The Method You Don’t Know You Have

Laura Berman Fortgang keeps a memory from early in her coaching career: a mentor telling her that after 100 clients, she would finally know what she was doing. She took him literally. Every session, she made a tick mark next to the phone. One, two, three, five.

“I remember that 100th person,” she says. Somewhere around then, a pattern she had been repeating without naming it came into focus. That pattern, she now tells coaches, is the thing most of them are sitting on without realizing it.

There is a method to your madness, and you don’t even know it, and it’s costing you millions of dollars.

Laura Berman Fortgang

Her point is not about marketing tactics. It is about recognition. Every coach who has worked with enough clients has found a repeatable way of getting a particular result. Most never write it down. Until they do, that result stays locked inside them, undocumented and unsellable, and the coach stays indistinguishable from every other coach offering the same vague promise of transformation.

The bet she made

Fortgang built her own career on the opposite bet. After 25 years in career and executive coaching, much of it inside corporate C-suites, she distilled her approach into a book, Now What? 90 Days to New Life Direction. The book led to training other coaches, then a TEDx talk that has drawn more than two million views, then a second book. What started as a way of working with individual clients became, in her words, “a category of one.”

Why she started coaching coaches

That phrase is the center of her current work. Four to five years ago, after hearing that 82 percent of coaches leave the profession within two years, Fortgang shifted her focus from coaching executives to coaching coaches on how to build a sustainable practice. She organizes the gap into four areas: messaging, methodology, marketing, and managing yourself. Methodology, she argues, is the one coaches skip fastest, because naming your own pattern feels less urgent than getting the next client.

What changes when you name it

It is also, in her experience, the one that changes the trajectory. She describes one client who had coached for 20 years without raising her rates, still doing resume work she disliked alongside the discovery work she loved. Naming and narrowing to her real methodology gave her the confidence to drop the parts of the practice that did not fit, finish a book she had stalled on, and move into C-suite work at the rate she should have been charging years earlier.

Another client, coaching for free out of fear of asking for money, worked through that resistance once his own method became visible enough to price.

Magic is not repeatable

Fortgang is candid that this runs against some of coaching’s own training. “We’re technically trained to ask more questions than anything else,” she says, and she still believes in that. But she draws a line between the open-ended discovery of a coaching session and the packaging a business needs. “Magic and your juju that you do in your sessions is not repeatable,” she says. A method is. A prospective client who can see a beginning, a middle, and an end trusts the process before they have even started it.

It picks you

Her advice to coaches searching for their own method is not to invent one. “I don’t think it’s about picking it. It picks you,” she says. It shows up in the clients you keep getting the best results with, the ones you look forward to, the work you would do even without being asked. Coach enough people, she says, and the pattern finds you. The work is simply paying attention long enough to see it.