When Considering the Most Stable Industries & Best Career Fields of the Next Decade, It’s Clear: Life Coaching Is At The Top!
You’re intrigued by the idea of becoming an effective life coach who can take your ideal client on a coaching journey, shining light on their blind spots and helping them create the professional life – and personal life – of their dreams.
But one of the biggest pieces stopping you from achieving your career goal of diving into the coaching industry is a nagging question:
Is life coaching a viable career option?
If you were evaluating only what are the happiest careers, or what careers you feel most called to, the answer is likely obvious: YES, life coaching is a viable career option!
But when considering what are the best career options out of the hundreds of thousands of options available to you, you’re probably also asking questions like:
- What jobs are in high demand right now?
- What careers will be in demand in 10 years?
- What are the most stable careers?
- What careers will make you rich?
- What should I consider when evaluating the best career fit for me?
As someone who is attracted to the coaching industry and considering taking the next step of developing coaching skills and becoming a coaching business owner, you know that a viable career option is one that offers you a way to earn a generous income.
But you want more, specifically a career path that allows you to help other people. An exciting field is one that allows your clients — and you — to grow and prosper together.
Keep reading to discover what makes life coaching a viable career option, even when you’re brand-new and becoming a life coach would be like an entry-level job for a new career path.
What Jobs and Industries Are in Demand Right Now?
When you ask whether life coaching is a viable career option and worth the business training you’ll need to create even an entry-level job in this industry, one thing you really want to know is whether there is a demand for what you’ll be offering as a beginner life coach. Is this a business model that can provide a stable – and even lucrative — living for you?
In a word: Yes.
When looking at all the career choices available, all signs point toward life coaching as a viable option. Forbes magazine named coaching as one of the fastest-growing 6-figure careers and estimated that coaching is a $2 billion industry.
The International Coaching Federation is even bolder in its most recent estimates. Its 2020 Global Coaching Study revealed that the total global revenue from coaching in 2019 was $2.849 billion USD, which was a 21 percent increase from its 2015 estimate.
In addition, the organization stated that there were 71,000 coaches worldwide in 2019 — a 33 percent increase since the last estimate was calculated in 2015. Not only is the industry growing, but you won’t be competing with hundreds of thousands of people even if you create an entry-level job as a life coach.
According to Forbes, about 20 percent of coaches earn an annual salary of six figures or more, with the average income generated by coaching hovering around $62,500 USD for coaches in North America. It’s important to note that many coaches also offer additional services, such as training and consulting, which can boost your annual salary even higher.
In addition, these statistics are an average of the annual salary of two distinct groups:
- Coaches who rely on their natural coaching gifts when they become a business owner. This often leads to sporadic income, struggles in attracting potential clients, and unrealized potential when it comes to annual salary.
- Effective life coaches who invest in professional training to learn the right way to become a business owner and grow a business, such as the life coach certification offered by Brave Thinking Institute. Getting access to proven tools, scripts and systems generally makes it easier and more predictable to generate a higher annual salary.
As a successful life coach, you have the option of being a business owner or of applying your coaching skills within an organization, as an in-house coach or even as a manager who also uses coaching skills.
Life coaching is a portion of the booming self-help industry. MarketData Enterprises, Inc., an independent market research publisher, estimates that the self-help industry should be worth $13.9 billion by 2023. The demand for life coaching exploded when The Secret was published in 2006.
Never before have more people been looking for change with the help of a coach. Potential clients are willing to invest to have their problems solved – and according to Ubersuggest, they’re searching for “life coaches” almost 50,000 times per month!
What Are the Best Career Options If You Like Helping Others?
Coaching — whether you’re a life coach, business coach, spiritual life coach, wellness coach, or some other specialty — is popular because it’s practical and has a measurable impact on both a client’s professional life and personal life.
Recognizing the impact that coaching has on its employees’ happiness, well-being and success, large companies such as Facebook and LinkedIn pay for their staff to receive on-the-clock life coaching in addition to business training. But in addition to hundreds of thousands of corporate employees, plenty of individuals pay for support in achieving their dreams, as well.
