How To Become a Life Coach – 6 Easy Steps 2024

If you are wondering how to become a life coach, take these six easy steps to start.

How to Start Life Coaching

1. Develop Your Unique Coaching Vision

Think about the skills you already developed in your personal- and work-life.

Reflect on your personal passions.

What is it, what makes you happy working with people?

In which niche have your past experiences been? This can be an indicator of where to build your unique coaching vision.

2. Become a Life Coach – Skills You Need to Develop

The following personal abilities are helpful for becoming a life coach:

  • connecting with other people
  • feeling empathy and putting yourself in other’s shoes
  • setting borders between you and other people
  • protecting your own interests
  • analyzing situations from different perspectives

If you don’t have them already, you should put hard work in, to develop them.

If you are not sure if the coach profession is the right choice for you, you can book a coaching session with me to find more clarity.

3. Choose Your Training and Certification Program

Coaching Training
Source: pixabay.com (geralt)

There are a lot of educational organizations on the market, and there are online and offline training to choose from.

If you want to get an ICF Certification, which is actually the best-known certificate in the coaching field, it has to be an

ICF Accredited Coach Training Program (ACTP)

There are a lot of educational programs that are accredited as ACTPs, here are some examples:

Do your own research through the web and look at all of the courses carefully. Check to see if there are some interesting training programs available near you.

Become a Life Coach

4. Become a Life Coach – Start Coaching

A good training program will schedule a lot of self-practice training sessions, in which the participants will coach each other.

I recommend extending these efforts with a private learning group. For sure, other participants in your program will be happy to join.

A supportive self-coaching group will boost your coaching practice.

Additionally, you can ask friends and family and offer them free coaching sessions. The more experience you are able to develop the better.

5. Start Your New Business

After getting your certificate, you can start with your new business.

  • register your business
  • plan your startup costs
  • create a marketing plan
  • plan how to get clients

Related: 10 Best Life Coach Certifications Online ICF Accredited

6. Build Your Website

Parallel to your education you should start building your website.

Engage yourself early in finding the right messages and content for your life coach website.

Present yourself and your unique coaching vision in a professional way.

Setup in the right way, your website can be a powerful tool to get new clients and will expand your reach.

You might be wondering:

Become a Life Coach – Salary

There is a huge variety in terms of life coach salary. The scale goes from
$75 to $500 USD per coaching hour.

According to the ICF global coaching study, the average fee for a 1-hour coaching session is around $230 USD.

Besides the hourly rate, the most important factor for the total cost of a coaching process is highly dependent on the effectiveness and the method of the life coach.

If a life coach and her methods are super-effective, your issue can be solved in 1 to 3 sessions. If not, it can take you 5 to 10 sessions or even longer.

In total, a coach with an hourly rate of $300 USD can be cheaper for you than a coach with a rate of $100 USD per hour.

This is one of the questions you should ask about in your pretalk with your potential candidate.
Ask openly about the estimated number of sessions.

Sign in to the form below to get my FREE pretalk questions checklist!

How Much Money Can You Make Life Coaching?

The ICF global coaching study assessed more than 15,000 professional coaches throughout the whole world.

Salary
Source: pixabay.com (mohamed_hassan)

According to the results, life coach salary span lies between $27,000 and $210,000 USD per year.

The average yearly life coach salary in

  • North America $62,000 USD.
  • Western Europe, UK $55,300 USD
  • Australia (Oceania) $73,100 USD
  • Global Average $51,000 USD

With an online approach to life coaching and a well thought out business strategy, containing digital products, you will be able to scale your life coach salary.

In this comprehensive guide, you find more numbers and stats about life coach salary.

How Long Does It Take?

According to the formal time period of different educational
curriculums, it will take you approximately two years to become a life coach.

Once you finish your education, you can start charging for coaching.

The more experience you gain, the better you will be, so realistically you should look at a timeframe of 5 years to reach a professional state.

However, if you are serious about becoming a coach who makes a difference in other people’s lives, you should commit to a lifelong learning process.

Your personal timeframe to become a good coach is also dependent on your personal abilities and your former worklife experiences.

Here you find my Life Coach – The Complete Guide.

About The Author

Bijan Kholghi is a certified life coach with the Milton Erickson Institute Heidelberg (Germany). He helps clients and couples reach breakthroughs in their lives by changing subconscious patterns. His solution-oriented approach is based on Systemic- and Hypnotherapy.

Bijan