Are you interested in becoming a life coach? Life coaching is a rewarding and exciting career choice. It focuses on helping people meet objectives in both their personal and professional lives. A good life coach will help their clients figure out their strengths and weaknesses, set goals they can reach, and come up with ways to overcome obstacles and achieve those goals.
Coaching is a huge industry with many branches. Business coaching in the US has a market share in the billions of dollars. There are also more than 23,000 registered life coaching businesses in the US, and the industry is continuing to show signs of expansion.
The fantastic thing about life coaching is that it can be applied to almost everyone with a wide range of challenges, such as career development, wellness and health, and much more. Life coaches give clients a safe place to explore their potential, find their passions, and make positive life changes.
As a life coach, you can make a significant difference in people’s lives while enjoying the freedom and control that come with owning your own business. If this sounds like something you want to delve more into, read on.
Qualifications Needed to Become a Life Coach
Although there are no official education or certification requirements to become a life coach, pursuing a qualification will boost your credibility and help you hone essential skills that are needed to successfully help your clients along their journey. Such skills include:
- Strong interpersonal skills: Life coaches need to build strong relationships with their clients. This requires the ability to connect with people, build trust, and create a safe and supportive environment for clients to share their thoughts and feelings.
- Excellent communication skills: Effective communication is critical for life coaches. They must be able to listen actively, ask thoughtful questions, and communicate ideas clearly and concisely.
- Good problem-solving and judgment: Life coaches need to be able to identify their client’s challenges and help them find practical solutions. This requires good judgment and problem-solving skills.
- Knowledge of coaching techniques and methodologies: Life coaches need to be familiar with coaching techniques and methodologies that are effective in helping clients achieve their goals. This requires continuous learning and staying up-to-date with the latest coaching trends and practices.
- Time management: Life coaches need to be able to manage their time effectively to ensure they can meet the needs of their clients while also managing their own workload.
- A passion for helping others: Life coaching is a profession that requires a strong desire to help others. Coaches must be genuinely interested in their client’s well-being and be committed to helping them achieve their goals.
- Continuous learning: Life coaching is an evolving field, and coaches must stay up-to-date with the latest research, techniques, and best practices. This requires a commitment to continuous learning and professional and personal development.
With that in mind, if you are interested in becoming certified as a life coach, you can choose from a number of different life coach training certifications. However, the life coach certification programs offered by the International Coach Federation (ICF) are among the most common.
- The International Coach Federation (ICF) is the largest and most well-respected organization for professional coaches. It offers a certification program that requires a certain number of coaching hours and adherence to a code of ethics.
- Certified Professional Coach (CPC) is a certification offered by the International Coach Academy which requires completion of an accredited coach training program, as well as passing an exam and demonstrating coaching skills through practical experience.
- Board Certified Coach (BCC) is a certification that is given out by the Center for Credentialing and Education. This certification is designed for coaches that work in disciplines linked to healthcare and wellness as well as other relevant fields. It requires the completion of a coach training program that is accredited, as well as the passing of an examination and the demonstration of coaching skills through practical experience.
- Certified Life Coach (CLC) is a certification offered by Coach Training Alliance and requires the successful completion of a coach training program, the passing of an examination, and the demonstration of coaching abilities through practical experience.
Becoming an Online Life Coach
In this section, we’ll go through the major steps required to become an online life coach, from identifying your niche to building your life coach courses on WordPress, to launching and marketing your courses!
1. Identify Your Coaching Niche and Target Market
A common goal among all life coaches is to help clients set goals and realize their full potential. But you will need to choose a field of specialization. You might become a life coach in personal development, wellness, spiritual coaching, business, executive coaching, or any other field that stirs up strong feelings of interest in you. This will help you describe your coaching services and set yourself apart from other coaches on the market right now.
Once you have determined the specific area in which you wish to specialize, the next step is to identify your potential clients. It’s important to think about your target audience’s average age, gender, degree of education, income, and career prospects. All these factors will influence how you tailor your coaching sessions, how you market your services, your pricing structure, and estimate how much money you can make.
2. Obtain the Qualifications and Credentials You Want
What you choose will largely depend on your target audience because the certification should convey trustworthiness to them. We’ve listed a few authoritative coaching programs above, but you should also research competitors in your niche to find which qualifications they have. For example, if you’re positioning yourself as a life coach that helps people progress in their careers, you’ll need a relevant qualification that showcases your business acumen. If you’re a life coach that helps clients make healthier life choices, you’ll need a qualification that confirms your expertise in nutrition.
Enrolling in a coaching program is also beneficial because you’ll leave knowing a lot more strategies and methodologies about coaching, which can help you as you navigate having coaching clients.
3. Choose Your Online Coaching Platform
There are a number of online coaching platforms available that come with in-built features to help you connect with clients and track their progress. And while these platforms work perfectly well, we recommend creating your own website with WordPress and using it to host your services directly. Here’s why it’s imperative for life coaches to have a website:
- It makes it easy for people to learn more about who you are and what you offer prospective clients, with a full breakdown of your services.
- Site visitors will easily be able to find your contact information, fill in contact forms, or schedule appointments directly using the calendars you set up on your website.
- You can host life coach courses directly on your website. Having an online course is one of the best ways to make passive income as a coach, and you can make this your main service or offer it alongside one-on-one coaching sessions.
