{*Did you know you can write on Elephant? Here’s how—big changes: How to Write & Make Money or at least Be of Benefit on Elephant. ~ Waylon}
~

One day, I impulsively quit my full-time Silicon Valley startup job as an in-house producer with little to no financial savings and declared myself a life coach.

I was burned out, and I wanted out of the nonstop work and stress.

Perhaps, it was a blessing that I had no idea what I’d be getting myself into. If I’d known then what I know now, I’m not sure I would have become a life coach.

It all started when my therapist brought it up.

Therapist: “Larissa, you should become a life coach.”

Me: “Is that a real job? Isn’t it a total scam?”

Coaching is not a scam. It’s truly a life-altering tool. I owe the self-confident, purpose-driven entrepreneur I am today to it. However, the journey toward becoming a coach has often felt lonely and problematic for me, and in my desperation, I have been scammed (more than once).

If you’re unfamiliar with it, coaching has overlaps with therapy, but differs. Coaching is for high-functioning individuals who have a clear goal in mind. A coach gets you from point A to point B. A coach is like hiring a CEO, mentor, and cheerleader to go from okay to up-leveling your life.

No one needs coaching—you get a coach because life is good but you want more.

Now to dive into what I wish I’d known before heading down this path:

1. Most of what you do is not coaching.

One of the top industry leaders of a highly popular manifestation course in Los Angeles told me what she thought she was going to be doing in the wellness, self-help space was helping other people. But she found that most of what she does is building and maintaining a business, social media strategy, brand launches, chatting with legal teams, and forecasting numbers.

The self-help industry is for profit. Coaching is selling a service, building a brand, and acting as your own boss, social media marketing advisor, and financial planner. At the bottom of the list is time spent in-session with your client coaching.

Coaching my clients is the dream job, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything, but only a handful of my hours a day are spent in a 1:1 session with my clients.

2. No one else cares if you don’t get ahead.

Say hi to your new boss: you. You’re in charge of your time management, your performance reviews,  your motivation level, and when you stop working (if you ever do stop working). It is this start-up mentality that will follow you as you sit on the toilet, and it will haunt you in moments that you wish it wouldn’t. Some of your best ideas may come on date nights or during your morning meditation.

Now, this may not sound so bad, especially the holding yourself accountable part, right? Wrong. One of the number one issues my high-functioning clients have is accountability, which is why they pay me thousands of dollars to keep them responsible for their goals. You’ll see influencer coaches brag about 6 a.m. wake-up times, long meditations, and six-figure months while you feel guilty as you stop work at 8 p.m. because you realize you skipped lunch for the third day in a row.

3. The pressure to be perfect is intense.

So much of how you get clients is by promoting not just the results you will get but also showing off your healthy lifestyle and work-life balance. People hire you because they want your life. They want to go hiking on a Tuesday afternoon. They want to feel like their self-care routine fits easily into their day. They want a vibey, healthy romantic relationship full of loving communication and polished selfies.

This looks like showing them the lemon water you drank, the “Breakup with your People Pleaser” workshop you are hosting, and your happy smile after a successful day at the gym. But even that is not enough. You also need to be vulnerable, share that selfie of you crying, and talk about how you’re having family drama or are struggling with health issues. You need to be aspirational but relatable.

Some coaches even use not being on social media or having a website as a marketing tactic. Either way, your job has a “lifestyle” reputation attached to it, and you will have to grapple with finding a sweet spot there.

4. It’s psychological warfare on your ego.

Coaching is not selling a tangible good like a pair of pants. It is selling, ultimately, at the end of the day, hanging out with you. You are the product.

The success of your business is directly tied to your self-worth. There is no boss or company to point the finger at when things don’t live up to your expectations. It becomes hard to find balance and know where your identity begins and your business identity ends. Suddenly, the investment you made to do something purpose-aligned turns into a cruel identity that fluctuates depending on the balance in your bank account.

It can be great when it’s great and horrible when it’s horrible. You then have to find equilibrium outside of your earning potential. If you can do that, you have unlocked the highest level of self-worth possible in a capitalistic society, and there is a big, beautiful freedom that comes with that.

5. Coaching is a side hustle until it becomes a full-time job (5-10 years later).

Unless you have hit the CEO level or are a famous influencer in the space, you won’t be making a lot of money. It takes time to build confidence and learn how to sell ethically. In my first year as a coach, I charged $1,800 for three months. If you do the math, I would need 55.5 clients per year to make 100k. Spoiler: I did not have 55.5 clients.

