It can be difficult and uncomfortable, but life coaches often have to confront clients who have overdue bills. On top of that, they must find and retain enough paying customers to keep their business afloat. To overcome these obstacles, coaches need a supportive community of other coaches. A lack of customers can lead to negative thinking.
Your mindset and thought process around customer acquisition could be the biggest obstacle to getting customers. Your inner thoughts could be creating behaviors and actions that are preventing you from converting people. Fortunately, a life coach can help with all of this and more. They can help you overcome Monday morning sadness, build trust, determine your career path, find the love of your life, start your own business, and much more.
Vishnu's post is spot on - it's important to help new and experienced life coaches alike. It's okay to move away from what you learned in coaching school (many successful life coaches don't train exclusively). Playing to your strengths and personality will help accelerate the success of your business. However, just because people think life coaching sounds interesting or inspiring doesn't mean they're willing to pay for it.
That's why no one has created a corporation full of life coaches who generate billions of dollars in profits per year. The value of training is based more on the value of the problem someone seeks to solve than on what an individual coach charges. When a coach removes their own fear, trust enters the space between coach and client. You have to learn paid advertising if you want to make a big impact - many times, coaches hire other “high-end” coaches to help them make 6 figures in 6 months but forget about simple things like a retargeting pixel on Facebook for their sales page. It's understandable why life coaches think it should be easy to build their business - when they go online and discover the power of the Internet, they forget about all the real people in their life who might be interested in their training. Any tangible skill is approximately 10000 times easier to market than training, so don't completely abandon them to become a life coach. Don't be the best secret life coach in the world: find ways to be seen and discovered by your potential clients.
Life coaches may be doing well financially (even if they're not training small business owners or executives), but it does take a lot of marketing mojo, drive, and ongoing commitment. It's important not to quit your job or other businesses to become a life coach.