As an effective life coach, you’ll be helping potential clients develop “soft” skills such as regulating their emotions, finding “flow,” communicating a clear vision, and fostering collaboration. These skills are as useful in your personal life as they are in your professional life and are just as valuable as “hard” topics traditionally offered for business training.
Coaching strategies can also be used to help your ideal client with stress management and improved collaboration. These skills can help employees feel happier and be more effective in the office, as well as in their personal lives.
According to Eclipse Life Coaching, as employees feel more engaged, accountable and responsible in their work, they become more productive, workplace harmony rises, absenteeism drops — and profits soar.
When you understand how widely applicable these skills are, you can quickly see why life coaching is a viable career option — great news if you’re thinking about becoming a business owner and creating a new entry-level job as a life coach.
One of the more encouraging points to note when considering whether life coaching is a viable career option is that it’s in demand even in “down” times. As a whole, the life coaches certified by Brave Thinking Institute grew their businesses exponentially during recent global challenges faced by hundreds of thousands of business owners worldwide. When you consider that life coaches support potential clients in creating lives they love, it’s no wonder.
For example, the “Great Resignation” is an ongoing trend of employees who are voluntarily leaving their jobs because of dissatisfaction – even to take entry-level jobs in new fields. Many are questioning whether their career path is in alignment with their dreams and values — questions that a life coach can help them answer.
What Are the Most Stable Industries?
When considering whether life coaching is a viable career option, you want to know that your new career choice is stable and will produce a steady stream of potential clients. Life coaching, as part of the self-development industry, definitely fits the bill and makes a worthy career goal.
The first known example of written self-development advice appeared in 2800 B.C. in the form of the ancient Egyptian genre called “Sebayt,” which means “teaching.” It refers to formally written ethical teachings focused on the “way of living truly.” A well-known example is The Maxims of Ptahotep, a letter of advice from father to son that advocates moral behavior and self-control.
Greek philosophers explored a wide range of topics relating to what we now consider psychology. Classical Rome produced Cicero’s On Friendship and On Duties, as well as Ovid’s Art of Love and Remedy of Love. Many ancient Islamic scholars wrote books that could be categorized as self-help, and the Renaissance produced a flood of self-education and self-help materials.
With the invention of the Gutenberg printing press in 1455, anyone could widely share their written prescriptions for self-improvement and the best way to live. During the 1600s and 1700s, conduct books that instructed men about how to behave in polite society were all the rage in Italy, France and England. In the 1800s, people voraciously consumed advice on weight-loss, parenting, marriage, time management, home management, etiquette, success, self-control, mind power, grief, and self-medicine.
The 1840s heralded the arrival of Transcendentalism, the beliefs of which align with many life coaches today, including:
- Everything is a reflection of God.
- Physical world is a doorway to the spiritual world.
- People can use intuition to see God in nature and their souls.
- A person is their own best authority.
- Feeling and intuition are superior to reason and intellect.
In 1859, Samuel Smiles penned the genre-naming book Self-Help, which featured biographical sketches of working-class men who succeeded despite adversity and included collections of aphorisms and inspiring quotations drawn from literature.
What Are the Most Stable Careers? Life Coaching Becomes a Viable Option
The 1930s brought us the standard classics How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, as well as Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. In 1956, our collective thirst for advice launched the Dear Abby column, which became the most widely syndicated newspaper column in the world, reaching hundreds of thousands of people each day.
The 1960s and 1970s were prime time for business owners in the self-help industry. New Age spiritual groups, such as Scientology, found their roots. Diet and exercise trends like jogging went mainstream. And Eastern rituals like yogan found a spotlight. The Human Potential Movement, organized around the belief that there lies within every human a pool of untapped potential, fueled the popularity of organizations such as the Esalen Institute.
In the 1980s, Tony Robbins, arguably one of the most successful and influential business owners within the self-help industry, first appeared on the industry radar. Meanwhile, Oprah Winfrey launched her eponymous talk show to offer a positive, uplifting experience featuring interviews, self-improvement segments and more.
By the 2000s, self-help has blossomed from a book genre to a full-blown industry — and life coaching as a viable career option and entry-level job took off.
