Want to become a life coach? Learn about life coaching courses to get life coaching certification and life coaching tools to start your life coaching career.
Are you insightful? Do you like working with people? Are you passionate about self-improvement and personal development?
If you have the heart, the enthusiasm, and the passion to be of service, as well as some understanding of human psychology, then life coaching is a good career to consider.
Read on if you want to know the answer to the question, “How do I become a life coach?”
Why Become A Life Coach?
Have you ever gotten that feel good tingling when you know you’ve done something right? And that because you’ve helped someone, more people like and appreciate you?
Helping someone grow, develop, and succeed in life is a triumph facilitated by a life coach. You, as the life coach, are now part of your client’s life.
Life coach jobs are very rewarding, both in a monetary and emotional sense. Tony Robbins is a famous life coach who helps his clients reach the pinnacle of success.
Aside from that, top life coaches can earn a very good income starting from Rs 100,000 a month and more.
Although there’s no such thing as a life coach salary, especially if you’re a solopreneur, a good life coach who has a steady stream of clients, can earn a very steady and high income.
What Do Life Coaches Do?
What is a life coach? A life coach is not a therapist or psychological counsellor, because they do not rescue the deeply depressed or the mentally ill – they only guide people who need help in achieving their full potential.
Life coaching is not all about talking – a guide provides certain activities that involve equal cooperation. In short, life coaches are someone you work with in order to set the right goals and to motivate you to follow those goals.
Life coaches do not dwell on the past history of their client’s life. Instead, they tackle today and the future. They help their clients see reality and appreciate what they have while going after what they are passionate about.
Unlike popular belief, life coaching is not a quick fix. Sessions can take months and months of activities in order to really see one’s self clearly in connection to reality.
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Who Can Benefit From Life Coaching?
Life coaching is all the rage because interest in self-help and personal development is growing as people realize that their mindset is the one obstacle to achieving success in their professional and personal life.
Self-improvement is the latest trend and a life coach can help people empower themselves by learning to recognize key components of their feelings and attitudes.
There are a lot of discontented people who would love to revamp their lives. From women who want to grow in their careers to macho men who hate getting into emotional stuff, life coaching is extremely popular.
What’s more, because life coaching takes on a competitive quality, kids and families, in general, respond better to the program..
What Qualities Does A Life Coach Need?
Life coaching is not for everybody. Remember that you will be dealing with the emotional burdens of your client.
You have to have a certain gift of wanting to help to make this work for both of you. Being a life coach entails huge responsibilities, so you have to possess certain characteristics that are indispensable.
The most essential quality a life coach must have is the ability to listen and empathize. Empathizing means feeling for the client and putting yourself in their shoes.
By empathizing you’re able to assess a client’s life and reflect it back to her, so she sees where her potential lies. You can then design activities that are appropriate and individualized to her needs.
The key to being a successful life coach is being able to listen mindfully and without judgment. The second most important quality is the ability to control one’s urge to give advice.
A good life coach does not tell the client what to do. The life coach helps the client realize, in an unbiased manner through exercises and other techniques, what it is she is looking for.
A guide must be fun-loving and innovative. The basis of life coaching is creating packages and interactive programs that aid the client in internalizing and realizing her goals, potentials, wants and desires.
A life coach job is ideal if you’re eager to help and train people. You have to be able to recognize which client simply needs encouragement and which one has a serious problem that might require one-on-one coaching.
And even if you decide that you don’t want to coach others, learning to be a life coach can help you grow, both in your career and as a parent… because parenting is coaching after all.
Are you one of the unique and talented individuals who possess the special traits needed to be a great life coach? Take this free life coach quiz to find out if you have what it takes to be a successful life coach.
If you’re an Indian woman looking to promote your life coaching services, download the SHEROES Only-Women app, and reach out to over 20 million Indian women.
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The Downside Of Being A Life Coach
The problem with life coaching is that it is an unregulated profession. Although a lot of life coaches have training and education, a number remain untrained in this arena.
Life coaching programs have no basis for qualification, no unified approach as to what makes a life coach a life coach. Most of the guiding practices are unproven and no extensive studies have been done.
These unproven methods pose a certain risk because life coaches are not equipped to recognize if their clients have serious mental illness and therefore need to see a physician.
The need for a cheerleader, a planner, a sort of life secretary, if you will, is a good premise, but some people really need more than that. An untrained and inexperienced guide can put herself and her client in danger.
What if the life coach fails to see the signals that a certain person is not only in need of a pick me up but is actually in serious trouble?
Experts are wary and they want only qualified professionals who have done accredited life coaching courses to enter the field of life coaching because they’re better able to analyze a person’s psyche and deliver appropriate solutions.
