Life coaching can range from helping clients achieve their dream career, to creating loving relationships, to realizing their life’s purpose or even improving their mental, physical and emotional health. The barrier of entry to being a life coach is currently very low and anybody can call themselves a coach without prior education or accreditation.
But this doesn’t mean that there are a lot of successful life coaches out there. It takes a certain amount of grit and skill to run a life coaching business successfully, as it does in all types of business. Life coaching is a broad industry, as it can mean any type of coaching that improves your wellbeing and life. There are dozens of smaller niches inside of life coaching that many coaches specialize in.
Live Events
If you like working with your clients in person, you enjoy speaking in front of crowds, and you want to help a lot of people to get a fast start and to learn a great deal in a short amount of time, a live on-stage event can be an incredible way to do that.
For 2-3 days, you teach a room full of clients, giving them detailed guidance on how to create the lives of their dreams, as well as homework, action steps and group exercises as needed so that they are able to learn your material as quickly as possible in the time you have together
1-on-1 Coaching
In this method, you have a 60-90-minute session with your client, either in person or via phone or the internet, once a week.
In these sessions, you discuss the action steps your client has been taking, the results they’ve gotten and the results that they want to get next. You teach them the success principles they require in order to progress from where they are, and you help them form a concrete, actionable plan to keep moving forward.
This method is useful for diving deep into your client’s life and mindset, but it should NOT be your primary form of coaching. If it is, you will become trapped in a cycle of trading hours for dollars, and your income and impact will always be limited by the number of hours in a day.
Group Coaching
With group coaching, you create a conference call with several of your clients at once, spend some time teaching them about the principles of success, and then answer their questions and give them personalized advice for taking the next step in their lives.
This method is a bit less in-depth than 1-on-1 coaching, but it allows your clients to learn from each others’ questions and experiences, and to network with each other. It also increases the energy that everyone receives through the calls, because they’re gathering in a community of passionate, like-minded people.
Combinations of the Above
Many coaches combine two or more of the above methods in order to give their clients the best possible results. For example, you could host a live event that gives your clients an inspiring, powerful start, and then offer a package that combines pre-recorded lessons with group or 1-on-1 coaching calls, so your clients can put the recorded curriculum to its most effective use.
Regardless of which system you use, it should include all four of these elements:
Reveal the universal, infallible principles of success to your clients. Without this, your clients won’t be able to create the big, lasting changes they’re looking for, so you MUST be able to give them the training they require in this area.
Help them to get really clear on what they truly desire, on their purpose in life and who they really are at their core.
Help them create a practical, actionable, step-by-step plan to reach their goals, and to repeat that process every time they have a new goal to fulfill.
Give them ongoing support, so they never have to handle the changes they’re creating or the obstacles they encounter alone.
Life coaching can be a viable business. However, it will only work if you understand all aspects of running a business.
The problem that a lot of coaches run into is the part that is business related and pertains to sales, marketing and business growth. Because coaching in an of itself is a heart-centered business, it’s easy to view all aspects of the business as such. But only the people that are serious about having a life coaching career do well in the business.
