I think I’m actually going to message you privately about some of this since it’s going to get pretty personal! What I will say publicly is that I also no longer call myself a “life coach”, but rather refer to myself as a “personal development coach”. “Life coach” as a moniker has started to feel rather tainted and hokey, and it’s misleading – it gives the impression that you can give people the answers and will tell them what to do, when what you actually do is help them access their inner wisdom and answer their own questions.

Some might say my course has (or had, it no longer runs) a poor reputation amongst some coaches, but this is pure snobbery based on the fact that it didn’t cost a fortune – I trained with a nationally recognised and state-run college of further education (ie somewhere where kids go to do A-levels and vocational courses) rather than with a private coaching training company. In fact it was a great course, which gave me a good bedrock to start from, and suited me fine. it was perhaps less experiential than other courses, because it was all distance learning, but it covered all the bases it needed to, and my own private enthusiasm carried me through because I did lots of extra reading and practice coaching. There was no pressure to attend more courses on top – there were no courses on top. I’m grateful for this, because if there had been I might have been carried away by enthusiasm and spent money I didn’t have.

I’m completely in agreement with your coach the expectations trainers create in students. My course never led me to believe I’d be making easy money hand over fist in the way that some courses do, because it didn’t need to rely on starry-eyed dreams to make as much money as possible from students. But even so it’s easy to get taken in by the promises made by other trainers, and it certainly happened to me. I went on a free weekend course with a very well known national organisation, some of which was a sales pitch. It was charging well over £3000 for their most basic course, plus expenses on top for travelling to a south-coast venue and staying in a hotel there for (if I remember rightly) the ten weekends of their course, but telling people that they’d make their money back “within a few clients”. They never mentioned how difficult it is to actually get clients, and believe me, it’s difficult. Really difficult.

You’re correct also that a lot of coaches aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer. I believe this is also a product of the churn-‘em-out training system, but also of the nature of the work. Many people train as coaches after they’ve been through coaching (as did I, I’m such a cliché) and are in their first flush of post-coaching excitement. Sometimes, being coached, you don’t actually work out what it is you want to do with your life careerwise, but find that the motivational boost to Get Things Done is so exciting that you get carried along in wanting to pass it on to others. So you do wind up with a lot of people whose answer to “I still don’t know what to do with my life” becomes “I’ll become a coach and help other people who don’t know what to do with their life”. This floods the market, often with people who are enthusiastic but unfocused (or flat-out crazy) and not particularly well-read or finessed in their approach. In accordance with the rule of a self-supporting industry, I actually wind up with quite a lot of these people as my own clients – people who trained intending to set up in business but never really did any coaching beyond it. For them, training sometimes ends up being more about their own personal development than it is about being able to help others, and that’s fine, learning to coach is really helpful for anyone – at the very least they can learn to coach themselves.

As you’ve mentioned, it’s a few years since I finished my training (if it ever finishes, really), and truth be told I’m in a much worse position financially than I have ever been! Honestly, although I love coaching, it’s not the field to move into if you want to make a living. Admittedly, I haven’t really properly applied myself to building my private practice, and I certainly haven’t rid myself of limiting beliefs, so on and so forth. I completely cop to that, and part of that has been my own lack of confidence and letting personal issues and matters get in the way. But I have had a regular coaching practice of sorts for 18 months now and with that experience behind me I can say that the most important skill you’ll need if you want to make money from coaching is the ability to market and persuade people to part with their money. Someone once told me a coach spends 80% of their time marketing, and they were underestimating. I also read a statistic which I can’t remember now, but it was something about 95ish% of coaches making less than $20k a year. Again, I believe that! It helps to have an additional source of income – it’s no coincidence that a lot of coaches coach in their spare time and are also in well-paid professions or have well-off spouses that support them. At the moment I’m in the latter category, except he’s not well-off, I just happen to be out of work and unable to claim benefits ;-)

You need to be super-duper resilient and unbelievably confident and unshakeable in your faith that you are good at what you do and deserve to get paid to do it. That also means not being ashamed to do it and to say what you do – I get the feeling if you do decide to go ahead with this you will need to do some work on that and perhaps design a role and name for yourself which you feel happy with. That ties in with FloatingPoint’s point about standing on your own credentials.

It’s a shame really that it’s so hard to market, because I really believe so many people can benefit from coaching, and the world would be a better place if more people would open up to it. I completely understand where you’re coming from wanting to work with happy, motivated people helping them to be happier and more successful. There is genuinely no feeling better than seeing someone make leaps in their confidence, confess their true goals, and improve their ability to achieve practical steps. Every time I have one of those golden clients who responds beautifully to coaching and actually acts on it and gets results inside and out, it makes me feel amazing and it’s all worth it. I wholeheartedly recommend it as a life-enhancing activity, but I’m not sure I’d recommend it as a sole source of income.

The rest I shall update you on privately!

Wow I’ve rambled a lot, sorry. I didn’t realise how much I’d written.