Life coaching education is a wide subject, and it’s very important to life coaches to learn what they need to know to become a life coach.  Where do you start?  Do you go to college and get a life coaching degree, or do you simply take a coaching course and become a certified life coach?  Whichever way you go, you must consider 3 things.

1.  Your Goal:

Do you want to moonlight as a coach or do you want to become the ultimate coaching guru with a large coaching empire?  Do you want to make coaching a part of your consulting or psychotherapy practice or do you want to hire coaches to work for you as you go out and give large seminars?  If so, you may not need to become a certified life coach.  

If you are simply adding coaching to a current professional services business, then you probably don’t need to have a life coaching degree, but if you are looking to build a coaching empire, then you’ll probably (eventually) want to become a certified life coach.  You may not know exactly what your coaching goal is, and in that case your life coaching education is going to be in question as well.  My suggestion… wait to figure out your goal or coaching vision before you go out and get a life coaching degree or look at a certified life coach future.

2.  The Skills You’ll Need to Reach That Goal:

Why?  Do you want the ‘street cred’?

Perhaps you really need certain skills.  See, your clients just want to hire you as a professional coach because you have the coaching skills they need in order to produce the results they want in their life or business.  they really don’t care whether or not you have a life coaching degree or if you have not even become a certified life coach (except in so far as they believe it will impact the kind of results they get from coaching with you).

So much more important than that life coaching degree is knowing the set of skills you need to garner in order to produce that result of having the big shiny coaching empire or just adding a few coaching clients to your professional services practice.

3.  The Skills That You’ll Have to Learn in The Field

Certain life coaching skills simply can’t be taught (for the most part) in the process of getting a life coaching degree or becoming a certified life coach.  You’ve got to just go out and work!

For instance, it’s easy to coach someone in a safe coaching school environment, because it’s all just practice.  But what if that same person was paying you $1,000 per month to coach them, and they just threatened to quit?  Now how much good is that life coaching degree going to do you?  Probably not much… You’re going to have to use true EXPERIENCE and produce results out of your own willpower and composure, and being a certified life coach may not make any difference.  That’s where your life coaching education will not help you.  You are on your own!