A career as a life coach has many benefits including, making your own hours, helping people achieve their dreams, and working from home. Part of making your choice to become a life coach will be getting to know exactly what a life coach does. Sure, they provide assistance to other people but how? And what will an average working day look like when you become one?
Life coach responsibilities
Being a life coach means you partner up with your client to help them achieve their goals. You will access an extensive toolbox of proven techniques that allows your client to uncover, understand, and overcome their obstacles. With your help, they can quickly achieve their goals and make shifts or changes in their life that will empower them to be happy and successful.
The beauty of it is that it’s up to your client to seek out and take action on these changes. You are there in an advisory role only, to support them on their personal journey, to ask targeted questions and point out patterns of behaviour.
The flexibility of coaching is amazing as are the number of niches (or specialty fields) you can tailor your services to. I’ve worked one-on-one with individuals but I’ve also coached in groups and companies with 500 employees.
Usually, people bury themselves in a lifetime of rubble, past experiences, hooked emotions, negative self-talk and beliefs about themselves and their abilities that pile up like the debris from a fallen building. It becomes difficult for the person in that life to see clearly, to move freely and to breath easily. Basically, they are stuck in that belief system. Their goals and desires seem out of reach or pointless. A life coach’s work is to help them clean away all the rubble that isn’t needed and to find ways to build up from the pieces that are useful. Once they are set free from the pile, their sparkle and shine become obvious. They create the building, you provide the broom.
This is achieved through specific strategies and skills designed to open up options and provide fresh choices. Seeing their situation differently allows them to get moving and find direction. It really is that simple, and, the change can be instantaneous.
Sometimes a coach will be required to help focus or suggest a direction to take, other times the solution is to lay down a challenge, motivate or provide support. At the end of the day, you celebrate together on every win.
One of the most important aspects of life coaching is to plan to a goal. This requires detailed action steps as well as holding your client accountable for achieving each milestone.
Unlike psychologists or councillors, life coaches do not offer advice or analyse the past. Change and growth are achieved through active listening, observation, asking empowering questions and challenging them to push through limitations facing them today.
One of the presuppositions to life coaching through my company is that the client already has all the knowledge and information they need to achieve their goals, it’s just lost under the stress and worry of everyday life. By helping your client select what areas to focus on and teaching them how to organise and prioritise their thoughts, they are able to identify the pathway that will bring them success. I guess it’s a bit like being hired to teach someone how to organise their walk-in wardrobe. The foundations and shelving are already there, as are all the clothes and accessories, you just teach them how to hang them well and let them get to it. It’s Marie Kondo for the brain.
As I mentioned, there are many niches to coaching so you can match up your coaching skills to your passion or life experience. So for example, if you were a personal trainer in a gym, you could do fitness coaching. Maybe you have overcome and healed from a specific conflict and you want to show others the way through. Other examples of coaching specialities are:
- Small business coaching
- Spiritual coaching
- Personal finance coaching
- Career development coaching
- Corporate business coaching
- Relationship coaching
- Health coaching
The perfect client
The best kind of client is someone who is achieving good results but wants to be great. This is the perfect area to achieve maximum success and see great results for your client quickly. They are motivated, dedicated and really desire success.
You find your clients through referrals from previous clients, testimonials and word of mouth from previous clients and recommendations from other coaches in other fields. That means you want your clients to achieve great results so they will pass your details on to friends and family. It also means you want to build a coaching network so you can refer clients that don’t fit your niche onto someone who can help them, and likewise receive clients from others.
You can also join business networks to meet and mingle with other small business owners, post fliers, have an active website, be a speaker at events, offer suggestions on advice forums and have a good social media presence.
How does a coaching session work?
Most coaching sessions take anywhere between 45 minutes to one hour and have a dual focus of education and offering a challenging activity. To be really successful, homework tasks are set for the client to continue their work between sessions and practice gaining results.
Work from home
Because coaching is so flexible you can easily work as a life coach from home and have a global reach.
This can mean that you meet with people face to face in your home, at their home or office or at a co-working space. You can also host a session over the phone, or create an online meeting room through a video platform like Zoom.
All these options work equally well for individuals, groups and companies, it really depends on your location, client and personal learning preferences.
Part of learning to be a coach involves understanding and applying different learning preferences, knowing yours will help you decide. If you are visual, you’ll prefer a face-to-face or video platform, if you are audio, you’ll be well suited to a phone-in and if you are kinaesthetic then you will really love face-to-face interaction. Which is not to say you can’t do well if you venture outside your preferred representation, a good match simply helps you absorb the information quickly and easily.
What does a working day look like?
6:00 am Self-awareness
Wake up, exercise, meditate, eat a healthy breakfast. Spend time with loved ones.
7:30 am Responses
Check emails and respond to questions sent or posted social media.
8:00 am Accountability
Meeting with mentors or contractors to brainstorm ideas and collaborate on progress.
9:30 am Prep work
Coaching client preparation. Prepare the space, check connections, have everything needed on hand.
10:00 am Client contact
Work with each client or client group with space between each session to go over the previous session and prepare.
1:30 pm Out for lunch
Catch up with friends, loved ones or mentors for engaging and stimulating conversation.
2:30 pm Walk-in space
Time set aside for unscheduled clients or meet with potential new clients.
3:30 pm Vision check
Check business goals against seven-year vision and take steps to reach these goals. Checking accounts, paying bills and handling finances.
4:30 pm Wind down
Sign off for the day. Review wins and will act on any new opportunities for learning.
6:00 pm Rest and rejuvenate
Eat an alkaline dinner, read or watch conscious movies.
How your day looks is limitless. Other options can be attending business meetings to speak about enhanced business strategies, writing how-to blogs, managing your staff, hosting a workshop, attending an event as a guest speaker, hosting a webinar on mindset, undertaken study or training, meeting with your coach, stepping outside your comfort zone with a challenging activity, or preparing a presentation.
How you run your coaching business is completely up to you. We ensure you have a range of skills and techniques to best match your client needs. We encourage a growth approach by opening up more choices to your client and allowing them to make new choices that best suit them and their goal progress.
One thing I do really stress for successful coaching is to have a life coach yourself, to challenge and clear away your own rubble so that you are more empowered towards your own personal goals and better equipped to help others.