Certified Life Coach Courses are one of the best ways to begin your journey to a new and exciting career helping others.
If you become a certified life coach, you get to
- Make your own hours
- Work from home if you want to
- Leave the 9-5 commute and your boss behind
- Work in your passion centers
- Help other people achieve their goals and dreams
- Take vacations and days ofF when you feel like it
If you learn how to do it, it’s a dream profession. I know, because I’ve been doing it for more than 21 years. It’s a labor of love.
But all this depends on one vital thing: being a skilled coach. And that means being able to identify high-quality certified life coach courses to choose from.
Certified Life Coach Course – LIVE ->
Certified Life Coach Course – ONLINE ->
The Best Certified Life Coach Courses
Certified Life Coach Courses are one of the best ways to begin your journey to a new and exciting career helping others. Plus, any good certification course is a transformational experience, so you’ll get positive change in your own life.
The big challenge is that there are many different types of courses out there to consider. They vary a lot in quality. And there are also different types of learning platforms to choose from.
How can you find a quality course that’s right for you?
This blog post will show you how. The sections below include:
- Creating a vision of your future
- Types of certified life coach courses
- LIVE life coach courses
- Online life coach courses
- How to find a quality Certified Life Coach Course
- What types of courses to avoid
- 3 very important things to remember
- Price ranges: low, medium, high
- Summary
- More Helpful Resources and links
- The dirty little secret of the life coaching world you MUST know about
First Get a Vision of Your Future As A Coach
If you’re considering becoming a Certified Life Coach, one of the first things to do is some self-reflection?
Why do you want to be a coach? What do you want to be able to do?
Whom do you want to help? What types of things do you want to help them with?
What are you passionate about? Do you want to do coaching full-time or part-time?
Can you see yourself doing coaching? Is it in person? Over the phone? Online?
What’s your vision for being a coach? Spend some time reflecting, making notes, etc.
This is time well spent and well invested.
Types of Certified Life Coach Courses
There are several different types of certified life coach courses out there today.
You can become a life coach, a health coach, a spiritual coach, or a business coach. I’m sure you have seen many of the different types of training you can take.
And you can be certified online or offline.
So how do you know which type of life coach training to do?
In many ways, the type of training you do will depend a lot on your aim as a coach. I.e. if you want to be a business coach, take training all about that. If all you want to do is focus on health, do a health coach certification.
One downside of choosing a niche and just being certified on that topic is that you end up narrowing your niche down too much. Health coaches really only get clients who want to improve their health in some way.
Career coaches work entirely with people in their careers. They are limited to that specific niche.
This is why I recommend doing a high-quality certified life coach course above all else.
Why?
Because once you learn a high-quality coaching process (and that is essential) then you can use it to do
• Health coaching
• Business coaching
• Personal development and self-improvement coaching
• Life Coaching – helping people achieve their goals
• Spiritual coaching
• And more
In other words, once you know an effective coaching process, you can apply it to a lot of things, and help a lot more people.
The next few sections of this post will explain things to look for and things to avoid when looking for high-quality life coach certification courses.
About LIVE Life Coach Training
You can do your life coach certification at a LIVE event. Most of these range from a few days to a week or so in length.
Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages of doing your life coach certified in a LIVE setting:
The Up-Side Of LIVE training
• You get to work with a group of people. It’s fun
• You can learn a quality coaching process from practicing it over a few days
• You get to work directly with a skilled teacher
• You make friends, build relationships, and have an experience together
• You will be guided through a coaching philosophy and process by an instructor
• It’s all contained so you complete it just by showing up
• The right type of LIVE training can be highly effective
The Down Side of LIVE Training
• You don’t get spaced repetition over time.
• The confidence that is attained is often only temporary because there has not been any coaching with “real people”
Note: Other aspiring life coaches in the training don’t count. Why? – See the next bullet point.
• You’re practicing with other people who have the same handouts you do. So they’re often doing the process you’re trying to learn in their head before you even begin. “Real” clients won’t (and can’t) do that. People who practice coaching only on other seminar attendees often have difficulty coaching real people out in the world. Those ‘real’ people won’t help you. you have to guide them entirely. They’ll help you without meaning to.
• If a lot of people are attending, you won’t get much actual interaction with the instructor. Bigger is not necessarily better when it comes to life coach training.
• Most life coach certification courses being offered in the United States are using dumbed-down curriculums that are nothing more than a questioning process beefed up with some self-help thrown in. And most people who are new to coaching don’t know the difference.
