When the Business Gets Hard

There is something nobody really prepares you for when you build a coaching business.

Not the marketing, or the pricing, or the proposals. Those are learnable. What nobody quite prepares you for is what happens inside you when the clients are not coming in the way you hoped. When enquiries are slow. When you can see other coaches apparently thriving and you cannot work out what you are doing differently, or wrong, or not enough of.

I am naming this because I am in it. And I am hearing it from other coaches too.

The business of coaching is hard right now. That is not a personal failing. It is a reality that deserves to be named honestly.

But I have also been noticing something in the middle of it. Something that feels uncomfortably familiar.

The struggle to build a coaching business asks us to do exactly what we ask of our clients.

The urge to grasp

When work is quiet, something kicks in that feels a lot like urgency.

The website gets looked at again. The LinkedIn profile gets tweaked. The offer gets questioned. You say yes to a discovery call you already sense is not quite right, because at least it is movement. You post more, then go quiet, then post again. You start three different strategies and finish none of them.

I recognise all of this. I have done most of it.

And underneath it is something worth getting curious about. Because the grasping is rarely really about the website. It is about the discomfort of uncertainty. The fear that something is wrong. The need to feel like you are doing something, anything, to make the not-knowing more bearable.

This is not a business problem. This is an inner work problem wearing a business problem's clothes.

The voice that says you should be working

Here is something I do not hear talked about enough.

When business is quiet, the resistance to rest becomes stronger, not weaker.

You would think that a slow period might create space. Permission to breathe, to reflect, to step back. But in my experience, and in what I hear from other coaches, the opposite often happens. The self-talk gets louder. "I should be doing something." "I cannot afford to stop." "Other people are building while I am sitting still."

Rest starts to feel like irresponsibility.

And there is a real tension here that I want to be honest about. Because this is not only an emotional pattern. There are bills. There is rent or a mortgage. There is the very practical reality that coaching is how we earn our living, and when it is quiet, that matters. The financial pressure is real, and pretending it is not does not serve anyone.

But I have also come to see that the frantic doing that tends to follow the "I should be working" voice rarely produces what we are hoping for. It produces more noise. More urgency. More grasping. And clients can feel that energy, even if they cannot name it.

The courage is not in pushing harder. Sometimes the courage is in stopping.

What this is actually asking of you

When I sit with this more honestly, I can see that building a coaching business in a difficult market is asking me to practise everything I invite my clients into.

To stay with uncertainty without rushing to resolve it.

To separate the discomfort from the meaning. The fact that it is hard does not mean something is wrong. It means something matters.

To notice the stories. "I am not good enough." "I have left it too late." "Others have something I do not." These are not facts. They are the mind doing what minds do when they feel threatened.

To come back to values. Not to what is performing well, or what someone else is doing, but to what is true for me. Why I do this work. Who I am when I am at my best in it. What I am actually building and why.

This is the inner work. And it does not pause because business is hard. If anything, it asks more of us.

Choosing how you meet it

I am not going to offer a tidy resolution here, because I do not have one.

What I am choosing, as best I can, is to meet this period with something other than panic or paralysis. To stay honest about the difficulty without letting it become the whole story. To rest when I need to rest, even when the voice says I should not. To say no to the things that are not right, even when yes would feel like progress. To keep showing up in the ways that feel true, even when the return is not yet visible.

None of that makes it easy.

But I think there is something important in the fact that we cannot coach our clients into courage from a place where we are abandoning it ourselves.

The hard season is not separate from the work. It is part of it.

Some reflections to sit with

Where are you currently grasping, and what might be underneath that?

What is the "I should be working" voice protecting you from feeling?

If you separated the financial reality from the emotional story, what would each one actually need from you right now?

What would it mean to bring the same courage to your own uncertainty that you invite your clients into?

Is there somewhere you are performing momentum you do not feel? What would honesty look like there?

What would your most grounded, values-led self choose to do differently this week?

About Melissa Hague

I'm Melissa Hague — a coach, courage-builder, and Certified Dare to Lead™ Practitioner. I support coaches to build the courage, compassion, and grounded confidence they need to show up more fully in their work, their lives, and their businesses.

Much of my work centres on the quieter, more human side of coaching — the inner work, the small brave steps, and the spaces where we learn to trust ourselves a little more deeply. I trained with Susan David in 2025 and am close to completing my Emotional Agility Certification. It's at the heart of what we explore inside The Courageous Coach® Programme.

Find out more at melissahague.com/courageous-coaches and let's connect here on LinkedIn.