Looking for a rewarding and lucrative career where you can help others achieve their personal goals? Explore the perks of becoming a life coach!
The life coaching industry has really grown in the last few years, with over 23,000 people working as life coaches in America now.
To become a life coach, you need to be incredibly sensitive to people’s needs and desires, as well as their mental health struggles. You can’t just walk into a meeting and tell someone how to get what they want. It takes a lot of work to get to the point where you can help others achieve their personal goals.
On the other hand, with all of the hard work comes great satisfaction. Being a life coach is one of the most rewarding careers you could possibly undertake. If you’re someone who is enthusiastic and has an understanding of how to set and achieve goals, life coaching could be the perfect job.
Today, we’re going to look at 9 great reasons to become a life coach. You may not realize it now, but keep reading and you may find out that your calling isn’t in business or the arts – it’s in helping people. It’s time to find out why people go into life coaching and why you should too.
What Is a Life Coach?
A life coach is a wide-ranging career where you work with different clients to help them achieve their goals. These goals could be anything from spiritual betterment and relationship help to career development and improved fitness. Each client is different and should be treated as such.
For this reason, many life coaches choose to focus their efforts on one particular area of life. Others might offer coaching in multiple areas with an overarching focus on the positive effects of spirituality or health and fitness. One of the reasons why there are so many life coaches out there is that each brings its own flavor to the profession.
In your day-to-day schedule, you might meet with one or more clients in a one-on-one setting. You’ll discuss their goals, helping them to establish short and long-term goals and strategies to achieve them. Developing actionable plans that put your clients in the best position to succeed is a big part of the job.
There’s a big psychological element to life coaching. You may use things like personality assessments to better understand your clients, then discuss their thoughts, emotions, and concerns with them. You’ll track each client’s progress and encourage them to overcome obstacles in order to reach the goals you’ve helped them set out.
Now that you know a bit more about what life coaching entails, let’s look at some of the perks of the job.
1. You Can Be Self Employed
Being self-employed is a goal for 70% of Americans. While there’s plenty of life coaching work through firms and care facilities, there’s a huge opportunity to work for yourself. It’s not easy to get to that point, but if you can manage to network and promote your services well, there’s no reason why you can’t be your own boss.
Working for yourself comes with numerous perks. You get to structure your business the way you want to run it, take on the clients that you want, and put your money where you think it belongs. There’s just no room for this type of control when you work for someone else.
There’s truly nothing more satisfying than building your own business from the ground up. What’s great about it is that there’s no inherent ceiling on how much your business can grow. Because you make all the decisions, you can follow your instincts and answer to no one.
2. Flexible & Remote Work
Part of being self-employed is creating the work schedule that you want. We’ve all heard about the benefits of a healthy work-life balance. When you’re a life coach who works for yourself, you get to live that lifestyle to its full effect.
Of course, you need to put the hours in if you’re going to get to the point where you can choose when and where you work. You’ll be tied to the clients that you work with and their schedules, but on the other hand, you’ll get to choose who you work with.
Not all life coaches work full-time. Perhaps you just got a life coaching certification and you’re testing out the waters. You can work part-time and keep working on other passions that you have simultaneously.
A lot of life coaches choose to set aside certain days of the week to deal with administrative tasks, like answering emails, marketing their services, and invoicing clients. With flexible scheduling, you’ll never have to worry about getting in over your head with your work.
3. You Love Helping People
As we’ve alluded to already, you don’t get your life coaching certifications unless you really love helping people. There are few jobs available that allow you to lean into that quality more than life coaching. Turning something you’re passionate about into a career is everyone’s dream.
Life coach training will give you the necessary skills and tools to do the type of work you want to do. Once you’re certified, however, you get to decide how you go about helping your clients. There aren’t any rules in life coaching, so long as the results are evident.
You’ll get to come up with your own problem-solving tactics to help people overcome their issues to achieve their goals. You’ll get to treat each new client’s needs as a fresh challenge, whether they’re career-oriented or based on personal relationships.
With each new challenge, you’ll find new ways to help people. You can build on past lessons and become more and more versatile as you go. This is how the best life coaches are made.
4. You’re Interested in Psychology
If you’re interested in human psychology, then being a life coach is the perfect role. Many life coaches actually start out as psychiatrists and there’s plenty of overlap between the two professions. That said, you don’t need to get a psychology degree to become a great life coach.
