How to become a life coach
Do you want to become a life coach?
If the answer is a resounding ‘yes,’ then you’re in the right place. I’m Felicity Muscat, a former life coach turned business coach and Mindset Mentor. With seven enriching years spent as a life coach, I now aid online Coaches, Practitioners, and Service providers in constructing a profitable, six-figure business. The journey you are wanting to embark on has empowered me to guide clients through a remarkable transformation. Ive written this article to help share some wisdom around the process.
The advice that I’ll give you about becoming a life coach is from the standpoint of giving advice on what you need to know in order to make it and be successful. As a lot of Coaches I have worked with have all been where you are and had the same concerns and challenges getting started, I had almost every single concern possible when I began, too.
If you’ve been wondering about transitioning careers and becoming a coach, or if you’re already a coach, I’ve written this article to help you know a few things before you get started. Trust me, you don’t want to miss some of these imperative things that, had I known them eight years earlier, would have made it into my second year, which I didn’t.
My business only started to work in my third year. If I had known some of the things I know now, it would have saved me almost $200k in running my business over the last eight years.
The first thing is how to get started as a coach.
Step 1
The first thing you want to do is set up your business name and branding. This can be done by finding a life coach certification programme that suits your needs and taking some time to develop your branding strategy.
Your life coach business name and branding will be the first thing potential clients see, so it’s important to make a good impression.
You want to have a brand, and the brand is generally what attracts your ideal audience. The values that your brand represents are what the audience will be attracted to, so create a brand that others want to be a part of, and you won’t have any trouble getting eyes on your brand. My brand works with Business owners who want to reach their potential. It is designed for high-impact, high-achieving coaches and Experts who refuse to play small. This allows me to speak to clients who value the best life has to offer, who value effortlessness over struggle, who value empowerment over being a victim, who are conscious, and who want to overcome whatever stands in their path to make it work.
Do you need to become certified as a coach?
If you have the experience to back you up with all the knowledge that you’ve acquired in your own time, definitely not. As long as you can actually produce results for your client, as clients won’t stay with you if they aren’t getting some type of value or result.
The second thing is that you want to decide whether you have a specific niche that you want to actually target, whether you want to be a coach and use your experience in order to help others who are in similar situations to you, or whether you actually want to go get your accreditation.
There is a different system and a different way to really be credible in your industry based on the two approaches, and I’m happy to share that in another article. I have written a short ebook in the MT Coaches group below, which you can grab in my Facebook group guides section.
You want to decide whether you want to get accredited or not, how to choose a good accreditation as a coach, and what you want to do.
So there are a lot of courses out there that offer your accreditation in life coaching, and you’re able to branch into business coaching, relationship coaching, health coaching, life coaching, and financial coaching, and they kind of offer the spectrum of all five.
I took my life course through Live It Now. It was at Neutral Bay in Sydney, Australia, where I became accredited as a Master NLP Practitioner. But the reason that I don’t actually tell my coaches or my clients why they need to become accredited is that you don’t actually need to be accredited to be an amazing coach. If I’m honest, I probably used NLP for maybe one year when I became a coach, and because I was studying the mindsets of people, I realised that NLP was not the best Modality to get my clients results. I finished my 4-year MRP accreditation and realised NLP wasn’t the way to get clients the results I wanted to help them with.
So you need to know first what you want to do in order to decide whether you need accreditation or not. If you want to help someone with finances but you don’t have any experience in finances, I would definitely advise you to go do whatever it takes to learn how to become a really good financial coach because it’s not only the results that you give your clients;
If you’re really good at what you do, you will constantly get referrals. Initially, I started out as a life coach, and then I spent the first and second years really mastering relationships. I was able to get over 30 referrals a year as I was able to get results for my clients, and I don’t feel I could have done that without having a solid understanding of their minds and the study I had done.
I was accredited as a Life and Business Coach initially, But I honestly felt that that wasn’t enough training for me to feel confident at the time. Little did I know at the time that I had a lot of confidence-boosting beliefs that were really making me feel like I didn’t know enough.
So I went and read almost 300 books in business, health, and relationships, so that when the client was actually coming to me with the problem, not only could I give them such a vast array of experience and wisdom for them to draw upon, but I could also use the mindset things that I had learned in order to help coach them.
So it’s really dependent on you and what you want to do with your client as to whether you need to become accredited.
Step 2
Next is knowing who your niche is and who you want to serve. This can be done by creating a life coach avatar or ideal client profile. By knowing who you want to serve, you can better market your life coaching business to them.
What do you need to Succeed as a coach?
