So, you want to be a great life coach? It seems that you have a burning desire to improve the lives of others for them to attain greater fulfillment in their lives. As a life coach, you’ll help your clients enhance their careers, relationships, and daily lives. But what are the qualities of a great life coach? Continue reading to see seven characteristics you must possess as a wellness professional.
1. Fully-Certified
Many people can give excellent advice for daily life. However, life coaches tend to take those pieces of advice further. Becoming certified through an accredited life coaching course will help you give professional life-changing suggestions to your customers.
To become an excellent life coach, you need to enroll in a quality training course. Note that the career you desire won’t happen overnight. Moreover, your life coaching skills need time and experience for you to become competent at it.
As a fully-certified wellness professional, you’ll build long-term relationships with your clientele. You’ll expose yourself to the different expert techniques to help people become more financially stable, achieve their goals, and obtain their happiness, to name a few of your many possible tasks.
One of the certifications you should consider completing is the Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). Achieving this set of skills helps reveal your inner talents in providing proper communication to people who may need it the most.
The definitions of the neuro, linguistic, and programming in NLP are as follows:
- Neuro: Refers to the state of mind (and body) affecting behavior and communication.
- Linguistic: The state of the body and mind wherein you can find verbal and non-verbal communication practices.
- Programming: Also called ‘living on autopilot,’ this term refers to a person’s capacity to adapt to different body and mind states.
Therefore, a fully-certified life coach with an NLP certification is a trained professional who knows how to structure daily life programs to enhance another individual’s communication skills.
2. Maintain Positivity
As a professional life coach, you need to maintain an optimistic attitude, particularly when looking at life’s different stressors. If you don’t maintain positivity, your clients can’t ‘feed’ off of that optimistic personality. Hence, you’re not going to do a very good job of providing positive substance to your clientele’s lives.
Without positivity in your life, you’ll likely fall into the pit of negative feelings. In turn, you might experience a loss of motivation. Also, it would cause you to feel as if nothing will work out the way you desire.
It can be challenging to maintain positivity, even as a wellness professional – but it’s not impossible. One way to maintain an optimistic view of life is to think happy thoughts.
Possess a happy thought that’s so powerful that it’ll propel you out of the dark feelings you might feel. This doesn’t mean that you should reject the negative aspects of life. Instead, accept life’s pressures, and only then will you find solutions that can change your life, and the lives of your customers, for the better.
3. Be Passionate
Passion is an intense feeling of enthusiasm towards a compelling desire. That desire might be a powerful urge to possess something in life. Once you have that ‘something,’ you might achieve one of your life’s success.
As a professional life coach, you need to be passionate about your career. Otherwise, you’re only looking at it as nothing but a job instead of a life-changing decision.
However, it’s important to remember that being passionate at life coaching doesn’t always come easily. Many people who decide to hire someone to help them become better at life might be talking to a person with more problems than them.
However, even when you have chronic stress, or life is throwing discomforts at you from every direction, you still have to maintain that burning desire to help your customers. That spark of passion in your being that you feel for your profession shouldn’t die out. Otherwise, you might find it more challenging than usual to help your clients achieve their life goals.
4. Be Self-Aware
Professional life coaches need to be self-aware, which means you need to recognize your thoughts and behaviors as they surface. You can develop this ability to look at one’s thinking and behaviors over time and with the right education. One way that you can develop this skill is to practice active listening, as it allows you to notice how you’re making decisions and how you’re responding to certain situations.
Another aspect of being self-aware is learning to trust one’s self. When you’re self-aware, you’ll know if you’re putting too much trust in other people. But, you might think that trust is a good thing. However, you should also keep in mind that too much of a good thing can be bad.
Therefore, learning to be self-aware allows you to trust in yourself in a way that it doesn’t lead to toxicity. In turn, you can teach your customers to trust others, but they won’t put too much faith in those other individuals.
As the German theoretical physicist Albert Einstein once said, ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’ To put that adage into the concept of trust and self-awareness, you should teach your customers not to put too much faith in a particular person or object if that entity can’t provide positive results for their well-being.
Keep in mind that a great life coach will exude essential qualities that will eventually reflect upon their customers’ persona. Hence, practicing self-awareness will, in turn, make your clients self-aware over time.
5. Practice Humility
Humility is a characteristic that you should possess as a human being and a life coach. A humble person will gather meaningful relationships, whereas haughty folks tend to reject or ruin those bonds.
Be confident, but not condescending. Practicing humility will get you to different places and avoid negative feedback, especially as a wellness professional.
Being a humble professional in the industry of giving different professional pieces of advice, you’re not self-critical or self-deprecating. Instead, you’re confident in your abilities and in different aspects of your being without trying to show them off. In other words, actions speak louder than words.
Your humility should rub off on your clients to show them that they don’t deny what they believe. But, what if your customers don’t want to deny their bad traits? Then, don’t let these people deny those imperfections.
Remind your customers that to err is to maintain humanity. Human beings aren’t perfect creatures, which means it’s okay to have some imperfections in life. Your clients should accept their inadequacies and build upon those deficiencies to become better people for themselves and society.
6.Keep Focused
The brain provides different thoughts that may surface in a blink of an eye. Hence, your mind can jump from one thought to another, and the same notion might be true for your customers.
Thus, maintaining focus is an imperative skill and quality for wellness professionals. But, the question is, how can you maintain that focus? After all, losing that focus on your passion for your chosen profession might inhibit you in providing excellent advice to your clientele.
The answer to that question lies in yet another inquiry: why? Specifically, why did you want to become a life coach in the first place?
Your ‘why’ should be stronger than any other sensation in your body and mind. If you know your ‘why,’ you can maintain a deep focus on helping other people achieve their life goals.
For example, perhaps you find yourself lost in your thoughts as you think about the many adverse events that have been happening in your life as of late. But, ask yourself, ‘why did you get into this career?’ Asking yourself this inquiry will help remind you of the reasons why you want to help other people.
In turn, you can maintain that focus and passion, allowing you to help as many people as possible in achieving their life goals.
7. A Great Listener
It’s safe to say that no one wants to talk to a person that captures words in one ear and throws them out the other. If you’re this person, then you’re not an excellent listener, let alone a great life coach.
So, always practice active listening when hearing the worries and doubts of your clientele. Active listening allows you to immerse yourself in your customers’ words fully. Show your customers that you’re actively listening by nodding in agreement or reacting to their statements.
Actively listening allows you to formulate suggestions and solutions for your clients to absorb. In other words, it’s like providing the correct solution to a mathematical equation instead of answering ‘five’ if someone asks you ‘what is one plus one?’
Final Words
Always keep the qualities mentioned in this post to heart. Remember, your clients depend on you for support on various aspects of their lives. Be an excellent, fully-certified wellness professional to your customers. But, and perhaps most importantly, be a shoulder to lean on for your clients.