Every client that walks through your doors will have lived their own unique life that informs who they are. You’ll need to be able to work with a variety of personality types, but you’ll also need to be able to have a general understanding of why they are the way they are. This requires some background in psychology.
Being able to get to the root cause of someone’s hardships is what will help you push them forward to achieve their goals. Whether it’s some form of trauma, self-esteem issues, or parent relationships, there’s a lot that can prevent a person from succeeding in life. Your job will be to get to the bottom of it and help your clients work through these issues.
5. High Earning Potential
The average life coach makes just over $60K per year, but high earners easily make six figures. There’s no denying that there’s a high earning potential for life coaches, but it’s all about the type of life coaching that you decide to do.
High-earning life coaches tend to make most of their money working for larger companies. They might help new executives build better leadership skills or work with an entire company to build more confidence in their respective roles.
When you have your own life coaching company, you get to decide what your hourly rate is. Many life coaches charge quite a bit – between $150-$500 per hour. If your services start to gain a reputation for success, there’s not really a ceiling on how much money you can make.
Of course, life coaching comes in many forms and it doesn’t always make sense to charge these higher rates. Our advice is to follow your passion because when you’re doing something you love as a job, the money doesn’t matter as much.
6. You Enjoy Bettering Yourself
To be a great life coach is to heed your own advice. This line of work gives you a great opportunity to broaden your perspective on life and grow along with your clients.
People come to you with all sorts of issues and you help them work through those issues. As you gain more insight into how different humans operate, you’ll gain valuable experience that you can take into your own life. Not only will this make you a better life coach, but it’ll make you a healthier, happier person as well.
When you think about it, you can’t be a life coach if you don’t learn to face your own issues – it would be hypocritical. Being able to look at yourself in the mirror and admit your own faults is one of the reasons you’ll be a good life coach.
Everyone has to put in the work to better themselves. When this becomes an intuition, you’ll be able to maximize your life coaching abilities.
7. Build a Wide Network
Starting your own life coaching business isn’t easy. No life coach becomes successful right out of the gate. There are going to be many months, if not years of struggle to build your business the way you want it. If this scares you, life coaching might not be the right profession.
When you’re able to buy into the nature of the business, however, you can look at building the foundation as an exciting aspect of the struggle. Your life coaching business will be founded on your ability to network and sell yourself as someone who can help people.
Networking is tricky for some, but most life coaches are sociable people who have a good sales pitch. Building a network of colleagues, associates, and clients will help get you where you need to go.
8. There’s More Demand Than Ever
Our society is more cognizant of the collective mental health struggles that everyone goes through than ever before. There’s more willingness for everyone – individuals and businesses alike – to embrace things like therapy, flex scheduling, and life coaching.
If you become a life coach, your services are going to be in demand. With so many other life coaches out there, you’ll have to put in the work to stand out from the competition. But the point is that people need life coaching, so there’s an opportunity for success.
This is the type of job that automation or AI will never be able to replace. You’re providing your clients with genuine human connections, which is essential for building confidence and overcoming personal hurdles. Life coaching is a field that is only going to grow in the future.
9. There’s Employment Variety
We’ve touched on this a bit, but it’s important to highlight the amount of employment diversity you’ll find within this single field. Yes, you can place your focus solely on corporate settings and make lots and lots of money. You can also focus on helping individuals.
Or, you can offer your services to anyone that needs them. If you want every single day to be different than the one before, you don’t have to choose between corporate coaching and individual coaching. Build up your portfolio by taking on any job that comes your way.
Some of the most popular life coaching niches are:
- Health and wellness coaching
- Financial coaching
- Relationship coaching
- Spiritual coaching
- Entrepreneurial coaching
- Leadership and executive coaching
Within these categories, there are countless paths you may find yourself going down. As we mentioned earlier, each client is going to bring you a new challenge. If you embrace them all, you’ll become a top life coach in no time.
Is It Time to Get Your Life Coach Certification?
These are just a few of the many reasons to become a life coach. At the end of the day, if you’re interested in helping people from all walks of life, you should consider life coaching as a career. Each day will keep you on your toes and let you flex your problem-solving muscle. Did you find this post helpful? Come back to our site again soon for more informative posts about everything from career advice to health and wellness tips.