At least a couple of times per month I get an e-mail asking which Life Coach training companies I can recommend. Unfortunately, as I trained in the UK I can only point people towards businesses that I’ve no real first hand knowledge of, but seem to be reputable.
Obviously I also suggest reading my insightful post How To Become a Life Coach for more in-depth information, but other than that, I’m struggling.
After another e-mail this week I started to wonder whether it would be worthwhile to join an affiliate scheme with a training company that I trusted and knew could offer a brilliant introduction to Life Coaching.
With that in mind I started trawling Google to see which training companies I could talk to and get a feel for. There was one in particular calling itself The Coach Training Alliance which seemed to be popping up all over the place with pay per click, so I decided to check out their site. (I really don’t want to send them traffic by linking, but if you want to take a look you’ll find them easily enough).
What a thoroughly depressing experience that was.
This site had it all. Annoying voice overs, silly life coaching quizzes designed to tell everybody they’ll be great for coaching (and I know this because I took it and gave dumb answers and was still told I’d be suitable to become a Life Coach), awful advice to potential affiliates (including saying that making money from affiliate marketing was easy!) and long letter sales pages full of hype.
I think I would have immediately backed out and headed elsewhere if I hadn’t been stunned by this comment on the landing page.
“Life Coaching has been named one of the top home businesses of the century. You can enjoy the financial rewards and personal fulfillment of owning your own business while making the world a better place.”
I have no idea who declared Life Coaching one of the top home businesses of the century because there is no attribution. However, I do think it would be wise to hold fire on that opinion for another 70 or 80 years to see what else pops up.
Unless that is, it was meant to mean the last century, in which case it’s completely unsubstantiated bollocks. Life Coaching as it is now wasn’t even available for most of the last century and the explosion to some extent has grown on the back of the advances in cheap telecommunications.
Either way, it doesn’t look good for the person who wrote it. Unless that is, the point was to mislead people into thinking they’d stumbled on the promised land. And that once they’d handed over the money for their training services they’d have gold-plated clients beating a path to their door and waving blank checks in their face.
I suppose theoretically there could be many reasons for wanting to become a Life Coach, but to my mind the most important by some margin, is having a strong desire to help people.
It’s not making money, not having a lovely home business and amazingly enough, it’s not even a desire to make the world a better place.
For a Life Coach Training company to be encouraging people to be a Life Coach to enjoy financial rewards and because it’s a great home business, is just ludicrous and counter-productive for an industry in its infancy that’s struggling to gain main stream credibility.
I once read a stat suggesting 90% of Coaches make less than $20k per annum in the US. Now even if that is a tad low and the real figure is, let’s say $30k, it’s still not likely to seduce anybody into believing being a Life Coach is a short cut to owning a small Caribbean Island.
The reason for this post is not just to slam the company in question, although they deserve slamming in my not-so-humble opinion, but to ask a much deeper question.
There is only ever one reason you want money and that is because you think it (or what it will get you) will either make you happy or move you away from being unhappy.
If you can have what makes you happy in the first place (a job you love goes along way toward that) then money above and beyond your basic needs becomes much less of an issue.
So the question is this.
Should the potential financial rewards be a consideration when choosing what you want to do as a career? And when I say a consideration, I mean ANY consideration whatsoever.
Should it even enter the debate?
You don’t have to be combination of Hercule Poirot and Scooby Doo to know what my answer to that question is, but I’m more interested in your take.
By the way I published a post on the How To Be Rich and Happy blog (What would you give up for fame and fortune?) confessing to watching American Idol. Feel free to mock me, I probably deserve it.
Tim Brownson is a Certified Life Coach and has been unsticking people and helping them reach their true potential since 2005. If you would like to know how he can help you
Gosh darn, Tim, you foiled my evil masterplan of getting filthy rich by exploiting gullible people! And here my primary motivation to becoming a life coach was the money…
I guess I’ll have to stick with my secondary motivation of loving the job, enjoying helping people, enjoying the freedom to make my own schedule, etc.
All those boring, unimportant things…
(not sure where I’m going with this comment, so I’ll just end it right here)
@ Vlad – Nah I’m not sure where you were going either.
BTW, do they still have slide rules in maths?
When I started comprehensive school at the age of 11 I had to take a slide rule with me. Calculators were banned from exams until the year after I left. The bastards! It was a plan to thwart me, and it worked, it worked very well, because I was indeed thwarted in my desire to become the new Stephen Hawking minus the wheelchair and voice synthesizer.
Oh dear, I found the site and took the quiz. Managed to score 25, and it still told me I was probably coaching already! What a pile of c&^%p! Anyway, moving right along….
I’m a little embarrassed to admit one of the reasons I looked into coaching originally was because of the promised income – the first advert I saw for an information night was promising an easy $100,000 per year.
I’ve stayed with coaching however because I love what I do. Nope, that 100k hasn’t materialised yet, but I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my career.