• At best LIVE training is only a foundation and a beginning. No great skill was ever attained, in any endeavor, be it art, medicine, science, business, or sports – in one seminar. Most certified coaches don’t continue to do training to improve their craft so they get really good. Of course, the best coaches do.
About Online Life Coach Courses
You can also choose to be certified online.
Most of these trainings are structured as live 2 or 3-day webinars. The quality varies significantly. Again, while most of them are teaching dumbed-down curriculums, the right type of online training can be highly effective.
The main requirement is that you need to be able to get to your computer on a regular basis.
The best online Certified Life Coach Courses are conducted over time and are not crammed into a 2 or 3-day event. That way you will get the all-important ingredient of spaced repetition.
This is exactly how our Online Life Coach Certification is structured at the NLP And Coaching Institute. Students get access to an extensive membership area with over 100 audios from our live trainings. They download our entire training manual. The course takes 18 hours to learn the 7-step coaching process. Two quizes (open book) are given. This is followed by12 weeks or more, of doing actual coaching sessions with a friend or colleague in order to practice what you’ve learned and get feedback from the instructor.
The main thing to remember is that an ongoing training that requires
practice and gives you feedback over time, is much
more effective than an “event” type training.
Here’s a free report and free online workshop that will give you more insights into online life coach certification. It also explains more about how the right type of online life coaching courses can give you twice the coaching skills for half the cost
How to Find a Quality Certified Life Coach Course
1. Quality Curriculum
One of the most important things to be concerned with, when considering certified life coach courses is the curriculum.
This is because so many of them out there lack quality.
What makes a quality curriculum?
Look for trainings that have a therapeutic coaching process rather than a glorified set of questions with some self-help techniques thrown in. When you learn a quality coaching process, one that is therapeutic, you can create amazing change for yourself and others. You’ll be able to pinpoint exactly where a person is stuck and understand why. And you’ll be able to apply the entire process to your own challenges and your own goals.
A coaching process that is ‘therapeutic’ gives you the ability to create breakthroughs and produce extraordinary results in your own life and for others. In fact, it is one of the best reasons to become certified as a life coach. You can use the coaching process itself for the rest of your life. Once you realize this, the importance of the quality of the coaching process you learn becomes obvious.
To see what a genuine therapeutic coaching process and curriculum look like, check out the curriculum at The NLP & Coaching Institute.
Notice that it contains methods for:
• Handling secondary gain (inner conflict preventing change)
• Emotional state management (the gateway to resources)
• Creating leverage (the desire to change)
• Ecology (holistic change)
• Future pacing (making positive change permanent and automatic)
• NLP interventions (generative therapeutic change patterns)
2. The experience of the instructor
Be sure to find out precisely who is teaching any life coaching course you plan on taking. Read the instructor’s biography.
Ideally, they should have lots of experience in coaching people and training others to become coaches.
3. The Experiences Of Previous Students Have Had
This is a good sign of higher quality training. Any life coach training that is any good will leave a trail of satisfied students.
Read the testimonials and notice what they are saying about the experience they had. Is that something you would want to experience too?
4. Spaced repetition
Practice is how one becomes skilled. But not just practice; practice over time.
That means spaced repetition. So be sure that any life coach courses you choose are designed to give you practice over time.
All of our Certified Life Coach Courses at the NLP & Coaching institute require that a student first learn our 7-step therapeutic coaching process.
Then, they’re required to do a dozen coaching sessions over the next 12 weeks, with a friend or colleague. This is how we build spaced repetition into all of our courses.
And what a difference it makes! The skill level and confidence that you will achieve after doing 12 actual coaching sessions, practicing what you’ve learned, is amazing.
5. In your price range or close
It’s important to get a life coach course that is in your budget range. The good news is that you don’t have to spend a fortune to acquire significant coaching skills.
There is quite a variety of price levels for training in the life coaching world.
They generally fall into 3 ranges.
Price Ranges
Cheaply Priced
These courses are usually under a couple of hundred dollars.
I recommend you avoid these entirely. Mostly because of the truth and principle that: ‘You get what you pay for.”
Life coaching is a career and it can make you really good money and transform your life both personally and professionally. You can do it part-time or full-time. You can coach people in person, over the phone, or online. And when you get good you can make incredible sums of money as you make a real difference in other people’s lives.
On top of all of that, a life coach course is a transformational experience. The better the course, the greater the transformation. To go cheap is to cheat yourself out of a really awesome transformational experience, not to mention a coaching process you can take with you for the rest of your life to create positive changes in your own life and also for others if you choose to.
