How to be a successful life coach, part 2

Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d'Ognes by Marie Denise Villers

How to be a successful life coach part 2

Last time we met we covered the desire to coach, the entrepreneurial spirit, niche, client attraction, and mindset. In part 2, we’ll cover coaching competence and skill mastery, business sense, interpersonal and business boundaries, personal development, mentorship, continuing education/training, community/support systems, and a proverbial room of one’s own for creative pursuits.

Coaching Skills: You need to be really adept at interpersonal communication, understand the concept of holding space, know how to ask questions that promote forward-momentum, work with client resistance and fear, create a safe container in which to do the work of coaching, put clients at ease, understand the psychology of change and personal growth. There really are no shortcuts here. If your coaching skills are not up to par, you will not have clients stick around and your business will not succeed.

Business Sense: Part of being a successful coach is insuring that you are running a business. That means setting up your internal processes in a formal way: the way clients contact you, schedule sessions with you, pay you, etc. You need to treat your coaching practice like a business in order for it to be profitable.

Interpersonal & Business Boundaries: You need to have time when you are on the clock and time when you are off the clock. Try to keep these two times as distinct as possible. This will help you focus when you are working and enjoy your free time when you’re not. In order to be a successful life coach, you need to be a happy one. And in order to be happy, you need to set good boundaries around work and personal time.

There’s so much more to say about this one and we cover quite a bit of it in 90 Days to Coaching Confidence & Marketing Mastery. This is an area where we are all on a learning curve. Many coaches I work with struggle to set limits, seeing clients at all hours, not charging for their time, being overly accommodating. And that’s just on the business side. On the interpersonal side, you have to have tight boundaries too. That means time for self-care (basic stuff like moving your body and feeding it nutritious food). It means time for important relationships, it means time for maintenance of our home environments. It means time for all the non-business things. And that’s the majority of our life, for most of us. So there needs to be the right balance and the right boundaries in your life coaching practice and in your personal life as a coach. When you get this right, you are in a really strong position to achieve success-whatever that may mean to you.

Personal Development: As a coach, you need to be growing. You can’t take the easy way out. You need to be learning and stretching and expanding your understanding of the world, your place in it, and how to always be stepping more fully into who you are and your authentic self. A consistent personal development practice is something that separates successful life coaches from coaches that are not experiencing the kind of coaching practice and the kind of lifestyle they want.

We cover personal development every week in the Authentic Wholeness Coach Certification program and since it’s a weekly practice, it becomes a discipline. By the end of the program, you have months of consistent personal development under your belt (in addition to the professional development, coaching methodology training, and marketing work that you get in the program).

In the Coaching Confidence & Marketing Mastery program, we also dive deep into personal development and its relationship to your business success. You need some kind of personal development practice to succeed as a life coach. Period.

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident

the art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.