Are Life Coaches Worth It? Take This Self-Assessment To Find Out.

Let me be honest with you for a second. Before I became a life coach, I wondered, are life coaches worth it? When I first heard the term, I had no idea what they were. 

After having spent a lot of time researching life coaches, I discovered that they have been around for quite some time. 

They were just new to my own perception of reality. However, when I finally decided to invest my time and money in a professional coach, my personal life, my spiritual life, and my professional life took on new heights. Doors & dreams I never thought possible for myself began to open. 📖

I know. I know. You’re wondering what this story has to do with anything, and how this story pertains to your own life.

Have you been pondering whether or not to invest in private coaching? Wondering how you know if a potential coach is a qualified coach? Curious how you find the right coach? Because, you know that something in your life needs to change. You have professional goals you want to reach. You want to let go of past experiences that are holding you back. You want some personal growth, and you know you need some professional help to be successful.

Basically, you want to know if life coaches are worth it. 🌻

Understanding the Role of a Life Coach

There are so many questions, phrases, and buzz words you could start to Google to determine if life coaches are worth your own time and money, but when I went down this rabbit hole 🐰, I ended up with more questions than answers.

There was more than one answer to every question I had, and I felt overwhelmed and literally stressed out! 

No one needs more stress in their life, and that’s the point of wanting a life coach in the first place, right? So, below you will find the top questions I had with the easiest answers there are; in creating these questions and answering them for you, you will be saving TONS of time surfing the web & feeling the overwhelm and stress that I did. 💻

You can also read more about what a life coach does & can help with by reading What Is a Life Coach?

Life coaches use new strategies to help their clients get results. Life coaching is for anyone, and few people realize that life coaches are for anyone. Most coaches offer a payment plan to be able to serve a greater community to help as many people as possible with their personal development, stress management, & overall emotional well being.

For a more in depth exploration of what a life coach is & results they can get you, head to this post, What Is A Life Coach? 21 Ways A Life Coach Can Help You. 🧑‍💻

The Difference Between a Life Coach and a Therapist

A life coach is defined as a person who counsels and encourages clients on matters having to do with careers or personal challenges. A therapist as a person who treats mental conditions by verbal communication & interaction.

Essentially, anything dealing directly with mental health will be out of the realm of a life coach. A great coach, however, can work in tandem with a therapist. You’re probably wondering how that is possible. Here is what that looks like in practice:

🌟There is a client, and she is working through some childhood trauma.

🌟 Her therapist will be able to help her process the trauma, and give her tools to work through the trauma through a well developed plan that the client and the therapist have developed together.

🌟This plan will have actionable steps the client can take & that are easy for her to incorporate into her day to day activities to help work through the childhood trauma.

🌟 The client may want to, or the therapist could even suggest the client work with a life coach simultaneously.

🌟 While the client and the therapist work together to work through the trauma, the client and coach can work on self confidence, self awareness, self esteem, and a wide array of other things.

Doing such a thing can greatly help & expedite the client’s healing by being able to process the trauma while also receiving coaching to help push them through their comfort zone and into the next chapter of their lives. All of that being said, the client and life coach relationship should only exist in tandem with the therapy if the therapist is in agreement that working with a life coach would be beneficial.

For your purposes, the easiest way to discern the difference between a life coach & a therapist is that therapists assist with mental illness & healing past trauma, while life coaches offer a place to explore feelings & emotions as they arise to help their clients create a better future that they are striving to have.

Many coaches and therapists have relationships with each other to make referrals based on client needs.

It is important to note here that coaches should be aware of the boundaries that exist between being a coach and being a therapist. These boundaries are not to be crossed. 

When a coach recognizes an underlying mental health issue that needs to be addressed, it is the life coach’s responsibility to let the client know their mental health issues are out of their wheelhouse. The life coach can happily work with the client again after they have seen or been cleared by the therapist to begin working together again.

