Getting Started As a Life Coach – Before Life Coach Certification
So, you want to become a life coach. Before you go through months or even years of preparation and training to become a certified life coach, it’s important that you know who your target market it is. Why not wait until after you are certified? Because it’s not a smart business decision to wait. Life coaching is as vast as life itself, and you need to have a specialty and a target audience in mind. It’s important to align your particular life coaching gifts with a training emphasis and contacts with people in your target market. My approach to life coach training involves 
getting started as a life coach before you are certified so that your earnings can help pay for your training. Makes sense, doesn’t it?
Target Market: Who Listens to You?
The first thing you could do is to determine who your target market is. Do you want to be a corporate life coach who helps corporate businesses and their employees or do you want to be a life coach for individuals only. Let’s assume you want to build a private practice of as life coach working from home using the phone and the internet to conduct sessions with clients. Finding your target market is not as simple as asking yourself, “Which types of people to I connect with?” You may interested in coaching middle-aged singles and couples, but what evidence do you have that individuals in this group (market) listen to and value what you have to say?
Test the Waters: Deciding On Your Target Market is Both a Personal and a Business Decision
Your best insurance against failure is to coach various people informally for free. If you do this with several people, you should start to see a pattern of which types of people resonate with your approach, your perspective, and your coaching tips. Then, can start to think about what your specialty is. It may not be what you want it to be. You have to let the response of people inform you about who you are going to be effective with as a life coach. Suppose you want to coach young adults and you can’t find clients. The ones you do find don’t stick and don’t seem to take the ball you give them and run with it. Well, you better rethink whether or not that is going to be your target market.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t work with young adults eventually, but it is probably a mistake to try to start there. Perhaps there is some missing piece in your own training or development that needs to be filled in before you can work with the type of client you would most desire to work with.
Next is to determine who you want as are your primary clients. Do you want your clients to be men or women? Age ranging from 25 to 40, 30 to 50, or 200 to 300 years old? These are the decisions that only you can make. But it is not all about your preferences. You must test your preferences against the market: who actually responds to you? You could start out by choosing the gender of clients who you can work comfortably with. You may be more comfortable with men or women. Just make sure that you are clear on which gender of clients you are more effective with.
Choosing Your Life Coaching Target Market: Who Are You Most Confident With?
By noting the types of clients you are most comfortable with, you are beginning to develop a professional identity as a coach. This can begin to happen even when you coaching informally without charging. Once you feel this confidence yourself, you broadcast this to your surroundings, and subliminally, to your prospective clients.
Market Yourself Before and During Life Coach Certification
A life coach is not a coach when who or she has no one to coach. As a beginning life coach, you need to market and make yourself known to other people. There are several ways to market yourself especially over the internet. You can write articles and you can even make your own blog site. Content should be about life coaching and other information related to it. I am planning to start a special membership website for life coaches who want to learn how to market themselves on the internet. If you sign up for the free membership at Steps for Change, you will be among the first to be notified when I am ready to launch this premium membership site.
Begin now by writing about yourself. Go to Tumblr.com and create a free blog. Before you have your first client you can begin practicing the art of communication. Where are people stuck in their lives? Do you have anything to day that might help them get unstuck?
