3 Questions to Ask to Find Out if a Life Coaching Side Hustle is Right for You

Do you have a desire to help people, expand your career, or start a business as a life coach, but you’re not sure if you want to leave your current job? 

Or, maybe you’ve dreamed of starting a life coaching business, but you don’t feel ready to leave behind your current career? 

The good news is– you can absolutely become a life coach without having to quit your current job! In fact, life coaching can make a very lucrative, flexible, and rewarding side hustle for many working professionals.

In this post, I’ll share with you three simple questions to help you determine if life coaching while working in your current career is viable for you, as well as three practices to help you maintain a work-life balance while you do.

Does starting a life coaching business mean that you need to leave your current career behind?

If you’re worried about abandoning work you love to become a life coach, let’s take a closer look at the real question:

“Will I have enough time and energy to juggle life coaching and my existing career at the same time?”

The answer is, it’s absolutely possible, but it depends on how busy you allow your career to make you and how you intend to structure your life coaching business.

It is so important to intentionally design your coaching business to support your goals, especially if you’re planning on maintaining your full time job while starting out as a life coach. 

As you decide how you will pursue training and certification, work with clients and design your business, you’ll get the most benefit if you prioritize systems and structures in place that will allow you to make the most impact without requiring all of your time and energy.

There are plenty of options when it comes to shaping your coaching career, but choosing the right one for you will ultimately determine your level of success.

For example, if you’re planning to coach clients in a strictly 1-on-1 capacity, that can and will eat up far too much of your time to maintain a balance between your coaching profession and your full time job.

On the other hand, if you have the right framework in place to serve many people simultaneously, it will allow you to keep the time and energy you devote to your existing career balanced, it is entirely possible to become a life coach while continuing your other line of work.

These types of seemingly-simple adjustments can be easy to overlook, making it imperative to choose how your coaching business will compliment the other areas of your life from the moment you begin.

What if you want to leave your career eventually?

If your plan is to leave your current career at some point in the future, the question then becomes:

“Can I make enough money as a life coach that I can afford to give up my current source of income?”

Again, the answer is “yes,” but it depends on how you choose to run your business.

Consider this: Do you know where your potential paying clients are, how to get their attention, how to enroll them, and how to coach them in a way that lets you serve many people at once, so that your income isn’t limited by the number of hours in a day?

And if you don’t know, should you let that stop you?

If your current career isn’t giving you joy, by all means, plan to leave it behind.

You were meant to spend your life making a difference by doing work you love, not simply surviving from one unhappy week to the next.

And if you choose to become a life coach, and you understand and consistently apply the principles of success, you absolutely CAN create the lucrative practice you’re hoping for.

But you will have to address the ins and outs of running a successful life coaching business in order to create a career that is sustainable, no matter how passionate you may be. 

That’s where the support of experienced coaches who have already paved the road to success and a community of like-minded, passionate individuals becomes invaluable– and it’s one of the reasons we’ve designed our coaching certification program to provide exactly that, as well as to teach the necessary skills to start and scale a sustainable, successful business. 

Three questions to help you decide if a life coaching side hustle is right for you

Question #1: What would you love?

One of the best questions you can ask yourself to reveal whether it’s time to transition from your current career to becoming a full-time life coach is: What would I love?

Would you love to stay in your current career and start a part-time life coaching business?

Or, would you love to leave your current job or shut down your current business entirely and become a full-time life coach?

Both paths are available to you, and you can always choose one path and change course later on down the road.

The direction you take depends 100% on the kind of career and lifestyle you’d love to create as a life coach!

Question #2: Are you creating your own products and programs?

Know this- the least successful life coaches trade their time for money, one hour at a time.

The most successful life coaches help their clients by moving them through programs, curriculum, and products over time, the longer-term commitments often resulting in more significant results.

But, keep in mind that creating your own curriculum and products will likely be a time-consuming process, and can make it difficult to start and scale your professional coaching business while also working full time.

