No doubt that over the past years more and more people have been offering life coaching services. Life coaches offer personal, spiritual, or professional advice and they enjoy helping others reach their full potential. With over 53.000 life coach practitioners globally, life coaching has seen a real surge and the effect it has on people’s lives.
source: vogue.in
Becoming a life coach is more than excellent listening skills and outsized compassion. Becoming a life coach is a business decision, and if you’ve decided that life coaching is your calling, follow these steps in order to legitimate yourself.
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1. Understand What a Life Coach is
A life coach is a person that identifies which aspect of a person’s life need growth and development. He creates plans and strategies in order to improve those aspects and reach those goals. It is different than mentoring, consulting or using motivational apps because the person in question owns the agenda and the outcome, and you are just trying to guide the person to achieve the goal.
2. Finding Your Niche
Finding your niche and building your reputation from there is helpful when becoming a life coach.
A life coach can focus on people’s personal, professional, or even romantic lives. They can even offer help in making decisions regarding health, such as nutrition plans, or uncovering someone’s spiritual side.
source: bamboolifecoach.com
No matter what, a life coach will always overlap some aspects of a person’s life. You can’t talk about someone’s career without touching on his personal life.
3. Get Trained and Certified
How to become a life coach? Do I need to be formally trained? Well technically, no, because a life coach is not the same as a medical doctor or therapist who is required by law to have years of training before practice. But according to the ICF study, 89% of life coaches are formally trained and accredited by a professional coaching organization.
If you are a certified coach, you are bound by ethical guidelines, and there is a little more rigor to it.
Although there are life coaches, who have zero training and credibility but still make six figures in a month.
source: coachmastersacademy.com
4. Setting up Your Life Coach Business
As a life coach, you can consider yourself as a business owner as well. So as any business, you will need to do some of the work that business owners do. This, of course, means improving in some non-coaching fields.
When begging the adventure of a life coach, you will need to determine your business type, and officially register your business with your state.
More work follows as you will need to assemble a business plan and address all the costs of your startup. More non-coaching work follows as you will need to go through some marketing strategies and create a plan that will make your business flourish. You can’t be a life coach without clients, and that’s why this part is very important.
Start by offering free, mini, or discounted sessions in order to get more people through the door. If people are satisfied with your work, then they will spread the word to people in their network and provide more customers for you.
source: pinterest.com
Is Becoming a Life Coach the Right Decision For You?
Having the personality is a key attribute to becoming a life coach. It can be a difficult, yet very rewarding career path that is best described as “human can opener.”
As money is the driving force in the world, you will need to look past that and work with love and passion, if you want to be the best.
