What we really mean is that you cannot hold yourself out to be a professional in an area where you do not have training or equivalent practical experience. You should also refrain from telling people what to do, but use the technique of stepping them through the pros and cons of different courses of action. If you give legal advice without being trained, you need to qualify that advice as an opinion, subject to them talking to legal counsel, for example: there are plenty experience based things you can give an opinion on without crossing the line. You can even draft an agreement, so long as legal counsel reviews the material before the client signs that contract with a 3rd party. You help to grease the axle, saving the client from legal billing while they were thinking things over, but then you step back from the boundary of what you can actually do as a life coach.

Even so, you can save the client many times what they pay you while you help them to define just what they really want, so as not to burn up chargeable time in front of a high-priced lawyer or accountant. That does not diminish the value of your expertise – the client seeks your input into their decision-making challenges because they know you have that expertise to share.

Never forget that life coaching is a business and that the aim of a business is to generate profits. We have several courses related to running a business, and you do well to go through that training if there is any aspect of what you want to do that involves advising prospective business owners. Our focus is on running your life coaching efforts like a business. You have to make sure a coaching service makes you money – that includes the cost of developing any training materials if you cannot pursue our affiliate option.

If you plan ahead, you can get much of that work completed before you open for business. It provides you the practical experience you need in a life coaching practice, and going through this program to sort out your own venture is also good preparation for coaching individuals who may be thinking of starting their own business, in keeping with not reinventing the wheel. This program is also a great tool to help clients to setup a business venture, although we offer a business consulting option to emphasize that option.

When you consider a coaching engagement, you establish the objective and estimate the effort required to get there. Then you establish a cost, like $500 - $2,000 to get to end of job. If you think of an hourly rate of $50 and then you look at 10 – 40 hours of coaching. There are different ways to apply that time – a burst of effort, or a gradual application. The client can consider the amount to decide if there is sufficient value to justify that investment: note that this is an extension of offering seminars where people can learn self-help, or even get involved with a mentoring program.

Clients that want personal service are people who consider their time so valuable that they want to be in control. The client must be the one to see value from what you deliver by way of your life coaching services. It generally depends on their receptivity whether or not there can be progress, rather than on what the coach attempts to deliver – when the client is engaged, the coach has the materials to work with. When the client accepts your proposal for a personalized coaching project, they really make a decision about investing in themselves.

The amount paid is a retainer for services – once those services are rendered, that is the end of the engagement. A client can have on-going needs, and elect to renew the contract, or decide to go on without your assistance.

• A client is ready to make changes to dramatically change their life! This can be the cusp of a new career direction, a decision to consider a business venture, or some other change that they want to bounce off their personal coach.
• They are tired of being stuck in a rut: they want new challenges to start living and experience life at a new level: that often attracts naysayers who undermine the client’s confidence, so they look to a coach for encouragement and support.
• The client is tired of doing things that are in vain, they need someone to help them assess what options might be considered, or how different alternatives might be considered, to find what can turn a corner, to help gain new ground!
• Help with tools and techniques used in business, focused on learning how to apply those tools and techniques in a hurry.

While it may seem like splitting hairs to deny an hourly rate and propose a contracted project amount, it is all about perception, because we focus on ensuring a specific outcome. We do not want to promise what we cannot deliver – we offer a realistic assessment of what we can do for a client, how we want to be compensated for that, and if the client is satisfied that there is value in the endeavor. Coaching usually far outstrips the results that can be achieved with mentoring where volunteers cannot be on-call. Implicitly you get paid by the hour, but the main difference is: if you charge by the project and you improve your coaching abilities, then you can accomplish your work with less effort and thus improve your hourly rate.

There is no question that the ideal arrangement would be coaching people in person, because there are many types of settings where you need to work with tangible examples to teach people how to develop the skills they need to progress in their career field. Not knowing how to effectively use business tools can be career limiting, and, if you are skilled at showing people how to use such tools, you could be in great demand. This section will be focused on how you might provide services that enable people to learn and practice workplace skills.

Stories have a powerful impact: as a life coach, you must develop the skills to use a story to inspire a client, or simply to get a point across; you must be open to collect stories that can be useful to explain concepts and principles in a way that plain talk just cannot quite accomplish. Stories help to inspire clients to do a paradigm shift, or to think differently, or try something new, before we devise an action plan to help them accomplish something, or overcome something that impedes progress. Sometimes the right thing to do is offer a specific life coaching technique, or strategy, to help them to accomplish that, but at other occasions you can use a story, and use that to evoke a response that leads to a viable approach that came from within.

Experience is archived in terms of stories of past accomplishments, that you can dust off and re-apply in a thoroughly modern setting, and many people will wonder where on earth you came up with those ideas. After you share a story, you do not in the next breath draw a parallel with the current situation to offer a solution, you ask questions to make the client think about the tie-in between the challenge at hand, and the story you told, such as:

• Can you think of what are a few of the elements of this story that might apply to someone like you dealing with the challenges you are facing?
• What parts of the story speak to you as inspiration for finding a way to deal with challenges?
• What actions does this story inspire that may help you to deal with challenges and get past any obstacles that stand in your way?

Stories open a portal to an alternate paradigm, or a paradigm shift, so what seemed insurmountable can appear quite doable from that alternate point of view. Once you help protégés to remove those original obstacles, they can see their way to using alternative approaches – you then need to back off, to let the process take its course, and not get carried away trying to convince them to do it your way, as learning from experience is still the best method. However, if you believe from experience that they are biting off more than they can chew, or if they are entering into a blind alley, you can encourage them to talk through the subsequent steps, and you can ask about those potential barriers, and how they would deal with those risks.

Learning Formats       SECC_LCB

This course is currently available in a classroom setting (public or company private) with approximately 30 contact hours.

PDF – Certificate Of Completion

Each course offers a certificate of completion that identifies the course, the student, and a brief description of the course. To receive a certificate the student must have attended at least 80% of the course sessions. This personalized certificate is forwarded to the student by Email.

PDF – Course Notebook

Each course includes a notebook in PDF format that provides the minimum knowledge the student must master in order to obtain the certificate. In the notebook you will find references to other study materials. Students receive the notebook by Email when their registration is confirmed.

PDF – Program Overview

An overview of this study program can be downloaded from the website by right-clicking on the program link on the enquiry page.

PDF – Current Training Schedule

A list of upcoming training sessions can be downloaded from the website by right-clicking on the schedule link on the enquiry page.

Registration – Service Providers

To register for any training course please look on the enquiry link page of your service provider (from where you accessed this website). On the page you will find a registration request form where you can order the course that you are interested in. The availability dates will be provided to you, along with payment instructions if you decide to go ahead.