You also may need to run beta-groups to test the efficacy of your programs and to create social proof like reviews, feedback, and results to help sell your curriculum to future paying clients.

Ideally, the best way to overcome these challenges is to look for a certification program that will provide you with a proven framework for the programs and curriculum you can use for your life coaching business. These should be products that can be customized to use with any coaching niche you plan to work in.

Not only will this free up more time and energy for you to balance your current career and your life coaching business, but it will also allow you to earn an abundant income and create more impact faster!

Question #3: Do you have experience running and scaling a successful life coaching business?

Becoming a life coach requires more than coaching skill alone.

Success as a certified life coach means you’ll need to find potential clients, connect with them, and enroll them- all before you ever actually coach a single person.

Your business requires an economic engine to help it run at its fullest potential, whether it’s your full time life coaching practice or it’s a lucrative side hustle giving you the income and impact you’ve been dreaming of.

As you are designing your life coaching business, it’s recommended that you plan for the amount of time it will take you to learn how to market and scale your business or for the amount of resources it will take to hire a marketing and sales expert to support you.

Regardless of whether you choose to learn how to start and scale a business on your own, or you decide to hire a professional to help you, know that the resources required in either case can significantly impact whether or not you’re able to start a life coaching business while maintaining your full time job.

To overcome these significant time and money costs, look for a certification or training program that will teach you the business skills necessary to start and grow a successful business. 

If the goal is to ultimately live in your purpose of helping others transform their lives for the better, you’ll need to create a business framework that both supports your work and also allows you to live a life you love. The right certification program will teach you how to do just that, and support you as you implement it.

How to start a coaching business and merge careers

There are many ways you can merge life coaching with your full-time job or start a coaching business while you’re working 40 hours a week, especially while balancing work and family.

In fact, at Brave Thinking Institute, we know it’s possible– we see it happen time and time again for our coaching certification graduates! 

Here are stories about two people who have completed coach certification training with Brave Thinking Institute for whom this was a consideration.

Erin had been an attorney for over 30 years when she came to Brave Thinking Institute for coach certification training.

She was tired of helping people solve disputes and wanted to help people live lives they loved instead.

She wanted to help clients design the kind of lives where disputes weren’t the natural outcome.

When she started, she set aside only one Saturday per month building her coaching business.

Pretty soon she was scaling back the time she spent at the law practice and increasing the amount of time she spent coaching.

After about 18 months, she was able to leave her law practice and devote her time exclusively to coaching clients.

Erin is now doing work she loves – helping people create lives that are more in alignment with what they truly love.

Another coaching graduate, Cynthia, is a cardiologist who didn’t intend to leave her full-time job.

Cynthia wanted to learn to be a coach so that she could help her patients not just deal with the effects of disease, but to help them develop a mindset that generates different results in their lives and increase their vitality.

Cynthia coaches her patients and treats them, so that their entire sense of well-being is transformed.

If you love the job you’re in, you might want to nourish transformation for clients within your existing practice.

Or, coaching can be a stepping stone toward a brand-new, full-time profession.

The important thing to know is this: You’re in charge and you get to decide!

Balancing work and life when starting a new coaching business

If you’re passionate about building an impactful, lucrative life coaching business while creating a lifestyle you truly love (and are able to enjoy), there are three practices you must master.

Practice #1: Use the principles of success to control your to-do list.

Part of being a life coach is teaching other people how to shape their own realities so they can create their circumstances instead of their circumstances controlling them.

So, to become a successful life coach yourself, you will need to master these principles and apply them to your own life.

Let’s take a look at your current situation:

• Are you too busy to become a coach?
• If so, what exactly is keeping you swamped?
• Are there tasks you’re doing that you aren’t suited for that could be done more quickly by someone else?
• Are there things you’re good at but aren’t passionate about that could be delegated?

You might think that these things need to be done, and no one else will do them right or you can’t afford to get help – but that would be allowing your circumstances to control your life.

