Virtual coaching is one of the fastest-growing areas for development professionals to be in, as remote and global work become increasingly the norm.
But reaching clients across the world takes hard work, and as you broaden the reach of your services, a growing client list means a bigger back-end burden. If you’re new to online practice or want to take your life coaching business virtual, this guide will help you pick an app that works for you!
What is Virtual Coaching?
Digital coaching is the virtual equivalent of face-to-face coaching, without any of the geographic restrictions. Often, it provides a more cost-effective, convenient, and equally effective alternative to conventional coaching.
Where coaching traditionally takes place face-to-face, digital or mobile coaching often involves live interactions through video, instant messaging, phone calls, or a combination of them all.
Working exclusively online, digital coaches provide the very same professional support and instruction that can help their clients develop, grow, and achieve their unique goals.
Digital coaching is the virtual equivalent of face-to-face coaching, without any of the geographic restrictions. Often, it provides a more cost-effective, convenient, and equally effective alternative to conventional coaching.
A digital model works very well across various different specialties, meaning that it’s possible to deliver:
- Virtual life coaching
- Digital health or wellness coaching
- Online personal training
- Nutrition coaching
- Mental health coaching
- Business or executive coaching
- Career coaching, and more.
While every program will be unique, digital coaches typically use a combination of live online sessions, between-session chats, and resources from a structured coaching program to deliver their solutions.
Best Practices for Digital Coaches
According to executive coach Ed Batista at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, there are at least five ways to incorporate best practices into your coaching model:[1]
- Choose proper equipment. A reliable, flexible, and powerful coaching app will be the most critical tool in your professional arsenal, by far. The right platform should essentially act as a toolkit for everything you do, from the way you design your coaching programs to how you support clients between appointments.
- Don’t dictate the channels. The range of media you can use to develop clients is wide, including everything from instant chat, to email, videoconferencing, and mobile coaching apps. While one channel might work for you, each coaching relationship is unique, so explore the different benefits of various media to find what works for optimal rapport and engagement with each coachee.
- Location matters. Virtual coaching requires a private, quiet setting for your sessions. Find a setting that’s free from distractions, so that you and your client can both…
- …Focus. To ensure minimal interruptions, close your other programs and find a space where you’re less likely to suffer from poor internet connectivity. Giving coachees your undivided attention is critical to developing a productive, collaborative, and trusting rapport.
- Manage your time. To make the most of a coaching session, both you and your client need time to reflect. Keep track of your conversations and give yourselves both some time to process by setting a clear appointment start and end time.
How To Deliver Virtual Life Coaching Using an Online App
Although there are many ways a virtual coaching app can help you as a life coach, let’s look at three of the top advantages you can expect from the right software.
1. Engage Your Clients on Autopilot
Motivating life coaching clients can involve a lot of legwork when you’re using standalone tools, whether you’re personalizing coaching tools or emailing PDFs between sessions.
With the right software, however, you can automate a large proportion of ‘non-coaching’ tasks such as emailing and tool design, which allows for a more considered, deliberate approach to building client engagement.
For example, with the right app you can:
- Customize digital homework and lesson templates, rather than craft bespoke PDFs and coaching tools from scratch
- Actively seek out feedback on how you’re doing as a coach or how your materials are being received, and
- Check in with and nudge clients between virtual sessions, to provide guidance and support.
2. Streamline Your Coaching Programs
Virtual practice makes you instantly more accessible to a wider variety of clients, which is great.
However, it also translates into a whole lot more customization as you adapt your solutions to different learning styles, interests, needs, and goals, which is where software can be invaluable.
With a virtual coaching app, you can not only create worksheets, exercises, and lessons more efficiently, but you can also:
- Save your life coaching tools as templates and organize into customized courses, packages, and programs that suit your clients
- Automate their delivery according to a schedule that suits you both (essentially ‘drip-feeding’ your content to coachees), and
- Share your life coaching programs with groups or teams more conveniently, which is a superb way to earn more revenue in the same amount of time.
3. Differentiate Your Services
A unique value proposition goes a long way in helping you stand out in today’s crowded coaching marketplace – and that’s especially true when it comes to virtual life coaching.
Digital coaching software can help you offer more relevant, valuable services that are tailored to your clients’ needs—at scale. For example, you can:
- Promote your coach branding by adding your corporate logo to your solutions
- Share exercises, tools, and solutions from your own practice email, and
- Tailor your clients’ coaching portal or app with a personal touch, e.g. client names or professional titles.
