Coaching as a Career - Different Types of Life Coaching

Adapted from "Life Coaching", Complete Yoga, Mar-May 2010, pp 32-35. Used with permission.

Life coaching careers take many different forms depending on the interests of the coach. Career coaches, for instance, will support their clients to set appropriate work goals and create strategies to achieve them. Typical clients could be a professional who want a career change or an executive facing retrenchment. A career coach may also act as a consultant to a corporate, working with a group of employees during restructuring. Career coaching, however, is only one of many possibilities - and the options are increasing as the accelerating rate of change places increasing demands on people in business and in their personal lives. Coaching is the second-fastest growing industry worldwide, which means that a life coach with extensive training and experience will have opportunities to offer life coaching courses and pursue a coach training career.

It's important to differentiate between the various disciplines within coaching, since some people assume that they are one and the same - or professionals label themselves one thing, but teach or do another. Marc Steinberg outlines the different types of coaching and what they aim to achieve:

LIFE COACHING Targets all areas of one's life; not focusing on business but also not excluding it. Often life coaching is sought in order to review and/or find one's true north, one's true calling, one's legacy.

BUSINESS COACHING Coaching on business related matters. Typically on performance improvement, change management and/or conflict resolution.

EXECUTIVE COACHING Focuses on leadership development and empowerment, coaching on entrepreneurial core competencies and life-work balance for the executive.

SPIRITUAL COACHING Focuses on the client's inner worlds, inner discoveries, meditative practices and other areas related to spirituality.

HEALTH/WELLNESS COACHING Looks at health/wellness matters, e.g. weight loss, lowering blood pressure, stress management, fitness, balance, etc.

SPORTS PSYCHOLOGY COACHING While the physical trainer supports the athlete in techniques and strategy around the sport, the sports psychology coach cares for the athlete's inner condition: the thinking and feeling/emotional state. If the trainer and the coach respect each other's areas of expertise, then the athlete has a most powerful support team in the combination.

CAREER COACHING Here it's all about either improving entrepreneurial core competencies or helping the client to find clarity, strategy and power to generate a career change.

TEENAGE COACHING Taking its cue from supporting and empowering the teenager to answer the question: "What if you could determine how your life's going to turn out?", this coaching also focuses on helping the teenager to detach from the dependency on parents and develop an empowering attitude towards authorities. (Rebellion is not of great service in the long run.)

RETIREMENT COACHING Focuses on creating new possibilities of meaning and action for the time after one's standard working life.

TEAM COACHING Team or group coaching is limited to a maximum of four or five participants. If the group is bigger, it usually becomes more of a training process. Being a group coach requires great experience in people dynamics and relationship handling. The focus of the coaching process is on the team's mutually agreed-upon goal.

RELATIONSHIP COACHING Focuses on resolving relationship problems, from being a single person and not finding the right partner to a married couple who have manoeuvred themselves into a seemingly dead end.

The benefit of any coaching experience is that regular coaching sessions keep one on track and are a powerful means for implementing change much faster than going it alone, explains Marc.

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