If I could have given my younger self one piece of advice, it would be to save enough money to cover my life expenses for a whole year. I’ve met coaches who charge 30k for six months and 90k for a year and coaches whose online courses make millions. The question to ask yourself is whether you are willing to work for 5-10 years to hit your income goals.

A new coach in their first year will likely make a max of 30k, and that’s if you’re really hustling. Most coaches fail. Even the coaches who stick it out for 10 years usually don’t. And yes, as an entrepreneur, the sky is the limit. Your earning potential is endless, but there is no shortcut. There is also no sweeter paycheck than the one you earned.

6. The most successful coaches sell coaching to other coaches.

The people who usually pay the most for coaching are new coaches desperate to figure out a coaching formula that will make them 10k a month consistently. It is the most lucrative coaching business model, and I’m sure this is a controversial opinion but it is mine.

I’ve had incredible life coaches who were business mentors. But I have also hired people at emotional lows who were selling the idea that if I followed their step-by-step method, I would find success in six months, and it never worked for me. That’s on me, no one forced me to, but those ads did a good job of playing into my insecurities.

There is no “right” way to coach. No webinar, group program, 1:1 breakthrough session, or sales funnel that will magically give you money, clients, or thousands of social media followers. I learned the hard way to block the barrage of Meta and YouTube pre-rolls that will invade your life, telling you that you can make millions if you just buy a proven coaching program on sale for a limited time. You’ll soon find out that all programs are always “on sale.”

7. Coaching is lonely.

If you are in private practice, you will be lonely. If you’re like me, I went from a team-based work environment where I still talked to several humans and interacted with Slack groups even though it was remote. And yes, like anyone else, I love my alone time. But when most of your days have zero social interaction, you miss it.

I miss co-worker happy hours, dinners, and spontaneous 1:1 Zoom calls to go over in detail the larger team Zoom call you just got off of. Coaches need coaches, but coaches also need entrepreneur friends. It took me years to make new friends who didn’t have 9-5 jobs. I joined entrepreneurship groups, volunteered to do speaking engagements, and went on retreats. Now, I have friends who get it and who I can learn from and lean on. Having co-workers whom you can call is essential. You are not only building a client base, you are creating a whole new community.

8. Just because your friends lean on you doesn’t mean you should be a coach.

I used to get so much validation from being a quasi-therapist friend. I loved fixing people’s problems and giving advice. I would have hours-long phone calls with friends and even co-workers. People often told me how much better they felt. This came easily to me, but being a coach is not being a go-to friend to lean on. Coaching teaches clients to develop self-care routines, find their inner confidence, and be accountable for their goals. You are creating structure and accountability with clear boundaries.

One of the most powerful coaching skills I learned is listening and asking empowering, open-ended questions. If you tell your clients to do something, they may agree; if you can get them to realize by guiding them, so it comes out of their mouth (not yours), they are more motivated to do it and more likely to believe it. I had to unlearn all my people-pleasing and let go of my savior complex. The blessing here is you transformed from a caretaker into a supportive leader.

9. Your income is tied to your social circle.

Coaching is usually more expensive than therapy and is not covered by insurance. Getting clients excited to enter a high-paying container is one of the most transformative experiences. Clients who can joyfully invest in themselves are so fun to work with, and there are many of them. However, to find those clients, you need to operate in a social circle of people with disposable income.

There are exceptions: Clients have put coaching fees on credit cards because they believed in coaching and were committed, but coaching is a privileged service. Your earning power is based on your clientele. If you want to coach CEO executives, you can charge higher. If you want to coach folks taking their side hustle to their full-time careers, you will likely charge less. Think about who you want to serve and where they are at, and that will give you an idea of your earning power.

10. Everyone will say they want to hire you, but few do.

If you are a life coach, you will be the life of every party. Once people figure out you’re a coach, you will get a ton of questions, and many people, often strangers, will say jokingly, “I need a life coach in my life.” This will happen to you at any event, without fail. Being a coach is not as mainstream as many other careers, and as a baby coach, I often thought this meant that those people wanted to hire me. But in reality, they just want to talk about their problems in a social setting.

You will realize that the clients who actually want to hire you never say, “I want a life coach.” They say, “I want my life back.” People don’t want coaches. They want support in attaining goals or creating effective solutions to problems.

Coaching has literally allowed me to drop people-pleasing, leave co-dependent relationships, start a newsletter, start a podcast, and help women and femmes achieve their wildest dreams. It is the best job in the world for me. But like anything you do yourself from the ground up that is not the traditional pathway, it’s a hard and worthwhile journey.

~

{Please consider Boosting our authors’ articles in their first week to help them win Elephant’s Ecosystem so they can get paid and write more.}

~