Your friends tell you you’re a great listener. Peers say you give excellent advice. And your boss notes that your communication and de-escalation skills are remarkable.
With all of this positive feedback, you start to wonder if there’s a way to put your outstanding interpersonal skills to work.
One course of action is becoming a life coach. This job puts that natural ability to listen to and guide into good practice, empowering people to overcome roadblocks and reach their full potential.
If you’re interested in this career path, learn how to become a life coach and what experience you need to get started. It’s never too early to study, pursue certification, and hone your skills in practice to make this career change.
How to know if life coaching is a promising career for you
Life coaching is a great career choice if you enjoy helping others on their personal development journeys. But you should also consider whether this pathway meshes well with your lifestyle, skills, and career goals.
If you love having a flexible schedule and the ability to work from home or in your own office, this career could be a good fit. Many coaches freelance or work with companies like BetterUp that allow custom scheduling and flexible hours so you only work when you want to.
Life coaching can offer an excellent work-life balance and control over your schedule, but if you struggle to self-motivate, it could provide too much freedom. You should be confident in your time management skills to maximize this perk while slating plenty of time for your clients and session prep.
Becoming a coach also means promoting your services and ensuring your clients are the right fit for you. This may require turning down a prospect from time to time when you can’t offer what they need. A C-suite executive might need help navigating the high-stakes environment of restructuring, and if you’re not familiar with those processes, it’s best to direct them to someone else.
Joining a coaching platform can help you navigate the matching process and find clients who require your offerings. As a certified life coach on BetterUp, for example, the system will pair you with people who have the same philosophies as you and are interested in the strategies you’ll use. And if it turns out that person wasn’t a good fit, you can rest assured they’ll find another coach on the platform who is.
4 essential skills for every life coach
Life coaches help their clients foster a growth mindset, improve self-awareness, and find clarity. Their role is to push the client to discover their innermost motivations and understand how they can feasibly work toward them.
So, what do you need to be a life coach when it comes to hard and soft skills? Here are four essential abilities that make a great coach:
1. Communication
Coaching is all about impactful conversation: creating a safe environment where clients can share their thoughts, listen to what they have to say, and communicate next steps with empathy and compassion.
Similar to a therapist, you should be an excellent active listener who tries to understand clients’ hopes, concerns, and insecurities without judgment. After you’ve heard from the person you’re working with, you should be able to clearly regurgitate what they said and communicate your thoughts on it, whether you want to validate their feelings or highlight a pattern you’re hearing.
It’s important that you’re comfortable empathetically communicating with people at a crossroads or who are starting over and feeling lost. Clients may experience self-doubt and insecurity, and it’s your job to help them find the motivation to further their well-being despite those obstacles. Approach communication with kindness, clarity, and understanding.
2. Organization and planning
When working with multiple clients at once, you’ll have to keep notes on their experiences, maintain communication throughout the week, and make sure there are no overlaps in your schedule. It can be a lot to handle, so having a knack for organization can be extremely helpful.
During coaching, you’ll also help clients break big goals into smaller, actionable pieces, and that requires planning. You should know how to create realistic schedules and keep track of progress — all without overwhelming clients. And when someone’s plan seems out of reach, you should be able to recognize that and determine realistic goals on a reasonable timeline.
3. Motivation
Clients will hit setbacks and feel frustrated — and sometimes even hopeless — with their progress. As their coach, you need to help them craft a way around the obstacle and motivate themselves toward goals.
Understanding theories of motivation, like self-determination theory and expectancy theory, can give you a structure to follow as you motivate clients. You can also use realistic goal-setting and self-assessment activities to help people discover which objectives matter to them. That way, when a client faces a roadblock, you can reiterate the initial motivation and the importance of the goal.
4. An open mind
As a life coach, you should be open to working with individuals on various pursuits. Unlike business, career, or health coaches, who specialize in a niche, life coaches may help individuals reach anything from better habits to career goals. You’ll have to stay open and ready to help clients with all kinds of experiences, goals, and roadblocks.
How long does it take to get a life coaching certification?
To become a coach on BetterUp, you need to have a coaching certification, which can take from a few weeks to a few months to complete. It’s one of the key qualifications to be a life coach, so don’t overlook it.
There are quite a few certification options out there, but the International Coaching Federation (ICF) is a good place to start. It’s one of the most widely known accreditation bodies and has an Education Search Service (ESS) to help you narrow down the certification options based on your needs.
Here are three popular certification options and how long they take:
Keep in mind that coaching authorities like BetterUp won’t only be looking at your certification and education. They’ll also consider your work history, hard and soft skills, and experience with therapeutic methodologies like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and motivational interviewing (MI). Make sure that, along with certification, you’re gaining experience and building your practice.
How to become a life coach: 4 steps
There’s no cut-and-dry guide to how to be a life coach. But certification, real-world practice, and gaining a bit of business acumen are generally parts of everyone’s journey. To guide you, here are four general steps to becoming a life coach:
1. Get certified
No matter your background, getting certified is a definitive step toward becoming a coach. Research viable programs that work with your schedule. If you have a busy professional life, you may opt for a virtual, self-paced course over a full-time, in-person one. Just make sure you’re enrolling in an ICF-accredited ACC or PCC program. It’ll teach you vital coaching competencies like cultivating trust, building client relationships, and staying present in communication.
2. Determine your offering
While becoming a certified life coach, you should think about what types of coaching you’d like to offer. Life coaching is broad, but you can still aim to work in a specific niche and show your unique value proposition to clients.
Perhaps you founded a small business and have entrepreneurial experience to share. Maybe you devised a proprietary coaching program for a particular common goal, like improving wellness. These are great examples of selling points that tell potential clients what the benefits of coaching are and why they might want to work with you.
3. Register your life coaching business
Life coaches planning to work independently should register their businesses following state requirements. If you choose this path, you should also prepare to take on the financial implications (like overhead) and administrative tasks (like scheduling) of running a company.
Joining a platform can simplify the process. BetterUp, for example, features automatic payroll and intuitive scheduling so you can focus all of your energy on coaching. You’ll also access continuing education opportunities, community events, and other support to grow as a coach.
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4. Market your services
The final and most exciting step is finding potential clients. Create professional social media accounts and advertise your practice there, set up a website with information on your offerings and prices, and leverage word-of-mouth marketing through friends and family members. As you start working with people, ask them for testimonials to share on your webpage and draw more clients.
Becoming a coach on BetterUp can make marketing your services more agile. The platform will pair you with ideal clients so you don’t have to search on your own. It also hosts personal self-assessments that clients can take and share with you later, helping you discover what each person needs and can gain from the coaching experience.
Become a successful life coach
To start a successful life coaching practice, you must first look inward and decide if this career is the best path for you. Ask yourself whether running your own business or scheduling sessions through a coaching platform is a working style that supports your life. If you don’t yet have the prerequisites for the job, try taking a few courses to expand your knowledge and work on your active listening, communication, and organizational skills.
Once you know how to become a life coach and have a training program under your belt, you can start a practice. Boost your potential for success by teaming up with BetterUp’s reputable platform, connecting you with clients who need the services and energy only you can offer.
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