Are you resisting the idea of choosing a niche? There is a saying: “What you resist, persists” that applies to what most coaches, healers and therapists do when it comes to finding their niche. 

Guess what they are really doing by resisting to find their niche? They are persisting in staying invisible, in not being heard, seen nor found by those who need their help.

Because, what is really a niche? 

The simplest definition is this:  Your niche is your position in the community. 

I’m an architect, so I use lots of metaphors related to buildings. But in this case, it’s literally your space in the marketplace. A place that you occupy and can claim as yours, where you can be yourself while being of service to others.

In business, it’s the combination of what you do and whom you do it for.

So why then it’s finding our niche something so scary for most of us?

First, because we think it will limit us. We believe that by choosing a niche, we are putting ourselves in a jail of boredom, that we are limiting our creativity and our self-expression. That we are closing the doorway to clients we know we could help.

No wonder we see that as the worst possible decision we could make for our business, especially at the beginning stages, right?

But that’s not what will happen.

The spiritual lesson of choosing your niche.

If I care so much about this topic is because I’ve struggled with it so much.

I was also resisting having a niche.
After my career as an architect proved to be the wrong one for me, I searched a lot. Any tool that could help me find my purpose, I was in. I just needed to figure out what I was meant to do with my life. Maybe you can relate to this.

I also had some unrealistic expectations about how my purpose should look like.

It should be around doing something that I love, of course. And since it was clear that the Universe wanted me to do that, doing what I loved would guarantee my financial success, of course…

Little did I know how naive my vision was!

But then, as always happens when our ego gets inflated, Spirit got tired of my self-centeredness, and taught me a few uncomfortable lessons.

I was spending my time doing what I loved, spreading the word about my work
…but I wasn’t even making enough income to pay my expenses.

Ouch!

Opening my heart to the quality of HUMILITY.

I discovered that living my purpose wasn’t that childish, selfish thing I thought it was.  I had to admit humbly that I had no clue about what other people wanted. And of course, they weren’t willing to just give me their hard-earned money in exchange for something they were not interested in, no matter how much fun I’d had creating it.

And thank goodness, that none of my marketing tactics convinced them to buy something they didn’t want in the first place. 

Years later I learned from Mark Silver that we can call different qualities into our hearts. We can ask to be filled with spiritual qualities when we need them. And by doing so we increase the quality of our work.

Think about your own life.

When you plan to buy something, do you buy what you really want? or do you feel an uncontrollable need to give your money away to those who haven’t even taken the time to understand you?

Why would it be any different with your clients?

This is a great reframe: Instead of looking at having a niche as something limiting, think of it as caring about a group of people so much you are willing to:

1. Get to know them well, 
2. Understand what they are struggling with, and how they want to be helped, 
3. Figure out what language resonates with them, and finally
4. Create the products, programs and services that want to buy. 

And in order to do that you need to be very humble. Stop thinking that the only thing that matters is what you love doing, and find a way to fulfill BOTH needs: your need to do something meaningful and your clients’ need to get what they want.

Because that is your niche. So let me ask you, who are you meant to serve? and what are you meant to help them with?

(Originally published on March 18, 2014. Updated and Edited on October 7, 2019)