Simple Life Coaching Tips To Set Yourself Up For Success On Your New Career Path

You made the decision to step into coaching. You’re thrilled about the possibility of unlimited income, flexible hours, and being your own boss. You feel inspired about impacting other people’s lives, and you’re ready to go for it… 

So, what now?

I can tell you from experience that becoming a life coach and creating success as a new entrepreneur can be very different from what you’re used to, especially if you’ve only worked as a full-time employee up until this point. 

Add to that the learning curve of understanding the life coaching industry, building your confidence to attract and work with clients, picking the right coaching training…

And it’s no wonder that without the right support, it can get overwhelming, fast!

That’s the reason why so many aspiring coaches end up making costly mistakes that waste their precious time and money – leaving them feeling stuck, frustrated, and not knowing what to do next.

Here at Brave Thinking Institute, we’ve identified the 5 most common mistakes people make when becoming a life coach and growing their business. 

Keep reading for the life coaching tips for success that will help you skip past the pitfalls that block most beginner coaches from achieving their goals!

5 (Avoidable) Mistakes New Life Coaches Make

1. Not Knowing Who Your Ideal Client Is

One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a coach is to not have a clear idea of who you’d really love to serve in your life coaching business.

They set out with the idea that they can help anyone who’s willing to pay for their services, but the truth is, the best potential clients must meet important criteria.

Your ideal clients must: 

• Be interested in their own personal growth
• Be willing to step out of their comfort zone for the sake of their personal development
• Have a dream – something they want to be, do, have or create in their lives
• Know they’d like help uncovering what their true potential, true passion, and a life they’d love might look like…And the steps to get there!

Beyond this base criteria, refine your audience of potential clients by identifying your coaching niche– the people in the world who you would most love to serve and who would be most likely to experience the greatest results from your approach to transformation. 

Maybe you’d love to coach single moms or single dads and help them create more balance and peace in their lives…

Or perhaps you’d love to work with entrepreneurs and support them in building successful businesses and creating a life they love.

You can hone in on who your ideal customer is by reflecting on your personal experiences, background, and the things you’re passionate about… 

These things will point you in the right direction of who you’re most equipped to help, and what would make you the most fulfilled as a coach.

Once you know who the ideal client is, you can hone in on specific problems they are facing  and offer them a proven, reliable, repeatable system for addressing their pain and solving their problems.

2. Feeling Like You Need to “Fill In The Silence” During Your Coaching Sessions

Picture this: It’s your first session with a paying client. You’re thrilled to finally start helping another person make their dreams come true.

You go through a mental checklist of the tips you learned at your life coaching certification, and the conversation is running smoothly…

Until the middle of the session, when your client goes suddenly quiet.

If you’re like most new coaches, your knee-jerk reaction is to rush to fill in moments of prolonged silence…

But this is a newbie-mistake. 

If you tune into what you’re feeling, you may notice that you’re doing this because you’re actually uncomfortable with the silence or mistakenly think it’s a sign that the session isn’t going well.

Sometimes new coaches are afraid they will fail as coaches if they don’t share their wisdom and support every chance they get – jumping in at the slightest moment of silence… 

But when you do this, you may deprive your client of an opportunity to reflect that can lead to insight that will help move them forward in life!

Instead of filling in silence, allow your client to sit with their thoughts for a few moments, and see what happens.

Why?

Because of the power of the Evocative Coaching Model.

This coaching model teaches coaches to do what they can to help the clients tune into their own intuition and evoke the answers they seek from within themselves.

This is the coaching model we train all of our coaches in at the Brave Thinking Institute. We believe that each person has within them everything they need to solve any problem they’re faced with, and to answer any question they may have.

As coaches, our job is to help guide the client to discover that power within themselves, and help them utilize their power to build a life they truly love living!

3. Believing Your Client’s Story

This may sound a bit shocking to you. But, your role as a life coach is not to believe the painful stories your client may be telling themselves about why something isn’t working or is not possible for them.

Instead, your role as a life coach is to hold the belief that your client is far more powerful than any circumstance or condition they face!

You can absolutely have compassion for whatever difficult past or present challenge your client is grappling with.

