Life Coaching Niches To Explore

Hi, Mary here. Before I jump into telling you the different types of life coaches that I believe have a great potential for amazing income, both as a side hustle if you're still working in a job or as something to jump into full-time, I want you to know something. This is really, really important, so please listen closely. Okay. When I started as a life coach in 2016, I started with no credentials. I still don't have any coaching credentials. I had no real coaching experience. I had had some conversations kind of randomly with people in my life, but I didn't have any clients, certainly no paying clients, when I decided to call myself a professional life coach. I had a teeny weeny weeny email list from a failed business from a few years earlier, so those people had really no connection to life coaching. It was completely unrelated. I had no other source of income at the time. I had very little in my savings to tide me over. And not only that, I didn't know what a coach's website looked like. Did I need a website? I didn't know what a quote-unquote coaching package was. All I knew for sure was that I wanted to help people, and I really believed in my heart of hearts that I had experienced a transformation in my life that I could facilitate in other people. That was where I started from. So if that's where you are, if you believe and you know that you have experienced something that can help another person, that is all you need to start as a life coach. That's literally all there is. I talk about this in another video. I will link to it in the description. But I know that there is some controversy around coaches being credentialed or not credentialed. My attitude is this: if you can help someone today, go tell people that you can help them and let them know exactly what you believe you can help them with. Because that's what I did when I decided to become a life coach. I told everyone I knew what I was up to I gave them the basic idea of how I could help them transform some area of their life through a new way of understanding themselves, and that was how I started. Do you know how I set my pricing? People often laugh at this, but it's a fact. I thought to myself, well, I need to make X amount to get the bills paid next month, so my coaching prices have to reflect that. I know I only want to work with this number of people, so each one has to pay this amount. I need to sign up this many people in order to meet that goal every month. And that's what I did. In my first month, I actually exceeded the goal by $1,000. Same with the second month, same with the third month. By month, I don't know, maybe 6 or 7, I had basically doubled my initial income goal. And it was all because, not because I had a big audience, not because I was some superstar coach, it was just because I kept telling people what I was doing and I started to get some testimonials as well. So if you think you need a lot of fancy bells and whistles to get started, you don't. All you need is a desire to help people, a willingness to tell people that you can help them, and a way to get paid like a PayPal account. So let's go into 4 different kind of coaching niches. I always hesitate to use that word, but it fits in this context that I believe have a tremendous amount of potential right now in terms of being a very lucrative type of life coaching to do. The first I would generally call obstacles coaching. Coaching. Now, I probably wouldn't put that on a website if you have a website, but the basic idea here is a lot of people run up against challenges, and what they need is someone to help them see that challenge from a new perspective, see options that they have. A lot of times people will go in circles for a long time around the same kinds of challenges, and it's mostly, in my view, because they're also surrounding themselves with the same people, so they're not getting a good variety of perspectives. You as a coach, if you have the ability, if you know that when you talk to someone and they share a problem, you can kind of see right through it, then this is an incredibly valuable type of coaching. In fact, this is really how I started. I told people, bring me any problem you have and we will solve it. And I know that sounds pretty brazen and kind of brave, but it was true. When people would come to me with a specific problem, because of the way I had transformed my own life and the perspective that I could bring to the person, we would get over that challenge sometimes very, very rapidly, even within the first session or two. So this is something that if you feel called to do this, you can absolutely do it. I know that if I can, you can. This does not take coach training. It takes some sort of life experience. It takes a willingness to put yourself forward and frankly, a willingness to charge money for this. A lot of coaches feel nervous about charging for what they do. Again, that's in another video where I talk about not coaching for free. Please, please, please remember that what you are doing as a life coach is valuable and this profession has really no end to the amount of impact and income that you can make. Another type of life coaching that has tremendous potential, if this sounds interesting to you, is working with people at midlife, maybe empty nesters or people who have been in the same career for a long time and want a change. Maybe people want to change other aspects of their life. When they reach their 40s, 50s, 60s. I still consider 60s midlife, but