Finding Your Unique Edge and Authority as a Coach
Eighty-eight percent of my clients come into my world through one small, specific offer. No fancy funnel. No paid ads. Not a hundred discovery calls. So when a coach tells me they can’t figure out how to stand out as a coach, I already know what’s going on. They keep trying to add more. What they actually need is to get specific about who they are.
That’s the conversation I got to have with Tracy O’Malley, one of the most meaningful mentors who has walked into my life. Tracy helped me own my energy, my edge, and my full authority in a way nobody else has. And in a market where everyone races to sound like the same AI-generated coach, owning who you are stopped being optional. It became the separator. So this episode is about finding your edge, trusting it, and letting it pull your right people closer.
The real reason clients aren’t buying from you
Coaches ask me this constantly. Why aren’t people buying from me? Most of them assume the answer is their skill, their pricing, or their offer. It’s almost never that. You are good at what you do. You have the heart, the passion, and the experience, and when a client sits in session with you, the transformation is obvious.
The gap shows up before that session ever happens. People buy when they feel seen and heard, fast. That ability to make someone on the other side of the screen feel fully understood in minutes is the X factor in coaching. Tracy does this better than almost anyone I have watched. She can take a stranger at the grocery store or a sixteen-year-old at one of my events and make them feel met within seconds. So if sales feel hard, the fix usually isn’t a louder pitch. It’s learning to build rapport faster and making the moment about the person in front of you.
Owning who you are is how you stand out as a coach
A year and a half ago I sat in a room in Palm Springs with my arms crossed, certain that personality work was lame and that nobody was going to put me in a box. Tracy was the guest speaker. By the end of her session I was ugly crying, because she handed me something I had never been given before: permission to be exactly who I am.
I am an Enneagram 8. Big energy, direct, allergic to being controlled. For years I treated parts of that as a problem to manage. Tracy showed me it was a design to own. That shift was so pivotal that I got an 8 tattoo. This episode isn’t a lesson on the Enneagram, and we barely touch the type numbers. The tool matters less than what it unlocked. When you fully accept who you are, you stop performing a watered-down version of yourself, and your work gets sharper because of it.
Hyper-specificity is your unique edge as a coach
Tracy and I are both obsessed with hyper-specificity. The more specific you are about who you are, what you believe, and what you stand for, the more your people recognize you as the real deal. They can’t ignore you, because you sound like nobody else.
Most coaches do the opposite. They sand down their edges to stay palatable to everyone, and they go forgettable to the exact people they were built to serve. So pick the beliefs that matter to you and say them out loud on every episode, every post, every piece of content. The people who love you move closer. The ones who were never your people drift away, and that’s the whole point.
Check your blind spots so you don’t wreck it
Owning your edge comes with a catch. You still have blind spots, and they don’t vanish just because you finally like yourself. Tracy puts it simply. You can drive a Prius or a G-Wagon, and either way you still check your blind spot before you change lanes.
The trick is to check it without the emotional charge. Knowing your weak spots has nothing to do with shame. Treat it as maintenance. When you can look at the messy parts of yourself with curiosity instead of judgment, you stay in growth instead of getting stuck in criticism. So name the blind spot, account for it, and keep driving.
You can’t be for everyone
Nobody loves this part. If your work is magnetic, it is also polarizing. The same realness that pulls your people in will push others away, and some will leave the moment they get what they needed from you. Tracy has felt that sting, and so have I. We are still human about it.
Polarizing is the assignment, though, not a flaw in your delivery. Some people treat the discomfort you stir up as an invitation to go deeper into their own work. Others aren’t ready yet, and your job is to still be there when they are. The version of you that triggers someone today can be the exact person they come back for two years from now.
The favorite-friend lesson that changed how I see my business
I’ll get vulnerable for a second. I have had friends, but I have never really had a best friend, and I once had a group of women write a note about why they didn’t want to be mine. Years later, someone told me flat out that I do friendship wrong, and I believed her for a while.
Tracy reframed all of it. She is not always the friend who gets the first invite or the daily text. But she is the one people call when their whole world is falling apart. That is the friendship that actually counts. And it maps almost perfectly onto business. As you grow louder and clearer about what you believe, you will get left off invite lists and overlooked by people who simply can’t hold the bigger version of you. None of that is rejection. Read it as a signal to go find the people who can.
AI can’t be your voice, and why that’s your advantage
Tracy and I had the same gut reaction to the newsletter going around that tells coaches to outsource every single task to AI. Mild nausea. I use AI constantly, and I think it is a genuinely useful tool. But the more you hand your control, your words, and your voice to it, the more you forget how to do the work yourself. You miss the reps. Let AI write your content long enough and you will sit down to create on your own one day with no idea what you actually think.
It gets more serious than lost skill. A lot of people now use AI as a stand-in for a best friend, a therapist, a sacred council, and Tracy is watching that isolation wreck people. You cannot outsource the human spirit or human connection. AI also makes a convenient mask for fear. You polish a post one more degree, you fish for a little validation, you build a quiet silo where you feel safe, and underneath all of it sits the same fear of rejection you were trying to dodge.
So use it the way we do. Throw your messy thoughts in, let it help you hold an idea, brainstorm when you are stuck. Then close the laptop and say the thing in your own voice. When everyone else sounds like the same manufactured slop, the coach who still sounds unmistakably human becomes impossible to miss. That is your edge. Don’t automate it away.
How Tracy owns her authority as a coach
Tracy’s story is why she can teach this. Fourteen years ago she was in rehab, nine therapists deep and trusting none of them, when a therapist named Nancy introduced her to this work. She told Nancy exactly where to put it. Then she surrendered, and within days she had figured out how to parent her two kids, who are wired nothing like her and nothing like each other. The culture in her home changed overnight. She has been sober fourteen years and a single mom for eighteen.
That lived experience is her authority. She built equal parts fire and softness on purpose, and that combination is what lets her see people fully and without judgment. If you want more of her wisdom, her podcast is a great place to start.
Connect with Tracy
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