you're new to my channel, my name is Debbie Shadid. I'm a Business Growth and Life Coach and the founder of the Business Building Boutique. For over two decades, I've helped women learn how to become coaches, get clients, grow their businesses, and create meaningful income doing work they love.

When you know your strengths, you stop sounding like every other coach and you become a niche of one. That's what makes your marketing, your selling, and your signature offer so much easier to build.

In this video, we'll walk through:

  • Why most coaches freeze on social media and don't know what to say about themselves

  • How the StrengthsFinder test helps you separate yourself into a niche of one

  • What your natural strengths reveal about how to market, sell, and show up with confidence

  • How to spot the downside of each strength so it works for you instead of against you

  • How to build a signature coaching offer that reflects your unique strengths

  • Why your strengths give you endless content for social media and Substack

When you finally know what makes you different, the marketing gets easier, the right clients start to notice, and you stop second-guessing every post. You're not competing with every other coach anymore. You're the only one who does it the way you do.

Ready to get clear on your niche, your offer, and how to talk about your business? Book your free Business Blueprint Call and let's map out your next step together: https://debbieshadid.com/schedule

Take the StrengthsFinder Test:

  • Grab a brand-new copy of the book so you get the one-time test code (you have to cut the page to access it): https://amzn.to/4ax6iBd

Shop Debbie's Resources for Coaches:

Connect with me, Debbie Shadid:

Listen to the Podcast:

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Transcript

If you're a coach who is not putting yourself out there and you know you need to be, you want clients and you're not doing the marketing that you need to, it could be because you don't know what to say, and I can almost bet that has something to do with it. In this episode, I'm gonna share a little-known strategy with you for how to learn how to talk about yourself. I'm gonna help you discover what to say. I'm gonna share tons of examples so you can apply it to your business starting today. I'm Debbie Shadid. I help women just like you build boutique-style coaching businesses without spending money on paid ads. Okay, so I know how you feel about social media. I know how you feel about filming yourself and talking about yourself. First of all, I want to acknowledge that is a real feeling. It's hard, right? You gotta learn how to do that. You need to learn how to get over yourself because the only path to clients is through marketing. So many women quit before they ever even start. They quit before they ever do the marketing or even give the marketing a chance. Now, you've heard me say it before, and I'll say it again, you get better at talking about yourself once you talk about yourself. You will discover how to do it in an easier way, but what I'm gonna share with you today will definitely help you. Now, we all have our niche, and hopefully you've identified a narrow niche, but within your niche, you are among other coaches, right? So let me help you separate yourself out into a niche of one. I'm gonna tell you how to do this by taking this StrengthsFinder test. Now, maybe you're saying, "Oh, Debbie, I've already taken those tests." I'm gonna tell you with StrengthsFinders what you do with it and how this will help you with your marketing, how it will help you create a program, how it will help you sell, and so many other things. I can almost guarantee that it will elevate your confidence as soon as you take the test I took this test first in 2013, and I have to tell you, before I explain to you the process, it literally changed my business, it changed my attitude about myself, about what I thought was possible, and my business took off, and I know it can happen for you too. I've actually purchased 120 of these books, shared them with coaches, and they feel the same way about it as I do. So I'm gonna leave a link in the show notes. It is very important that you buy a brand-new book, because inside the book is the test code. You have to cut the page to get the code, and it's a one-time use code. So buy the new book, take the test. It only takes a few minutes, and you'll get really practical responses back of what your natural