Why did you become a life coach?
I became a life coach to help people realize their true potential and make transformations that they never thought were possible. Most of you likely have a similar reason why you became a coach.
It’s always best to remind yourself why you became a coach, as it can help you make the right decisions regarding your coaching practice and life. Your purpose gives you a filter to evaluate all choices in life.
If you’re now at crossroads and trying to decide if you should become an online coach and expand your client base, you’ve come to the right place.
What is Life Coaching?
A life coach often works one-on-one with clients and uses different coaching tools and models to help clients attain goals that clients have set for themselves.
Although a coach’s personal experience and work achievements can help in the coaching process, coaches refrain from advising clients and remain open to the client being the expert on their life.
Life coaching can span all areas, from relationship coaching and divorce coaching to existential coaching. Most coaches pick a niche like dating, creativity, or fitness and stick to it. This helps establish their expertise in the niche over time.
On the other hand, some coaches, especially new coaches, don’t settle on a niche until they find out what types of clients bring them the most fulfillment. This allows them to gain diverse experiences by working with a range of different clients.
4 Benefits of Online Life Coaching
1. Improve client engagement and accountability
Online life coaching allows you to send electronic reminders and activities to remain top-of-mind for clients, even when they are not in your coaching session. This increases client engagement and accountability.
2. Expansion of customer base
An online platform removes limitations on your geographic reach. As long as you have a reliable communication platform and can converse in the clients’ language, you can tap into any client segment that needs your services.
3. Best value for money for clients and more satisfaction for you
When clients are more engaged and accountable, they gain more out of coaching. This will also improve your satisfaction when you see clients attaining goals that matter to them.
4. Decrease confusion and stress for you and the client
When all client documents, questionnaires, assessments, and contracts are stored online in a single platform, you and the client will be saved from the overwhelming plethora of documentation that goes into coaching.
How To Be An Online Life Coach
- Count your assets and strengths. You had a life before you became a coach. Look at what skills and niches you have already mastered. Which client segments are you uniquely positioned to understand intimately? Do you need a coaching certification to upskill?
- Everything starts with the client. Based on your skills, evaluate if there is a need for your type of coaching. If so, where can you find these clients? What are their struggles?
- Create a one-page business plan. Marry your skills with client segments and create a model of how you plan to service your clientele. How will you market to these clients? Ensure that you don’t spend too much time on this step, as you can tweak the plan based on what you learn when you start coaching.
- Set up an online life coaching platform. What technology tools can you use to set up your online platform? Use criteria to shortlist tools and select the best life coaching platform for your practice.
- Start coaching online! Once you have the platform installed, you can start coaching clients. At the beginning of your practice, you may start coaching for free or at low fees, and that’s perfectly alright because you need more training and referrals/testimonials.
5 Ways Software Can Boost Your Work
- Automation of repetitive tasks
Most clients go through the same steps, especially at the beginning of the coaching process, when the coach is getting to know the client’s goals, values, and strengths. These tasks and activities can be easily automated via a coaching tool. - Quick and easy progress check-ins
Coaching software allows you to view client progress online without any processing and conduct quick check-ins. This can save you time from having to track progress manually. - Seamless integration of the client’s life-cycle
A coaching tool can integrate almost all stages of a client’s life-cycle. Some of these stages include contracting, intake, discovery, scheduling appointments, invoicing, receiving payments, conducting completion exercises, and obtaining testimonials. - Access to industry best practices
Coaches need to keep themselves informed on the best practices of the industry. Since a coaching tool uses expert user inputs, you will get access to industry best practices. - More time on value-added tasks
Time saved through automation and minimal processing means that you will have more time to work with clients one-on-one and build your online coaching practice.
What is the Best Life Coaching Platform?
