21 Types of Life Coaches & How To Choose Your Own Path

It’s not news that life coaching has taken off in a big way, so being strategic is essential to landing clients and growing your business.

If you’re thinking about entering the game, you’ll need to know about the different types of life coaches so you can pick a niche and stand out from the crowd. Use this article as a guide to finding your specialty and dif

The Different Types of Life Coaches: A List

Any experienced life coach knows that differentiation is key to standing out, and picking a niche is the best way to start.

Online life coaching is a booming industry that’s growing more each day, but a broad list of the main different types of life coaching is as follows:

1. Business coaching helps entrepreneurs and companies achieve their full potential. Coaches in this niche work with clients to help them clarify their vision and mission, set goals, and develop strategies that will help them achieve their goals.
2. Career coaches collaborate with clients to help them find their ideal professional path, better leverage their strengths, or take the next steps career-wise
3. Confidence coaching is for clients who are keen to develop more self-esteem and overcome limiting beliefs to realize their ambitions with the help of a coach
4. Creativity coaches support clients who are keen to tap into, grow, and apply their creative thinking, skills, and talents
5. Executive coaching helps organizational leaders excel in their corporate roles and enhance their positive impact on their company and people
6. Family coaching help clients create and maintain healthy, positive dynamics and strong functioning relationships
7. Financial coaching is for clients who are looking to develop better financial behaviors, habits, and mindsets or overcome specific money-related challenges
8. Fitness coaches empower clients to develop strength and physical functioning through habits, nutrition, exercise, and mindset
9. Health and wellness coaching helps clients overcome challenges and obstacles to living a healthier lifestyle and guide them to improve their physical and emotional wellbeing
10. Leadership coaching aims to help leaders achieve career, organizational, or personal goals in the context of a business or team
11. Mindfulness coaches apply techniques and practices to help clients remain mindful in life, and can address goals such as stress reduction, awareness, or improved health.
12. Nutrition coaches guide others to live healthier lives through an improved diet and eating habits.
13. Personal trainers support clients to improve their wellbeing and/or achieve specific health-related goals with fitness, dietary, and lifestyle enhancements.
14. Personal development coaching helps clients overcome challenges and obstacles by enhancing their self-awareness, facilitating personal goal-setting, and challenging perspectives.
15. Productivity coaching is for clients who want to manage their time more effectively and enhance their productivity for more efficient goal achievement
16. Purpose coaches work with clients to explore their deepest desires, set specific meaningful goals, and work toward them with a plan
17. Relationship coaching is designed to support individuals and couples in developing better relationship skills for a healthy, rewarding dynamic
18. Sex and intimacy coaching helps clients feel closer, safer, and more related to their intimate partners on an emotional and/or physical level.
19. Sports coaching helps athletes and teams find motivation, prepare for events, and can include training or guidance for particular events
20. Team coaching supports groups to improve their collective capabilities, by targeting cohesiveness, communication, culture, and more in an organizational or team setting.
21. Transformational life coaches work with clients as they navigate change, helping them live their most authentic, ideal lives.

2 Examples of Popular Life Coaches

Differentiation is the key to standing out as a life coach, and picking a niche is the best way to start.

So what type of coach is the most sought-after?

Here are two of the most in-demand types of coaching and how they work.

Mindfulness Coaching

From stress reduction and heightened self-awareness to reduced anxiety, depression, and pain, mindful living can have plenty of potential benefits.

Mindfulness coaches work with clients to help them introduce these benefits into their lives, using techniques such as meditation, breathing exercises, and mindset activities.

Among many other things, this type of life coach may help clients overcome obstacles or improve their wellbeing by:

• Training them to focus their attention in the present moment
• Manage stress and anxiety using techniques such as Progressive Muscle Relaxation or Body Scan Meditation, both available as customizable digital templates in Quenza as shown below
• Help them connect to inner calm and peace using meditation.

Productivity Coaching

Productivity coaches may work with clients from all walks of life who are keen to make better use of their time.

Using journals, habit planners, and other techniques, they may help others with goals such as:

• Setting time management or efficiency goals
• Reducing procrastination
• Helping them find focus or clarity
• Supporting them to better focus their time and energy
• Reducing stress related to time management or deadlines, and
• Helping clients develop techniques and strategies to accomplish their goals.

Quenza’s Realizing Long-Lasting Change by Setting Process Goals exercise, shown below, is one example of a productivity coaching activity that helps clients create a habit plan for achieving their goals.

