WHAT IS LIFE COACHING?
Life Coaching is all the rage these days. Browse on LinkedIn or open up Instagram, and everyone seems to be a coach, or know a coach. Perhaps you have your heart set on being a coach. But what is Life Coaching, really?
According to the Cambridge Business English Dictionary, “a Life Coach is someone who helps their clients decide what they want in their life, and how to achieve it.”
Glen Murdoch, Founder and CEO of The Life Coaching College, explains further: “Life Coaching is all about moving you from where you are now, to where you want to go. So if you’re stuck at Point A, your Life Coach will help you get unstuck and reach Point B.”
How they do this will vary depending on the course(s) they have undertaken — but ultimately, a Life Coach will help you to maximise your potential, gain clarity and confidence, maintain focus, and find success in your personal/professional life.
THE ORIGINS OF LIFE COACHING
Life Coaching has a number of supposed roots, including sports psychology and business management.
Over in the US, the American financial planner Thomas Leonard is generally acknowledged as the first person to develop coaching in the 1980s — founding the first Coaching school “Coach-U”.
Meanwhile, back in England around the same time, John Whitmore and Graham Alexander pioneered the GROW Model of Coaching (which is still used today) based on Timothy Gallway’s ‘The Inner Game of Tennis’.
However it officially kicked it off, Life Coaching started to seep into the self-help industry and business world throughout the ‘80s — Tony Robbins being a prominent coach during this period and beyond, leveraging Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) skills — and took off in the ‘90s as a career in and of itself.
Nowadays, Life Coaching has grown to become an incredibly lucrative and popular industry. According to the International Coach Federation’s (ICF) 2020 Study on the Global Coaching Industry, there were over 70,000 coach practitioners globally in 2019 (up a meaty 33% from 2015) — and the Life Coaching industry takes a yearly revenue of almost $4 billion AUD (an increase of 21% over the 2015 estimate!).
SO WHY IS LIFE COACHING SO POPULAR AS A CAREER?
We interview every single student before they join one of our coaching courses, so we know exactly what draws most people to this career path: freedom and fulfillment.
“Life Coaching is often about contribution. It’s about being able to live your life on your own terms, build your own business, work the hours you want to work, and know that the work you do is meaningful,” says Glen.
Now perhaps more than ever, in a COVID-19 climate, being able to work remotely has massive lustre!
“With the internet age, and the social conversation being so success-focused and freedom-focused, Life Coaching has ballooned in recent years. As a Life Coach, there are endless opportunities to redefine your work, and be your own boss — while doing work that is actually fulfilling.”
It can also pay a pretty penny too. According to the ICF, Life Coaches charge an average of $300 AUD a session, and make at least $85k AUD annually. Similarly, we’ve seen incredible results from many of our graduates — you can read some of their stories here.
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THERAPY/COUNSELLING, MENTORING + LIFE COACHING?
This is a common question that gets asked by clients and prospective coaches alike.
Ultimately, coaching is future-focused. It’s about moving someone forward: looking at where you want to go and how to get there. In contrast to coaching, Counselling and Therapy are often focused on looking back and healing the past in order to move forward.
Coaching and Mentoring are different because coaching is about powerful questioning, whereas mentoring is about advice-giving. That being said, adds Glen, “a really good coach will often play in the space of being a mentor, a trainer, and even incorporate therapeutic techniques.”
WHAT HAPPENS DURING A COACHING SESSION?
A coaching session takes place when the client is at Point A in their life, and wants to get to Point B — and the coach helps them through all possible options to get there. How they do that will depend on the tools they have in their coaching toolkit!
A traditional life coaching session primarily involves listening and powerful questioning by the coach to help the client find their own answers.
But modern coaching has evolved to be a little different. It often brings in therapeutic-techniques, such as NLP, to help clients shift their limiting beliefs and behaviours and reach their goals.
A session might include mentoring too if you have expertise in a particular area or field, or a set of philosophies you want to teach your clients. Because at the end of the day, great mentoring should have coaching at its core, anyway.
“Excellent mentors don’t just give information. Having coaching skills up your sleeve means clients will be a core part of the growth and transformation process too. So you won’t just tell them what to do – you’ll help them take action and make it happen.”
The bottom line is, with the right training course, you can make this career your own! “Coaches nowadays get an opportunity to do all of these things and more,” emphasises Glen.
HOW WE TRAIN OUR COACHES AT THE LIFE COACHING COLLEGE:
The four main modalities you’ll learn in our top-rated Diploma of Life Coaching are Traditional Life Coaching, NLP, Hypnosis, and Positive Psychology.
Each of these disciplines comes with a range of techniques, tools and models you can use in a coaching session, so as a coach, you’re not a one-trick pony! You have the ability to give your clients what they want (or what they need!), when they need it, to best support their growth.
And perhaps most importantly, you’ll be equipped with the skills to support and create real transformation for your clients — with confidence.
Click here to explore our Diploma of Life Coaching Course — where we’ll teach you how to build a profitable coaching business, alongside the skills you need to change the lives of your clients for the better.
