Next up in our Where Are They Now? series, we are featuring our Coaching Academy graduate coach Kris Verlé. Kris shares his coaching journey, detailing how he utilises his life coaching qualification to successfully coach clients online across different time zones and continents through his executive and life coaching business. Read on to learn more about his journey.
When people ask what I do for a living, I usually keep it simple. I say I’m a coach and that I help people navigate some of the big and small decisions in their professional and personal lives.
I started my coaching practice about ten years ago and went full-time in 2019. I coach exclusively online and almost all of my work is done through one-on-one sessions. I recently also started two group coaching programmes that I absolutely love. I work globally, although for time-zone reasons (I live partly in Asia and partly in Europe), I focus mostly on the UK, Europe and Australia.
Having to choose a niche never sat well with me personally, so I brand myself as a coach who combines executive coaching with life and career coaching, which has worked quite well for me. Having said that, I do attract a certain type of client – mostly people who are already doing well professionally, but feel they are missing something. The term ‘midlife crisis’ gets mentioned a lot in my intake sessions! A lot of the work I do is indeed quite existential and identity-focused, so clients are often interested in exploring topics like impact, meaning and purpose.
About seventy per cent of my clients are male, although that is not intentional on my part. My guess is that’s because there are far fewer male coaches out there. I also work with many expats which may be due to my own background having lived in many different places. Rather than focusing on a specific niche, I try to clearly communicate the results clients can expect from working with me. I find that infusing my content with a bit of personality and humour, while still demonstrating plenty of expertise and authority in my field, helps to differentiate myself a bit from the sea of other coaches.
Ever since I was young, I wanted to create some sort of impact and influence in the world. Having studied politics, I ended up working in the UK Parliament for a number of years and later on as a lobbyist. For fifteen years, I felt like a complete impostor pretending to know what I was talking about! Worse, after all that time, I still couldn’t point at a single thing where I could claim any sort of personal impact. I felt so stuck and dissatisfied in my career, and yet I was clueless as to what else I could possibly do. By working with an excellent coach myself, I realised that the world of policy-making was way too slow for me. I needed something where I could combine my desire to work with people with a sense of immediate impact. After attending the Coaching Academy’s free 'Introduction to Life Coaching' webinar something really clicked into place.
It still took me a little time to take the leap to pivot my career and sign up to my formal training with the Coaching Academy, but I’m so glad I did or we wouldn’t be having this conversation!
Every single engagement I have with clients, I too learn something new. People are so incredibly resourceful and I feel privileged when they share some of their own learnings and perspectives on life. When you’re in a session, you’re really side-by-side with your client, so any new insight they generate for themselves, genuinely feels exciting for me too. Plus, I’ve lost count of the times I thought “wow, I should really apply this to my own life too”. Also, and perhaps rather embarrassingly, but I’m a bit of a shy connection ‘addict’. That makes coaching a perfect profession because I get to establish deep relationships without necessarily having to be particularly vulnerable myself.
My three keys to success
The more time passes, the more I appreciate the incredible depth of coaching as a skill. To become a great coach takes time and investment in continuous professional development. As the saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So, focus on great coaching by constantly upping your practice and adding new tools to your toolbox. The longer you coach, the more intuitive you’ll become in questioning and reflecting back to your clients, but that won’t happen unless you deeply mull over your own learning and development as a coach as often and deeply as possible.
If you would like to find out more about online opportunities for life coaches to grow their business online, then please join our Head of Training Sharon Lawton, and Coaching Academy Expert Trainer Mike Blissett, on our June's edition of Coaching Conversations. They will be discussing the topic of ‘Growing Your Coaching Business with an Online Course or Coaching Programme’ - visit our Coaching Conversations event calendar to book your free place.
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