Is Coaching Right For Me?

Let’s start with the most important point: Coaching is utterly, wonderfully glorious.  It’s such a gift to get some time to focus on untangling the mess of your own thoughts in the company of someone who is objectively and actively listening to you and is there to support you in that moment.

That’s the reason, in a nutshell, that I’m a coach.  It’s a beautiful experience and I love being the coach as much as I love being the coachee.  It’s such a gift!

I’ve been helping people with creative minds gain clarity, make and stick to workable plans, dream big and take meaningful action.  And, if you’ve not quite picked up on the theme already, I blooming love coaching!  Hopefully over the next few paragraphs, I’ll convince you of that too 🙂

I work with a wide range of clients, but the majority are folk who are running their own creative businesses as individual artists, freelance supremos or creative entrepreneurs.  Using your creativity as your career is wonderful but it is also seriously hard work.  We face a much higher rate of rejection, are often expected to work for lower pay/fees than other sectors and it can also be really blooming lonely.

What a creative business coach can do

That loneliness is where coaching can really come into its own.  Imagine having a challenging cheerleader in your corner who you check in with each week and, once or twice a month you get to meet up, share how it’s all going and make plans for the month ahead.  They gently challenge you, pushing you to work through your limiting beliefs and stories you tell yourself that might be holding you back.  They are also in your corner, cheering on your little and big wins, celebrating with you and supporting you to succeed.

Pretty lovely, eh?

It is all too easy to get stuck in your own head, especially when you’re busy and life is throwing all sorts of curve balls your way.  When you think ahead, it always seems possible that in a few days or a week’s time you’ll have an hour or two to plan properly, but that’s the first thing to get dropped from the diary when things are too busy.

How a Coach Can Help You Plan

Hands up who has put something bold in their diary, like “development day” in a few weeks time, only to cancel it later on when it looks impossible to carve out that sort of time for something so indulgent* as planning and strategy.

If you’ve got your hand up, you’re in good company.  Me too.  I did exactly that this past week - I’d set aside a day in September to spend solely on developing my business with particular projects in mind.  Glancing at my diary this week I deleted it as I felt I couldn’t give myself a whole day.  One to discuss with my coach sometime soon!

*(I’m joking of course, it’s not remotely indulgent and your business is likely to be more successful if you make the time, but when you’re on your own or in a micro team, it can be SO hard to prioritise it).

There’s a couple of things at play here.  Firstly, the urge to turn planning and strategy into such a big task that it needs whole days.  To spend that much time is a luxury - one I occasionally do get, but I don’t need to do it all the time.  Planning can happen in a spare half hour too.  Secondly, by carving out that big space in the diary is a form of procrastination when some of that planning could happen right away.

Coaching helps consistency

Working with a coach on a rolling month-to-month basis can be so helpful in that smaller, ongoing, consistent planning.  Taking a little bit of time out once a week or even once a day to remind yourself where your priorities lie for the week or two ahead is invaluable.  Having that challenging cheerleader to share it with is priceless.

Consistency can feel like a bit of a dirty word to a lot of us (me included).  It feels like the opposite of creativity, spontaneity and fun.  It doesn’t have to be this way!  You have immense freedom when you run your own business: it’s something others are extremely envious of, and you shouldn’t take it for granted.  Part of that freedom is getting to decide what consistency looks like for you.  Instead of thinking about what you “should” be doing in your business, be a good sort of pirate and think about how you can take meaningful action in a way that is totally suited to you, your way of thinking, your lifestyle and your interests.  

It’s truly wonderful to be in a position where you can make it up as you go along.  That doesn’t mean you're off the hook though and can just kick back.  All that freedom needs a large dollop of self discipline and a dash of grit to keep your business going.

How a coach can hold you accountable

Which comes to the other biggie about coaching: accountability.  The majority of creative people I work with are far more accountable to others than themselves.  Sometimes that manifests as quite extreme people-pleasing, but most of the time it’s not that full on, it’s  just how we’ve been conditioned.  We get a buzz from helping other, fulfilling promises to others and, perhaps most importantly, we find motivation in the validation and affirmation from others.

When you don’t have a line manager or a boss, your coach can be that person you feel accountable to.  You can set deadlines to get things done and agree on a way to report back so they know you’ve achieved what you promised.  

In my Coaching With Sarah subscription programme, this accountability can look quite different from one client to the next.  I’m interested in working with you and working out what works best for you, rather than adopting some off-the-shelf approach.  So your accountability might be a weekly check in and I’ll have a reminder in my diary to chase you up if you’ve not messaged.  

For someone else it might be more ephemeral - one of my favourites was a client who was a writer.  They knew they wrote best in the afternoon after they’d been for a walk on the beach on their own.  Their accountability to me was a single photo of the beach - no caption, just the photo, to which I responded with a simple thumbs up.  That was enough to tell me that they were writing that day. 

How Do You Find A Coach? 

If the above has struck a chord and reinforced your thoughts that some coaching might be useful, then the next step would be to find the right coach for you.  If you think that might be me, you can book in a free initial chat and find out more about my coaching programme here.  If not me, then a quick google or a search on linkedin will fling up lots of options… like, thousands of options.  What you want to look for is someone who talks about having done a decent coaching qualification, that they have insurance and have regular supervision.  Beyond that, it’s down to the feel - if this person makes you keen to achieve the actions, then they’re a good fit.  

An important note to end on is that the hard work of coaching happens in between your coaching sessions.  As much as I’d love to be a fairy godmother with a magic wand, I can’t manage miracles.  You need to put the work in.  Your commitment to doing the work is directly proportional to how successful the coaching will be.  

If, after all that, coaching isn’t the right thing for now, I’ve got plenty of free resources that you might find useful.  My Weekly Planner (recently featured in Ideal Home Magazine, August 2025) will be a good place to start, but feel free to have a rummage around my gifts page too!

As well as publishing here on my page, this blog is also a guest post on She’s A Peach.  Aly, founder of She’s a Peach works with solopreneurs like me, supporting us to sort our SEO out to make us more google-able.  For my business, SEO is the number one most important marketing thing I can do - it’s lead to the most clients, and biggest turnover.  If you’re not sure what I’m on about or, if you know but you’ve not done much to optimise the searchability of your website, you know where to go!