Life Coaching: Is It For You?

Life coaching may be the perfect career choice for you if you’re someone who really enjoys helping people. Typically individuals who get into this field of work are great friends and listeners who also have a knack for giving very good advice.  If you’re thinking about becoming a life coach, one of the first things you might want to do is to hire a life coach for yourself.

How to Find a Life Coach

The best thing you can do is to get some referrals from people you know who are already involved in the process of coaching themselves. A strong recommendation is the best way to find someone you would be able to work with.

With so many people coaching from all over the world and the ability to hold virtual sessions either on the phone or Skype these days, the Internet is an excellent resource for diving into online life coaching. Do a simple Google search and you’ll find a lot of great personal coaches with good websites and pages of testimonials.

In general, a life coach will schedule a first meeting or consultation with you free of charge. This will help you to at least get a good idea if this person is someone whom you might enjoy working with. Usually you can tell a lot in that first meeting and it’s always good to go with your initial gut reaction to a person as your goal will be to develop a great working relationship.

The whole idea behind hiring a life coach yourself, will be to get very familiar with the process of personal coaching to determine if this is a good career match for you. You should tell your own coach this goal up front and it may even be the case that the person coaching you ends up being a great mentor and resource on your journey to becoming a life coach yourself.

Types of Specialized Life Coaching

There are different areas that a life coach might specialize in. If you find yourself drawn to one particular area of interest, then it may actually make the best business sense to specialize in a particular field of coaching. This would allow you to work one-on-one with your ideal client and also allow you to develop a lot of experience and authority in one particular area.

The types of coaching listed below are not necessarily interchangeable with that of a general life coach. In some cases, the training and requirements may differ so it’s worth some further exploration if you find yourself drawn to one particular type of coaching. Here are some examples of the types of coaching that exist:

• career coaching, job coaching: focuses on issues related to work, career and the transitions that may come with this process
• executive coaching, business coaching: focuses on helping executives within companies or individuals with business goals
• sales coaching: focuses on working with sale people to help achieve their goals in this area
• financial coaching: focuses on helping individuals to create and achieve financial goals
• productivity coaching: focuses on helping people to become more productive on a regular basis
• health coaching, wellness coaching: focuses on helping individuals achieve goals related to their health and well-being
• stress management coaching: focuses on helping people to get through stressful periods of life
• ADHD coaching: focuses on helping people who have been diagnosed with ADHD
• NLP coaching: a method of coaching that utilizes NLP, or Neuro Linguistic Programming
• Christian coaching: focuses on helping someone with goals that are in alignment with their Christian faith
• spiritual coaching: focuses on goals that are spiritual in nature
• holistic coaching: focuses on taking a mind, body and spirit approach to creating change in one’s life
• relationship coaching, dating coaching: focuses on helping people deal with issues and goals related to their intimate relationships

This list is really just to get you thinking about some ideas for different life coaching opportunities. If you are fully invested into growing your own business as a personal coach, you could really build that around any topic that you have an expertise in or passion for.

Do you have experience with moving your family overseas? You could become the expert expat coach and help others with this issue to do the same. Are you completely caught up in the world of Internet Marketing? You could consider building a coaching business around one particular area or for people who are new to getting a business up and running online.

Once you’ve been involved in a life coaching program yourself for a few months, you’ll most likely have a pretty good idea if this is something you want to pursue yourself and also if you have an area of expertise that you might specialize in.  From here, you’ll determine if you want to register with a training program and make the decision as to which coaching school and what kind of certification you are going after.