The Path to Becoming a Life Coach in Easy Steps

The life coach is often confused with the therapist. However, therapist and life coach are two different professions. The therapist has to get into the brain of the person and guide them through their emotional problems. An NLP coach has a wide aspect in their profession.

Life coaching is an appropriate business for those who are driven towards helping others. Unlike therapists, Listening and advising are only a part of their profession, life coaching is much more than that. In brief, we can say that a life coach is an entrepreneur who has to promote his business; so you become a salesperson, marketer, and a leader all by yourself.

However, it does not happen overnight, there is a proper plan you have to follow and struggle hard to follow your passion. But with the right direction and guidance, you can achieve success and guide others to a successful life.

Steps to become a life coach

Here is the 5-step process that will help you build a successful life coach career.

Identification of the niche

This is the foremost step to choosing the niche you want to pursue. The right way to choose the niche is by identifying your area of interest. It is a big plus if you have even a little bit of experience and knowledge in the same area.

Some of the niches you can choose from are as follows:

Personal

In this field, a coach guides the people to help achieve their goals in their personal life or help them in solving their issues related to personal relations, mental wellness, and health.

Professional

A professional coach is there to help individuals make decisions related to their careers. There are two types of coaches professionally; career and business.

People seek help regarding pursuing their careers in different fields from a career coach. However, a business coach is there to help people define goals for their business and take them to heights.

Spiritual

The work of a spiritual coach is to help people connect with themselves and help them dig deeper in their life. They also guide people to take a holistic approach and widen their beliefs.

Financial

Financial coaches are there to guide people in financial matters and help them achieve financial goals by motivating them and inspiring them.

Fitness

Fitness coaches are there to help people achieve their fitness goals and motivate them to achieve their targets.

Get yourself certified

However, it is not mandatory to get yourself certified to become a life coach. You do not need to spend years studying or training for the life coach business unlike the psychologists and or medical practitioners. But certification gives accreditation to your professional career as a life coach.

As per the standards of ICF, the certification of the professional coach should meet their requirements to get accredited in the life coaching line. But not every coach you meet online is certified as per the standards of ICF.

To get yourself certified, you can choose the training program from the specialized coach as per your niche.

During your training, you must work on certain skills such as:
• Listening skills
• Communicating abilities
• Leadership qualities
• Confidence building
• Goal-setting
• Interacting skills
• Decision-making skills
• Solving problems
• Coaching skills
• Accountability

Initiate your career as a coach

After getting the certification, you can begin working as a life coach yourself. One thing you need to understand here is that in this business, you do not have a product to sell. You are offering a service in form of yourself and your time. So, you need to work upon that only. But there are certain things you need to figure out before you start your own business.

Registering the business

Once you decide to work as a life coach, the first step is to choose a name for your business and get it registered with the state authorities or the body responsible in your country.

If you decide to run the business as the sole proprietor, then it does not require any registration but if not then you need to register it in the name of the owner.

Estimate the cost

You need to count the estimate of the expenses you would be incurring while running your business. First of all, deciding the place would require decision-making. If it is online, then it would save you some cost but if not then you just need a place to meet people. Paying for the place is the cost you have to incur.

Also, include the costs in setting up the webinars and the seminars.

Promotional cost

Of course, marketing is the main part of any business. You have to spend good money on promoting your business. Marketing is the best technique to reach out to clients and potential customers.

The best strategy is to expand your business online and expand your existence on social media platforms. It is the most attractive and least expensive way to maintain your branding.

Website building

Create your website so that clients can reach up to you and contact you. It helps you build a portfolio and clients can have a reference of your work easily.

Select a platform to train people online

Life coaching is complete when you have started training people. And to begin your training journey in neuro-linguistic programming, you can choose any digital platform you want. You can start your journey by partnering with someone who is already established or building a platform from the scratch.

Establishing your training program

After finalizing your niche and building a website, you must build your training program and get in touch with as many clients as you can. To build a better career as a coach, you must work on a few things.

For this follow a few steps:

Build the goals for learning

You must keep a goal in your mind that you have to achieve at the end of the training program. Setting expectations is the best way to improve your work and you must do it for all the training sessions. It will help you achieve the targets and keep on getting better with every training session.

Create an outline

Creating the outline would help the client to know the content and what they would be learning in the whole training program. This way, it will be easier for you to explain the content and the client will have a clear image in the mind.

Create the content

The courses you offer must have content that is useful to the readers and the candidates applying for the course. You can seek help from the content creators or instructional designers if you do not feel like creating it yourself.

If you have blogs on your website, you can also use them for additional content in your course material.

Certification

Remember, that people seeking the course or training from you, would be expecting the certification at the end. So, you must design a certificate and upload the design on your website also. It will help them to trust you and the certification attracts people easily.

Create the payment gateway

Setting up the platform through which you would be getting payments is also an important step in the whole process. Also, give the clients as many options as you can so that they can pay through any digital platform they are comfortable with.

This is the whole process that you need to know and the step-by-step guide that will help you create your business as a life coach.