Online Life Coach Courses

If you are lucky enough to get to the point where you plan to go on an interview for a life coaching contract or business coaching position in a corporate training environment, there are some things to think about and some things to do to get prepared. Consider you are trying to get a job as a corporate life coach where you are required to train a group, motivate them, and achieve results.

First, sit down and think honestly on the help you have ever needed and have received or not received that enabled you to get to this current place and then think about how you would then give the help to help someone else. This may be great fodder for the interview itself! Make a list of this information and then rank it in order of importance for doing the job, or helping someone new to do the job.

In terms of setting up the training, again think about what’s needed, then assess the skill levels within the organization. Are there people already within your organization that demonstrate a practical skill set related to the training needs? These can be helpful people to have involved the training even if you get an external trainer in to do the actual training, as most people tend to respond much better to one of their own, especially who has already done it. They can then see the real practical benefits of what is being said and it can overcome the ‘what do they know about…’ syndrome that can happen in coaching training.

You do also need to try to clarify are you talking about corporate coaching or are you talking about ‘mentoring’ as the structures are actually quite different in a work environment. Mentoring is a much more informal endeavor. Business coaching is a more formal thing. It’s possible you may need to have both systems in place, but work that out for yourself ahead of the interview so you can go in with a clear mindset of what you and the company need. This could score you some big points.

It’s a great thing to have gotten to the point of being invited to the interview but closing the deal can be tough. Make sure you are ultra prepared for your adventure into business coaching. Life coaching and business coaching training can be rewarding work, and getting in the door can be difficult … and rewarding as well.

If you have ever found yourself getting very excited about helping a friend with a problem, maybe you should become a life coach. If you are passionate about everything, maybe you should consider being a life coach. If you are a giver of yourself, you may be a candidate to become a coach.

Coaching is a rewarding and fulfilling pursuit that may bring the satisfaction you been lacking. Have you ever helped out a friend and you had an enveloping feeling of being in your element. You were providing them the support and encouragement they needed to overcome a particular issue. Well you were coaching! Think of the sensation and emotion you felt when you created momentum in that person’s life. Is that a feeling you would like to have again, perhaps on a daily basis?

Are you really engaged in a career you consider a calling? What are you true passions? What spins your wheels? Drives you? Floats your boat? Is life coaching something you might excel at?

Ask yourself these and other probing question to get down to the core of what you really want in life. What is special about you and your style? Are you naturally drawn to people in need? To you love to see others succeed. Do you feel driven to get the most out of people? Perhaps you should become life coach. This may be it for you!

Are you independent? Are you driven? Do you want to work for yourself? Make your own hours but really strive to be a success and own your achievements? Life coaching can offer these things and a host of others. Is it for you? Take the first steps be examining what’s inside you and do you have the qualities, characteristics and desires to be a life coach. Look within!

Coach U is an IFC accredited school so right of the bat you know we are dealing with a quality life coaching training program. This is one of the primary coaching schools, it was founded in 1988. This establishment has trained a lot of coaches.

Coach U was founded by long time coach Thomas Leonard. Honestly I’m not familiar with Thomas Leonard but he is apparently known as the father of life coaching. In 1996 Thomas sold Coach U to Sandy Vilas and proceeded to found and develop another school. Now even his second school is we respected and a well known in the community. If this guy founded two successful schools, he must be doing something right when it comes to developing a life coach.

Coach U will provide comprehensive training. Completing their program should take about two years. Expect to put in about two hundred hours into the program. If you are the kind of person that appreciates an indepth, complete program this may be for you. This is a lot of time to put into life coach training. Some people may not be ready for this kind of commitment. Make sure you know what you are getting into. If you have some experience as a coach, this may be overkill. If you are looking for quick accreditation go elsewhere.

The type of training Coach U offers is teleclasses. Again this is not for everyone. You are also expected to work independently on workbooks, online material, CDROM etc. The telephone classes are usually provided on a weekly basis and consist of one 4 hour class session with 20-26 participants. (No it is not one on one.) A separate life coach mentor is suggested at an extra cost. The course cost is just over $5700 and around $220 for books. If a long term, comprehensive program is what you are looking for, Coach U may be the life coaching school for you.

The Coach Training Alliance life coaching program is available worldwide and is accredited by the IRC. Accreditation is a big plus of course, something you always want to look for. They offer self study as well as teleclasses. I’m not sure if they have an extended one on one mentoring program. Their life coach training program last 55 hours. The school was founded in 2001.

The program at Coach Training Alliance is a short one lasting only 22 weeks. That could be seen as an advantage or disadvantage depending on the type of person you are. A big plus is that they divide their focus between coaching skills, business skills, and marketing skills. Unfortunaately they do not offer refunds.

Their Certified Coach Program includes an instructor lead seminar of 60 to ninety minutes in duration each week. Also included is 1 – 2 hours a week of self study with their special software package called Coach Training Accelerator™. When you complete the program you will be certified as a CTA coach but you will not be a certified ICF coach.

