Top 7 Coaching Trends for 2021

Successful coaches know how important it is to be aware of trends affecting your clients’ business. Often, however, we’re too busy following their industry to make time to follow our own.  

Fortunately, awarenow has an amazing community of expert coaches and industry observers who are happy to share their insight. We polled them - as well as a few outside resources who are authorities in their field - and came up with 7 key trends affecting the coaching industry for 2021.

2021 Coaching Trend #1: Differentiated Virtual Coaching

Obviously, the coaching world has become more virtual in 2020. While experts differ about the extent to which this change is permanent, two things are clear:

1. Coaching will be at least somewhat more virtual than in the past
2. People have “Zoom fatigue” from too many boring video meetings

The second of these provides opportunities for coaches who get ahead of the curve.   Ben Taylor of HomeWorking Club suggests that coaches can avoid giving their clients Zoom fatigue by “looking at what else they can do with video calls, with interactive presentations and other bells and whistles to boost engagement.” Similarly, Marcia Narine Weldon of Illuminating Wisdom notes that she is putting more effort into: 

Reading a client's body language on a computer screen. This is a critical skill because so much of communication has nothing to do with words and many people will continue remote coaching in the future. I've also tried to meet with people earlier in the day, if possible because energy levels are so much lower than in the late afternoon and evening.