How to become a Life Coach in India

How to become a Life Coach in India

Life Coaching is a wildly misunderstood subject. Many confuse it with counseling. Many with consulting. The truth couldn’t be further away.  One of the most common questions asked on the social media channel of NLP Coaching Academy is, “Which Online Life Coach Certification program in India to attend?” “How to become a Life Coach in India?” The easy answer, “Attend an accredited Life Coach program,” is insufficient because within this question lies hidden a series of unasked questions, which many people who are seeking answer to Life Coach training in India must consider.

Life Coaching has grown to be a successful form of talking personal change work. A life coach is not supposed to give you hacks to suddenly transform your life. A life coach is required to provide you with a safe environment where you can talk without the fear of judgment and work out things for yourself. A life coach is supposed to be a sounding board for you – someone who can help you broaden your views and shift your perspective to better serve you. If you are looking for how to become a Certified Life Coach in India, then you must understand the nuances of the industry before you dive in.

It is important to distinguish motivational speakers from life coaches. A lot of celebrity coaches parading around as life coaches and preying on the gullible masses by leveraging PR and Marketing may not even be coaches in the true sense of the word.  Surprised?  Read on!

There are coaches available dime a dozen on social media who claim to be “The Best Life Coach” or “The Best Business Coach” and can be seen “coaching” an audience of over a thousand people from the stage. In reality, these people are promoting their speaking gigs, consultancy services, training programs, online webinars, etc, as coaching. Let’s get real- do you really think a Rs.99 webinar or a Rs.999 workshop can bring about the “Life Transformation” that it promises? Come on!

Coaching, in the true sense of the term, cannot happen from the stage. Most of these people get away with these antics because of strong advertising and PR campaigns.

How to become a Life Coach in India ~ Becoming a coach requires proper training and certification, does not matter whether online Life Coach Certification, or classroom, both are recognized internationally accepted ways of learning now. Although this is not mandatory, any coach worth their salt will have some sort of training under their belt. Hence demand for quality Life Coach training in India has seen a significant demand.

How to become a Life Coach?

• Finalize your outcome of becoming a Life Coach
• Research and find the training organization who provides Life Coach training
• Zero in on the mentor coach (part of above research)
• Attend the Life Coaching training course
• Get certified (Take up ICF ACC level at least)
• Set up your marketing and sales plan
• Hire a digital marketing team to work with
• Generate leads, work with clients and establish as a Life Coach
• Learn and upgrade your skills continuously

What is Life Coaching?

Sometimes, people get excited seeing an online ad about Life Coaching training in India and immediately want to explore this vocation. At a bare minimum, one must know that Life Coaching is like therapy and not as therapy. Like therapy, the Life Coach must practice skills like listening, empathy, patience, being non-judgmental, reflecting, asking Socratic questions, etc. But unlike therapy, Life Coaching is outcome-driven. The client seeks deep transformations that will put them on their desired growth path. And it is the job of the Life Coach to facilitate the discussion for the client to find that path.  A life coach is not going to solve any issues or provide any advice or mentor a person.  A life coach partners with their clients to help them overcome their challenges and achieve their goals.  They bring in their expertise to the coaching relationship in the form of active listening and nuanced questioning with the use of which, they bring about a gradual transformation in their client.

The coach helps the client explore his/her options, question his/her beliefs, broaden his/her mindset and shift his/her perception in a way that proves to be conducive to his values, goals, and dreams.

What should one know if one is interested to know how to become a Certified Life Coach in India?

Great question. Clarity of purpose fuels passion. And passion is a crucial daily requirement in a Life Coach’s existence. Here are two great high-level reasons to become a Life Coach in India:

1. It is a sunrise vocation

While many vocations are disappearing like endangered species, modern life is throwing up new vocations that will help us evolve. Life Coaching is here to stay if you are looking for how to become a Life Coach in India, and how to survive in the Life Coaching industry.  Here are three factors:

Ambition: The per capita ambition of human beings is on the rise. People want more. People want it all. And those who want to excel in every sphere of life are naturally drawn to Life Coaching.

Stress: More ambition means more stress, more daily confusion. People on the growth path want a constant pillar of support whom they can trust and seek advice from. The Life Coach is trained to play this role.

