You've Qualified as a Coach. Now How Do You Actually Get Clients?
By Stuart Thompson | The STILL Method
The fear usually arrives before the decision does.
You are weighing up training. You can picture yourself doing the work, sitting with someone, actually helping. And then a second picture arrives, less welcome. The certificate on the wall. The qualification you worked for. And no one in front of you to use it with. A long silence where the clients were meant to be.
It is the quietest reason good people never start. Not doubt about whether they could do the work. Doubt about whether anyone would come, and whether they would be left to work it all out alone.
So let me deal with both halves of that fear directly, because it is the question I am asked more than any other. Getting clients is not luck, and it is not about being loud, salesy, or online all day. It is a small set of ordinary things done steadily, and at STILL it is something we help you do rather than something we leave you to face by yourself. If you want the full picture of what the training itself involves first, the STILL Method coach training page lays it out. This is about what happens after, and what stands behind you when it does.
The fear is real. The maths behind it is not.
The silence people imagine is almost never the silence they get.
Here is why. The fear assumes you are starting from zero, broadcasting into an empty room, hoping a stranger hears you. That is not how a coaching practice actually begins. It begins with the people who already know you, and the people they talk to, and it grows by word of mouth from there. The first clients are not strangers you have to win. They are usually a conversation or two away from where you are sitting right now.
That shift matters, because the fear of silence keeps people stuck in exactly the wrong place. It tells them to wait until they feel ready, until the website is perfect, until they have a following. None of that is what brings the first client. A direct, human conversation is, and you do not have to work out how to have it on your own.
Your first clients are closer than the internet makes them look
When people think about finding clients, they picture marketing. Adverts, algorithms, content, the whole exhausting machine. And then they look at how little they enjoy any of that and quietly decide coaching is not for them.
But your first clients almost never come from the machine. They come from your existing network. The people who already trust you, and know what you have just trained to do.
This makes some people uncomfortable, as though it means trading on friendships. It does not. You are not pressuring anyone. You are simply letting your world know that this is what you do now, and that you have space for a few people. One or two families you work well with will talk to other parents. A single conversation with a local headteacher or a GP can open more doors than a month of social media. None of it needs a marketing machine. It needs a few honest conversations, and those are far more within reach than an advertising budget. Those first clients matter out of all proportion, because they give you the stories, the confidence, and the word of mouth that carries everything after.
Get specific enough that people can repeat it
The single biggest reason coaches stay invisible is that they describe themselves too broadly. "I help people feel better" tells no one anything. It does not stick, and it does not travel from one person to the next.
Specific is what travels. A grief coach for people supporting a bereaved child. A sleep coach for shift workers who cannot switch off. A pain coach for people who have been told there is nothing more to be done. When your description is that precise, the right person recognises themselves instantly, and everyone else knows exactly who to send your way.
This is one of the quiet advantages of training in a defined specialism rather than a vague general qualification. You finish knowing precisely who you are for. And because every STILL Method certification is built on the same nervous system framework, you can hold more than one specialism without starting again each time. Many coaches begin with anxiety and add grief, or sleep, or low mood, because the underlying model is already shared.
You are not handed a certificate and waved off
This is the part I care about most, because it is where most training lets people down.
A great many courses end the moment the certificate is issued. You pass, you are congratulated, and then you are alone with it. That is precisely the gap that creates the silence people are afraid of. We built STILL so that the certificate is the beginning of the support, not the end of it.
When you qualify with us, you do not start from a blank page. You qualify holding a complete, ready-to-deliver programme, with session plans, scripts, and client materials already written, licensed to you to use under your own name. You are listed on our Find a Coach directory, which sends real enquiries your way while you build. You join monthly mentoring calls and regular team meetings where we work through your actual cases, your actual pricing, and your actual stuck points, not theory. You sit in a community of other STILL practitioners doing the same work, and joining it gives you our marketing course free, so the part people dread most is taught rather than left to you to invent. Alongside that you get case advice, CPD opportunities, lifetime access to your materials, and every future update we make. And we are building a Community Interest Company so coaches can be paid to deliver funded sessions, which is paid work routed to you rather than work you have to chase.
That is the honest answer to the silence fear. It is not that you will never have a quiet week. It is that you will never have it alone, and you will always have something concrete to do next, with people beside you who have done it before.
Sell a programme, not an hour of your time
"I offer coaching sessions" is vague. It asks the client to imagine what they are buying, and most people will not do that work. They drift.