In the past, life coaching was used as a business motivational tool for executives. Human Resources (HR) often realises that high powered executives get restless and might want to evaluate their lives.
Life coaching is an interactive, positive, and forward-thinking coaching practice that can be very good for people. The emphasis, however, is on whether a life coach is qualified to be one or not..
Another downside of coaching is that it involves exchanging your time for money and which means 1-on-1 coaching is not scalable as you only have so much time in a day. To overcome this limitation, you can start a group coaching program.
Group coaching is one of the best ways to serve more clients in less time. But without the right tools, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and get lost in the details of managing your coaching groups.
Another way to scale your life coaching practise is to offer short courses to answer specific questions that you see coming up repeatedly in your sessions with clients. You can publish and deliver online courses to your students.
How To Become A Life Coach
Although life coaching only deals with the sunny side of life it is important to understand how the human psyche works, to be able to accurately facilitate your client’s goals. Making coaching game plans requires some degree of psychological knowledge.
It is imperative that a potential life coach get some psychological training. Local community colleges offer courses in psychology and counselling, and there is an abundance of training and seminars out there.
Most life coach certification programs will give you some understanding of people’s psychological needs, but if you have a deep interest in learning about psychology, it will greatly help in your life-coaching career.
Life coaching is a serious business. We are dealing with people’s lives. One mistake and somebody’s life gets ruined. Life coaches are often criticized for claiming to be experts without proper training.
Do not be one of those people. If you do choose this profession, evaluate your options carefully and get the education, training and life coach training you need to succeed in this profession.
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How To Get Life Coach Certification
The problem with life-coaching as a profession is that it is yet to be regulated and a formal educational certification has not been established. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get certified as a life coach.
You can do any life coaching course that is certified by the International Coach Federation (ICF), an organisation that provides independent certification to those who operate their own life coach school.
With online education becoming more popular nowadays it is much easier to get life coach certification from any number of professional life coaches.
How much does life coach certification cost? That depends on the life coaching courses and programs you choose. But if you want to know how to become a certified life coach for free, you’re not asking the right question.
Not everyone is suited to be your client, so you need to ask how to be a life coach who can help a certain kind of person.
You also need to ask yourself what your skillset is. For instance, if you’re a hypnotist, you can incorporate hypnotism as one of the modalities for transformation in your life coaching program.
If you’re an artist or a writer, you can teach your clients to achieve life transformation through art or writing. An energy healer or yoga expert could incorporate energy healing or yoga as part of their transformation practice.
Depending on how you want to help your clients achieve transformation, you need to do a life coach certification program that will work for them.
Of course, you don’t have to stick to just one healing modality for your clients. Most top life coaches use a combination of different modalities and the more techniques you can use the more successful you will be.
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Life Coaching Courses To Kick-Start Your Practice
Ideally, you should do some online life coach certification programs and get life coach certification online, so you can start your life coaching practice right away.
You’ll learn core coaching principles and how to put them into real-world practice. You also learn the business development skills you need to grow your coaching business, and the marketing tips and skills to attract new clients.
If you want to become a much sought-after life coach, the best life coaching marketing step for marketing your life coaching business is to learn how to build life coach personal branding.
I hope this information on life-coaching jobs, the steps to become a life coach and various life coach certification programs have helped you decide what sort of life-coaching practice you want to pursue. If you’re a life coach, do share your experience in the comments below.
About the author:
Priya Florence Shah is the Group Editor at SHEROES and author of Devi2Diva, an emotional self-care book for women.
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This is an excellent article. However there are a couple of distinctions and points I would like to add.
A well trained and qualified coach, does not need to have a psychology or counseling background. It can useful but is not a requirement or essential. Also a coach need not take on the emotional burdens of their clients – the aim is to be involved and empathetic but detached in the same way as any healing professional.
Coach training will include instruction on what to look for and recognize in a client that indicates they need therapy, not coaching. A good coach will not hesitate to refer to a therapist where necessary.
You are right in saying that, as yet coaching is not regulated, but if an aspiring coach makes sure they do their training with a school accredited by the International Coach Federation or some other independent coaching association, they will ensure they are well positioned should regulation of coaching come about. The catch here is to make sure the independent coaching association is just that and not a front for a coaching school.
The bottom line for anyone wanting to become a life coach is to get coach specific training from a good school. I have a checklist of things to look for when choosing a coaching school that is useful in helping aspiring coaches make the right choice before they enroll.
Thanks for the feedback, Wendy, and for the excellent points you made. I'm sure they will help our readers understand more about the life coaching profession.
Life Coaching is really the best career in terms of transforming lives and of course it involves equal cooperation between the coach and the client.