How to Become a Life Coach should be a natural extension of existing services for any entrepreneur. It can boost your prestige, your presence — and your profits. As with any business venture, planning is the key to ensuring you make the most of your unique blend of skills, personality and experience.
This post is designed to help you determine and put in motion your own, unique coaching program. Let’s go through five basic steps you need to employ to set yourself up for success.
Contents
Step #1 Determine Your Style in how to become a life coach
For maximum results in every area — profitability, personal fulfilment and client satisfaction — it’s important to understand your own needs and preferences before you rush off to cater to your clients. What are your experiences, skills and what knowledge do you have which can be used to help and serve others?
Are you ready to start coaching at the top level — the one-on-one mentoring model — or would you be more comfortable with a limited-number group membership site?
Do you like teaching via video, text or audio? Are you a “people” person eager to mentor… or a techy loner who simply has information to impart?
Even if you’re a definite loner and you find interaction difficult, plan to include coaching in your service package and plans anyway: Not only will you be able to find the perfect model for your personality, but you’ll also be able to enjoy the added benefits that coaching others can bring….
– Rapid increase in niche authority
– Automatic expert status
– Perfect positioning for word-of-mouth buzz creation
– Extra streams of income- Increased desirability as a JV partner
– Increased attractiveness to “super affiliates”
– Increase in perceived value to clients, customers, peers, affiliates and the media
– Increased media opportunities and guest desirability- Perfect positioning to create strong loyalty; build fans and followers
– A stronger brand Analyze your preferences, skills and personality. Research what your target coaching clients want.
Pick the coaching model you feel most comfortable with. Create a program incorporating all these elements.
Step #2 Choosing Your Coaching Model
Once you’ve determined who your best paying clientele would be and where the boundaries of your own comfort zone lie, it’s time to decide which coaching model will bring in maximum customer satisfaction, results — and profit.
Popular choices to consider, roughly in order of lowest fee to highest:
– A simple newsletter coaching membership
– Weekly “closed” blog lesson format, with limited feedback through comments
– A basic membership site, with forum discussion (free or paid)
– A graduated membership site with increased access to your feedback at different price points (E. G. “silver”, “gold”, “platinum”)
– Coaching via semi-regular or occasional teleseminars or webinars (with or without interactive capability)
– Intern mentorship- One-on-one email or telephone coaching- Exclusive “in person” retreats for select, limited groups
Feel free to mix-‘n’-match these models, depending on your clientele’s needs and on your own saleability. To determine the latter, ask yourself the following questions:
– Are you already well-known in your niche? A public figure? A celebrity?
– Do you already have a strong communication style preference that works well for you? For example… – Audio .MP3 interviews?
– Teleseminars?
– Written lessons or blog posts?
– Video instruction (screenshot or live)?
– Pre-recorded?
– Live and interactive?
– Forum discussion model?
– Guided membership site with multiple elements (written posts, feedback, discussion forum, resource section including video or audio files, etc.)
– Where do your technical skills lie? (E.G. video making, blogging, audio interviews, etc.)- Do you plan to outsource any element of your coaching delivery? – Do you have a budget or will you have to start at ground level?
There are other important questions to ask yourself, in preparation. Your answers will determine what you can charge:
1 – Where are you on your own journey within your niche? Are you considered by public to be at the top level, do you have solid experience under your belt or are you simply a couple of steps ahead of your target clientele?
2 – Do you need specific certification or accreditation to coach in your niche? And if so, do you have it? Are there any governing organizations which regulate it? Would having a general coaching certification really add to my niche authority, guest status or earning power?
3 – Is your preferred coaching model a simple one, or does it involve multiple or complex resources? Will you have to have software created? Provide scripts and software for your clients to use? Complex or expensive delivery methods? Hire a virtual assistant?
4 – What are the potential profits versus your investment with this coaching model? Considering your budget and resources may be necessary, at this stage. If you can’t invest in setting up as high-end a program as you like, can you plan for it later, with room to grow?
Step #3 Checking the Essentials
Now it’s time to take a deeper look at your own personal characteristics. Anyone can become a coach, but only a certain percentage has what’s considered a “natural” coaching affinity.
Do you lead a balanced life? It’s not impossible to coach if you’re constantly juggling and scrambling — but you can maximize your profits and prestige so much more from a position of calm harmony and balance. (Remember, mediocre coaches, tell; good coaches show; great coaches live it.)
Have you mastered time management? If so, it will be much easier to “walk the walk” and lead with authority. Your content will flow smoothly, your lessons will be stamped with professionalism and you’ll be able to stay objective through effective decompression.
Are you able to motivate or facilitate? A strong coach knows when to be quiet, when to nudge, when to guide. Her greatest joy comes when clients seemingly take their own “next steps” and come to believe in their own abilities and see their own paths.