As life coaches, our top priority is providing value to our clients and helping them achieve their goals. Client engagement and accountability are key here.
| Quenza | |
|---|---|
 | Quenza is focused on the value you can bring to your clients while cutting down on your administrative burden. |
| Main features | Activity builder Automated pathways Science-backed activities Community support Progress tracker HIPAA-compliant GDPR-compliant Online communication Customization Mobile app |
| Drawbacks | Although a relatively new platform, some great features are constantly being added. |
| Price | Starts at $49/month |
| Free Trial | 30-day trial for only $1 |
| Website | https://quenza.com |
| Nudge Coach | |
|---|---|
 | Nudge Coach takes customization to a whole new level. This level of customization is attractive because each client is different, and we need the flexibility of customizing coaching engagements. |
| Main features | Client-facing habit tracker Engagement tools Automated sequences Cards for reminders and motivation Monthly challenges HIPAA-compliant Integration with Zoom Mobile app |
| Drawbacks | Does not include payments or scheduling. |
| Price | Starts at $30/month. |
| Free Trial | Available for first three clients. |
| Website | http://nudgecoach.com |
| My Coach Office | |
|---|---|
 | My Coach Office, as the name implies, is a tool that manages the coach’s office. It’s like an administrative assistant that can take care of all the things you don’t want to deal with. This is an excellent first platform for you if you’re a beginner coach. |
| Main features | Invoice processing Scheduling Coaching Notes Reporting Coaching groups Group reminders Mobile app |
| Drawbacks | Mostly for admin purposes. |
| Price | Starts at $24/month. |
| Free Trial | 14-day free trial |
| Website | http://mycoachoffice.com |
How To Use Quenza For Life Coaching
Dashboard for an overview of your coaching practice
Need a quick way to get a snapshot of the latest developments of your practice?
The Quenza dashboard summarizes the latest notifications, active clients, activities in progress, and active pathways. Taking a look at your dashboard on a periodic basis will give you a sense of how your practice is doing.
Activities for client engagement
Activities are exercises and reflections that the client can perform prior to beginning coaching or between coaching sessions.
Coaches can schedule these activities to be sent to clients at pre-determined intervals. These activities will keep clients engaged with their coaching goals and reinforce what was discussed in previous coaching sessions.
Efficiency through expansions
In Quenza, you don’t have to create all the activities yourself. There is an existing library of activities created by expert coaches.
You can simply reuse these activities as is or add on to activities from expansions as you deem necessary.
Automation through pathways
Coaches spend a lot of time emailing clients, following up, and maintaining client documents. Quenza lets you automate a set of activities and remove yourself from the admin grind.
Industry best practices
The coaching world changes regularly as more and more research is conducted on human psychology. In addition, many coaches regularly publish books and papers based on their coaching experience.
The community portal on Quenza has a wealth of information. You can also share your insights and ask questions from the expert coaching community.
4 Unique Life Coaching Tools in Quenza
Self-directed learning paths
As previously mentioned, life coaches work with clients with very different needs. What is common with all these clients is that they want to attain a set of goals. But the path to get to the goal will be different for each client.
The automated pathways feature in Quenza lets you create a self-directed learning path for the client based on the client’s goals, existing gaps, and ways to bridge the gap.
You can work with the client to set up the pathway at the beginning of the coaching engagement and adjust as you go along based on the client’s progress.
The wheel of life
Most life coaches assess all areas of a client’s life at the initial discovery session. A tool that’s often used for this is the wheel of life.
The Quenza wheel of life lets you and your client choose from different domains, prioritize each domain, and measure the satisfaction in each area. Domains available in the tool are partner, learning, money, recreation, career, health, environment, community, friend, and family.
Progress tracking
Tracking the progress of client goals using a tool can motivate many clients to make progress. Quenza has planned the trackers feature to be introduced in Q3 of 2021. This feature will create a visual graph to depict clients’ progress towards goals.
Client chat
Based on your niche of life coaching, some clients may need to get in touch with you for emotional support. For example, if you’re a divorce coach and your client had an extremely challenging day at the court, they may need to get in touch with you to regulate their emotions.
The client chat on Quenza is available for times like this. The interface is fully encrypted, and the feature can be turned off for certain clients if they no longer need this functionality.
Final Thoughts
As a life coach, you can tremendously expand your impact by using an online platform and becoming the ultimate online coach.
Want to take your life coaching practice to the next level? Start with a $1 trial and see the efficacy of this platform for yourself.