You have heard that there is a right way and a wrong way to do everything, including online life coach certification. Life coaching can be one of the most rewarding areas of coaching, where you can really make a contribution to your clients’ lives, but with a little effort you can spend a lot of time and money and not end up being a very effective coach. Here are three ways to do it wrong.

Don’t Look behind the Certification Curtain

Coaching is an unregulated profession. There are no licenses. There is no proscribed course of study. There are also no real rules about who can certify their graduates and who cannot. The good news is that if you have experiences and training that have prepared you to be a great and impactful coach, there is nothing standing between you and all those people that you can help. The bad news is that you must do your own due diligence in determining the organization, school or program that stands ready to anoint you as “certified.”

Assume All Online Life Coach Certification Programs Are Legit

Online life coach certification programs are as unregulated as the coaching industry. Generally, don’t assume that any program is legitimate. Check the people who put the program together, and more importantly check that success of the graduates and their clients. Ask for references and check them out. This may be particularly true of programs that are aligned with big name celebrity coaches, or ones that are overly “touchy-feely.” Don’t go for any program that doesn’t have a very large component based on hard science.

Pick a Program that Is All Online

Finally when looking for online life coach certification programs, realize that you can do the entire program remotely, but you might not be able to do the entire program “online.” This is because the single most important component of any coaching program is coaching and being coached in a guided fashion. Insist on a lot of this. And if a program does not have it, run away as fast as you can!

By the way… you’re invited to claim your FREE step-by-step “Life Coaching Business Blueprint” video toolkit. Just go HERE now to get your life coaching business blueprint videos.

Dave Iuppa
JTS Advisors Strategy and Accountability Coach