Should I Get a Life Coach? Factors to Consider

Let’s get to the good part, shall we? The part with your burning questions about coaching sessions, hiring a good coach, how to hire coaches, and the possibility of joining a coaching program. 

Below you will find a breakdown about how life coaches help their coaching clients, and what to think about as you filter through the types of coaches in order to choose the right one for you. 💃

Confidence Issues: How a Life Coach Can Help

Life coaches can help in many ways. They typically come in the form of business coach, spiritual coach, and health/ fitness coach. While all of these categories can be broken down into many sub categories, these 3 are the overall options of coaches.

Before you invest your time and money into working with a coach, let’s examine more closely how each type of coach can help:

🖥️- Business/ corporate coach: These types of coaches are typically experts in their field, or they could also simply be successful entrepreneurs that help their clients get promotions, gain confidence in the workplace, own business, build successful businesses, help bring businesses out of the red, and they work together to help you build yourself up in all aspects of the entrepreneurial/ corporate arena.

🧘- Spiritual coach: Simply put, these coaches help you discover who you are. They help you to connect to your intuition & inner guidance in order for you to arrive at your own intuitive answers to your problems, and to your life purpose. All of this will inevitably lead you to find your sense of emotional well being and inner peace.

🚴- Health/ fitness coaches: These bracket of coaches can be, and are often utilized by doctors to help patients implement lifestyle changes that need to be made to be healthier, or heal an ailment. While not all health coaches are utilized by doctors, they also help normal, everyday people. Like you. They can help you achieve fitness and health goals by providing an action plan, set goals, and offer individual support so that you can feel like a better human being overall. 😉 If you are a health & fitness coach looking to take your own practice to the next level, make sure you check our Brett’s Yoga Teacher Training courses.

Lack of Vision: Guiding You Towards Clarity

Do you ever feel like you’re living the same day over and over again? You feel this way because you have lost your sense of purpose, have a new purpose that you are not aware of, or no longer feel motivated to have variety in your day. The good news?

💖 A LIFE COACH CAN HELP! 💖 Specifically a spiritual coach in this case.

When you feel the way described above, you have no clarity. You have no clear focus of where you are and where you want to go in the future. In this arena, it is important to find the right person. There are clarity coaches, life purpose/soul purpose coaches, dharma coaches, etc.

Spiritual coaches use various questioning methods during a coaching session to achieve focus, and make your life better. These coaches help make up for lost time by guiding you to self discovery and learn to answer the questions you seek on your own. The coaching relationship is special because this way of coaching is unique to each coaching client. A good coach does not try to push or force a realization, breakthrough, or answer on their clients. Wait time is essential. It is in the silence of these coaching sessions that the private coaching sessions result in clarity.

Multiple sessions are typically necessary to completely work through where you are, where you have been, and where you want to go. Spiritual coaches have to help clients reprogram their mindsets and conditioned beliefs to help their clients discover that they are limitless, and that their coaching clients have purpose. Spiritual coaches recognize the beauty of you, and help you to unlock your potential, and set it free. Thus, making the world a better place, and raising the energetics of the entire world. Yes, you matter that much.

Many coaches are credited through the International Coach Federation, but spiritual coaches are often certified through a more specific program as well. Their education and credibility will vary depending on their client focus.

Goals: Setting and Achieving with a Life Coach

All three types of coach can help with this depending on what your ultimate goal as the client is. It is important to note here that most of us want to be better in more than one aspect of life, but please take the time to get in touch with yourself to decide what is most important to you right now. In this moment, it should be quickly realized that there is one, clear, resounding goal you want to focus on right now. I mention this because you don’t want to work with a health coach if in reality you want to be better in your career at this moment. You will lose motivation & momentum. You will lose the will to continue to show up if your free time is not being spent in the realm you truly want to better yourself.

