10 Mistakes to avoid when starting your health and wellness coaching career

Certificate in hand, the world is at your feet, here's tips to starting your new health coach career.

You have graduated, you are looking ahead, the health and wellness coaching career you have worked hard and passionately towards. It is so exciting as a graduate to launch your business and start earning.
Here are 10 tips post graduation, these tips will help you and your successful coaching career:
1 - Overcomplicating                       2 - Comparing 
3 - Emulating                                   4 - Under-appreciating
5 - Pretending                                  6 - Opportunities 
7 -Yes                                                8 - Freebies
9 -Overloading                                10 - Everything
11 - ????

Studying something you’re passionate about, something that nourishes your wellbeing so much that you’re also able to help others do the same for themselves is exciting. It’s not hard to get excited and motivated each step of the day. 

As you draw near to the end of your training you hold on a little tighter to your studies, savouring every morsel. And then… Graduation day comes, certificate in hand, and you can officially call yourself a coach, or wellness coach, or health coach. Not only that, you’re now entitled to work as one, charging clients and making a living from coaching. Amaaaazing!!!  

Around one in every three graduate coaches will take that final step and begin seeing clients. Yet every one of them has come to coaching to grow closer to their authentic self so they can help others. 

We’d like to pause here for a moment and explore what can we do to increase the number of trained coaches that find their way to a successful coaching practice. 

Have you ever tried to book into something and the process was so exhaustive that at some point you began to wonder if it was meant to be? If it’s this hard now, what will it be like when I get there? Exactly! Make booking a session with you simple. Make the session also simple, it will create a lovely flow for you and your clients experience with you so you can both spend more time basking in the awesome stuff. 

Have you had a session with another student coach, or seen a ‘super coach’ at work and been in such awe you’ve thought ‘I want to be just like that’? But, was there a voice in the back of your mind asking, ‘how could I ever be that good’? Did any self-doubt creep in? It’s awesome to witness the beauty of a coaching session where the client is owning the session and soaring, the key to take from other coaches is inspiration. Be inspired to back yourself, after all they started just where you are and look where they are now. Keep practicing, just as they did and likely still do, avoid comparing yourself to others, use yourself as your measuring stick. Create your vision of you coaching how you would like to coach and manifest that. Draw on your ‘why’ as your scaffold. Why did you come to coaching? ​

It’s really great to witness a wide variety of coaching styles, ask other students and graduates if you can be a client with them, sit in on as many group coaching sessions as you are able to, and take classes with graduate coaches. But… Always leave room to be your authentic self so you can turn up to your sessions for your clients. Take what you learn and use it to grow and deepen your unique skills and talents. ​

Learning can (and should) be a humbling process, we begin to grasp just how much we have yet to know. Most of us have started at a new job or career and questioned if we know enough to do the work. However, we are up and running with confidence in no time. Trust in yourself, trust in the compassion and kindness that brought you to coaching, trust and honour what you have learned in a formal education setting and importantly what you have experienced across your whole life, and trust in you. You are more than notes from classes in a course, you are a whole, experience-filled being. ​

It is perfectly acceptable to not know everything. In fact, it is not humanly possible to know all there is to know. Clients may pose many questions to you around specialised health, exercise or mental health conditions, and unless you hold qualifications and training in these areas it’s best for you to focus on resources such as other practitioners to refer to. Build your specialist referral list, then go that extra step and connect with other health professionals. If in doubt refer on, remember your scope of practice as a coach is to empower others to see their own unique talents and to find ways to draw on these. You are not there to rescue, treat, solve, or save. It is completely acceptable, in fact it is completely responsible, to say to a client that you’ll look into something that you’re not sure of and get back to them with more details. ​

Early on you might hear people say things like ‘oh wow you can practice on me’, or ‘I’d be really interested in booking in with you’, and you think to yourself ‘they’re just being polite’. Few people would express interest if they weren’t actually keen. Make it possible for them to book in. Take every opportunity the universe sends you; they will be many and varied, the only thing standing in the way between you potentiating them and living your ‘why’ is your inaction. Back yourself, you came to coaching to help others, if someone is standing right in front of you literally asking how they can come to you, make that easy for them to do so. Don’t doubt yourself, they haven’t.​

It’s great to throw yourself into things with gusto. Taking on too much though can have you feeling a little stretched. It’s great to do collaborations, freebies, community engagement work and so on, but know your worth. You can’t give to others from an empty cup. In taking care of your energy and space you can show up fully for clients. ​

Doing freebies for friends and family is a great way to hone your craft, keep in mind at some stage if you’re going be able to do this for a living and support clients, you’ll need to start valuing your service with a fees and/or package structures. You might continue to have special prices for people close to you, friends and colleagues. Remember to work as a coach you must be able to pay your own bills. ​

You are one person and there are just 24 hours in a day, 10 of which are the most you want to work for, if that. You’ll throw your enthusiasm behind your coaching, you might blog, vlog, podcast, be interviewed, interview, run workshops, plan retreats and maybe more. There is so much you can do as a coach; in many ways you are only limited by your imagination. We have coaches in the flower industry, climate change, all the way through to spiritual transformation, corporate leadership and beyond. And, while the opportunities are exciting remember your own words of wisdom, take things a step at a time, build on the foundation you create, and you’ll be on the road to your goals. Focus on the foundations, just 1-2 things that will enable you to do the simple things well and then furnish your coaching with fancy stuff from there. Use just 1-2 of your favourite tools, take your time, after all most clients have visions that have come together over years, it’s unlikely they’ll get there in one hour. 

It’s just not possible. Not all clients will resonate with you, some you won’t resonate with, that is life. You can’t be the coach for everyone, but you can turn up for the clients who are meant to be with you. Clients are all seeking different outcomes, and each of their paths that leads to their vision will be coloured so differently. Keep working on you, the work you do will benefit all those around you. ​

Oh and can I slip one more in .....

At the beginning we mentioned 2 out of every three coaches don’t actually coach. Some have come to coaching and it’s taken them on a new and exciting path they never envisaged and that’s awesome. Others though have allowed self-doubt, Imposter Syndrome, and negative self-talk to build a huge self imposed barrier that doesn’t really even exist. It’s that whole “if I don't give it a go I will at least not have ‘failed” mentality. As the architect and builder of this barrier we are the ones who can choose to make it dissolve. Remember your ‘why’. Remember the dream you had, likely it was to empower others to take confident steps in their path back to wellness, ones that are firm and safe and avoid some of the pitfalls you wish you’d known about. All those people with fragments of your experience are still there, they are just waiting for you to turn up and open the door to your futures, be all there! ​

Author

Leanne Cooper Dharma/Destiny Coach Founder and Director, Well College Global