Support: In the good old days, families and communities were able to offer time, expertise and emotional connection on a daily basis. But today, support is outsourced to a professional. Ambitious and stressed people seek and deserve such a professional.

2. You have a leadership mindset

The greatest part of the Life Coach’s work happens one-on-one with the client, behind closed doors. Even with the aid of able mentors, the Life Coach might feel lonely and doubtful. That’s why (s)he must be self-driven and confident. For this reason, Life Coaching is not for everybody. It is a vocation for those who value excellence in themselves and others. It requires passion and perseverance.

If you fit the bill, then you are a leader and a nurturer. And you will derive immense joy and meaning by becoming a Life Coach. Additionally, established Life Coaches do very well financially.

Scope of Life Coaching 

The scope of life coaching is immense. The demand for life coaching has been high in western countries for a long time now and a steep rise in demand for Life Coach certification in India can be seen in recent times. The pandemic, especially, has acted as a catalyst for the coaching industry in India. More and more people are now recognizing the benefits of hiring a Life Coach.

Life Coaching can be viewed as an umbrella term for all aspects of coaching as whatever challenges we face, whether personally or professionally, fall under the purview of the “life” that we lead. Therefore, the services of a life coach can be used for development in both your personal and professional life.  Hence, the demand for Life Coach certification in India.

On a personal front, a life coach can help you build healthy relationships, enhance emotional intelligence, achieve personal goals, resolve internal conflicts, define purpose, find inner peace and happiness, and more.

On a professional level, a life coach can help you improve your communication, build team management skills, learn conflict resolution, handle stress, deal with failure, enhance your decision-making skills, achieve career goals, cope with career change, and more.

If you are searching for how to become a Life Coach in India, then there is good news ~ Corporates are now eager to invest in quality certified life coaches to resolve their workplace challenges, build on personnel strengths and create an inspiring workforce and conducive work environment.

Moreover, with the world becoming a virtual place, life coaches can take their practice global. The possibilities are limitless.

With such a vast scope and with the demand for life coaches rising, investing in a good training and certification coaching course is a potent option.

What’s the difference between counseling, mentoring, and coaching?

This is a nuanced question. In a nutshell, counseling focuses on healing, mentoring focuses on offering specific expertise to play a specific role, and coaching is about helping individuals chart their best-suited, unique paths to the future. It is less concerned about how you became you and more focused on how to help you become the best version of yourself.

What are the specializations in Coaching?

If somebody tells you they want to be a cricketer and you know cricket, you will naturally ask “Batsmen, bowler, or all-rounder?” The specialization doesn’t stop there. As a bowler, you could be a seamer or a spinner. As a spinner, you could be a finger spinner or a wrist spinner.

Similarly, you can be a pure Life Coach for the layperson seeking personal and professional growth (like an all-rounder who does everything in the field) or you could specialize in Business Coaching, Career Coaching, Wellness Coaching, Leadership Coaching, Executive Coaching, Sales Coaching, Peak Performance Coaching, etc. If you want to work with CXO-level people, you will want to be an Executive Coach.  Also, if you are interested in nurturing units of people, you can become an Organizational Development Coach. If you want to work on health and fitness goals, it makes sense to become a Wellness Coach.

Whether you choose a vertical focus area or a horizontal approach is a key question you will ask at the beginning of your journey as a Life Coach. Often, Life Coaches begin with a generic Life Coach template or choose 2-3 specializations and then identify the one most suited to their temperament and mission.

Skills required to become a Life Coach 

A life coach needs to hone certain skills in order to carry out an efficient coaching session. If you are looking for how to become a Life Coach in India, then be aware of the skills required to become a Life Coach as well.  Most of these skills can be acquired and built upon with practice.  Make sure to check the quality of the program when looking for Life Coach training in India. Some skills essential to becoming a life coach are as follows:

