Myths About Being a Life Coach
Being a life coach is an exciting career where no day looks exactly the same. Some days you might be working with private clients, other days you might be preparing a lunch and learn presentation for organizational coaching, and another day you might be coaching a group. While this sounds amazing and rightfully so, there are some myths about being a life coach that should be addressed.
Myth: If you build it, they will come without any effort on your part. This is the number one myth about being a life coach—or any kind of business owner! Just because you build a business does not mean that clients will flock to you without some effort to build your coaching business. Any coaching training that promises an easy way to find clients without much effort is unfortunately trying to bait you, and it’s those training programs that make it seem easy that create this myth about being a life coach.
Myth: Coaching is just a conversation. Coaching involves active listening, crafting collaborative questions that don’t have easy answers to allow the client to explore their personal truth, and having the perceptive ability to see when you need to empathize with a client versus when you need to challenge a client. Conversations that happen between friends are reciprocal; friends expect that you listen as much as you talk. Coaching conversations are strategic, actionable, and the focus is on the client.
Myth: Having a niche will limit who you can work with. Consider this recent Craft of Coaching episode with Laura Simms where we talk about whether or not you need a coaching niche—as Laura highlights, it’s absolutely possible to do profound work on a client’s way of being, even if the entry-point is a niche topic such as career coaching.
Myth: You have to have your life together, in order to be a great coach. Plenty of doctors don’t have perfect health; plenty of accountants don’t have perfect finances. While life coaches do need to be ethical and accountable to their clients and the coaching process, it’s a myth about being a life coach that all coaches have their lives perfectly put together. The skill a coach can bring is really about how strategically they support their clients. Perfection is the ultimate myth!
Our training program gives you marketing support to set you up for success, real-time feedback to develop your unique coaching style, guidance on aspects of setting up your business such as adopting a niche, and puts your personal development as the heart of the journey to becoming a coach so that you can grow just as much as you support your clients to grow.