I think it’s of some importance to consider the realistic income from any career. We all have expenses and financial responsibilities. There’s no point taking a job that pays less than $30,000 if you’ve got yearly expenses of $50,000 – not unless your spouse earns enough to make up the difference.
Should it be the only or major consideration in choosing a career or job? No, definately not.
So…I should cancel my home life coaching party? Because I think it will do really well, all those Pampered Chef chicks OWE me.
I think finances should be a consideration, not the deciding factor, but something you should give a bit of thought to when figuring out what you’d like to do. For better or worse, money or lack of it, can put you in a position that limits your choices which could ultimately bring unhappiness.
Different people have different relationships with money, and unless you are at the extreme at either end, it’s not something that you necessarily need to change, but it’s something that should be accounted for when making life decisions. If you’re happier being in a situation where you make a steady, predicable paycheck then working on commission where it’s feast or famine wouldn’t be for you. If you’re happy with easy come/easy go – hey, be a serial entrepreneur!
So, it’s not just the amount of money, but other factors that should be considered as well. I think refusing to acknowledge the importance of financial considerations at all can be just as damaging as making all of your decisions based on money.
“If you can have what makes you happy in the first place (a job you love goes along way toward that) then money above and beyond your basic needs becomes much less of an issue.”
I completely agree. I’m currently making much less money than I did when I was doing big company consulting stuff, but because I love what I do now, I have much less need for lots of money. My desire for all the things I used to buy, telling myself I needed or deserved them because I was working hard, has diminished, if not almost disappeared.
But I can understand why these training organisations appeal to the “get rich quick” mindset. So many of them are more about bums on seats than they are about developing brilliant coaches. Yes, I’m sure they help the occasionally gifted coach to harness their talents, but they also spawn a whole lot of people who call themselves coaches who just give the profession a bad name.
Also, I think there’s a thing around coaching, thanks to people like Anthony Robbins and some of the people who’ve modeled themselves on him, that with enough self-belief and a handful of coaching magic, you can earn as much money as you want. I personally think this is bullshit.
I think you outlined a very good reality check.
When it comes to figuring out your career, I’m a fan of:
- living your values
- blending passion, profit, and value
- driving from your life style
- directly addressing what it takes to “funding your life style” (know the limits / possibilities before jumping in the pool)
If you can’t fund your life style with how you want to make a living, then it’s a hobby ;)
Having a noble purpose in life have its rewards. By following our passion and doing our best, financial rewards will come. :-)
I’m with Melinda on this one Tim. Finances are a consideration simply because you gotta do the maths (or math as you’re now a Floridian). I have a heap of debt that I built up in my 20′s (I had so much fun but was as dumb as a brick) that needs paying back in addition to a mortgage, so there’s a minimum figure I need to make each month. Ignoring the reality of my finances would be like ignoring anything else going on in my life – not helpful.
BTW, I too hate these coach training companies that do a great job of selling their training courses but never even mention the work required to build a viable business and make even a modest income. Not particularly ethical in my view.
I think the money should be a consideration because if you can’t make ends meet, you will be limited from doing your best at coaching. I am guessing many are enticed by the hourly rate that coaches charge, while forgetting about how many billable hours there actually are.
There are many people out there that want to get rich quick. I wonder if there’s anything about getting happy quick. Maybe that’s what some drug dealers claim to offer.
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by TimBrownson: Ger Rich Quick – Become A Life Coach http://su.pr/2U8uCt It’s easy people and I regularly bathe in cash….
Hey Tim,
well,I somehow feel “sick” when people consider life coaching as money making strategy…it is a mission, purpose, matter of life and death to serve as coach…not a matter of ranking it among the most popular jobs in the century…
More over, you cannot just decide to be a coach without truly feeling it within, that this is what I am meant to do…
No sales pitch would ever work on this.
From my personal experience:
“after “AHA moment”, thanks to my first mentor (who has never asked money for that!), i just knew it, what i wanted to do in life.”
Coaching is lifelong journey and if my insights, experiences and ideas, can help others it is worth more than any money in the world…
Eventually,I trust money will follow as consequence of sincere dedicated effort to unleash talents in those who reach out for help.
This is what my first mentor told me,when I have asked him, “How will I pay you back? I don’t have the money to afford your time…”
He replied instantly: “Send the message forward! You will experience same situation when you will be in my position as mentor and the only thing how you can pay me, is send the message forward…”
I am sending mine forward;-)
Have a super cool day, folks!
cheers,
i.
@ Melinda – Well there’s no point unless you are happy to cut that expenditure. If you’re not then the questions has to be asked “How badly do you want it?” People do internships for jobs with zero pay and manage to survive.
@ Tracy – Run your party, but I want 25% for licensing you.
Money should be a consideration after the choice has been made imho otherwise it is given too much credence.
@ Christine – I agree it’s total bullshit. There is only a certain amount the market will stand unless you only want to coach people earning 6 figure salaries and good luck with that one.
