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If you're considering working with a life coach or are new to the whole idea, you should know what life coaching is about, who it's for, and the best ways to find a good life coach.
As with hiring any other professional, it's important to choose wisely as it'll greatly affect your experience. Getting the wrong life coach could put you off the whole thing even though there are plenty of people who benefit a lot from life coaching.
Let's take a quick look at life coaching before seeing the best ways to find the right life coaching for you, your goals, and your budget.
Who Is Life Coaching For?
The short answer is that life coaching is for everybody. Anyone can benefit from having more direction in their lives through working with a life coach.
However, life coaches more generally work with people to help them with either their careers, personal lives, or a combination of the two.
The people who'll most benefit from life coaching are those who struggle to achieve their career goals, feel lost in their career, or are generally unhappy with their current situation at work.
Life coaches can also help people with their personal goals. These could be related to their interpersonal relationships, diet, exercise, hobbies, or anything in someone's personal life where they need help setting achievable goals.
Finally, life coaching is particularly good for those who have problems maintaining a healthy work-life balance. Life coaches focus on helping people manage and achieve their goals and when it comes to work-life balance, the best life coaches really excel.
Just make sure you know exactly what life coaches should and shouldn't do before working with one.
What Exactly Do Life Coaches Do?
The term “life coach” says a lot about life coaches and what they do while also really saying very little about what exactly they do.
Much like sports, where athletes are coached by professionals who help them perform to the best of their abilities, life coaches do the same with a focus on a person's career or personal life.
While a sports coach may run training sessions, offer advice on technique, come up with strategies for the game, and even tell the athletes what they should and shouldn't eat, a life coach can teach you strategies, approaches, and techniques to help you achieve more of your personal goals.
It can help a lot in your career and personal life to have structure, clear and achievable goals, and even have someone to help pick you back up when you struggle.
Motivation is key to achieving goals and life coaches work with clients to manage their motivation, work on techniques for dealing with failure, and teach them how to set goals that keep them motivated and driven toward achievable goals.
Every life coach is different so what exactly your life coach does will depend on what area of your life you're working on and what you need help with.
Just remember that life coaches won't do everything for you and you'll be expected to prepare for each life coaching session.
Is Life Coaching Worth It?
Again, whether or not life coaching is worth it will depend a lot on what you want out of life coaching, how much you need it, how much you're willing to pay, and the kind of life coach that you get.
Life coaching is as much about the life coach as it is about you. Life coaches help their clients, but the clients also have a massive responsibility to be active participants in the process. It's their lives that are being coached, after all.
If you're looking for clarity in terms of your career or even goals in your personal life, life coaching can be hugely beneficial, too. Just like tidying the messiest room of the house, it can be difficult knowing where to begin, but with the help of a life coach, seemingly impossible conundrums become much easier to solve when there's somebody else to help you with them.
For those who struggle to maintain positive or beneficial habits, life coaching is excellent for teaching you how to stay motivated. If you're the kind of person who starts things but never finishes them, a life coach can teach you how to stay on track and, more importantly, how to get back on track when you stumble.
What You Should Look for when Hiring a Life Coach
If you feel that you could benefit from life coaching, your next job is to find a respectable and professional life coach. Just like with any other line of work, there are bad actors in the world of life coaching, too.
To hire the best life coaches, you have to set the good coaches apart from the bad ones. This isn't to say that a lot or even most life coaches are bad, but it can be difficult to work out which are which before it's too late.
With life coaches, testimonials from other clients are essential. Not every coach is right for every person, but you should always start your search by looking for life coaches who are highly rated. If you can find sites or platforms (like ours), where freelancers and life coaches are rated by their customers, you can see which life coaches regularly produce happy customers.
It's also useful to look at potential life coaches' previous experience, any qualifications they may have, the kind of coaching they offer, and what they look for in a client. After all, there's always the coach and there's always the client and it's massively important for both parties that they're working with a good match.
There are also financial concerns to look for so you'll always want to look for life coaches you can afford. You don't want to have to stop your life coaching too soon because you can't afford it. Not only will you fail to properly enjoy the benefits of coaching, but you'll also have wasted your money on the coaching up until then. Look for coaches with an hourly rate that you can afford while also remembering that you get what you pay for.
Incredibly cheap life coaches may seem like a smart choice, but it can often be more cost-effective to go for more costly life coaches with a proven track record of helping their customers.
What is the Best Way to Find a Life Coach?
By now you should know what a life coach can do for you and what you'll be looking for in one. You can now really start your search.
With life coaching, there are plenty of ways to find reputable and suitable life coaches. The quick and obvious way, which likely brought you to this article, too, is by searching for life coaches online.
Using a search engine will immediately give you lots of results. As with searching for anything else online, it can also help to add extra queries to your search to get more appropriate results. Rather than just searching for “life coach” or “life coaching”, consider adding where you live and the specific type of life coaching you're looking for.
You can also use old-school approaches like asking around. Speak to friends, family, and colleagues (if you can). You never know who may have worked with a life coach in the past or who knows one that they'd recommend. A recommendation from friends or family goes way further than one from strangers on the internet.
How Much Should You Pay for a Life Coach?
Several things affect the cost of a life coach. The first is the life coach's own experience and qualifications. Generally, the more experience and the more qualifications a life coach has, the more you can expect to pay for them.
Supply and demand will also affect the cost of a life coach so if you find yourself in an area with a lot of people looking for life coaching but very few life coaches, expect to pay a lot. On the other hand, when very few people are looking and there are life coaches to spare, you may be able to find very affordable life coaching.
It's important that you work out how often you should see your life coach as you don't want to see them too infrequently for them to be effective or so often that you don't have anything to work on in your sessions.
Your location will also affect the cost of life coaching. If you live in a more expensive area, you'll find that life coaches charge more and that their rates tend to reflect the cost of living.
However, life coaching takes all kinds of people with different qualifications and experiences so while the average rates on the Superprof site are around $40 an hour, you can find life coaches charging anything from $25 to $150 per hour.
As always, do your research, think carefully about your budget, and screen and chat with potential life coaches before hiring them. Many are available to chat with before hiring them so take the time to work out all the finer details of your coaching before you start working with them.
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