My original coach training was so incredible, and changed me and my life so profoundly, that I’m still doing it 26 years later! And I’ve changed thousands of people’s lives with it.
One of the greatest secrets I can give you is that if you’re stuck, find a way to pay a little more for your training than you have in the past, so you get a higher-level set of resources than you’ve been getting access to. The training I took so long ago was more expensive than any seminar or self-development course I had ever taken up to that point. And what a difference it has made.
If you invest a little more you can get really good training. Never go for the cheapest thing. Successful people never let the money or the lack of it, stand in their way. They “Find” the money.
I once had a student so devoted to taking one of my courses, that he saved for months and sold pieces of his furniture he didn’t like or use anymore just to pay for the tuition. He finally paid for the course. And he was one of the best students I’ve ever had.
If you were sick, would you go to a doctor who went to the cheapest medical school? How about a lawyer? Would you want to be defended in court by a lawyer who went to the cheapest law school they could find?
Medium Priced
These courses are in the $1000 to $2500 range or so. Marketing training can be a little more.
You can get excellent Life Coach Certification skills and training in this price range.
This is the range our courses we offer at the NLP And Coaching Institute.
High Priced
These are life coach trainings that are $3,500 to $7,000 or more.
Some life coach schools, especially those who self-pronounce themselves the best and claim to be the ‘ultimate standard’ in the industry are over-charging for their trainings.
They often offer long drawn out trainings. Many students drop out due to the elongated time required to complete their courses. Often they become perennial students, constantly in search of more training.
These trainings are not recommended.
What To Avoid in Certified Life Coach Courses
Remember to avoid:
• Cheap courses
• Overpriced courses
• Dumbed down curriculums (a glorified questioning process)
• No spaced repetition – i.e. a 1-time event with no longer-term follow-up
3 Important Things To Remember
Here are 3 things that can really make a difference in your journey to becoming a certified life coach. Because I have been training and certifying coaches for more than 20 years, I have seen the patterns that make people successful coaches. These 3 things are key:
1. Do You Have The Time? Will You Make The Time?
Is it the right time for you? Take something OFF your plate. Life coach training takes time and energy. You have to focus on it and really apply yourself, first to learn it, then to practice and get good at it. Plan the time to do the assignments and learn and practice what you’ve learned.
2. Are You Really Committed? Ready To Go All In?
If there is one thing I’ve seen over the course of training coaches for more than 21 years, it is that those who ‘go all in’ and make the time and show up and follow through – become the best coaches. They succeed.
Life coach training is not something to do half-way. It requires focus, commitment, and practice. And it will repay you many times for all the effort you put in.
3. Becoming a Certified Coach Is Only Half Of Your Education
The other half is marketing; i.e. getting clients.
And if I could one more key it would be this: Remember to invest in marketing training separately. Learn how to do it. Learn how to make it fun. Learn how to make it easy.
Most people who are drawn to being a coach are helpers and healers. Often, more than they realize. So they’re actually pretty good at the coaching if they learn a quality coaching process.
But they’re rarely as naturally good at marketing.
Marketing is getting and keeping customers. This is not the same thing as coaching those customers.
Once you’re a certified coach, focus on marketing your coaching services.
Summary
- Get a vision of your future as a coach.
- Decide if you want to do a LIVE course or an ONLINE course.
- The coaching models out there today are vastly different in terms of quality.
- There are many certified life coach courses being offered that are not of much value
- The coaching process you learn, is in and of itself, is the big benefit you get
- Be certain that any certified life coach courses you choose have a therapeutic curriculum
- After you are a certified life coach, focus on marketing your services
- Avoid cheap courses and avoid overpriced courses
- The right online course can make you a better coach than doing LIVE training
- Be sure that any certification course you take uses spaced repetition over time.
- That’s the secret to acquiring real skill
More Helpful Resources To Check Out
On this page is an audio called “Start Here -> 3 Secrets”. It will give you ideas on how to set up your ‘become a life coach’ project.
Here is a free report and free online workshop about how ONLINE life coach certification can give you twice the skills as a LIVE training, at half the cost.
Here’s is a free report and free online workshop on how to become a certified life coach.
A free mini-course on audio, complete with PDF downloads, checklists, and more: Everything you need to know before you become a life coach.
The Dirty Little Secret Of Life Coaching
There is one thing you should know about before you invest in any certified life coach courses. This is also the single biggest mistake I see aspiring coaches make.
Here’s a free report that will tell you all about it.
The dirty little secret of the life coaching world that you MUST know about
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