Do I Have to Suffer a Lot of Adversity in Life to Be an Effective Life Coach?

Many life coaches wonder if they have to have suffered severe adversity to have a successful life coach career.

Have you wondered this, too?

Many successful life coaches have a “signature success story,” which usually tends to focus on how they overcame personal hardship to get to where they are today.

As for my own signature success story, I often share my background of being a teen mom, experiencing life-threatening kidney disease and struggling for years to make ends meet. Far from being a tragic tale, my journey taught me about the power of grace and empathy, and put me on a trajectory of dedicating my life to studying and teaching transformational principles, which I’ll be forever grateful for.

But, whether you’ve experienced severe adversity or not, as a life coach, you do still have something valuable to share with your clients and with the world – YOU!

You do not have to have experienced a lot of adversity in your own life in order to have a successful life coach career.

Your ability to create results for your clients does not depend on:

1. Whether or not you can relate to what they’ve gone through (or are going through), or…
2. You having experienced adversity in your own life that was harder to overcome than something one of your clients is dealing with.

Your ability to build your life coach career is directly tied to your ability to guide your clients through a proven system of transformation that will produce results in their life.

Let me explain… Your job as a life coach is not to support your clients in retelling the painful stories of their past.

We’ve all had difficult things happen in our lives, like a relationship ending, a loved one passing away, or a career setback, for example.

You may be working with a client who has experienced one of these challenges, or is experiencing it right now.

Of course, it’s important to be empathetic when your client talks about a difficult experience they’ve had, or are having.

However, your job is not to support them in continuing to focus on what isn’t working in their life, but to support them in focusing on what they would love to create for their future!

The good news is that there is a system of transformation that you can guide all of your clients through that has proven to help them generate extraordinary results in their lives time and time again!

This system is called the DreamBuilder Program, it’s one of the programs we train our life coaches in how to deliver to their clients at Brave Thinking Institute, and it has the power to transform almost any dream into reality for anyone, anywhere when applied correctly.

3 steps to coach someone with a troubled past

If you are working with a client who is grappling with a past or present challenge in their life, here are 3 simple steps you can follow.

STEP #1: Listen effectively

Listening compassionately, and without interrupting, allows your client to sort through their own feelings, and this often leads them to discover their own clarity on what to do next to find a path out of their pain.

Listening well does take more than simply being in the same room as the other person while they talk because you have to truly listen to what they’re sharing, tune in and be present, rather than focusing on planning your response while they’re still talking.

Listening can help with your client’s struggle to find the right words to convey what’s happening in their hearts and minds, and it helps if you give them time to sort through their thoughts, and even ask questions to help them clarify what they’re saying.

STEP #2: Encourage your client to engage in a forgiveness practice

Forgiveness is not about saying something someone else did or said to your client was okay in some way, it’s about helping them set themselves free from the painful stories of their past or present.

STEP #3: Support your client in focusing on dream-building

Negativity has a certain pull to it. It’s easy to focus on people or situations that have or are hurting us, and this can only pull us down further.

This is why it’s important to, once you’ve listened to your client share their challenge with you, you then support them in focusing their attention on their dreams – what it is they would love to create for themselves and their life.

If they could wave a magic wand and create anything in the areas of love and relationships, time and money freedom, and health and well-being, for example, what would they love?

And what’s one small step they can focus on taking today that will help them move toward that dream?

By listening effectively to your client, encouraging them to engage in a forgiveness practice and helping them focus on what they would love, you’ll find that your client will eventually stop pouring their energy into the painful stories of the past or present… and begin moving toward the inspiring future they’d love to create for themselves.

Hitting rock bottom is not required to have an abundant life coach career

So is your successful life coaching career contingent upon your own turnaround success story?

Absolutely not. I said it before, and I’ll say it one more time before you go:

Your ability to build your life coach career is directly tied to your ability to guide your clients through a proven system of transformation that will produce results in their life.

And now, I have a free resource for you!

For step-by-step tools and proven strategies for starting a highly successful life coaching career, one that makes a profound and lasting difference in the lives of others and allows you to earn an abundant income while working from anywhere that you choose, click here to download my FREE ebook, Are You Meant To Be a Life Coach? >>