What Coaches and Mentors Can Learn from Purple Cow
You wrap up another session with a client, solid advice delivered clearly, a sensible action plan, the kind of guidance any competent coach in your field would have given. The client thanks you politely and doesn't mention the session again, while a colleague's client raves for weeks about one oddly specific exercise that made them see their situation differently. You start wondering if you need more certifications, a better framework, a slicker set of slides for your next workshop. Underneath that impulse is something you haven't quite admitted: sound, sensible guidance has become the baseline every client expects, not the thing that makes them tell someone else about you. What needs to change isn't your expertise. It's what you're willing to make distinctly yours.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
0 of 5 selected
The core lessons, applied to you
Why sound advice stops standing out
Clear, sensible guidance used to distinguish a good coach from an unqualified one; now that credentialing and information are widely available, sound advice alone is simply the expected floor, not something a client feels compelled to mention to a friend.
A coach delivers a well-structured, evidence-based program that covers all the fundamentals competently and thoroughly. Clients report satisfaction on a survey and rarely refer anyone, because nothing about the experience differed from what they could have found in a well-reviewed book.
Identify the one part of your method that isn't standard practice in your field, and if you can't name one, develop it deliberately over your next few sessions.
Build the distinctive part into the method itself
An inspiring speaking style or a warm rapport can't substitute for a methodology that is, underneath the personality, identical to what every other coach in the space offers. The actual approach has to differ.
A mentor relies on natural charisma and an encouraging tone to carry sessions built around a generic goal-setting framework used across the industry. Clients enjoy the rapport and struggle to explain afterward what made the guidance itself different from anyone else's.
Redesign one recurring exercise in your practice so its structure, not just your delivery of it, is something a client hasn't encountered with another coach.
Serve the clients already most invested
Trying to be broadly appealing to every possible client waters down a coaching practice until it satisfies no one deeply enough to talk about it. The clients already most invested in transformation are the ones whose enthusiasm actually generates referrals.
A coach designs a program to be gentle and accessible enough for total skeptics, softening the more intense elements that dedicated clients respond to most strongly. The diluted version fails to energize anyone enough to recommend it.
Identify your two or three most engaged current clients, and design your next offering specifically around what made their experience work, rather than around a hypothetical average client.
Refresh your method before it becomes generic
A technique that felt genuinely distinctive when you developed it tends to spread through your field as other coaches learn and adopt it, eventually becoming standard practice. Staying remarkable means treating your signature method as a stage to build past, not a finished product to defend indefinitely.
Focusing on your most invested clients can feel like neglecting newer or more hesitant ones who need a gentler approach to start, and turning away a nervous new client rarely feels like the right call in the moment. Resolve it by offering an accessible entry point for newcomers while reserving your most distinctive, intensive methods for the clients who've already shown they're ready for them.
Name one thing, honestly
What is the one exercise or approach in your practice that a former client would specifically describe if asked what made working with you different?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
0 of 3 selected
Run this for seven days
Identify your two or three most engaged current clients, and design your next offering specifically around what made their experience work, rather than around a hypothetical average client.