Your past does not define your future. According to professional life coaches, developing into one’s best and healthiest self is a lifelong process.
Instead of hindering you, a troubled past can actually be an asset to your coaching career. Life coaches who have lived through challenging times can speak from personal experience when they guide clients toward healthy, happy, and fulfilled lives.
If you worry that your own past experiences, perceived faults, or personal shortcomings might hold you back from success in this exciting and enriching field, think again. Here are three reasons to feel confident in pursuing to the meaningful life coaching career you deserve.
Life Coach Training is All About Growing Through Experience
The various experiences, struggles, and challenges you’ve lived through are invaluable. Consider how you will be able to relate to your future clients and their struggles. Your personal life challenges have brought you to this place, and they can help you going forward.
Life coaches help others learn how relationships, financial prosperity, and lifestyle choices intertwine, and how they can be brought into balance. With life-coach training, you’ll gain deeper insight into how decisions in one area of life affect those in another.
Top life coaching and counselling colleges use a method called ‘experiential learning’ – learning through your experiences while you train. Living through your own transformation every day as you get closer to your career goals will better prepare you to help others undergo their own transformation.
Your Own Struggles Help You Empathize and Connect with Others
Many life coach career professionals focus their practice on specific circumstances they feel a personal connection to. The deep familiarity they have with a particular struggle makes them uniquely situated to help others in similar situations.
Through life coach training, Rhodes graduate Jennifer Schramm realized that her personal experiences made her an expert others would seek out. “It gave me the confidence I needed to be me in the world,” she explains. “In 2006 after leaving Rhodes College, I started my own one-on-one practice with a specialty in eating disorders and self-esteem. My client base has since grown across North America and gone as far internationally as Afghanistan.”
She has also held workshops at eating disorder recovery clinics in Toronto like Sheena’s Place and Danielle’s Place, bringing her insights on overcoming eating disorders to people desperate for that knowledge. By pursuing a life coach career, Jennifer found fulfilment and success, sharing what she knew best.
Your Story Will Empower Others Throughout Your Life Coach Career
The statistics are grim – 70 percent of Canadians are disengaged with their jobs. 7 percent will have a major depressive episode in their life, and a full 1 in 20 will encounter a mental health or addictions problem. The numbers speak clearly: people need help.
Despite the overwhelming number of people experiencing these difficulties, they often feel alone in their suffering. Sharing how you struggle and have struggled, and are succeeding in despite of that, can give others the hope, encouragement, and confidence they need to begin their own healing.
Life coach training teaches you how to turn the problems you face into opportunities.
“I have been living with chronic pain for over 20 years and had doubts about my ability to be able to actually work as a coach and counsellor,” shares Rhodes graduate Kira Lynne. “Rhodes gave me a big boost in confidence, both in myself and in my abilities as a life coach.”
Now Kira is a published author with a thriving private practice, and can share how she has dealt with her pain while helping her clients cope with their own chronic pain.
Would you like use your experience to help others live healthier lives?
Are you ready to become a life coach?
Visit Rhodes for more information about how we can help you reach your goals.
