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1. Find your niche

2. Get a life coach certification

- How to become a certified life coach

3. Decide how you’ll work with clients

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Although it may seem that learning how to become a life coach requires little more than stellar listening skills and outsized compassion, in reality, becoming a life coach is a business decision. Once you've decided that this is your calling, take at least the following three steps to ensure your business and services are legitimate.

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1. Find your niche

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Before becoming a life coach, you might find it helpful to find your niche and build up your reputation from there. Most life coaches focus on people’s professional, personal, or romantic lives. Others drill down further and help them make changes regarding health, such as nutrition and exercise plans, or to uncover their spiritual side.

Undoubtedly, as a life coach, you’ll touch on more than one of these areas regardless of your central focus. For instance, Plotline Leadership offers three distinct service lines—careers, specific projects, or personal stories—but Tim Toterhi, founder and life coach, says that there is certainly some overlap.

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Once you find your specialty—which will probably be obvious to you, based on your background and what you feel comfortable talking to clients about—you’ll be in a better position to market yourself and your business accordingly.

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2. Get a life coach certification

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Technically you don't need to get a life coach certification to work as a life coach. Becoming a life coach is not like becoming a psychologist or a medical doctor, which by law requires years of intense training before you can practice. But according to the ICF study mentioned above, 89% of coach practitioners receive training that was accredited or approved by a professional coaching organization.

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While learning how to become a certified life coach isn't required to launch your business, it can certainly be helpful and something much of your competition will have done. “When you’re a certified coach, you’re bound by an ethical guideline,” says Toterhi. 

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But that isn’t to say that all successful life coaches are technically certified. “I know and have worked with coaches who have zero official certifications and regularly make six figures in a month,” says Chelsea Quint, a spiritual health and happiness coach. “It is a case-by-case basis.”

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For her part, Quint took a health coach-specialized training program with the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, which provides nutrition and diet education as well as business basics. She says that training and accreditation is just as important for the life coach as it is for the client.

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“I do think that it can be helpful internally to make you feel legit,” she says. “And it helps having some kind of base-level certification where you can hone your skills and start to figure out what areas you want to focus on.”

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How to become a certified life coach

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Whether you find your life coach certification course via Google or word of mouth, and whether it’s online or in-person, before you enroll, make sure that the course is credentialed by an association like the International Coach Federation, which sets industry standards for ethical coaching. You can use ICF’s Training Program Search Service to find a legitimate course that aligns with your life coaching goals.

During your life coach training, you’ll learn fundamentals like active listening skills and creating a trusting environment for your clients. You'll also learn the business of becoming a life coach and ethical concerns you may need to navigate during your practice. Becoming a certified life coach can be an intense process, and you’ll likely need to fulfill a certain amount of hours of training before you can earn your certification. Therefore, you'll want to make sure you're serious about becoming a life coach before you take on this workload.

Note that most life coach certification programs will earn you a general credential. If you want to earn a certification in a specific aspect of life coaching, like the niche you’ve identified above—such as wellness, career, spirituality, or relationships—gear your search toward a specialty program.

Then, of course, there’s the price to consider. Life coach certification courses are almost never free. In fact, becoming a certified life coach may cost you upwards of $5,000. That said, many of the accredited courses we’ve come across cost within the $1,000 to $3,000 range.

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3. Decide how you’ll work with clients

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As you learn how to become a life coach, you'll also refine your approach to working with clients and decide exactly what types of services you'll offer. Both Toterhi and Quint have different packages, levels of service, and areas of focus that they offer their life-coaching clients.

According to Toterhi, whether he’s working with a client on their story, career, or a specific project, being clear and setting a goal upfront is a priority. “I like to work in three-month increments, long enough to get a meaningful change—either an entire project or enough to create a habit if it’s a small thing,” he says.

Even before charging his clients, he makes sure to “spend a lot of time talking with people before they sign up—almost everybody I work with I talk to for free first to make sure they’re actually looking for a coach and not something else.”

Quint offers a variety of packages, including the Breakthrough (one 30-minute session), the Makeover (a dozen 50-minute sessions), and the Quickstart (one 90-minute session). How you break down and price your services is entirely up to you.

Have a clear goal in mind when you start out with your client. If you reach your goal, you can set up another one. But give both sides a chance to move on if the fit isn’t right.