If creating life coaching courses is a route you want to take, then you’ll also need Sensei LMS, a Learning Management System plugin built for WordPress.
Sensei LMS
Sensei LMS is an all-in-one LMS plugin designed specifically for online courses, such as those related to personal development or coaching skillsets. Sensei is available in a few different pricing tiers, but the recommended option for coaches who want to create engaging courses is Sensei Pro, which gives you access to all of the plugin’s features. Here are some reasons why Sensei Pro could be the right fit for your life coaching course:
- User-friendly interface: Sensei LMS seamlessly integrates with WordPress and uses the Gutenberg block editor as its interface, which means WordPress users will find it really simple and intuitive to create and manage course content.
- Interactive features: Keep students engaged with Sensei Blocks (a group of multimedia blocks you can add to lessons), conditional content, content scheduling, and more.
- Assessment and feedback tools: Sensei LMS provides a range of quiz types that can be set to automatic or manual grading, which can help you track your client’s progress and provide personalized feedback. Students can also contact teachers easily if needed.
- Integration with WooCommerce: Sensei LMS integrates with WooCommerce, which means you can easily set up payment options for your life coaching course, such as one-time payments or recurring subscriptions. By utilizing WooCommerce Payments, Sensei LMS is able to interface with a number of well-known payment channels, including PayPal and Stripe.
Overall, Sensei LMS is a powerful tool that can help you deliver a highly personalized and engaging life coaching course while also providing you with the tools to manage and monitor your clients’ progress effectively.
4. Plan Your Coaching Content
Once you’ve set up your website, then it’s time to populate it with content. Relevant content will include your course content but could also include landing pages, blog posts, case studies, and any other kind of content that’s intended to attract a readership.
Remember that publishing content frequently can significantly help your website rank, but you also need to be consistent with your brand no matter what you post. Here’s a quick guide to help you with creating content for your life coaching business:
- Pick the forms for your content: When thinking about how to engage with your consumers, there are many different kinds of material that you may develop, such as blog posts, videos, webinars, training courses, podcasts, and so on. You should select the formats that correspond with your abilities, methodology, hobbies, and the preferences of your audience and explore how others in the coaching industry are presenting their content.
- Build a content calendar: Create a content calendar to help you organize and plan your material in advance. This will assist you in maintaining organization, consistency, and concentration on the content goals you have set. The subjects, forms, and dates for your material as well as the advertising techniques, should all be included in your content calendar.
- Concentrate on well-being: As many people who hire life coaches are looking for ways to enhance their own well-being, you should think about developing content that touches on this subject. You may, for instance, produce content on the topics of stress management, self-care, mindfulness, and other aspects of overall wellness.
- Leverage your entrepreneurship: As an entrepreneur, you have the ability to create material that details your experiences, offers advice, and imparts knowledge gained. Your audience may get feelings of inspiration and motivation as a result of this, in addition to seeing your coaching skills in action.
5. Develop a Marketing and Advertising Plan for Your Course
Developing a business plan can assist you in defining your objectives, approaches, and procedures for expanding your coaching practice. It must include a summary of your services, target audience, price, marketing and advertising plans, and financial projections.
Determine which marketing touchpoints will be relevant for your audience, including paid ads, organic SEO content, email marketing, social media, and so on. If you want to broaden your client base, you should think about forming partnerships with other coaches or firms in comparable fields.
An effective marketing tool can be testimonials from happy clients. You should get in touch with former customers and inquire as to whether or not they would be prepared to talk about the excellent experiences they had working with you. Make use of these endorsements on your website, in your social media, and in any other marketing materials you create.
Furthermore, if you’ve created courses with Sensei Pro then you can submit them to the Sensei Showcase to get them promoted by the team that built the plugin.
If you’ve chosen WordPress.com as your managed WordPress host, then you can also make use of Jetpack’s Blaze ad network, which is a great way to advertise your courses on websites that cater to a similar target audience.
6. Assess Results and Improve Your Life Coaching Services
Frequently check in with your clients to analyze their progress and decide whether or not they are making strides toward achieving their goals. Monitoring the development of your clients is an important part of providing excellent service. To monitor the development of your customer, you can make use of a variety of techniques, such as questionnaires, feedback forms, or private dialogues. With Sensei, a clear benchmark of success is seeing how many students have completed their courses.
Gather information regarding your past experiences as a coach, such as the number of customers you have assisted, the percentage of clients who have achieved their goals, and the general comments you have gotten.
Maintain a high level of proficiency in your coaching. Learning and development are constant pursuits for a full-time and successful life coach. You can improve your coaching experience and stay up to date on the latest coaching methods by going to workshops, reading books, or taking classes.
Bear in mind that you can always edit your online courses even after you publish them, so if you have new learnings that you want to integrate into your existing courses then you can publish them as new modules, which will encourage students to return. Alternatively, you could create a brand-new course to supplement your original one.
Launch Your Life Coaching Business with Sensei LMS
Life coaching is a fulfilling career that involves helping individuals set and achieve personal and professional goals. The role of a life coach is to support and guide clients in identifying their strengths and weaknesses, setting achievable goals, and finding ways to overcome obstacles. Sensei LMS, and specifically the Sensei Pro plan, is the perfect partner for this, giving you a platform to launch online courses and engage learners in an interactive and supportive way.
Get started on your life coaching journey with Sensei Pro.