American writer Timothy Gallwey is credited with identifying the self-improving potential of sports coaching with the publishing of The Inner Game of Tennis in 1975. He believed that an athlete’s life, behavior and character were significantly more important than technical or physical skills.
The 1970s also saw business owner Werner Erhard’s founding of EST, an intensive personal development course which taught that people were responsible for their own outcomes. The second most important influence on the coaching industry, Erhard sold the intellectual rights of est to an employee-owned organization that eventually became known as Landmark Education.
Thomas Leonard, arguably the biggest influence on life coaching, worked as the Budget Director for Landmark Education in the 1980s. As a financial advisor, he found that people were often seeking more than just financial guidance when they came to him. Finances are often just a small part of the problem, and Leonard realized that people were really craving advice about their lives in general.
Leonard acted on his observations and became a business owner. He started with an entry-level job as a life advisor, calling himself a “coach.” When coaching others, he drew together knowledge from a number of different fields along with instruments used by est and Landmark to create his own coaching methods.
In the mid-1990s, business coaching took off, and coaching emerged as a distinct profession that was separate from business training.
As the first large company that made use of coaching, IBM elevated coaching from a personal development vehicle to a proven method to develop people in a business setting. Celebrities, politicians and other industry leaders took notice and sought the help of coaches, elevating their profile in the process.
Tony Robbins, named one of the “Top 50 Business Intellectuals” by Accenture and one of the “Top 200 Business Gurus” by the Harvard Business Press, has worked on an individual basis with Bill Clinton, Wayne Gretzky, Serena Williams, Hugh Jackman and Pitbull, as well as American businessmen Peter Guber, Steve Wynn, and Marc Benioff. Coaching certification programs began to crop up to meet burgeoning demand for coaching skills, business training, and proven coaching strategies.
What Is the Safest Investment for a Stable Business Model?
As you develop a deep understanding of what makes you happy and what your purpose is, you may recognize that it is time to change your career goals to include becoming a life coach and business owner. Before embarking on this career path, however, it’s good to also have an understanding of what it takes to succeed.
You’ll want to get a feel for what your annual salary might be, whether you start your own business, connecting with your ideal clients face-to-face or in a digital setting, or whether you are enticed by a recruiting firm to lend your coaching skills to an organization as a full-time, in-house coach.
You’ll want to understand the different business models that can work to create a successful coaching career. As a business owner, you may choose to share coaching strategies with your ideal clients in one-on-one coaching sessions. Or you may find it boosts your annual salary more to design group coaching programs for individuals or businesses.
You’ll want to explore business training programs where you can learn valuable coaching skills – and ideally, a proven coaching process. A quality, well-rounded life coach certification program can rival the best graduate programs out there.
Most successful coaches who want to be successful business owners, as well, find it beneficial to specialize in a type of coaching, such as life coaching or spiritual life coaching. You may also find it easier to find and attract your ideal potential clients as a business owner if you focus on certain industries.
Life coaching is a viable career option. To decide whether you’re ready to launch your coaching business, consider:
- The demand for your coaching services
- The size of your market of ideal clients
- How easily your market of potential clients can be reached
Merely becoming a life coach does not guarantee success as a business owner. Many life coaches struggle, because your coaching skills aren’t the only factor in your success. You’re becoming an entrepreneur, and the gap in knowing how to attract potential clients and grow your own coaching business is often so great that highly skilled, wonderful life coaches decide to coach people part time, on the side, or even for free, because they are missing critical ingredients in their business training for building a successful coaching business.
What Is the Best Job for the Money? Adelina Found Out
When considering what are the most stable industries out of the hundreds of thousands that exist in the world, it’s safe to assume that social work would fit the bill. But when also asking what is the best job for the money, social work pales in comparison to life coaching. Just ask Adelina.
Highly educated and dedicated to her career as a social worker, Adelina worked long hours and had little time with her family. She had been engaged for 6 years, only to discover the month before her wedding finally arrived that her fiance was cheating on her.