You will work with a coaching group throughout your training and you will also have a mentor coach that will be there to observe and critique the group. Thirty of your 55 hours will be instructor lead sessions with direct observation and something called telegroup monitoring. Honestly I’m not exactly sure what that is. 25 hours will be online sessions and assignments, self study and action challenges (I assume this is some sort of group training exercise. After classes start there are no refunds offered, this is certainly a significant disadvantage. Not only that, there are only partial refunds give before classes even begin. The Coach Training Alliance life coaching course is a relatively fast and inexpensive path through life coaching training. However if you are expecting a more in depth training experience, look elsewhere.

You better love helping people

Coaching is essentially helping people succeed so you’d better love helping people. Do you enjoy talking with and advising people? Do you get a thrill from seeing them succeed? Do people naturally gravitate to you for advice? Do you freely give advice and consultation? You should answer a resounding YES to all these questions or most of them at least, if you are thinking about becoming a life coach.

A nifty way of further investigating the field of life coaching without enrolling in life coach training courses is to actually hire a life coach and experience first hand how a life coach works. It will be invaluable to witness life coaching from the other side of the fence as a client. In this way, you can actually watch how a life coach operates. You can see what it’s like to be coached. If hiring a life coach is financially impractical, you can at least engage in some free consultations and phone calls with experienced coaches to get a taste of how they operate and what their career is like.

You better love learning

If you want to do something well, learn it well. Life coaching is a dynamic profession in which life experience and natural ability are key but training is essential as well. Certainly you will want to benefit from other successful life coaches. Some form of life coaching training is important. There are two main ways to facilitate your life coach education: mentoring and life coaching school.

Hiring a life coach mentor is an expensive but effective way of learning the daily routine of a life coach. A mentor will answer any questions you have and allow you to experience exactly what being a life coach is all about. Some form of life coaching courses is a second effective way to really learn how to become a great life coach. Choosing a life coaching school can be difficult. Accredation is a great tool to help limit your choices. Talk to former students of your life coaching institute, talk to teachers, take free sample classes if possible. Really investigate before plunking down any cash. Do your research.

You better love marketing

What?!? That’s right you had better love marketing…yourself. You had better be able to sell yourself of you want to become a successful life coach. This is especially true when you are starting out as a new coach but it will always be a benefit throughout your coaching career. Selling yourself and marketing your services is critical. You may want to consider this when searching for life coaching training classes. Do they cover marketing and aspects of promoting your life coaching services? You won’t be successful if no one knows you’re there. Promotion is important so people know about what you do; and salesmanship is important so you can convince that client you are the right coach for them.

So do you love these three key areas of the life coaching field? Do love helping people? Do you love learning? Do you love marketing? Yes, yes, yes? Then you may have the right stuff to become a life coach. Good luck and happy coaching.

When you are looking for a great life coach to rev up your career, fire up your personal life or just give you a needed kick start there are three important things to look for in a coach, I call them the three Ps of finding a life coach!

Pedigree
The first of the three Ps is pedigree. This is just fancy way of saying you should look for a certified life coach. You’ll find many people calling themselves life coaches. You’ll find many other even calling themselves certified life coaches. Certified by what? By whom? Most of these so called certified or any other person calling themselves a coach are neither a coach nor certified. Sometimes the coach in question maybe misinformed or uninformed about where they received their certification and the relevance and legitimacy of it. There a specific skills and training a life coach should have experienced and a certified life coaching program is the best bet for any coach to get that experience. Simple life experience is not proper training for a life coach. It may help the coach but its no substitute for proper life coaching courses.

Look for a coach who has attended life coaching trainign classes certified by IPEC. IPEC is one of the premiere life coaching schools and one of the first to be certified and fully accredited by ICF, the International Coach Federation. ICF has set the standards for the coaching industry. They have established and they maintain worldwide standards for coaching ethics and practices. IPEC certification requires over three hundred hours of classroom training and one hundred hours of live field training. Person to person training is essential for the proper development of a life coach and it will enable them to grasp and retain the fundamental and nuances of life coaching practices. There are schools who only train online or over the phone. This is fine for part of a coach’s training but definitle not a complete life coach traingin program. Actual coaching in a live setting is a critical part of a coach’s development.

People
The second P of my three Ps of choosing a life coach is people. Talk to people who have worked with you prospective life coach. Get a sense of the coach through the experiences of others. Great coaches will obviously have happy and satisfied clients. The clients should feel like they have make great strides in their life and have progressed measurable toward their goals. Ask probing questions if possible to really get a sense of the way the coach works and if you think it would be a fit for you. Find out how long the client worked with the coach and gage the recommendations accordingly. Also try to discover the relationship of coach and client. Make sure this isn’t the coach’s friend trying to help out their buddy.

