While hiring a personal or executive trainer can be a powerful solution to help you solve personal or business problems or achieve goals, it's not a miracle solution. Instead, you may need a therapist. A coach will focus primarily on looking to the future, on finding new ways of acting and thinking, rather than dealing too much with the past. If you have problems such as depression, anxiety, or a mental illness, you need a trained therapist.
A life coach can help people in different areas of their lives. But because every human being is different, so will their goals. Often, a life coach advises clients on a personal and professional level. This means career, personal development, relationships, nutrition, divorce, grief, and even financial well-being.
And while coaching isn't about telling people what to do, sometimes people need guidance, advice, and to be held by the hand. But I agree with you and I also advise people not to quit their jobs or other businesses to become life coaches. Once you start to see coaching as a way to earn money, all the relative stress that this entails will greatly affect your training and make it extremely difficult. A trained mental health professional will be able to support you on your path to mental health, not a personal counselor.
In addition, it takes a certain type of person to succeed in business, and it's not necessarily compatible with the kind and generous nature of most coaches. A fairly large one tells people on their website that coaching is the fastest-growing industry in the U.S. UU. In general terms, satisfaction is about living a life that is valued, purposeful, and alive, and balance is about choosing a life that is in action, aligned with a compelling vision.
I see the possibility of being a serious business person with years of work experience counseling another person or a dietitian who helps people transform their eating habits, but this industry is asking for a lot of money from the pocket of someone with no experience in psychology. Okay, let me edit that a little bit: IT CAN BE a business, but it needs a few more things combined to make it a business that actually generates money (because a business that doesn't make money is a hobby, and I've seen a lot of fans of life coaching in my day). But again, I like the idea of taking the course “anyway” to learn more skills and I lose the training opportunities offered by my old job, managing teams, etc. The beginning of a new coaching relationship is an ideal time to remove accumulated layers of identity.
But what makes the business of these trainers work is that they've chosen a very specific niche and haven't been afraid to build a brand around a very specific problem. I love training and partnering with my clients, watching their growth and experiencing their “AHA” moments.
