Charmain Bogue | Why I Narrowed My Practice to Executive Coaching

 

Charmain Bogue at work

Doing fewer things turned out to be the most strategic decision I ever made for my own work.

For years, my advisory work was a buffet. Strategic planning engagements. Board facilitation. Training design. Coaching. If an organization had a problem in my general territory, I would build something for it. The variety was interesting, and saying yes to everything felt like growth.

It wasn’t. It was diffusion. And the decision to focus my practice on executive coaching came from finally taking my own advice, the advice I had given dozens of organizations: you cannot be excellent at a thing you only do occasionally.

The pattern I kept seeing in my own calendar

When I looked honestly at my engagements, one pattern was impossible to ignore. The strategic plans, the training sessions, the facilitated retreats, all of them produced their best results when they came with sustained coaching attached. And they produced their most disappointing results when they didn’t.

A strategy document without a leader who changes behavior is a PDF. A training without follow-through is an event. The coaching relationship was the part that actually moved organizations, and I was treating it as an add-on. That is a strange way to run a practice: burying the active ingredient in the packaging.

What focus actually feels like

I expected narrowing to feel like loss. It felt like sharpening. When you do one kind of work, your pattern library compounds. The executive who cannot delegate looks new to a generalist. To someone who coaches constantly, she is a familiar shape, and the conversation can skip three sessions of throat-clearing and go to the real question.

There is also an honesty benefit. When I offered many services, every client conversation held a quiet conflict of interest: their problem could become whichever engagement I had room for. Now the offer is one thing. Either coaching is what a leader needs, or I say so and point them elsewhere. The clarity is good for them and, frankly, a relief for me.

Referrals changed, too, in a way I did not predict. When people could not summarize what I did, they could not recommend me. “She does strategy and training and coaching and facilitation” is not a sentence anyone repeats at dinner. “She coaches executives” travels. Specificity is not just a craft decision. It is how word of mouth works.

Saying no is a service

Here is what I tell the women I mentor, many of whom are building practices and businesses of their own: every yes is funded by invisible withdrawals from your existing commitments. The client you take on tonight is paid for by the depth you cannot give someone else next month.

Women especially get trained to treat range as the goal, to be useful in every direction, to never let a request bounce. I did it for years. But a practice built on never disappointing anyone slowly disappoints everyone a little. Concentration is not arrogance. It is the only way the work gets the version of you that is worth hiring.

The question I ask now

Before any new commitment, professional or otherwise, I ask one question: does this make me better at the thing I have decided to be? Not “is this interesting,” because nearly everything is interesting. Not “can I do it,” because the answer is usually yes, and that is the trap.

Most things fail the question. That used to bother me. Now I understand that the failures are the system working. A focused practice, like a focused organization, is defined by what it declines.

I will be honest about the fear, because pretending it was easy helps no one. Walking away from work I had spent years building felt reckless for about six months. Then the thing focused people kept promising actually happened: the depth produced better results, the better results brought better clients, and the practice grew on the strength of one thing instead of limping along on five.

I spent a career telling organizations to choose. Strategy is choice, I would say, pointing at the slide. It took me longer to apply it to myself than I would like to admit. If you are sitting on a sprawling calendar wondering why mastery feels far away, I can save you the consulting fee: you already know which thing is yours. The rest is packaging.

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