Adelina ended her engagement and fell into a deep depression. Every morning, she would angrily ask God, “Why did you wake me up? Why wake me up when there are so many other people in the world who actually wanted to wake up but couldn’t?”
One morning, she heard the voice of God reply to her, “I’m not done using you.” Trusting in the guidance she had received, Adelina began exploring what her new purpose and career goal might be — a search that led her to Brave Thinking Institute.
Adelina didn’t question whether life coaching was a viable career option or whether she should become a business owner and take an entry-level job as a life coach. She knew that the joy of helping others achieve their dreams would be fulfilling. And as a social worker, she knew that life coaching would certainly be a better paying career path.
She said goodbye to her long hours and low pay as a social worker, and became certified as a DreamBuilder Coach.
She finally experienced what it felt like to make a lasting difference while working with one ideal client after another, helping them create the personal life and professional life they had always dreamed of. She finally had time to travel and enjoy the company of her family. And she had a greater income to indulge in more of life’s pleasures.
As her life coaching business grew, Adelina felt called to move beyond her self-created entry-level job and become a Life Master Consultant. But she didn’t know how she could pay for the additional life coach training she needed to achieve this new career goal and hit the next level of success as a business owner.
Her intuition had an answer: “Call your Mom.” Once again, Adelina trusted her guidance and called her mother. Even though their relationship had been strained, her mother decided to support Adelina’s dream by using her retirement money to get her started.
Today, Adelina is a full-time Life Master Consultant who loves to help her clients create lives they love living. She earns a 6-figure annual income (so far) as a business owner and has donated over $37k to causes she cares about! She’s developed a deeper, more loving relationship with her mom. And she married the man of her dreams, and they’re expecting their first child!
What Is the Safest Job in the World?
When deciding whether to pursue your career goal of becoming an effective life coach and join the ranks of other coaches who have become business owners and built successful careers in the coaching industry, you can look at the question from many angles:
- What jobs are in high demand right now out of the hundreds of thousands of possibilities? Life coaching is one.
- What are the happiest careers? Life coaching is definitely on the list. Nothing beats helping your ideal clients create their dreams.
- What jobs will be in demand in 10 years? All signs point toward life coaching continuing to grow as an industry.
- What is the best job for money? Life coaching can be lucrative, and it’s rewarding. That winning combination puts it on the “best” list.
- What is the safest investment? An entry-level job that is stable, in a growing industry, has demand even in challenging times, that pays well — and that makes you happy. Life coaching checks all of the boxes.
To make life coaching a viable career option, you don’t need a graduate program degree, fancy business training or a franchise-sized investment.
However, you do need:
- Training and certification to give you the deep understanding of essential coaching skills and time-tested coaching methods. The best certification programs will give you a proven coaching process, as well as a business model that works to attract potential clients and help you take your ideal client on a well-mapped coaching journey that has worked for hundreds of thousands of people already.
- Business-building support to make a reliable, predictable income as a business owner. Your ability to be an effective life coach is separate from your ability to run a business. To build a thriving business, you need to understand where to find potential clients, how to attract your ideal client, how to create and sell coaching programs, and more. Good certification programs help you with business-building support.
- A community to feel supported, grow, and help others grow as you work side-by-side to achieve your career goals. When you’re new to the coaching journey and being a business owner, you can’t possibly know everything you need to know. Surround yourself with a community to ensure that you receive mentoring from experienced coaches and support from your fellow newer life coaches as you work toward being an effective life coach who could impact hundreds of thousands of people.
If you’re thinking about starting a highly successful life coaching business, continue your exploration of the coaching journey and what it really takes to build successful careers in this exciting industry by requesting a copy of Are You Meant to Be a Life Coach?
You’ll discover how you can make a profound and lasting difference in the lives of others as a life coach and business owner, while earning an abundant income working from anywhere you choose.
Request your free copy of this information-packed coaching resource here!
Previously, i paid some $ but still dont know i stand. Can someone help me understand.
Karlous U. Kalu
Hi Karlous- if you’re looking for support with a training or progran you purchased, please reach out to our team at ClientCare@BraveThinkingInstitute.com — they can help you find any information you need!