Choosing A Career in Life Coaching

There are now dozens of recognized ways to label your value offer as a coach, but picking a specialty and making a successful business from it requires some planning:

• Where do your experience, skills, and talents lie?
• What coaching topics do you feel passionate about? and
• Is there any demand for your area of expertise?

One way to find a niche is using Quenza’s Finding Your Ikigai life coaching exercise, shown below.

This exercise helps you identify what you love doing, what market demand there is for the kind of coaching you are interested in offering, what you can be paid for, and what you are good at. Where these four elements overlap, you can discover your ikigai and the particular niche that works for you.

Once you’ve identified your ikigai or chosen type of life coaching, here are a few more useful questions to ask yourself:[1]

1. Is my niche too broad? A broad value proposition can make your service hard to sell, but a narrower proposition can easily be expanded as you gain experience.
2. Do I know my target clients? Being familiar with the type of clients you hope to coach will give you a head start with your marketing. Instead of cold calling, you can reach out to connections or social media groups when you pilot or launch your first signature program.
3. Am I committed? Your coaching practice will grow with you, it’s essential to pick a niche that you’re passionate about. Before you write your life coaching business plan, take some time to consider the things you love in your work, personal life, or hobbies.

5 Types of Life Coaching Certifications

Accreditation isn’t a legal requirement for coaching practice, which means that you don’t necessarily have to take a life coaching course or training to start your business.

However, many coaches choose to pursue a coaching certification to learn practical skills and distinguish themselves in a competitive marketplace.

If you are interested in getting accredited, here are a few potential courses that may interest you:

1. The Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching (iPEC) offers a 10 to 12-month-long Certified Professional Coach (CPC) Qualification that is ICF-accredited
2. INLP Center runs a 150-225 hour Life Coaching Certification Training Program
3. Life Purpose Institute has a 60-hour Life Coach Certification Program
4. The Certified Life Coach Institute offers Level 1 and 2 Certified Life Coach Pathways, and
5. The Institute for Life Coach Training (ILCT) has a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) certification with 130 training hours.

For more courses, take a look at our 8 Best ICF Coaching Certification Programs and Courses guide.

Best Digital Solution To Become The Ultimate Coach

With or without your chosen certification, online practice won’t come naturally to you as a coach unless you’ve got the right software for the job.

The day-to-day tasks of life coaching – onboarding, session planning, resource development, program design, personalization, evaluations, and more – will only become more time-consuming as your business gains traction and more clients.

If you want to develop yourself as a coach while growing your business, Quenza’s digital tools are designed to help you.

With everything you need to plan out your coaching business and streamline your every day, Quenza is your one-stop toolkit for:

• Building customized coaching tools and homework
• Offering life coaching packages, programs, and e-courses
• Taking notes quickly and efficiently
• Coaching groups of up to 50 participants
• Engaging your life coaching clients with chat, notifications, and more.

There is a range of digital solutions for life coaches today, but Quenza is by far the most customizable and easy to use. With Quenza, you can start, run, and grow your practice seamlessly from anywhere in the world.

6 Unique Features Included In Quenza

As well as getting your life coaching business off the ground, Quenza can help you with career development with some of its unique features.

These include:

1. Quenza Groups: A useful feature (above) for coaching cohorts, teams, and classes with bulk client import, bulk results exporting, progress tracking, group chat, group notes, and more.
2. The Wheel of Life: This unique Activity Builder tool helps you create bespoke Wheel of Life assessments using personalized dimensions and scales to explore values, needs, satisfaction, and other life domains.
3. Quenza Expansions: Like the Finding Your Ikigai Expansion, these templates give you a quick, easy way to share tailor-made tools from evidence-based activities, exercises, meditations, and other resources.
4. The Quenza Client App: A free, multilingual client smartphone app that notifies your clients of activities, completed tasks, and chats, and where they can download all their life coaching resources as PDFs.
5. Quenza Notes: A brilliant in-app feature for creating journals to share and work on with your client, as well as for taking session notes.
6. Quenza Chat: Your HIPPA- and GDPR-compliant instant messenger for staying in touch with clients between appointments and building up engagement.

Final Thoughts

Picking a coaching niche can be tough, but it’s well worth taking the time if you want to distinguish yourself.

Once you find your calling, make sure you check out our how-to guides for getting your practice off to a flying start, so you can build and launch a successful first program!

Ready to put your planning into practice? Start your $1, 1 month trial of Quenza and turn your ideas into life coaching solutions with Quenza’s easy-to-use digital tools.

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