Life Coaching as a Career
Many people need assistance setting personal and professional goals. People through life can become immobilized or unhappy with their lives and are unsure how to alter unhealthy behavior patterns or create new personal or professional goals. Sometimes they seek guidance from specialists through life coaches.
What is a life coaching?

Life Coaching
Coaching is the process of observation of existing thinking, behavioral and linguistic patterns, setting specific goals, discerning hidden saboteurs and supporting the client in making a plan of action and following it to achieve the desired results. During their work, life coaches create such a deep respect and rapport, the client feels comfortable, and most of all safe, to move from their “stuck” place to success. In simple words, coaching is like having a personal trainer for your life.
A life coach knows the client has all the answers to every question or challenge, even if those answers appear to be obscured, concealed or hidden inside. The coaches’ job is to ask the right questions and use right tools and techniques to empower the client to find those answers within themselves.
Coaches are trained to listen to their clients’ words, observe their actions, and become aware of the way their client currently interprets the world around them. Intelligence is about having fine distinctions about a topic or field. The finer the distinctions, the more wisdom or perception is available. This program will teach the coach fine distinctions about human behavior. By identifying limiting strategic filters and beliefs through close observation of verbal and non-verbal patterns, the coach elicits solutions and facilitates resolution of conflicts.
Main Goal of Life Coach
The main goal of life coach is to approach their clients with the understanding that there is a positive intention behind every behavior. There is no such thing as failure – there is only feedback. The ability to identify and interpret this feedback is one of the many ways coaches find what is blocking a person from their goal. Then the coach and client create a feed-forward plan of action to achieve goals and eliminate the challenges.
A life coach knows the client has all the answers to every question or challenge deep within them, even if those answers appear to be obscured, concealed or hidden inside. Life coaches act as detectives to identify the strategies that are already successful in other contexts of a person’s life and to tease out hidden saboteurs that may be keeping their client from achieving their goals. Then they guide their client in discovering how to apply their successful strategies as a way of overcoming their identified saboteurs. By sharing communication tools and strategies for success, this method of coaching builds a relationship with the client that shapes the client’s ability to make better and finer distinctions leading to solid decisions and life choices more naturally and easily.
Online programs in Life Coaching
- Walden University – Leadership Development and Coaching
- Certified Professional Life and Business Coaching
Fowler Wainwright International Institute of Professional Coaching - UMassOnline – Certificate in Creative Thinking at Work
How to Become a Life Coach
If you want to become a successful life coach, you need to possess great communication skills. Professional life coaches understand the relationship between how people think and communicate. They have an awareness of the relationship between language patterns and behavior. Life coaches are usually trained to track the assumptions and thinking processes of the client reflected in their use of language. A skilled life coach should be able to track the clients’ beliefs, behaviors and metaphors of life enable and to ask appropriate and pertinent questions of the client. This leads to a deep self exploration for the client that often facilitates subtle shifts in the client’s awareness that often makes all the difference in making significant progress towards desired outcomes.
If you want to become a life coach, you should keep in mind that Life coaches do not require any license or certification to practice.
They have no training requirements.
Career in Life Coaching
Life coaches work with people who don’t have a specific mental health diagnosis. Counseling psychologists see people who have an identified mental health issue.
Nowadays coaching industry offers you a variety of career options. Your coaching business can take place in a one-on-one setting, on the phone, in a small group, in an online format, or any combination. You may opt to conduct lunch time seminars on your coaching specialty to smaller groups at corporations.
Featured Online Programs
- MS - Leadership Coaching Psychology - Capella University
- MA/Psych - Exec Coaching - University of the Rockies
- MS Psychology - Leadership/Coaching - Walden University
- PsyD - Exec Coaching - University of the Rockies