You really don’t need too much. You actually do need to spend a little bit of time understanding the sales process and how to convert clients, because depending on how well you do that, that is going to be the reason why your business makes it or doesn’t. If you cannot convert sales or if you don’t know how to obtain leads, it doesn’t matter how good a coach you are; your business won’t work.
I studied the human mind for 15 and a half years. I was absolutely and painfully struggling in my business without this knowledge. I was doing 75 things at once. I was doing speaking gigs. I was burned out simply because I didn’t understand the correct strategy on how to obtain leads, and if I had known that, it had nothing to do with how great I was or whether my business was going to be successful. It would have saved me a lot of wasted funds by not investing in the wrong things. It actually depended on how well I could bring in leads and then convert them. It would have saved me years and years of wasted time.
Once you’ve done that, you want to actually have some type of social presence, and your social presence is basically there, whether it’s in the form of a website or not. You either need a website, a Facebook page, or an Instagram page, and then a way to get leads organically (without paying for advertising). Via paid-for platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads. You don’t need to pay for ads, but you’ll need this instead if you don’t want to pay for ads.
1) A great daily routine to get traffic into your business via Facebook groups, Pinterest, and Ticktock
2) The ability to write good content and optimise it
3) A consistent, disciplined, and patient approach if you want to grow organically
4) A Personality that is able to stand out and go against the grain and has no problem writing value-based content that addresses your ideal client’s biggest pain points to start attracting your ideal client to you
Why is Authority almost the most important thing as a coach?
The reason it’s imperative to have some type of authority as to why you are good at what you do is because you either need to have articles embarking on your knowledge of your niche, you either need to have a book that you’ve written, or you need to have some type of way to communicate your message to your ideal niche. Without authority, everything you do as a coach is going to be difficult. Clients will choose other Coaches over you if they feel they are better at showcasing their value and expertise. Almost all of my clients who came to me in the mindset space had read almost all of my content and knew I was the coach for them before I had even spoken to them. In an online space where hundreds of Coaches are spending more on ads, to get in front of your client, you need a way to stand out, show how you are different, and let the content and your book or website do most of the selling for you, so you don’t cap your ability to scale later.
It’s going to be hard to convert leads. It’s going to be hard to get referrals. It’s going to be hard to turn cold traffic into warm traffic. It’s going to be hard to get clients to trust us. Your clients are going to give you a lot of resistance. They’re going to be very defensive because they’re not sure if what they’re investing in is going to work. But if you successfully build your authority first, either in a few ways or by yourself,
How do you begin Creating Authority in your clients minds?
3 ways
1) Client results
2) Content that addresses the challenges and pain points -Clients find you interesting based on your ability to talk about their pain and problems.
One is through social proof; another is through having a lot of knowledge that you give out in terms of value marketing; and I’ll talk more about the other ways you can form authority.
And that’s generally based on three things. One, based on your ability to engage your audience, is to build trust, and three is to get their attention. If you can successfully do that and actually have those skills, you will be able to constantly build authority and be the go-to expert in your niche.
Why is it important to become an expert or an authority?
I’m not sure if you are aware of this, and no coaching company will let you know, but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of coaches entering this market every year. If you don’t know how to stand out and attract followers in your niche, someone who isn’t as good as you at what you do will be chosen every time.
Next Steps
If you need help, I have a few resources down below that will help you. The first one is that I have my own conversation connection formula, which I’ve used in my 16 years in sales to give you an authentic conversation that converts clients if you’re interested as well.
I also have the objection handler, which is a way to authentically open up a client to be able to help them help you without any sales tactics, without any manipulation, just being an authentic coach with integrity and not falling for all of these sales tactics on the market.
Once you have the coaching foundations sorted, as well as the marketing and positioning, There are a few mindset hindrances that a lot of new coaches actually develop along the way when they experience challenges. And I’ve written an article below about the 10 mindset strengths you need to develop as a coach in order to make it in this industry, and a few of them touch on your ability to fail quickly and your ability to know what your niche is and to figure out whether it’s profitable really quickly.
Do Some Coaching Spaces have more available clients and are more profitable than others?
So when you’re starting out as a coach, there are four coaching spaces or niches that are going to set you up to be able to have an abundance of clients. And if you can set up your coaching business from the start the correct way, it will allow you to scale as big as you want to. So it’s really important that you make sure, before starting out and investing your time and money, that the niche that you’re interested in serving is profitable.
In my resources guide, I’ve created exactly what’s needed for you to start learning. You can grab them in my Coaches High Impact Network Group in the guides Section.
Message me if you have questions and want to join my Coaches high-impact network, where you can get practise clients.