strengths are. In fact, you'll read the list and you'll be like, "Wait a minute, that really is me." You will have a way to identify yourself that you've never had before. Very simple, straightforward strengths, and you'll finally be like, "Okay, that's it, isn't it?" I remember feeling so empowered. I found out that my top strength was responsibility. I'm gonna give three examples of my own strengths so you can see how to use the process that I'm gonna teach you, and how you will be able to utilize it in your own business, how to create your offer, how to talk about yourself, and how to use social media with these strengths. So my number one strength is responsibility. Now, when I had that test result, I was like, "Okay, this explains a lot," because I feel so responsible for my clients. At that time in 2013, I was doing work for clients that they needed to be doing for themselves. As a coach who has built her business on helping coaches build profitable businesses, you have to learn how to do things like the marketing, the tech, talking about yourself, putting yourself out there. You have to learn how to do it, and that's where my skill set is. I teach coaches how to do that. But you know what I was doing? I was literally doing the work for them. I would teach them how to set up the tech, and then I would say, "Oh, let me just do it for you," because I wanted to be responsible for them getting it done, yeah, instead of them doing it themselves. Now, what was so bad about that? Maybe you're thinking, "I would like Debbie to do that for me." But what was so bad about that is you leave working with me and you don't know how to do it yourself. I help coaches create a business once for a lifetime, and if you have not learned how to do what it is you need to do, then you can't do it after you work with me. So I needed to take responsibility for giving the responsibility of the business setup to my clients. Another really interesting thing, if you have this strength and you're a coach, I would check yourself on this because when I would have consultation calls and the clients would tell me about their life. We all have a story about our life and about money and about our finances and about the time we have to go work with a coach. That's a common story. As soon as they'd start to tell it, I would offer a discount. I'd be like, "Oh, uh, let me just help you out. Let me help you make a decision to say yes. I'm gonna give you 50% off." First of all, that doesn't sound professional and it sounds like you're desperate. Nobody wants to sound that way. And really to have a successful business, you decide on the price and you hold yourself to that price 'cause you're in it to make money, okay? And the investment that they make is really an investment into them doing the work. So there I was like, "Oh, let me give you a discount," over and over again, so I was making like a fraction of the money that I could have. And by the way, something interesting happens when you do not charge your full price. Sometimes you resent your clients. And I had no reason to resent my clients'cause they weren't doing anything wrong. I was the one who'd done something wrong. Because I felt so responsible, I was doing the work for them, which kind of made me mad even though I was doing it, and I was giving them a discount that they didn't even ask for. So there you go. Responsibility as a strength is that I say to you, Look, I am on the cutting edge of everything that happens. I am feel really committed to work with you. I feel responsible for the investment that you've made in me, and I'm gonna show up as my best, always prepared. I'm gonna guide you and lead you and answer all your questions." That is a coach who's very responsible, right? She turns up on time. She does what she says she's gonna do, and integrity is very important. where you go too far is by taking on the responsibility for the client. The second strength I wanna highlight to you that I believe you might have in your top five strengths is learner. And I can say that because you're here learning. What's so great about a strength like that is I can say to my coaching clients," I know everything that's happening. I know the latest trends. I know what everybody's doing in the marketplace. I am up to speed, so you wanna work with me because I'm on it. I know what's happening." The downside to that is if you don't get this under control, you spend your entire week, in fact, seven days a

