Avoid These 5 Costly Mistakes When Starting Out as a Life Coach

Have you heard the classic Rod Stewart song, “Ooh La La”?

The chorus of the song goes like this:

I wish that I knew what I know now
When I was younger.
I wish that I knew what I know now
When I was stronger.

Not only is it one of the catchiest choruses ever recorded, but it acknowledges a truth that applies to every aspect of life as time goes on.

Whether in the area of relationships, finances, business or career, I think we’ve all experienced mistakes or failures that we wish we could have avoided!

We’ve also all had the experience of looking back and wishing we could have made different choices, and do certain things differently, knowing what we know now.

When it comes to building a successful life coaching business, wouldn’t it be amazing if you knew what the common mistakes people often make in growing their businesses beforehand… so that you could prevent yourself from going down the wrong path right from the get go?

Well, you’re in luck, because at Brave Thinking Institute, we’ve identified and can now share the 5 most common mistakes people make when becoming a life coach and growing their business, and how you can avoid them.

5 Mistakes New Life Coaches Make

1. Not knowing who your ideal client is

One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a life coach is to not having a clear idea of who it is that you’d really love to serve in your life coaching business.

In my own coaching business, a potential client must meet four very important criteria.

One of the criteria is that they must have a dream – something they want to be, do, have or create that isn’t a part of their current reality.

Or, if the potential client isn’t clear on their dream, they have a deep knowing that there’s more out there for them, and they’d like help uncovering what this more looks like and how to begin moving toward it!

To discover the other three criteria I look for in a coaching client, and I recommend you do, check out our blog on how to attract the perfect client.

Maybe you’d love to coach single moms or single dads, and help them create more balance and peace in their lives!

Or perhaps you’d love to work with entrepreneurs, and support them in building successful businesses and creating a life they love!

Once you know who the ideal client is for you, you can hone in on specific problems they are facing offering them a proven, reliable, repeatable system for addressing their pain and solving their problems.

2. Feeling like you need to “fill in the silence” during your coaching sessions.

At Brave Thinking Institute, where my faculty of expert coaches and I train and certify heart-centered life coaches, we teach what we call the Evocative Coaching Model.

Essentially, we train our coaches to do what they can to help the clients they work with tune into their own intuition, and evoke the answers they seek from within themselves.

We believe that each person has within them everything they need to solve any problem they’re faced with, and to answer any question they may have.

As coaches, our job is to help guide the client to discover that power within themselves, and help them utilize their power to build a life they truly love living!

When you are in the middle of a coaching session with a client, you may rush to fill in moments of prolonged silence…

If you tune into what you’re feeling, you may notice that you’re doing this because you feel uncomfortable with the silence for some reason, and you want to “fill it” by talking.

But when you do this, you may deprive your client of a few moments of silent reflection that may lead to an insight that will help move them forward in life!

Instead of filling in silence with chatter, allow your client to sit with their thoughts for a few moments, and see what happens.

3. Believing your client’s story.

This may sound a bit shocking to you, but your role as a life coach is not to believe the painful stories your client may be telling themselves about why something isn’t working, or is not possible for them.

Instead, your role as a life coach is to hold the belief that your client is far more powerful than any circumstance or condition they face!

You can absolutely have compassion for whatever difficult past or present challenge your client is grappling with.

But it’s also your job to occasionally have a “tough love” conversation with your client to remind your client just how powerful they truly are – and that they can have the life they want provided they are willing to let go of disempowering thought patterns that are preventing them from moving forward.

4. Not knowing your “why.”

Why did you, or do you, want to become a life coach?

What’s behind your desire to make a difference in the lives of others, and in this world, in this way?

It is very important to be crystal clear on why investing in growing a life coaching business and serving your clients is truly important to you. Your why may be a sentence or two, or it can even be a more fleshed out mission statement!

For example, if you chose to serve female entrepreneurs in your business, your mission statement could be:

To inspire and support female entrepreneurs in growing businesses that make a difference in the lives of others, and creating lives they truly love living.

If you choose to create a mission statement for your life coaching business, your first step is to ask yourself these questions:

• Who do I serve?
• What result do they want to create?
• And what do I stand for?

Allow yourself to sit with these questions for some time, and ideas that you can craft into a compelling mission statement will begin to make themselves known.

Once you’re clear on why you do what you do, in those moments when you begin to feel like your entrepreneurial tank is out of gas (as all entrepreneurs do at times), it’ll be far easier for you to reconnect with the reason you began down this path in the first place… which will reignite your fire to keep moving forward!

5. Focusing almost all of your efforts into coaching, and very little into client attraction and enrollment.

To be successful in any business, you must invest time, energy and resources into marketing yourself and your services, so that a steady stream of new clients will continuously flow into your business.

As a life coach, as a student of transformational principles, talking about these principles is something that you automatically feel inspired by and passionate about!

This said, the right people will want to be in conversation with you… You simply have to know where to connect with these potential clients, and how to have enrollment conversations with them so that they feel inspired to step forward and commit to working with you.

At Brave Thinking Institute, not only do we train our coaches in how to coach their clients effectively, we also provide them with in-depth training and ongoing support in both client attraction and heart-centered enrollment.

This advanced training is the reason why so many of our coaches are earning six-figures and more, while making a profound and lasting impact in the world!

Every single one of us is a spiritual being having a human experience… and this includes making mistakes sometimes!

Not one of us is perfect.

We are all on this journey called life, making mistakes, experiencing failures, and seeking to live our freest, fullest and most expansive life.

When it comes to making your mark on the world through the growth of your business, you will experience bumps and challenges along the way. Everyone does!

But by expanding your awareness of the five common mistakes that most life coaches make when it comes to building their coaching businesses, your entrepreneurial journey can be an even smoother and more fulfilling one.

For more step-by-step strategies and proven secrets on how to start or grow a successful life coaching business that makes a profound and lasting difference in the lives of others, and supports a lifestyle that you desire, click to download the FREE ebook, Are You Meant to Be a Life Coach?