An Anti-Marketing Manifesto for Coaching

It’s well documented that coaching is hard to market. I’ve looked at countless marketing support programmes for coaches and, if I’m honest, I’ve been repelled by most of them. Not because they’re bad (well sometimes I think they are terrible), but because I’m not convinced traditional marketing and sales strategies truly work for something this personal.

And I think that tells us something important.

I’m clearly doing something right. I have clients, and the work is valued. But getting business still takes a huge amount of effort. Over the winter break, I found myself thinking less about how to sell coaching and more about how to name what I do through Thorp Coaching.

I don’t believe work like this can be “sold” in the conventional sense. It’s too human. Too bound up with identity, self-belief, and how people see themselves as leaders. And yet we know this to be true: good leadership improves outcomes. It strengthens teams. It supports performance and the bottom line.

So why is coaching still something many leaders only reach for when things have gone to pot, rather than something that sits alongside leadership as a normal form of support?

Here’s where I’ve landed.

Coaching deals in intangibles. Things people often can’t yet feel, imagine, or put into words. Fulfilment. Confidence. Self-trust. Ease. Even success itself shifts meaning depending on who you are, what season you’re in, and what you’ve already lived through. Joy, for example. I’m not sure I even knew what that felt like a few years ago. I’m still learning to notice it when it arrives.

Business doesn’t like grey. Coaching lives almost entirely in the grey.

Rather than leaning into that messy middle (where I believe the real work happens) we try to reduce something complex and deeply human into certainty, metrics, and neat outcomes. Much coaching marketing pushes for exactly that: clarity before readiness, certainty before exploration.

But surely one of the most important capabilities a leader can develop is the ability to work well without certainty. And perhaps one of the most valuable roles a coach can play is helping leaders build that capacity.

Instead, many coaching narratives quietly demand that clients arrive with answers either for themselves or for teams:

What’s the problem?
What’s the goal?
What’s getting the way?
What’s the vision?
What’s the wildest dream?
What’s the true potential?

Here’s the reality. Many of the leaders and teams I work with can’t answer those questions. Not because they lack ambition or imagination, but because they’ve never experienced work or life without constant pressure, friction, or low-level dysfunction. They may also not yet know what it feels like to operate at a genuinely higher level. We imagine how other senior leaders feel but imagination rarely matches lived experience.

There’s another assumption baked into much coaching marketing that we rarely name.

It assumes people know what coaching actually is.

Many don’t.

They may have a vague sense that it involves talking, goals, or accountability. Some confuse it with mentoring, therapy, consulting, or performance management. Others have had a brief or superficial experience that didn’t touch anything meaningful and quietly decided coaching “wasn’t for them”.

What’s rarely acknowledged is how exposed it can feel to step into something you don’t fully understand. To book time and spend money with a coach without knowing what you’re meant to bring, how deep it might go, or what it could stir up. Particularly for senior leaders who are used to competence, control, and having answers.

So instead of reaching out, many stay where they are. Not because they don’t want support, but because they don’t yet have language for what’s happening or a clear sense of whether coaching is the right container for it.

And at the same time - and this matters - many of my clients come to coaching from a very different place.

They are not broken. They are not floundering. Many are already fulfilled, high-achieving, and proud of what they’ve built.

What they have is perspective.

They understand that meaningful leadership is not a solo endeavour. That doing complex things well leading organisations, shaping culture, making long-term decisions takes a village. And coaching is one part of that village.

For these leaders, getting support isn’t remedial. It’s intentional. They don’t wait for things to fall apart to reflect, be challenged, or think well. They build those practices in deliberately, because they know sustained excellence is rarely achieved alone.

Coaching marketing rarely speaks to this. When coaching is framed only as something you reach for when you’re stuck or burnt out, it reinforces the idea that asking for support is a sign that something has gone wrong.

In my experience, some of the most impactful coaching happens not at moments of crisis, but at moments of possibility.

I know this terrain personally.

Three years ago, I couldn’t have imagined the life I’m living now. Not because it was unattainable, but because my nervous system had no reference point for ease. I’m not sure I believed I could be different. I didn’t back myself yet. So I unconsciously committed to a life that felt under-fulfilled because trying felt too risky.

When difficulty is all you’ve known, difficulty feels normal. You adapt. You cope. You tell yourself this is just how leadership, work, or life is.

This is where I think coaching marketing often misses the mark. We’re encouraged to sell “solving the problem”. But what if the problem isn’t clear yet? What if someone can’t even imagine a life, business, or team that doesn’t feel permanently strained?

Over time, I’ve also questioned the language we use around fulfilment, confidence, and potential. I still don’t know what my wildest dreams are. I’m closer than I was, but getting here has taken years. I’m also learning that I’m comfortable with a gap between what I could theoretically achieve and what I actively choose to pursue.

Not because I’m playing small.
But because joy, health, and enoughness matter to me.

Potential without choice is just another performance metric.

I see the same pattern play out in teams.

If I’m honest, I’m not sure I’ve ever worked in what I would now call a healthy, high-performing team. I’ve been a high-performing individual. I’ve worked in successful groups full of intelligent, committed people. But healthy AND high-preforming? No. 

Which raises an uncomfortable question. If as a leader I could sense something wasn’t right, why didn’t I try to fix the teams I was part of,  or more uncomfortable still, own my role within the dysfunction? And move to action. 

The truth is, I’m not sure I believed it was possible. Not for the team, and not for me.

When you’ve never experienced a healthy system, health doesn’t feel like an available option. It feels abstract. Idealistic. Something other people talk about. So instead of intervening, you adapt. You normalise. You cope. Over time, that can harden into a quiet apathy not because you don’t care, but because everything feels too entrenched to shift.

I see this now, leaders and teams don’t lack insight, intent, or intelligence. They lack a lived reference point for something different, the belief that someone can and will help them change. 

This is why I started the Access to Coaching project. Not as a charitable gesture, but as a way to get closer to the truth. I wanted to understand the real reasons people don’t access coaching support.

I know I’m good at what I do. My clients tell me the work is deep and lasting. So the question isn’t whether coaching works. The question is what sits in the gap between people seeing the work, resonating with it, and actually reaching out.

Some will say it’s about money. And sometimes it is. But at executive level and within corporate teams, I don’t believe that’s the whole story.

More often, people don’t reach out because they don’t yet have language for what’s happening or because they believe support is something you earn through struggle, rather than something you build in to do meaningful things well.

And this brings me to the part that’s hardest to package.

The thought of boiling down the beautiful, complex thinking my clients do in sessions into a tight, snappy marketing message brings me out in hives. This work is about knowing yourself, owning your choices, and deciding how you want to live and lead. It’s big, human, sometimes unsettling work. Compressing it into a tidy promise feels dishonest.

So instead of pretending this work is simple, I’m choosing to name it more accurately.

I work with leaders and teams operating inside complex ecosystems, I offer time space and support to enable them to see themselves and their systems more clearly. Not to escape complexity, but to learn how to navigate (and possibly enjoy it) with more agency, less unnecessary strain, and greater choice about how they show up in life and work. 

If there’s one thing I now know to be true, it’s this: it’s not too far gone. There is another way to work, to lead, and to be in teams. Not a perfect way. Not a friction-free way. A more enjoyable and healthy one.

I know this because I’ve walked that path myself. Slowly, imperfectly, and with help.

And now, I know how to walk it alongside others.