Getting a life coach is the new rage today. It is one of the fast-rising careers according to business reviews and is one of the professions that reached an annual income of $1 billion. More and more people, mostly executives, are getting the services of a life coach in order to propel their careers into a more fulfilling, better and richer one.

So What Is A Life Coach?

A life coach is a trained professional, who is generally a mentor. It helps a client in setting and achieving their personal goals. It aims to work and address one’s aspirations, projects, successes or a personal transition in their life or relationships. A life coach would begin by examining the person’s current status and try to discover the challenges and obstacles that are hindering the person from achieving those goals. There is a session intended just for listening intently to the client and making queries in order to get a clear picture of what the client wants to achieve. Then, the coach would now determine a course of action to drive the person into the life that they want. Coach and client would begin their partnership by working together and setting up a system and a structure to move towards that goal.

Although it is now considered a profession, life coaches don’t call their clients as such. Most life coaches would prefer to call it a partnership. Life coaching is an art of designing an alliance to give you the power, the power of being able to provide yourself with answers to every question that you have in life. Though the answers may seem obscure, a life coach will be able to give you the missing given to your equation.

What Does It Take To Become A Life Coach

To become a life coach, you need a certification from a professional school that is accredited by the International Coach Federation (ICF). ICF is an international organization that sets the standards of professional coaching, practices, training and ethics. It also takes charge in monitoring and regulating these standards. Before one can be qualified to apply for the certification, there is a 300-hr requirement of rigorous training, plus 100 hours of live or face-to-face training sessions. There is a separate training for telephone conversations and live coach mentoring. With the live training, the potential life coach will have a firsthand experience of coaching sessions. This is essentially helpful so that they will have a full grasp of the fundamentals. With this certification, clients are assured that they are really dealing with professionals who possess the skills and training.

Becoming a life coach requires having personal integrity. You also need a vast experience of reaching your own personal goals, for how can you coach and mentor someone when you yourself are having a personal fiasco? Being a life coach may seem an effortless job, but it really is not that easy. It is a demanding career of helping people achieve their personal goals. It requires an enormous amount of communication skills that goes way beyond just listening. It does not only need a bachelor’s degree but a master’s degree with specialized training, too. You need to have the skills to ask the right questions to your clients and be able to empower them to find the right answers themselves. A life coach needs to be able to provoke positive thoughts in a creative manner and help their clients make the right choices in order to move towards an effective, better and more fulfilling life.