• Active Listening: A life coach is required to be an exceptional listener. A coach listens with an intent to understand not just what the client is saying but also to understand the things that underlie the client’s words- his beliefs, values, etc. Good deep listening can be the catalyst for change in a coaching session.
• Nuanced Questioning: A Life Coach must be a skilled questioner. A coach needs to be able to ask clear, concise questions in a language that mirrors the client and his sentiments. The questions asked must serve the purpose of self-reflection and deeper exploration.
• Powerful Reflection: A life coach needs to be able to reflect on what the client says and present it in a way that nurtures clarity of thought in the client. The coach should be able to use tools such as paraphrasing and meta-modelling to bring about change in perspective for the client.
• Compassion: A life coach needs to be compassionate, empathetic, and approachable. These characteristics go a long way in building trust between the coach and the coachee.
• Passion: A life coach should be passionate enough about his profession to continually build on it. Learning how to coach does not come with a one-time syllabus that you can study and be set for life. It is heavily dependent on interpersonal skills, intuition, and ever-evolving frameworks. A coach needs to be able to readily incorporate feedback and newer frameworks into his coaching style.

Is it possible to become a Life Coach by attending an Online Life Coach certification program in India? 

Well, the answer is yes, a person can become a Life Coach by attending an ICF approved program with global recognition from ICF.  ICF certification is in great demand because it ensures that the Life Coach or a Coach has gone through proper training, mentoring, towards becoming a Life Coach.  Hence, ICF-approved program whether classroom-based or online Life Coach Certification program approved by ICF is pretty much the same.  Make sure that your Life Coach training in India is an ICF approved vendor, and the program is approved under ICF ACSTH or ICF ACTP.

Caution:  If you are looking to become a Life Coach, and specifically want to utilize the ICF brand, then make sure that the ICF-approved program is ICF ACSTH approval (60 hours of ICF ACC level). Our instructor led leads to Online Life Coach Certification. 

How does one succeed as a Life Coach?

Finally, we are ready to answer the question we started with. Let us answer it by looking at two phases of how to become a Life Coach in India:

From an ASPIRING coach to a CERTIFIED Life coach in India

Here, we are asking WHERE to study Life Coaching in India. This depends on accreditation, quality of trainer, quality of content, duration and scope of the program, design of the program, etc.

Skills required to become a successful Life Coach

Being a life coach and becoming a successful life coach are two very different things. Along with the above mentioned skills, a life coach requires certain additional skills to become a successful one. Some of them are discussed below:

• Entrepreneurship: A life coach needs to treat his practice like a business. Just like a new business requires attention to multiple aspects, a life coaching business also requires investment, capital allocation, product development, business development, marketing, sales, customer relations and the works.
• Marketing: A life coach needs to package and market his services in a way in which his target audience finds it appealing. A coach also needs to pay special attention to what differentiates his services from the other thousands of coaches out there. Initially, when the budget is low, a lot of the burden of marketing falls on the coaches’ shoulder itself. Hence, it is important for coaches to know about basic marketing tools and strategies, at least.
• Side Hustle: Life coaches cannot become an overnight success. It takes a lot of persistence and perseverance for a coach to become successful. It is important that the coach is aware of this reality and plans his income accordingly. A coach should look at alternate/ multiple sources of income while still building his coaching business.

Now that you have an idea about the realities of the coaching industry and what it takes to be a true and successful life coach, you can research and decide for yourself who the Best Life Coach in India is or where to get your Life Coaching Certification from, Online Life Coach Certification, or classroom depending on what suits you.

Coaching is a highly rewarding career- if pursued the right way.

From a CERTIFIED coach to an ESTABLISHED coach

Having acquired technical expertise in being a Life Coach and having experienced coaching in simulated settings, you will now embark on the challenging and exciting journey of making a difference in people’s lives.  How to become a Life Coach in India enables you to find the Life Coaching training course, and the following articles will help you understand how to become a successful Life Coach in India:

This article offers in-depth inputs on building your business as a Life Coach – How to find more Life Coaching Clients

This article speaks about the beginning and nuances of a Life Coach’s journey – why is Vikram Dhar the Best NLP Trainer in India, and the number 1 celebrity life coaching authority in India/Asia.

Summary: 

While it is easy to become a Life Coach, it takes a lot of persistence, hard work, planning, strategy, and dedication to establish as a Life Coach.  You will encounter a lot of programs about Life Coaching, but beware not all courses will be the same.  The coach trainer facilitating your Life Coach program, Online Life Coach Certification or classroom, is going to be the game-changer in your Life Coaching journey.  To understand all the factors and then commit to the plan is the way forward, if you are looking for Life Coach certification in India.