Do you care about people? –You don’t need to be a “people person” to be a great coach — but you do have to care about your clients, even if it’s only caring that they receive the skills or information they need. Great coaches will never do a sloppy or token job: Instead, they focus solely on the results the end user needs or wants, and do their best to deliver it. That’s truly caring!
Do you enjoy mentoring others? If you think you don’t, perhaps all you need is a different coaching model more suited to your personality.
Here’s the real deal about coaching: The more you enjoy helping your clients attain success, the more powerful and effective you become. The more you live it, the more your clients will believe.
If coaching real, live people doesn’t come easily to you, don’t despair: You can still profit from it. Pick one of the simplest models set up for no to minimal interaction (for example, offering a high-value, monthly or weekly newsletter, packed with insider tips or instruction).
Now it’s time to start thinking specifically about your potential profits.
Step #4 Monetize Your Coaching… Effectively
You might be amazed to discover how many people start “accidentally” coaching or mentoring for free — and then discover they’re investing so much time, they really do need to start charging!
Get yourself into the habit of profitability by keeping in mind this formula…
The closer you can get to all three objectives, the more successful your coaching venture.
One of the easiest ways to boost your profit ratio by reducing the time invested into your coaching program lies in repurposing existing material. For example, taking a paid product you’ve already written and turning it into lesson segments, adding your feedback to the mix to give it an interactive twist.
You can position your step-by-step coaching as an up-sell to the paid product itself… and the beauty of it is, those who take you up on this offer will have pre-qualified themselves as dedicated students willing to go the extra mile (the most rewarding type of people to help!)
This pre-qualification, so that success-driven students present themselves at your doorstep, leads to the second part of our formula, greatest client success. Remember, these are the clients who will become the most dedicated affiliates and who will give you the most glowing, sincere testimonials. Combine your minimum time invested with their success and that naturally leads you to your final goal: Maximum profit!
– Other ways to maximise your profits while minimising your time invested:
– Use resale rights or PLR material and simply add interactive elements
– Limit access to your time. Don’t attempt to be all things to all people. Let your actual set up pre-control precisely how and where clients will have access to you.Provide a free forum to give your students a chance to help each other… at no cost to you
– Provide self-help resources such as worksheets, templates, shortcut software, plug ins and widgets
Step #5 Deciding What to Charge
When deciding what to charge, however (and when to charge it) the onus is on you to come up with your perfect mix:
1 – Will you offer a ground-level, free option, open to all?(Perhaps a forum dealing with your niche subject?) This is a great way to not only determine if your niche subject is hot enough to generate coaching clientele, but to accelerate your authority status. If you consider your free ground-level forum as a tool, it can help position you to present paid options (perhaps more than one).
2 – Is your skill level equal to your proposed fee base? And before you rush to brand yourself as “not really all that much of a celebrity” or admit that you’re only a few steps ahead of your clientele, remember that it is all about perceived value. If the need for your coaching is hot enough and competition is thin or inferior, you can charge more — and get it.
3 – Remember your coaching program will — and should — have a limited, natural life span. While it’s nice to imagine you will create paying customers for life, it’s important to acknowledge that people seeking coaching are on a journey… to get where you now stand. It’s your job to help them get there and without fulfilling that mandate, you won’t become one of the top coaches. So plan and plant several levels into your client’s journey.
Consider starting them out with a low-cost weekly newsletter, graduating them to an “inner circle” coaching program with feedback (e.g., “how to” lessons with assignments and feedback); then finishing off the journey with big-ticket, one-on-one coaching.
Also consider adding “master classes” with special guests at a higher skill level than you possess, to get your graduates in the habit of return for tune ups.
4 – Set up an affiliate program. Provide excellent resources for those who want to promote you. Make it easy for them to do so.
5 – Weigh your profit potential against your costs, define your needs and compare features. If you need Help Desk software or a virtual assistant to help you administer the program, factor this in and charge more. If you need membership site software, do your homework and select software that runs easily (i.e. don’t let cheap software sabotage your brilliant coaching). Be sure to consider if you need to:
– Create membership levels such as silver, gold and platinum?
– Allow staggered content to “drip” to individual members?- Allow both “lifetime” access as well as graduated access?
Conclusion
The most important step you’ll ever take, however, is also, fortunately, the simplest. And that is… “Just do it”. Get started. Yes, even while getting accreditation or certification or only being a few steps ahead yourself! If you can help your potential clientele, then go ahead and provide that newsletter, or turn that info product into lessons. Promote your new coaching program with passion. Even offer your services as a prize in a contest for a limited number of people, strictly to generate testimonials and create loyal affiliates — there’s always a way to get the coaching ball rolling in a way that feels natural both to you and your clientele.
Remember that coaching is a journey of transformation… for both you and your client. Change and adapt with them — and be prepared to reap real rewards.
To your success!
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