Life Coaching: Assisting People in Achieving Personal Goals
Life Coaching: Assisting People in Achieving Personal Goals
Life coaching can be a very rewarding career especially for those people who like to help others succeed in their lives. If you are one of those people who would like to engage in life coaching as a career, here are some of the important things that you need to know about this emerging new profession.
What Is Life Coaching?
A lot of people associate life coaching with therapy but the truth is, life coaching is not targeted at helping people with psychological ailments. Yes, life coaches follow some of the procedures used in therapy but where therapy aims to correct psychological problems, life coaching strives to correct the development path of the person.
Life coaching is rooted in the idea of executive coaching and draws on the techniques developed in the areas of management consulting and leadership building to guide people towards achieving their goals. There are many disciplines involved in life coaching namely psychology, sociology, management, finance, political science and others.
In other words, if you want to engage in the profession of life coaching, you must have some backgrounds in any of the aforementioned disciplines to be able to help your clients. Life coaches apply different methods of assisting clients. Most life coaches use goal-setting, mentoring, behavior modeling, values assessment and behavior modification to help their clients.
What Investment Do You Need Before You Can Start a Life Coaching Career?
The biggest investment that you need to put up to start a life coaching career is your time and your expertise. If you want to be a good at your job, you need to get advanced training in coaching, mentoring, goal-setting and the likes. Do not stop learning new things everyday. Always remember that the needs of your clients are evolving so you need to keep abreast with the latest development of your industry.
To facilitate coaching sessions with your clients, you will need a telephone and a computer with internet connection. Most clients are usually too busy to sit down with your and discuss their plans so you will most probably have to talk to them on the phone or online most of the time. If most of your clients prefer to get counseling over the phone or online, you need not set up an office in a commercial district. You can even work at home to save cost on rent and other overhead expenses. Just set up a small office in a vacant room in the house where you can work in peace.