Take a moment and think about it:

• What do you WANT to be doing with your day?
• What’s keeping you from doing it, and what action steps can you take to start shifting that?

Practice #2: Merge your business and your coaching.

If you’re in an industry that complements life coaching, becoming a coach can add another layer to your services and allow you to serve your clients on a whole new level.

By learning the mindset and principles of success and knowing what causes failure, you’ll be able to discover the root problems behind your clients’ challenges.

This allows you to not only help them overcome those challenges, but also to prevent the problems from popping up again, so the results you create are bigger, faster, and longer-lasting.

Now you can raise your fees – since you are providing value far above many of your peers, you deserve to be paid accordingly. Not to mention, people are thrilled to pay for results they love!

Practice #3: Set up a system that lets you coach multiple people at once.

Designing group programs can be more work upfront than simply enrolling clients and coaching them one on one.

That is, if you’re doing the work of creating the program yourself. Before I get into that, let’s consider the cost of coaching solely one-on-one.

With this method, you trap yourself in a cycle of trading dollars for hours and your income will always be limited by the number of hours that you are able to work in a day.

Even if you grow an audience and you’re able to charge more, your income and free time will always be competing with each other, leaving you with less of both than you deserve.

This is the primary reason that all of the most successful life coaches use systems that let them serve multiple clients at once.

Doing so removes those frustrating limits from your income and impact and allows you to change hundreds or even thousands more lives, without spending hundreds or thousands more hours.

Utilizing a system that allows you to work with more than one person at a time instead of “trading hours for dollars,” you can fit life coaching into your schedule, so your family and existing career doesn’t suffer because of it.

Becoming a life coach full time

For some people, work is just a means to an end. Earn enough money, make ends meet, feed the family, pay the mortgage, and do it all over again each month. For others, it’s a sacred mission.

For those on a sacred mission, work is something they enjoy waking up to each morning, and it fills their hearts with hope and joy.

Which situation are you in now? If you’re in a career that isn’t exciting and fulfilling to you, it’s nothing to be ashamed of and you are not alone.

But remember: You deserve so much more.

You deserve to be doing work that you truly enjoy. You deserve to be able to take pride in what you do, knowing that you’re making an impact on the people around you and the world as a whole.

You deserve to reach the end of the work day with plenty of free time to spend with your family and friends, and with no nagging worries that you haven’t made enough money that day.

Is your career or business doing that for you?

Take a few minutes to think about your work, and what you want to create with it.

This exercise doesn’t have to be a big, daunting task that severely interrupts your day; just set a timer for 10 minutes and contemplate the following questions:

• Do you enjoy your work, and  do you look forward to doing it each day?
• Are you proud of the changes you’re creating in the world?
• Are you making the money your time is worth? 
• Do you have enough time for yourself and to enjoy your family, your friends, and your life?
• And if you aren’t, what is keeping you stuck in that position, unable to create a business or career that’s everything you desire and deserve?

The most important thing to know is that you get to choose! You get to create whatever you want for your life and your career based on your vision for your life.

Would You Love to Build a 6- or 7-Figure Coaching Business?

Click here to reserve one of the strategy sessions I mention in the video above…

Or, if you think you might be one of those who has a sacred calling to become a life coach and you have the desire to help as many people as possible, I have a gift for you! 

Click here to get access to an eye-opening resource that will help you jumpstart your journey toward a more fulfilling, purposeful life. You’ll get the clarity you need to know if becoming a life coach is right for you– whether you choose to pursue life coaching full time or as a lucrative, fulfilling side hustle. 

The Meant to Be a Life Coach ebook will give you: 

• The only 6 questions you need to ask to discover if life coaching is truly the right path for you
• The one, crucial thing that will determine your level of potential income and impact
• The simple strategy most people overlook when trying to start a life coaching business
• The most common mistake new coaches make and how to avoid it
• …and more! 

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