Personality
The third P is personality. This is a personal matter that only you can decide and essentially you will be going with your gut so to speak. Do you like someone fiery and boisterous? Do you like someone firm and low key. Do you like businesslike professionalism or a casual approach? Do they have experience with you particular area of concern? These are things you should think about when you meet and talk to your possible life coach. Don’t rush into your decision. If you feel pressured by your potential coach, seek another one. There’s no reason whatsoever to enter into a coaching relationship if things don’t feel quite right. One thing you should ask for is a sample session with you coach. This should give you a concrete example of how your working relationship with the coach will be. You have to have a great comfort level and a trust level with your coach if you’re going to get everything out of you experience with your life coach. Good luck!

If you have any interest in becoming a life coach, then you most definitely have some interest in life coach training or life coaching courses of some kind.  But what types of training are available.  What are the credentials of training courses?  What types of certifications exist?  These perplexing questions can be a source of confusion for the budding life coach.  Let’s take a look into some of what’s available out there.

Most life coaching classes will not be given at your local college.  There are no college degrees in life coaching that I am aware of.  The training centers you will encounter will be independent entities,.  Lack of well established criteria for a life coaching ‘degree’ so to speak makes it much more difficult in evaluating a coaching school or program.  Given that these classes are independently administered, you will find many of them are given online.  Some people may find this to be a great benefit as it eliminates travel expenses and time wasted on the road.  On the other hand many people may dislike the more impersonal nature of online study and prefer a live face to face teacher.  Both types of training are available.

Interestingly, there are also teleclasses available, these are classes given by phone.  An experienced life coach will give one on one consultation.  The Institute for Life Coach Training employs this teching methodology.  I must say it sounds quite interesting and most certainly I feel it would be very productive.

The Ultimate Purpose of Life Coach Training
Practical life coaching skills are the ultimate goal of any life coaching training program.  Acquiring these skills and tools will greatly add to your ability to help your clientele reach their goals.  You should be focused on gaining the skills to help you clients gain clarity in their lives.  You also want to provide them with a full and deep understandning of what makes them who they are.  You will gain great satisfaction ot of knowing how to help them tap into their internal attributes they nees to solve the problems they are encountering and reach the goals they desire.  Skills like these are highly rewarding.

Some of the types of courses you should look for are:  business coaching, executive coaching, accountability, creating the client relationship,  leadership skills, fostering change, conflict resolution, avoiding burnout, adhereing to core values, defining success, sponsoring, group coaching, challenge and direction, maintaining focus, maintaining motivation level., and many others.

Do your Homework
Make sure you do the proper research and attain the proper comfort level with you prospective training program before making a comittment of any kind.  The abundance of life coaching classes and programs out there both online and offline make for a confusing landscape.  There is no short cut.  Research both online and face to face are necessary.  Testimonials are great but making a phone call and speaking with a former student of a life coach training program you are considering will do wonders.  Also contact life coaches you may know and the facility owners themselves before committing to a program.  The costs are not trivial so thoroughly complete your homework before choosing a life coaching course.

Life coach classes and training programs are popping up online, offline, and all over the place these days, but what exactly is a life coach. What can someone expect from a life coach and what can some expect if they decide to become life coach?

A personal life coach can be expected to provide support to augment and develop the skills, capabilities, and inventiveness of a client. The coach’s job is to be a partner to their client and to help them produce a fulfilling personal and professional life. Life coaching is a supportive relationship between client and coach where the focus is on defining and achieving the client’s goals. Life coaching sometimes called success coaching also focuses on solving problems and self esteem. If you intend to be a life coach you should be a person who can raise the self esteem of the client and help them make the most of themselves. You should be able to help them maximize their opportunities and maximize their successes. And you should be able to help them develop solutions and strategies to achieve their personal and professional goals.

Should I be a life coach?
If you are considering becoming a life coach you should be one thing first and foremost: a listener. Life coaches are trained to listen but it sure helps if you are naturally a good listener to begin with. Life coach training can enhance this ability certainly, but listening should naturally one of your strengths. Your clients will expect you to listen and provide honest feedback.

Another desirable quality you should posses if you want to become life coach is good observational skills. You will need to observe your client and understand and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. Again, life coach classes can teach this skill but a natural ability will put you ahead of the game. You will need to observe the client’s personality traits, habits, and skills, You have to get accurate picture of the client by listening and observing.

A third trait that is helpful in your quest to be a life coach is that you are supportive. You have to have the client’s needs in mind and you have to focus on and support the client’s desires. You will have to tailor your approach to fit the client’s needs. Being a natural motivator and supporter is a great advantage to a budding life coach. Life coaching courses should be able to teach this skill as well but you wouldn’t want to become a swimming instructor if you didn’t like the water would you? You will be expected to evaluate and pinpoint you client’s strengths if you intend to be a life coach, evaluating your own skills is the first thing you must do. You are already your own first client!