And, occasionally, you will also have to have a “tough love” conversation with your client to remind them just how powerful they truly are – and that they can have the life they want provided they are willing to let go of disempowering thought patterns preventing them from moving forward.

4. Not Knowing Your “Why”

Why did you, or do you, want to become a life coach?

What’s behind your desire to make a difference in the lives of others in this way?

It is critical to be crystal clear on why investing your time and effort in growing a life coaching business and serving your clients is truly important to you. 

That’s only something you can determine, and the most powerful reasons why are usually deeply personal motivations – because it will keep you going when you’re faced with a challenge.

Your “why” may be a sentence or two, or it can even be a more fleshed-out mission statement.

For example, if you chose to serve female entrepreneurs in your business, your mission statement could be:

“To inspire and support female entrepreneurs in growing businesses that make a difference in the lives of others, and creating lives they truly love living.”

If you choose to create a mission statement for your life coaching business, your first step is to ask yourself these questions:

• Who do I serve?
• What result do they want to create?
• And what do I stand for?

Allow yourself to sit with these questions for some time, and write down any idea that comes to you. Then you can reflect on your initial thoughts and craft them into a compelling mission statement.

This may sound just as a theoretical exercise, and you may not think much about it when you’re going through it… 

But make no mistake – in those moments when you begin to feel like your entrepreneurial tank is out of gas (as all entrepreneurs do at times), being clear on why you do what you do will make it easier for you to reconnect with the reason you began down this path in the first place… 

Which will reignite your fire to keep moving forward!

5. Focusing Only On Coaching and Neglecting Client Attraction and Enrollment

A lot of new coaches forget about the “business” part of their coaching business.

As soon as they get clients, they devote their entire efforts to sessions…

Until they finish working with their current clients and realize there’s no one to replace them!

I get it – helping people manifest their dreams is deeply fulfilling, and that’s probably what you’d love to dedicate most of your time to. 

But to be successful in any business, you must be able to sustainable attract and enroll clients to work with you.

That means investing time, energy and resources into marketing yourself and your services – so that a steady stream of new clients will continuously flow into your business.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be as complicated as it sounds.

You can increase your visibility, position yourself as an authority and attract potential clients by showing up and sharing your expertise and your message.

When you do, the right people will want to talk with you… You simply have to know where to connect with these potential clients, and how to have enrollment conversations with them so that they feel inspired to step forward and commit to working with you.

At Brave Thinking Institute, not only do we train our coaches in how to coach their clients effectively, we also provide them with in-depth training and ongoing support in both client attraction and heart-centered enrollment.

This advanced training is the reason why so many of our coaches are earning 6-figures and more, while making a profound and lasting impact in the world!

How To Start Being A Life Coach

Every single one of us is a spiritual being having a human experience… and this includes making mistakes sometimes!

Not one of us is perfect.

When it comes to making your mark on the world through the growth of your business, you will experience bumps and challenges along the way. Everyone does!

The truth about life coaching and starting your business is that the best way to do it is… 

Doing it. 

Taking one step at a time, doing what you can, from where you are, with what you have.

I tell you this because it can be tempting to wait for the conditions around us to be perfect, for the right time, or a point in your life where it’s easier or more convenient. 

However, waiting just attracts more waiting.

When transformational coaching came into my radar, I was a school teacher and I had already set myself on a path to become a principal. It was called the “superintendent track” and I had already devoted years of working myself to the bone to achieve it.

I could have decided that I couldn’t possibly waste all the time and effort I had dedicated to that goal, or that I needed to prove that I could climb the “traditional” ladder of success… 

But those excuses would have only kept me in what was familiar, living in the same limits and paradigms I already knew.

So my best advice to you? 

Identify what you can do today to get yourself on the path of becoming a transformational life coach.

And I have a special gift that will help you do just that, and a little more…

Join my next 5 Day Coaching Challenge! 

In just 5 transformational, interactive days, you’ll get the inspiration, support, and been-there-done-that know how to help you catapult your life coaching career to new heights (no matter where you’re starting!) 

This free challenge will give you step-by-step strategies and proven secrets to start or grow a successful life coaching business that makes a profound difference in the lives of others and supports the lifestyle that you’re longing for.

This is an incredible opportunity, and I know you’ll love it!

Click here to save your spot for our next FREE 5 Day Coaching Challenge!