A programme is different. A six week grief support model. A structured course you can name, explain, and put a beginning and an end around. People can picture a programme. They can say yes to it in a way they cannot say yes to a vague open-ended arrangement.
This is exactly why we hand you the programme already built. The ADHD Coaching Practitioner course qualifies you to deliver a complete six-week foundation and a twelve-month programme, session by session, with a workbook for every client. The Life After Loss grief training gives you a full group model you can run from your first cohort. You are not inventing a structure under pressure. You are delivering one that already works, and adapting it with our support as you find your feet.
Go where the need is already sitting
You do not have to build demand out of nothing. In a lot of places it already exists, and it is going unmet.
Schools are the clearest example right now. From September 2026, grief and bereavement education becomes a statutory part of the curriculum in England under the updated DfE RSHE guidance. Settings will be actively looking for people who can support that work credibly, and a grief coaching specialism puts you exactly where that need is. The same is true across children's care, workplaces under strain, and any setting where the waiting list for clinical help runs to many months. Going where the need already sits is far easier than trying to manufacture it. The question worth sitting with is which of those rooms already contain the people you are trained to help.
Let people feel the work before they decide
People rarely buy coaching from a description. They buy it once they have felt what it is like to be in front of you.
This is why a free taster or a short workshop works so well. It removes the guesswork. Someone sits with you for half an hour, feels genuinely understood, and the decision to work with you properly stops being a leap. You are not convincing them with clever words. You are letting the method speak. The whole logic of STILL is built for exactly this, because the five steps, Stop, Talk, Imagine, Listen, Learn, are something a person experiences rather than something you describe at them. Our own free workshop works on the same principle, and you can build your own simple version of it once you qualify.
The coaches and clinicians near you are not your competition
A lot of new coaches quietly fear therapists and counsellors, as if they are rivals fighting over the same people. They are not.
Coaching sits alongside clinical support. It does not replace it, and good clinicians know this. A counsellor with a long waiting list, or a client who needs structured practical help rather than therapy, is often relieved to have someone trustworthy to point towards. The same goes for GPs, schools, charities, and coaches in a different specialism from yours. STILL is trauma-informed and built to complement clinical care, not compete with it, which makes those relationships easier to build than you might expect. We safeguard properly too, with checks and references completed before anyone works with clients under the STILL name, and that credibility matters when you are introducing yourself to a school or a GP.
Charge from your very first client
This is the one people resist most. New coaches often work for free, or near it, for far too long, telling themselves they will start charging once they feel ready. That day never quite arrives on its own.
Charge from your first paying client, even at a modest rate while your confidence builds. Most STILL Method coaches charge somewhere between fifty and eighty pounds for an individual session, with school-contracted and group programmes paying more. Paying clients show up, do the work, and value the outcome. Pricing your work properly is not greedy. It is part of taking the work, and yourself, seriously.
The thing that gets people through the quiet bit
Most people who come into this work do not push through the early months on the strength of a business plan. They do it because of a person.
Usually a specific one. The friend they did not know how to help. The child they watched struggle and felt useless beside. The version of themselves, a few years back, who needed someone who actually knew what to do and could not find them.
That is the thing that carries you through the slow start, far more than any tactic. The thought of being the person in the room who knows what fear actually is, and what it actually needs, and can do something about it today rather than adding someone to a list.
If that thought has been sitting with you, it is worth taking seriously. The fear of silence is real, but it is the most solvable problem in this whole line of work, and it is one you solve with a programme in your hands, a directory sending you enquiries, mentoring in your calendar, and a community at your back. You do not walk it alone. That was the whole point of building it this way.
Find out what the training involves
The STILL Method trains coaches and practitioners in anxiety, grief, sleep, ADHD, pain, low mood and more, and supports them long after they qualify with mentoring, a practitioner community with a free marketing course, ready-to-deliver programmes, marketing materials, and a directory listing. Provider accreditation through ACCPH and IPHM. Live on Zoom or self-paced online. No clinical background required, and most coaches come from teaching, care, and career-change backgrounds. If you want more than one specialism, the Training Pass gives you every certification for £2,100, saving over £5,000 on individual enrolments.
Stuart Thompson is the founder of The STILL Method and has spent more than 25 years working directly with anxiety, grief, and nervous system recovery. His work has been featured in The Guardian and he is the author of 90 Days With Your Nervous System: Not Against It. The STILL Method has trained practitioners across the UK and worldwide.
