They Laughed at Me

They used to laugh at me.

When I first became a life coach, I wanted to understand marketing, build a business, and help a lot of people. I joined masterminds, read the books, and showed up to the meetings.

In many of those rooms, I was the only woman. I was certainly the only life coach.

Successful businessmen would smirk when I explained what I did. Talking about feelings? Was that even a real business?

Once, someone thought I was the assistant and asked me to get coffee. I got it, then sat down as a participant in the mastermind. They were mortified. I was delighted.

Those experiences never made me want to stop calling myself a life coach. They made me want to change what people thought a life coach could be.

Seeing myself differently

Frank Kern was the first mentor I had in those marketing groups who really believed in me.

When I told him I wanted to make a million dollars in a year, he treated it as a beginning. A good start.

I made that first million dollars during the year I worked with him. Being taken seriously helped me see myself in a new way.

Later, I found myself speaking to rooms of businesspeople who were taking notes and asking questions about how I had made money as a life coach.

They were still laughing, but now they were laughing with me.

I had been advised early on to call myself a consultant because life coaching had a negative connotation. I refused. I wanted to change the reputation of the industry rather than hide my place in it.

A life coach could be someone you hire to help you make your life better. Someone who helps you unblock your future.

That is work I am proud of.

Help clients become independent

One of the first coaching organizations I explored talked about holding clients accountable and keeping them as clients for the rest of their lives.

That felt like babysitting to me. Creating dependency was not the coaching I wanted to do.

I wanted to help people develop their own discipline and independence. I wanted them to learn to manage their minds.

The Self-Coaching Model is central to that work. I can coach someone using the Model without teaching them the whole Model at the beginning.

I ask questions and help them understand what is happening in their life. As they gain clarity, they become ready to learn how to coach themselves.

Then they can take that skill into the world. They may come back for a touch-up, but they do not need me to supervise every decision.

Helping someone understand their own brain gives them something they can keep using.

Holding space is a skill

Being a good friend and being an effective coach require different things.

With our friends, we often give advice, try to fix things, or tell them how great they are. We offer our answers.

As a coach, I want to hold nonjudgmental, loving space so the client can discover their own answers.

That does not necessarily come naturally. Judgment and advice often do. Holding space is something to learn and practice.

Understanding how to coach yourself does not automatically mean you know how to coach someone else. Coaching another person requires feedback, supervision, and practice.

And please do not coach people against their will.

Your experience of feeling better through self-coaching may make you excited to help everyone. But developing the skill of holding space is part of becoming a coach.

Work on the cause

I focus on causal coaching: understanding the cause of an issue instead of only working on its symptoms.

With overeating, for example, I do not want to simply hold someone accountable for eating less. I want to help them understand why they overeat, why they have so much desire for food, and what is going on with their hunger.

If a client changes their eating to please me and get my approval, what happens when I am no longer there?

Understanding the cause gives them a different way to approach the problem. They can work with their desire and their mind rather than depend on my supervision.

When I stopped overeating, I moved on with my life. That is the kind of change I want to help clients create.

I also think it matters that the people teaching coaching practice it. Using the work in our own lives and coaching real clients gives us experience to bring to the teaching.

Making money as a coach

I want coaching to be a professional, successful industry. I love encouraging coaches to make money while helping people.

The Model can be used on many topics. Marketing becomes clearer when you choose a niche and know who you want to help.

You can think about creating your own business or working for someone else. In either case, creating value, overdelivering, and showing up matter.

I do not know exactly what you will do with what you learn. My success does not tell me what your result will be.

But I want you to see that making money as a life coach is possible and consider what you want to create.

Keep your attention on your clients

Your coaching mindset includes how you see yourself and what you focus on.

I feel proud when I say I am a life coach. I see the work as helping people have the futures they want.

That focus matters when you are afraid to show up.

I coached a schoolteacher who had created a program to help people let go of attachment after a breakup. She wanted to offer coaching on the side, but she was afraid of rejection.

She had not asked anyone to pay her or made herself available to the people she could help.

My attention was on those people. They were suffering, and she had something to offer them. Focusing only on how she might look or feel kept her from offering it.

Coaching is about serving your clients. Remembering that can help you show up when your brain wants to make everything about you.

Learn, watch, practice, and get feedback

Coaching tools include distinguishing facts from stories, processing feelings, understanding boundaries and the manual, and working with worthiness, decisions, and goals.

Using those tools well also means respecting that a client may have a very different experience of the world from yours.

You need to acknowledge that difference while holding space for them to understand their own beliefs.

The training process I value includes learning a concept, watching it demonstrated, and practicing with feedback.

A beginner and an experienced coach may need different instruction. Feedback helps you see what you need to develop instead of assuming that understanding an idea is the same as being able to use it.

Life coaching is not being a glorified friend. It is a skill and a profession I have been proud to help build.

People laughing at it did not change what I wanted to do. I wanted to help people understand their minds, become independent, and create their futures. I still do.