Once you have decided which type of coach would best benefit you, you must then spend the time with your coach. There are a few avenues to engage with a coach. Perhaps you are the type of person that is more comfortable with others who are in the same boat as you, and working to achieve the same goals. In that case, group coaching may be something you want to explore. If you want someone to completely focus on you as the client, and want to achieve your goals quickly, maybe you explore online coaching where your coach can meet with you via live video chat.

While your coach will work with you to decide & develop a plan to reach your goals, you must still perform some strategic thinking on your part before you start your journey with your new coach. Coaching helps you achieve the goal, but it is your job to be in touch enough with yourself & have developed relationships with yourself in order to be well on your way to achieving your goal by the last session with your new coach. The coaching itself will help you develop an actionable, step by step plan to help you get to where you want to be. In other words, to achieve the goals set forth by you. Whether you choose to work with a coach for the short or long term, your blind spots (limiting beliefs, set backs, and hold ups) will also be recognizable to you, and you will have tools to work with that will help you get back on track in keeping your goals at the forefront of your mind.

Life Transitions: Navigating Change with a Life Coach

The most important thing when deciding to work with a new coach is to keep an open mind. Often, people choose to work with life coaches when they are going through some kind of transition in life. That is what a life coach is there for. This is a coach’s area of expertise as everyone goes through different seasons of life. Sometimes those seasons throw life at you in ways you have never had thrown at you before. Thus, making these seasons difficult to navigate.

The whole reason you have chosen to invest your time and money in life coaching services is to be supported, and learn new ways, and get new tools/ methods for how to deal with & interact with life. This new life as you know it now.

The lives of coaching clients are improved the most when there is the least amount of resistance in learning these new ways & new ways of thinking. If you want to see the best results, it is important that you do not have an “I already know that attitude”. Maybe you do know the information, but you have been applying it wrong. Trust your coach, and trust yourself.

Craving Purpose: Finding Meaning with a Life Coach

Coaching can be utilized to find your new life purpose. Contrary to popular belief, the life purpose you have when you are 18 is not the same life purpose you have when you are 40. By that time, you have developed and created new relationships, goals, etc. It is perfectly acceptable and perfectly normal for your life to take a turn & decide you have fulfilled or outgrown the old life purpose, and you need to step into your new purpose. This is a hard concept for many people, and coaching can help you break through the resistance of giving in to a new life purpose as well as help you discover what the new life purpose is.

The Investment: Are Life Coaches Worth It?

The answer to this question varies as to why, but the best answer is… yes. Whether you participate in group coaching, online coaching, in person coaching, or any other type of coaching, because of the methods used in coaching, you will definitely find it beneficial.

Understanding the Cost of a Life Coach

The cost of a life coach is typically determined by the coach themselves. The process of determining cost works like this:

🌸- Life coach goes through their coaching program & has to do coaching for free in order to complete required number of coaching hours for completion of the course.

🌸- Life coach gets certification & then utilizes beta clients (more free coaching) to determine both their niche, and get client feedback/ testimonials to use in marketing themselves.

🌸- Upon my own completion of my own coaching program, I took Maria Wendt’s advice, and started by charging $1,500 for a 3 month (12 sessions each an hour long) for the first 10 clients or the first few clients, and then increased my price by $200 every third client thereafter.

Some other factors that determine the cost of each specific coaches include:

🌺- specialty

🌺- demand for that coach

🌺- results/ track record in results for the coach/ credibility

🌺- certifications of the coach

The Value You Gain from Coaching

The top reported values and benefits you gain from coaching include:

⚡️- Focus & Clarity

⚡️- Improved Self- Awareness

⚡️- Better Self Esteem & confidence

⚡️- Accountability

⚡️- Improved Communication Skills

⚡️- Stress Management

⚡️- Improved Motivation & Productivity

According to the same study conducted in the previous section, 80% of people who have already invested their time and money in coaching reported feeling more confident.

Even if you were able to just improve in one of these areas listed above, your time and money spent with a coach would be well worth the investment.

