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7 Steps to a Successful Life Coaching Career

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Last Updated on March 30, 2025

Life coaching is a relatively new career choice, and as the title of this post suggests, it’s all about helping people find their most fulfilled selves—a valuable and vital job choice if ever there was one. However, what exactly does a life coach do, and what skills do they need to succeed? Check out our guide on life coaching below.

If helping people achieve their dreams sounds satisfying, life coaching could be your career.

What This Article Covers

  • What Life Coaching Involves: Learn how life coaches help clients achieve personal and professional fulfillment through guidance, goal-setting, and motivation.
  • Key People Skills for Success: Discover how empathy, active listening, and effective communication are essential for building strong client relationships and fostering growth.
  • Mastering Goal-Setting Techniques: Understand how life coaches use frameworks like SMART goals to help clients break down objectives into actionable and achievable steps.
  • The Role of Psychology in Coaching: Explore psychological tools like MBTI personality profiling and NLP techniques that enhance coaching effectiveness and client success.
  • Motivation and Accountability Strategies: Learn how life coaches keep clients on track by providing encouragement, support, and accountability throughout their journey.
  • Achieving Work-Life Balance: Discover how life coaches assist clients in creating a balanced lifestyle by managing priorities and making time for personal fulfillment.
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A bit more on life coaching as a career

For the most part, life coaching is something that you will do freelance on a one-to-one basis. It is a service that helps fill that gap by providing advice and support once people have finished their education but still have things they want to achieve in life but aren’t sure how to get there.

Contrary to popular belief, it’s not your job not to advise people so much as to challenge them and draw them a path they can walk that will allow them to reach their most treasured goals.

People skills

To be a life coach, you need to relate to people correctly. This means that you can have empathy with your clients and their situation. However, you also can remain detached enough so that any of their negative energy does not overwhelm you and stop you from helping them in the way that they need.

The prime value that a life coach can provide is an objective view that can help the client put their wants and needs into perspective. Something that can be incredibly valuable for anyone looking to identify what is most important to them in life and how to get there.

As a life coach, you will also need to develop a way of talking to people that helps them see where they might be going wrong but is respectful and not condescending. After all, you will primarily work with adults who are paying you directly. So, they need to feel that the relationship is positive, nurturing, and thriving rather than one in which they are just instructed on what to do.

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Goal setting

Understanding the goal-setting process is also vital for a good life coach. Goal work forms a large part of the dialogue between the coach and the client and the motivation for change itself.

That means you need to be able to help your clients identify the goals they want to work towards and break these goals down into manageable and achievable steps.

Many life coaches use the SMART goal system or a variation of it to do this. This system not only identifies goals and how to get there but also uses several checks and balances to ensure that they are relevant to the client’s life and can be achieved in the time scale that they have. This can mean a much better rate of success for the client.

Psychology

The psychological elements of life coaching are many and varied, and it can help to study some of the more significant concepts, such as personality profiles in terms of the MBTI, as well as actualizing techniques like NLP.

Knowledge of the MBTI personality profiles is helpful in coaching because it can help clients identify what they need in their lives to be the most fulfilled. Each person fits roughly into four categories: extroverted vs. introverted, sensing vs. intuition, thinking versus feeling and perceiving vs. judging. Once you have established where they fall on the MBTI scale, you can help the client identify different working conditions, ways of absorbing information, and types of interpersonal connections that will suit them the best.

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05/08/2025 04:50 pm GMT

Without this knowledge, clients can easily believe they would be happy and fulfilled in a particular life situation they worked hard to achieve, only to realize that it isn’t a good fit. Therefore, a life coach can help clients minimize wasted time and effort on poorly suited goals. Alternatively, they can help them create conditions for achieving their goals much better suited to their natural self. Something that will make aims much easier to achieve and maintain in the long term.

NLP, or Neuro-Linguistic Programming, is another psychological tool that has a valuable place in life coaching because it’s all about reprogramming the brain through speech. It can be incredibly useful in helping a client break through blocks, overcome confidence issues, and reframe situations more positively. Something that means there is less of a drain on the client’s internal motivation to achieve what they have set out to do.

Motivation

Talking of motivation, when picking a career as a life coach, it’s vital to remember that you will have a key role to play in supporting and motivating your clients to achieve their goals. This often includes showing faith and reminding them of their strengths and capabilities, either verbally or by email or text.

However, the life coach is also there to hold the client accountable for their decision and see them through. For some clients, this may be as easy as discussing how a particular task went and how it can be improved. However, for others, it may include helping them analyze their feelings and any issue they encountered while completing a step on their plan and seeing how they could be holding them back in other areas.

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05/08/2025 10:35 pm GMT

Balance

Of course, no one can truly enjoy life unless it’s balanced, something that so many of us struggle with in modern times. Balance is another vital element of life coaches’ work, and it can be their responsibility to help foster equality between all the different responsibilities and needs in their clients’ lives.

This could include helping clients ring-fence working times so they can have more leisure time to enjoy. It could also involve assisting clients in finding short times during their day for fitness or artistic activities they have identified as valued. A life coach will help them include greater variety and richness in their everyday lives.

Next Steps

  • Assess Your Coaching Skills: Evaluate your communication, empathy, and goal-setting abilities to determine your readiness for a career in life coaching.
  • Gain Proper Certification: Enroll in an accredited life coaching program to build credibility, learn coaching techniques, and meet industry standards.
  • Define Your Coaching Niche: Identify the area you want to specialize in, such as career coaching, wellness coaching, or personal development, to attract the right clients.
  • Develop a Business Strategy: Create a plan outlining your services, pricing, and marketing strategies to establish and grow your coaching practice.
  • Start Building Your Client Base: Leverage social media, networking events, and referrals to connect with potential clients and grow your coaching business.

Final Words

Becoming a successful life coach requires dedication, self-awareness, and a commitment to helping others reach their full potential. You can create a meaningful career that positively impacts lives by refining your skills, earning certifications, and building a solid client base. Stay proactive, continue learning, and embrace the journey of guiding others toward their goals.

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05/08/2025 04:45 pm GMT


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