@ JD – Great points I like all those.
@ Walter – It’s nice to think that although I’m not convinced it always happens that way. I agree in principal though.
@ Steve – Maybe I could have been clearer. Life Coaches get paid, so if it’s something somebody badly wants to do then surely they can cut their cloth accordingly. If they aren’t prepared to downsize or make sacrifices, then how badly do they want it?
I do understand that debt accrued before the light switch went on complicates the issue though. You naughty boy.
@ Kevin – See the answer above ;-)
@ Ivana – I love the whole pay it forward movement. It really separates those people that say they want to help and those that say it and really mean it.
Always love your cheeky posts but dammit! You summed it up in one fell swoop before I could get there and look profound:
“Money should be a consideration after the choice has been made imho otherwise it is given too much credence.”
Now I’m off to find this website and make squillions!
@ Rosie – Well you’re still profound in my book.
Remember to tell them I sent you!
Finances are definitely a piece of the pie, however, they should not be the primary piece of the pie when considering a career path. Unfortunately, it sounds like that website succumbed to placing sales before helping people and chose to hype the position in order to increase its sales.
You definitely need to focus on money to some degree; rather than farming for our own food, we exchange money to provide for our physical needs, which must be met before any other needs can be meed, according to Maslow’s hierarchy.
The other point about money is that it allows us to make better choices (in the hands of a wise person). For example, if we have the option of choosing two doctors and one has a better reputation for doing a better job, but costs more money, then our choice can be constrained by finances.
The final point about money is that, while cliche, it is true: “He who has the gold makes the rules.” People with big money make our world run, unfortunately, and the more we can keep out of their hands, the better off we are.
Great post Tim. In response to your money vs happiness question, I have to say that I’m (as you know) struggling with this right now.
I did the right thing, I gave up a well-paid job I didn’t want and set out to earn a living in a more amenable way. I consider myself intelligent and capable, yet 1 year on I didn’t have much to show for it.
Whilst financially I don’t need to just yet, I’ve now taken another well-paid job. There are lots of benefits and the spare cash is useful and nice to have.
Yes, you’re right, it doesn’t make me happy. You’re also right that I’d accept less money (but not that much less) for work that I did find more satisfying.
I expect a lot of people might be in a similar situation to me. And, I suspect the key (which I’d love to find) is to learn how to enjoy the work that one does, even when that isn’t their passion (for want of a better word). This will mean they can enjoy their working day and their free time without financial worry.
Tim, where is that key?
@ Dan – I’m still not convinced that people are getting this at all by the responses I’m getting.
Nobody has explained why money is important above and beyond keeping somebody out of the gutter. I get that, but what good is a $250k house over a $100k apartment if the person is unhappy in the former?
There are plenty of really happy people living on minimum wage so it is possible to be happy and earn very little.
@ Mark – Yeh, tell me abut it. If I could crack that one I would actually already have the Caribbean Island.
BTW, worrying is a choice and some people can have $1m in the bank and still worry about whereas others have zero and don’t. It’s not a given.
@Tim Brownson
I’m sure there are people who have horrible credit scores and minimum-wage level jobs who are very happy; they have accepted and learned that money is simply something that they don’t need much of in order to be happy in their lives.
I think that most people enjoy more money than they need because they can have more objects and more services, which do you make you happy, but only for a short time until you “need” the next object or service.
The perceived good in your example may be a status thing: I can afford a $250k house, which makes me a more important person in society.
Do you NEED that? Of course not, but you do need adequate living space for your family.
For myself, a poor college student, I learned to be happy with next to nothing. I borrowed an old bike to get exercise. I drove a decent and now borderline crappy car. For fun, I read books from the library and played outdoor basketball. The only money I spent was on necessities.
Everyone can live that way if they choose to, however, for most people the nice things that money can bring into your life are just too much to give up.
Personally, I’m not sure if I could be happy working for minimum wage, unless of course I focused only on heaven and forgot about the here and now.
The thing though, money doesn’t always buy you happiness, but it certainly buys you choices (almost similar to what Dan said above).
It almost always gives you that freedom to choose. What to buy, what to wear, where to go, how to find, etc. Imagine the day you no longer have to worry of getting what you desired. You want something, whatever it is, wherever it is, voila, it’s (or you’re) there.
Even people who are able to live happily with minimum wages, it’s still their choice to be happy with whatever they have. But I’m sure there are times when they say, “I wish I could do that,” albeit not often and inability to do/have that thing doesn’t get them down.
To a certain extent, money also buys a peace of mind-of some sort. Maybe not always about you, but for people that you love. I.e. if something happens to you today, your next generations are well taken care of for the rest of their life (accepting the fact that insurance companies could go bankrupt at anytime).
The thing about scheming people for wanting to be a life coach, that’s just wrong. There are still good people in this world, who purely believe that they can do good and make a heap of money at the same time.
It’s do-able though, right, Tim? Just not as easy as they make it look.