A Simple Marketing Principle EVERY Coach Needs
Are you an academic or executive function coach who hates even the idea of marketing your business?
Do you catch yourself thinking:
I NEED to improve my website…
I NEED to post more often on social media…
I NEED to send more cold emails…
I so often hear one of two things from coaches in the Anti-Boring Learning Lab:
They avoid marketing at all costs, which negatively impacts their business growth, or
They feel pressured to do more posting and emailing and all the marketing things—which ends up sucking the joy out of owning their own business.
Can you relate?
If so, there is a better way.
In the video above, I compare marketing to studying to uncover a simple principle that can make a huge difference. You can watch the video at the top of this post—or keep reading for the full idea in writing.
What I Realized
Recently, I had the funniest realization.
I was thinking about the problems that coaches in my Rock Your Biz training program have with marketing—learning how to market their services as academic or executive function coaches—and it occurred to me that the word marketing is a lot like the word study.
In the video above, I talk about all the ways these two words—marketing and studying—are similar, and how we can trap ourselves into not taking action for some really understandable reasons.
(I say “silly,” but honestly, they make total sense once you understand how our brains work.)
So let’s talk about what marketing and studying have in common.
What I’ve Noticed
Marketing and studying are both “big” words.
A coach I was talking with recently said, “I know I should market, but I hate marketing.” Students say the exact same thing about studying: “I know I should study, but I hate studying. I just can’t get myself motivated.”
I think the reason for both is that we hold these words as if they’re huge boulders.
Marketing starts to feel like this massive, overwhelming thing. Studying does too.
But marketing should be simple. It shouldn’t feel like this big, hard, stressful task. It should sound more like: What’s the next small thing I can do easily?
We Don’t Break Big Actions Into Small Enough Steps
When I was coaching this particular person about marketing and how to make it more doable, I realized she hadn’t broken the idea of marketing into small enough, teeny-tiny, incremental actions.
So instead, “marketing” stayed this big, mountainous concept that just created stress.
Students struggle with the same thing. They don’t know how to break studying down into smaller, doable actions either. That’s one of the reasons my work around anti-boring, science-backed studying focuses so much on helping students identify actions that actually feel motivating and doable.
When something feels too big, our brains shut down. That’s true whether you’re a middle school student studying for a test or an educator building a private academic coaching business.
We Don’t Believe We Can Be Ourselves
Another parallel I see all the time: people don’t believe they can be their authentic selves—either as marketers or as students.
The coach I was speaking with had a story that being an effective marketer meant doing a bunch of distasteful tasks that didn’t feel good to her.
Students carry the same story about studying. They think studying automatically means doing things they hate.
But that’s not actually true.
This coach happens to be a college professor. As we talked, she realized she already has habits she enjoys—building relationships and connecting with colleagues on campus. Those are skills she genuinely likes using.
Once she saw that, she could imagine translating those same relationship-building skills into finding colleagues and referral partners outside the college setting. That realization brought visible relief.
She suddenly saw that she already does know how to market.
Because in this context, a good marketer is simply someone who enjoys building relationships with other interesting, thoughtful people they want to spend time with. When marketing looks like that, there’s far less resistance.
It’s exactly the same for students. Studying doesn’t have to mean abandoning everything they enjoy. It means rethinking what studying actually is—just like coaches need to rethink what marketing actually is.
Over-Functioning and Under-Functioning
When people see the word marketing or studying, there’s often an impulse to either under-function or over-function.
Students who under-function don’t study enough. Students who over-function do too much—often focusing on activities that don’t actually help learning.
Educators do this with marketing too.
I’ve seen it repeatedly over the years: people assume marketing means a very specific checklist.
“I need business cards. I need a website. I need social media. I need this. I need that.”
So they over-function. They do everything—and quickly burn out.
One of the principles I believe in deeply, whether we’re talking about executive function coaching, studying, or running a private practice as an educator, is this:
We need to figure out the least we need to do to reach our goal.
Not the most. The least.
That goal might be earning a solid grade on a test. Or it might be building a few meaningful referral relationships that actually feel good and sustainable.
Support That Doesn’t Add More Pressure
If you’d like support thinking about marketing your academic or executive function coaching work in a way that feels aligned—and not overwhelming—I recommend exploring the Visitor’s Center of the Anti-Boring Learning Lab.
There, you’ll find free learning resources that take you behind the scenes of how I built my one-to-one student coaching practice, with plenty of practical takeaways you can adapt to your own work.
You can explore those resources here:
Visitor’s Center:
https://antiboringlearninglab.com/resources
A version of this article was originally published here on June 6, 2023.