in any case, I have worked with a lot of people in this age group. And first of all, it's a wonderful group of people to work with. I enjoy it so, so much. And I also feel like it's an age group that is still untapped. We still sometimes have this idea that if you're not in your 20s or 30s, you know, you're kind of done. But midlife coaching— people at that stage of life have so much vitality. I know I do, and maybe you do if you're in that same age group. But honestly, this has so much potential because people are looking for support. They're not necessarily finding what they need in terms of the books they read or the podcasts they listen to. Sometimes that one-to-one support is really, really what they need. And I know from my own experience working with people in that age range, it's so exciting to see people go from feeling kind of on the margins, uh, feeling like, you know, maybe they're not sure what they want to do, to suddenly coming alive again and realizing they have all these untapped interests that maybe they've been pushing down, pushing down, pushing down for years. And now you're giving them permission to explore all of those things that they really may want to do going forward. So if this is calling to you, if you're in that age range, or if even if you're not, but you really see this group of people as someone you would like to support, then I am behind you 100%. I know that there is a tremendous amount of potential here, and Nice little side benefit here. A lot of people in that age range do have a little luxury spending that they're able to do, so they can afford your coaching. Nice plus. A third type of life coaching that has tremendous potential— oh my gosh, this one is so exciting— is what is traditionally called work-life balance coaching. Now, I personally I don't really like the term work-life balance because I kind of feel like, you know, it's all life. It all falls under life. But just to make things easier, I'll use the term work-life balance because we all generally know what it means, right? It means that somebody is putting too much emphasis on their work and not enough emphasis on their life outside of work. So things feel off-kilter. They often feel taxed and tired and burned out. And how many people do you know just in your circle who are feeling this way? This is a very simple type of coaching business to start because you probably already know at least a dozen people who fit this category and who would love to pay you to help them through this, to help them gain perspective, to help them put themselves first, to give themselves permission to have more of a life outside of what they do to make their income. And from my perspective, and maybe this is true for you, I see more and more people, especially since the pandemic, they've really stopped to say, is this how I want to be living? Is this how I really want to be spending my time? I'm not so sure. Well, you can be there to be the person who helps them through this period of change, who helps them give themselves permission to make the changes that they want to make so that they do have better, quote unquote, work-life balance. This niche, if you will, has so much potential. And if you feel drawn to work with people who are in this situation, which is a lot of the population, then go for it. Huge potential. The final type of life coaching I want to talk about in this particular video that has a lot of promise and is so needed is working with millennials. As a parent of a millennial and someone who talks with people in that age group and sees what they are going through, Oh my goodness, they have a lot of struggles, a lot of struggles. And it really doesn't matter how old you are. If you are a millennial yourself, you may feel drawn to help people in your same age group. But even I, who am definitely not a millennial, have thought, you know, maybe there is something that I can do to support these younger people at this difficult time in their lives. I know that for many of them, they are facing very difficult career challenges. They may have student debt that they are facing, which is forcing them to make decisions that maybe they don't necessarily want to make in terms of work because they have this debt to pay off. They may be struggling to achieve what they believe are sort of basic things like having their own home, etc., etc. They have a tremendous amount of pressure on them and they can use support. And this is the reason why I'm encouraging you to consider this particular niche, the millennial niche, because they need more people really listening to their problems, to their challenges. And frankly, I think it could be helpful if you are older than a millennial to think about working with this particular group because you have something that they don't have, which is you have a few more years of life experience that you can bring to these conversations. And also, if you are a coach who has gotten some training in a particular coaching modality, really think about how you could bring it to this age group. I have such a fondness for them because, as I said, my daughter is one, and I just see how vast their challenges are. And gosh, it would be so wonderful to have more caring people wanting to help that particular segment of the population. I hope this video has inspired you to get out there and start your life coaching business today. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe to my channel for more, and I'll see you in the next video. Bye for now.