Potential Downsides of Hiring a Life Coach

This section will discuss why it is imperative for you to invest in coaching that is for YOU. Unfortunately, not everyone that calls themselves a coach should actually be calling themselves that. There are some downsides when it comes to both looking for and working with a life coach.

When Coaching Might Not Be the Answer

Coaching will not be the answer for you if you suffer from a mental illness. As previously mentioned, if you are working with a therapist, you will need their permission to either move into life coaching exclusively or allow you to work with both a life coach & the therapist.

This is for your protection as no good coach would intentionally look to derail a client’s progress. Typically, coaches can tell if there is a mental issue that needs to be addressed by a therapist, or other professional, in which case the life coach would suggest you work with a therapist before continuing with their coaching services. However, do not solely depend ton the life coach to notice such things as mental illness. New coaches may have a harder time identifying signs of mental illness, or may not yet know what their limits are when it comes to coaching.

What to Look for in a Life Coach

There are a few things you should consider & look into before you decide a coach is THE ONE you want to work with :

🎯- Make sure you are aligned with their message. In other words, make sure you actually believe what they believe & how they believe it. Need physical alignment as well? Brett’s Alignment Hacks Training Plan is perfect for you!

🎯- Identify your goals- knowing your goals & what you wish to accomplish will help you narrow down the type/ niche of the coaches you would like to potentially work with.

🎯- Find a coach that specializes in your goal- before you sit there & think “oh, I need help with getting organized. No coach helps with that.” Don’t settle yourself short. There is a vast plane of coaches that can literally help with anything & everything.

🎯- Make sure you like your potential coach- if at any point you find yourself thinking “that’s silly”, or rolling your eyes when a coach shows up on your feed… move on. That is not the coach for you. Even if those reactions are led by your ego, you aren’t ready to work with them…yet.

🎯- Book a discovery call, or introductory session- many coaches offer this an option for several reasons.

1️⃣- to make sure you vibe with each other

2️⃣- so they can hear your goals, and determine if they feel they are capable of helping you.

3️⃣- to break the ice so that if you do start working together, you don’t have to waste time getting acquainted, and to also get rid of the awkwardness in your first session.

Making the Most of Your Life Coaching Experience

Just like everything else, you get out of coaching what you are willing to put into it. So, essentially, if you are looking to feel out coaching & see if it is for you… don’t do it. Life coaching is only beneficial if you are wanting & ready to make changes. To level up & move on to the elevated playing field of your life. It is NOT for you if you are feeling uncertain of change, or if you have an “I already know that” attitude about most things. I apologize if that is harsh, but I’m just telling you how it is. I don’t want you to end up feeling like you wasted both your time & money. Everyone wins 😍

Self-Assessment: The First Step in Coaching

The first step in coaching is to get clear on what you want from working with a coach. Take a few minutes to sit with yourself and identify these things:

👸🏻- where are you right now in life?

👸🏻- where do you want to go/ be?

👸🏻- why do you want to be there?

👸🏻- how will it make you feel?

👸🏻- why do you want to feel this way?

👸🏻- what will you accomplish if you get these things & feel this way?

This should be a starting point in looking for the type of coach you want to work with.

Identifying Your End Goal: What Do You Want to Achieve?

This can be developed & thought about before you begin looking for coaches, or it can even be something you work through with your coach. Oftentimes as we go through coaching sessions, we have breakthroughs. Those breakthroughs help us get to the next level of thinking. So, what you originally thought you wanted your end goal to be may change as you go through your coaching sessions, and that’s okay.

Once your end goal is identified, it is important to keep it at the forefront of your mind. This doesn’t mean obsess over it, but it does mean that every choice you make should get you one step closer to fulfilling that goal. If the action doesn’t help you get there, make a different choice. This is also known as inspired action.

