How To Become A Life Coach: Your Step-By-Step Advice

If you have a passion for helping others and you’d like to make a business out of it, then you might be looking to learn how to become a life coach. You may see friends who became coaches or ads for other life coaches in your area and wonder how easy it is to get started.

Well, it’s not as difficult as it may seem, and by following the right steps, you too can create a successful coaching business that is fulfilling and helps others.

Here, we’ll explore what it means to be a life coach and go over a step-by-step guide on how you can become one yourself. Keep reading to learn more.

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What is a Life Coach?

If you just recently discovered this term, you might be wondering what life coaching is all about. Like any other coach, such as in a sport, their task is providing you with motivation and tangible guidance in order to achieve a goal.

Instead of coaching someone on how to win a basketball game, a life coach teaches people how to overcome difficult points in their lives in order to achieve their goals. The goals can be anything from finding a relationship to starting a new career.

Life coaches generally aren’t meant to provide you with advice on a specific issue you’re having, but rather help guide you through the process of dealing with a problem and overcoming it. Life coaches are trained to help their clients use a different mindset to come to terms with their present experience and find suitable solutions to their problems.

What Does a Life Coach Do?

If their job isn’t to impart advice, then what exactly does a life coach do?

Life coaches use their training to help their clients recognize their intentions, weaknesses, and strengths, and then create actionable plans for change.

As a life coach, it is your job to help your client pinpoint their dreams, goals, and even their purpose in order to work towards those as a goal. Many people already have specific habits or mindsets that prevent them from getting what they want, such as fears, doubts, or uncertainties.

Life coaches also help people recognize these destructive mindsets that hold them back from their dreams. Once both goals and obstacles are identified, then a coach and their client create a plan and work on it together until the goal is met.

How is a Life Coach Different Than a Therapist?

After learning what a life coach is and what they do, it’s usual for people to think that life coaches are the same as therapists. However, this is a common misconception.

While coaching can be just as helpful as therapy for some people, the way each one is used is different. Coaches focus on your present and future and help find ways to create the future you desire. Therapists, on the other hand, tend to look to your past in order to discover patterns or behaviors in your present.

The way therapists and coaches handle each session is also different. For example, a therapy session is usually led by the client and what they’d like to talk about. Conversations are left open-ended with room for interpretation and insight.

However, a session with a life coach is a lot more focused on a specific topic. The conversation is directed based on a client’s goals and overall progress, so it’s less about finding insight and more about creating actionable plans.

More than that, a therapist goes through different licensing than a life coach. If you’re looking for someone to help you with mental issues or depressing thoughts, then a life coach probably isn’t what you’re looking for. Therapists have been trained to diagnose disorders and offer professional tools to deal with difficult behaviors or traumas.

But, if you’re looking for purpose in your life or are feeling lost and directionless, then a life coach can help put you on the right track.

Step-by-step Guide on How to Become a Life Coach

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If you’re convinced that becoming a life coach is the right path for you, then it’s important to know where to go from here.

These are basic steps you can take to start your journey as a life coach and help other people find and achieve their goals.

Step 1: Find Your Niche

In order to serve the right clients, you’ll need to find a niche that reflects your strengths, passions, and interests as a coach. Life coaches can help people with a variety of things, but it’s not ideal for one life coach to consult on all of them.

Choosing a niche can help solidify your expertise and make you the go-to coach for clients looking for assistance on a very specific issue. So, before you go deeper into the process of becoming a life coach, consider what niche you’d like to work in.

Here are a few examples of popular life coaching niches:

• Business
• Relationships
• Weight loss
• Spirituality
• Career transitioning
• Health and wellness
• Leadership
• Family-work balance

After choosing your niche, you’ll have a much easier time following the rest of the steps, including establishing and marketing your business and finding clients.

Step 2: Get Certified

The next step on how to become a life coach seems obvious, but it’s also the most necessary. In order to become a life coach, you need more than just a passion for helping others. You need to have the required professional training.

While getting certified isn’t actually a requirement for life coaches, it will help you get a leg up over your competition and also give you the training necessary to excel in the field. Clients will be more likely to gravitate towards coaches who have dedicated time to studying and honing their professional skills, so getting certified is a worthwhile investment for your budding business.

It’s important to find a life coach certification program that teaches you about coaching in general, and also about coaching for your specific niche. A certification can also help guide you through the business end of coaching and teach you effective ways to market your business and find new clients.

Step 3: Establish Your Business

This step involves both technical aspects and a lot of planning.

First things first, you’re going to want to start by registering your business. While the exact procedure for this can vary depending on where you live, it usually involves deciding on your business entity (LLC, corporation, freelance, etc.) and then registering it with your state. You’ll also have to take care of some other business-related factors, such as getting yourself set up with an accountant or a business manager if you don’t want to do all the business administration work yourself.

Once the work of getting a business up and running is done, you’ll need to create a business plan. There will obviously be initial costs to setting up your business, especially if you’re renting a space or racking up other expenses. However, many coaches rely on digital spaces instead of physical ones, so this is the time to set up a killer website that will attract the right clients.

Step 4: Create a Marketing Strategy

Now that you’re open for business, the next step is creating a winning marketing strategy to gain new clients. This is a very important step, since without any clients, you can’t really be a coach.

You’ll want to sit and create a step-by-step marketing plan for your coaching business, or even consult with a marketing expert. Your marketing plan might include things like networking within your community to start spreading your business via word of mouth referrals, creating a social media presence, or participating in conferences.

Some new life coaches will offer free initial sessions to their circle of friends and family in order to get the ball rolling. This can be an effective way to test your coaching strategies, get testimonials to use on your website and social media, and also to get more referrals.

Step 5: Expand and Grow Your Business

You shouldn’t be slowing down after landing your first few clients, this is the time to put your business and marketing plans into overdrive.

Once the referrals start coming in more frequently, it’s important to continue expanding your presence both online and in-person. Ramp up your social media strategy by growing your network, posting ads on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and/or Instagram.

Now that you have more experience with multiple clients, you can also assess if you’re in the right niche, or if you want to shift your business into a more specific speciality.

Get feedback from clients on what worked for them really well during your coaching sessions and what didn’t, and from there you can adjust your future coaching sessions according to your personal strengths and weaknesses.

To Wrap Up

Hopefully you’ve learned something valuable on how to become a life coach. The journey isn’t simple, but it’s worth it if your passion is guiding others and helping them find and achieve their goals.

If you’re already a life coach with experience, you might want to consider learning more about business in order to expand your own. An online degree in business administration from University of the People can be just what you need to grow your life coaching business. You’ll be able to take classes online while still working at your coaching business, so you can apply what you’re learning and see results right away.