Do you love helping people achieve their dreams? Are you good at offering guidance and encouragement to others? Those are two of the most important qualifications you need to become a life coach. If you're considering starting a business of your own and answered yes to those two questions, life coaching may be the perfect career for you.



What is a Life Coach?

Life coaches help their clients to figure out the obstacles that hold them back from achieving their dreams, and then guide them to discovering their own solutions to those obstacles. It may sound like therapy, but there are some substantial differences. A life coach is a combination sounding board, cheering section and nagging mother to help people actually tackle the things they need to do in order to achieve a goal.

What Does a Life Coach Do?

Your biggest job is to help your clients figure out what they really want, and what they need to do in order to achieve it. There's more to the job than career coaching, though. Your clients may have specific goals in mind -- to get that book written, or to improve their personal relationships, for instance. You may be hired by a company to help their executives or workers increase their job satisfaction. You may decide to take on any clients, or you may choose to specialize in niche areas like relationship coaching, personal life satisfaction, wellness, weight management or spirituality.

Advantages of a Career as a Life Coach

In most cases, life coaches are considered consultants. As a paid consultant, you'll have the freedom to choose the clients with whom you want to work and set the hours that you'll put in. You may choose to work locally with private clients, or travel nationally to work with corporate clients. A successful coaching consultant can command fees of over $1,000 a day for conducting life coaching sessions, in addition to travel expenses.

What it Takes to Be a Successful Coach

Most life coaches are self-taught, though there are a number of certification programs for people who want to enter the field. In addition to understanding how to motivate people, you should know how to network with others and how to market yourself and your business to others.

A career as a life coach is not for everyone, but it is a rapidly growing job niche in the current job market. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects the consulting industry, of which life coaching is a large part, to continue to grow heavily through 2016. If you have a positive, solution-oriented personality and a love of helping others achieve their goals, life coaching could be your dream career.