Take my quiz to find out which YTT is best for you:

Thinking Big and Preparing: Setting Yourself Up for Success

Be open. Be open to receive, open to new ideas, open to change, open to yourself, open to trusting yourself & your truth, open to our intuition. If you try to be rigid & keep a rigid schedule, or try to force breakthroughs; you will actually push yourself further away from your goals.

We live in a time of instant gratification & deadlines, but self care & personal development does not operate by those same rules. Be open & be patient. If you do those two things, you will essentially have daily breakthroughs whether you have a coaching session or not.

Working Your Plan: The Importance of Follow-Through

As mentioned earlier, you get out of coaching what you put into it. Your coach cannot force you to do the homework, meditations, or anything that happens when you hop off or conclude a coaching call. You have your action plan & you know what to do, you know how to do it. So, just do it. When it gets hard, book your next coaching session. Your catch is there to offer you support when things get hard, or resistance sets in. Whatever you do, just don’t give up. The only person you will be giving up is yourself. My guess is that you want a coach in the first place because you are tired of giving up on yourself & you want to make changes. So, steer into it. In fact, when it feels the hardest, that’s when the biggest breakthroughs happen. And, if you need to take a break for a couple days, or a week, then do that. Remember your goals & achieving them are up to you. How quickly you get there is also up to you.

Find an accountability partner if you need to. Ask your coach if they can connect you with another client of theirs that has similar goals, background, or whatever else makes the two of you connected to buddy up with. Someone that can offer additional support that you are also supporting as well.

When Resistance Sets In

Resistance happens when our conscious mind gets into panic mode. Literally your conscious mind recognizes change is happening, but a bigger change is coming more soon than later. Your conscious mind is your current self, and its job is to keep you safe. The “safe” place is to keep you exactly where you are. But, your subconscious, higher self, wants bigger & better things for you. So, when you inevitably feel resistance, ask yourself where the resistance is coming from & why it is popping up. This is actually the best time to push through & do some inner work (meditation) to feel out the resistance. The lasting breakthroughs come on the other side of the resistance, and a beautiful new “level” of life is waiting for you there.

Do I Need a Life Coach? Evaluating Your Personal Needs

Instructions: Introduce the following subsections in a few sentences.

It is up to each individual person as to whether or not they need a coach. But, if you are reading this whether because you follow the blog, or you searched for the topic in a search engine, I am guessing you are seriously considering a life coach.

Be mindful that according to 80% of the population that has worked with a coach before has, as the very least, gained confidence. If you are ready & willing to change, to create a new reality for yourself, & get an actionable road map for how to get there, you need a coach. If you are tired of trying to do it on your own and “falling off the wagon” for one reason or another… get a coach 👯‍♀️

How Often Should You See a Life Coach?

Most coaching programs are 3 months long with 12 one hour sessions. So, you would be meeting once a week for an hour. This can also look different depending on your goals, your coach, & other circumstances. Group Sessions typically consist of a smaller number of 1:1 sessions because you will typically have a weekly group session. There are also coaches out there that do one off sessions, and others that just offer ongoing coaching as needed & require their clients to pay per month or per session.

Final Thoughts

Coaching is a beautiful investment & one that not many have been disappointed with. The first step is the hardest, but you made it to the end of the post, so you’ve already completed the first step. Now, move on to the next step: vetting potential coaches. Here is a list of coaches that are already certified in various areas (I’m not partial, but this is the program I graduated from 💁🏻‍♀️). This can serve as a starting point for you to start your search. At the end of the day, if you want to feel better & have a more fulfilling day to day life & not be wishing for the weekend anymore, what do you have to lose?

Next Steps

• If you’re interested in learning the three skills that empower you to embody your yoga off the mat to get the results you desire in your personal life, check out my Yoga for Self Mastery course.
• Explore my knowledge hub for How to Become a Yoga Teacher or consider becoming a Somatic Yoga Coach in my newest certification program.
• Practice yoga with me on my YouTube channel with over a thousand free classes.