Life coaching is a profession that offers spiritual, personal, and professional advice, but is different from consulting advice, mentoring, therapy, or counseling. Life coaching addresses very specific personal projects whether that’s a business success or general conditions and transitions in the client’s personal life. It focuses on the client’s life and his relationships or likings by examining what’s going on around him. It discovers the client’s obstacles or challenges; what they might be and what course of action you should choose to help them make their life what they want it to be.
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How to Find the Best Online Certification
1. Do a lot of research
The best way in order to become an expert life coach is to obtain life coach certification, which in context is the equivalente of a college diploma for your trade.
Just like college, the most respectable coaching certification programs will charge between $5.000 and $10.000 for a complete life coach certification course. This is a very small fee to pay considering that a life coach can make up to $100.000 annually. If you do your research right and play your cards right, that fee will cost you nothing, and it will definitely aid you and your career.
According to Coaching Institute, before starting your life coach training, we recommend educating yourself by reading the most popular and widely respected books on life coaching, in order to understand what you are getting into.
2. How to find the best legitimate training programs
Starting a life coaching business is easier than starting a regular business. And sadly, the case is same with life coach training programs.
But all is not doom because you have the help from The International Coach Federation (ICF), which is an organization with the purpose of promoting the life coaching industry around the world. And this organization has been making rigorous standards to schools around the world for over ten years in order to make them receive the prestigious accreditation.
Source: Bookible
There are hundreds of online certifications for a life coach all over the world, each specializing in a different area of specializations and methods of training. These programs are called ACTP’s or Accredited Coach Training Programs, and the ICF accreditation is becoming the gold standard for all life coach programs. So that’s why you should only look for programs that are ICF accredited.
3. Choosing the best program for you and your lifestyle and interests
All ACTP’s must be up to ICF standards, but the methods in which they deliver the training will differ.
Some ACTP’s will focus primarily on leadership coaching, and they can only offer you in-person training, meaning you must be there in order to take the course. However, you have other life coach programs that offer their training online to anyone, regardless of where you live.
Regardless of what area you chose the program to be from if the course is ICF accredited, then it will be taught by life coaches who hold very respectable titles and are big names in the industry.
You might want to be a coach who is more business orientated, or you might want to be to a coach that offers more personal advice. No matter what area you wish to dwell into, a life coach will always have overlapping aspects of the client’s life. You might be a business coach but can encounter personal problems and offer advice.