week I was working, until 2: 6:42

00 or 3:00 in the morning learning things. Are you guilty of that? I was signing up for everything. I was buying all the courses. I was reading multiple books. Now, when you read multiple books, and you watch all these webinars, you go to all these courses, you watch all these videos, what do you do? Nothing. You know why? Because you're confused. You're overwhelmed. You're like, "Wait, which way is the right way to go?" So what I found, and what I found for our clients is, you get paralyzed and you don't actually take action. That very day that I found out what my strength was, learner, that very day I decided, okay, I have to figure out what is the positives and what's the negatives. That's what I was just sharing with you about responsibility and about being a learner. So the positive is I know what's happening in the world. The negative is you gotta watch out for what you're learning, right? Too much causes you to be stuck and in overwhelm. So what I decided was from that point on, one coach at a time. I would only work with one coach, I would implement everything, and I would not look at another coach until I was done working in that program. Do you know how much that increased my results with the coach? I mean, It skyrocketed my business, honestly, because I was applying everything I was learning. The same way with books. I happen to be reading two books right now, but it's 'cause I'm in a book club. Otherwise, one book at a time. One book, start to finish. I don't even buy books. I add them to my Amazon cart, and that is it. Until I'm done with what I'm doing, I don't buy anything else. So that's really what I want you to do. Look at the way I've described those two strengths, how I looked at what the positive was, I looked at what the negative was, and I focused on getting both of those right so I could step into my natural strengths in a much more elevated, better way. My third strength I want to share with you that many of you will have as well is ideation. Ideas. Do you have a lot of ideas? I bet you do. Almost every coach I talk to has got so many ideas they don't know which one to settle on. Let me talk to you about that. Number one, that also keeps you stuck, right? It keeps you from doing anything, and once you start on something, you never really take it far enough because you have the next better idea that you move forward with. And I can tell you for sure, the way to have success as a coach is to pick one idea and to go all in on it and to not quit, okay? The ones who win don't quit. In my coaching as a business coach, ideation is an incredible strength to have because I help coaches with ideas. I help them figure out where to market. I tell them what they need to say. I tell them how to show up on social media, what their niche should be. I have the right ideas that coaches are looking for. But you know what else I found early on when I took this test in 2013 was if I shared too many ideas, people were like paralyzed. They couldn't do anything, right? It was too much, and sometimes they didn't even wanna come back to coaching because they were so confused about what their next move was. Can you see how these simple strengths being identified to me changed me and my business? This is why our clients have loved this process. This is what I want for you, too. Take that test. Find out what your strengths are. I do wanna mention to you, this is a test that you take once. You do not need to take it every few years. Tom Rath says this is it. Your natural strengths are your natural strengths. Okay, let's talk about marketing'cause that's what you're here for. I said if you're not showing up on social media or putting yourself out there, it's because you might not know what to say. Now, imagine this. Now you know my top three strengths, Imagine all the ways that I can talk about that on social media. I can talk about how responsibility shows up in my coaching, how I treat my clients with a level of care that is different than anyone else because I feel responsible, right? I am in it with them. Same way with learner. I mentioned earlier, look, I am on the cutting edge of everything. I know what's happening. I can almost guarantee you that I am ahead of every trend. I know when the next thing is coming down the pipeline, and I can tell you about it before somebody else can. That is such a unique advantage, and all of that is marketing content. You could even go over to Substack, which is my new platform I'm testing out, and you could write full-on articles about your top five strengths. Inside the Strength Finder books, it gives a description of each strength, and oh my goodness, you can go to Chat GPT or Claude and ask about strength finders, and it will tell you all about it. So you could even go so far as to say,"Here's my top five strengths. How could I utilize those in my business? What do I need to look out for?" and there you go. ChatGPT will tell you how you use those strengths in your business. So now I've talked about how you can use it on social media, I've talked about how you can use it on Substack, and now I want to talk about creating a coaching business that emphasizes those strengths. So your offer is a signature offer that should reflect the skill set that you have. That's what we teach inside the Business Building Boutique. We talk about building an offer where, that combines all of your unique skills, and your unique skills come from your natural strengths. So look at your business and the signature offer that you put together, the solution that you offer your clients, and the path that you take them on to get to that solution. How can those strengths really work for you? So responsibility, like I say, look, whatever you create, I will review. I want to make sure that what you're doing sounds right, looks right, comes off right, so I'm going to review it. Because I want to make sure that they know what to do from the very beginning. That is how I've created the program to highlight one of my best strengths, responsibility. So think about your strengths. Think about looking at your offer. Does it highlight your strengths within the coaching process that you have created? Okay, the last thing I want to mention, I mentioned about you creating a niche of one. Now, . You might be a coach who helps somebody lose their last 20 pounds. They've had a baby, something like that, okay? How do you separate yourself from the rest? You weave in those five strengths. You weave those into your niche, and now all of a sudden, you are the coach who is this, and this, who also helps women lose their last 20 pounds after having a baby. That is exactly what I have done. That is exactly why I stand out from all of the other business coaches, because I utilize my unique skill set, my unique strengths in the business model and the process, the Business Building Boutique that we put together. So I hope this has been exciting for you, and I hope that you go get the test. Get your strengths back. I think it takes about 20 minutes or so to take the test, and then write down those strengths and put them somewhere where you can see, and then start thinking about how does that show up? Where is that being highlighted in my business, or how am I not using that for good, that strength? How is that showing up in a way that is taking away from my business? Identify those and then make the decision how to integrate those strengths even more into your business. Because remember, they're your natural strengths, so you are using them. Then tell me in the comments what your strengths are, and follow me on Substack. Subscribe. I will find you over there. And when you write your article about your strengths, Let me know when you've done it, and I will follow you. I will be one of your first subscribers. That's it. Have a beautiful day. Go embrace your strengths, and let's make a difference in the world.

Debbie Shadid https://www.DebbieShadid.com
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EP 353 - How to Get Started on Social Media as a Coach in 2026 (for Women 50+)