If You Are a Life Coach - Get A Mentor

As almost 400 training organizations spew out thousands of newly qualified Life Coaches every year in the US the industry gets more and more competitive. Although The training organizations would have you believe otherwise, the demand for Life training services doesn't even come close to the amount of sessions available.

The waters are muddied even further as more Counselors and Therapists spot the perceived growth in Life and suddenly start advertising on their websites that they also offer Coaching.

Interestingly enough, although there are many similarities between Coaching and Therapy, such as rapport building, questioning and listening skills, there are also a lot of subtle and not so subtle differences. Consequently, a Therapist deciding to offer Life training without further training is like a car mechanic deciding he wants to also service farm machinery. For sure he may get some stuff right, but he may also get a lot wrong.

I said the growth in the industry was perceived and what I mean by that is because people see and hear about more people training to become Coaches they thus presume the demand must be growing.

However, the reality is that there are no statistics to support this belief and a lot of anecdotal evidence from people quitting Life Coaching after a short period, to suggest the opposite is true. Getting an appointment with a Life who isn't in the realms of 'Super coach' and who doesn't charge $50k to get out of bed, really isn't difficult.

One way to short-cut the procedure to success and one that very few adopt is to seek the help of a mentor. When I became a full time Life Coach in 2005 the industry was nothing like as competitive and it didn't take me long to rank highly for the search string 'Orlando Life Coach'. At the time there were maybe 4 or 5 coaches in my locale. Now that number is more like 40 or 50.

I have mentored a number of Life Coaches and it's always a great experience. I can help them avoid some of the pitfalls that I fell into in my early days. It took me close on three years to become profitable and establish myself to a point where I had a relatively thriving practice.

I was lucky because I had 3 years and a supportive working wife. Some people don't have that luxury and need to start making money much sooner or end up quitting the industry.

Unfortunately as newly qualified coaches we don't know what we don't know. Therefore, the easy option is to take a look at what other Life Coaches are doing and replicate their model believing that it must be successful. This is frequently not the case because Life Coaches do not advertise the fact that they have few clients and an empty calendar.

I know some people don't like to ask for help because they see it as a sign of weakness. In this case not only is asking somebody to mentor you not a sign of weakness, it is also a recipe for long-term success and something i would encourage any newly qualified Life Coach to do.