What’s The Best Platform For My Practice?
While the right platform for you will depend on your niche and client list, here is a general list of essential tools and features to look for:
- Priced for scalability
- Easy to use
- Versatile
- Customizable, and
- Secure
Quenza is one example of an all-in-one software solution for online coaches, as we’re about to illustrate.
5 Ways To Use Quenza For Life Coaching
1. Create Your Own Activities
Resource prep can take up a great deal of your time as a coach, but recycling generic templates doesn’t deliver quite the same impact.
A feature like Quenza’s Activity builder gives you a quick and powerful way to design personalized exercises, quizzes, lessons, and other activities efficiently and without compromising their uniqueness.
As shown, you can create everything from visualizations and psychoeducation to meditations, goal-setting exercises, and assessments with drag-and-drop tools, then share them instantly with clients:
For more great templates and exercises to create, check out 21 Impactful Coaching Tools & Exercises for Coaches.
2. Motivate Clients
Specialized virtual coaching software like Quenza can also work beautifully as a motivation app, because it enables you to send client reminders and updates when you share resources:
Reminders work brilliantly both for course content and for virtual coaching management – above, this client is being prompted to finish their intake form and start their first online lesson.
3. Build Better Coaching Journeys
If you’re offering virtual life coaching packages and programs, Quenza’s Pathway tools help you speed up your program design by organizing your unique content into curricula or sequences, as shown:
More efficient coaching sequence creation means it’s much quicker and more realistic to start offering packages, online courses, and group coaching solutions to grow your practice!
4. Stay On Top of Client Progress
Once your coachees have received your resources, you’ll need a secure way to monitor their progress.
With a virtual coaching app like Quenza, for example, you can view the status of each exercise plus your clients’ responses all from one Dashboard, as shown above.
5. Give Timely, Relevant Feedback
Quenza also gives you a secure, private way to share your coaching feedback in real-time.
Instead of sending emails back and forth, instant messaging gives you a quick way to answer questions and motivate coachees between sessions.
5 Tips for Online Health, Wellness, and Nutrition Coaches
There are many moving parts to consider when it comes to health, wellness, and nutrition coaching, especially if you collaborate with other providers.
Here are a few things to keep in mind about successful virtual coaching when you work with clients in this niche:
- If you manage confidential patient health information, make sure you choose a GDPR or HIPAA-compliant coaching app that will protect your patient and coaching notes. Not only is this best practice, but it could also be a legal requirement.
- Working with other coaches and providers such as GPs or therapists might require you to share patient data or transfer clients. It’s a good idea to ensure your chosen app supports organizational collaboration, e.g. client transfer, multiple users, or file and data sharing.
- Some apps, such as Quenza, come with special features for group coaching and classes. These are very useful for running motivational competitions or enabling peer support between your health coaching clients, among other things.
- Nutrition, fitness, and health coaching often involve client journals, fitness and meal plans, videos, and other custom resources. A virtual coaching app that supports file storage (e.g. Quenza’s Files feature) will allow you to share these resources with clients and groups from anywhere in seconds, rather than emailing PDFs.
- Building on this, video can play a large role in the health and wellness sectors (e.g instructional videos and HEPs). Make sure your chosen app allows you to include videos in your exercises—this can go a long way toward engaging your clients.
3 Digital Tools for Executive and Leadership Coaching
Whether you’re mentoring or coaching in the workplace, Quenza’s Expansion library is a great source of science-based exercise templates that you can use as inspiration.
Here are just three examples:
- Finding Your Ikigai: This leadership and career coaching tool can be used to help clients clarify their next professional steps. As shown above, your clients can use the Japanese ikigai framework to find the point at which their passions and strengths overlap with what the world needs and what they can be paid for.
- Strengths Then and Now: This Quenza Expansion helps clients recognize their strengths by reflecting on their past, which is useful for professionals who want to leverage their unique capabilities in goal-setting or action planning.
- Emotion Masks: This EQ training tool, shown below, can be useful for executives and leaders that want to enhance their emotional awareness. This tool can easily be adapted for organizational group or team coaching contexts.
You may also find the following guides helpful:
- Discover more executive coaching tools in our 5 Best Executive Coaching Apps & Leadership Coaching Tools article
- When you’re ready to implement your programs, we’ve reviewed the 3 Best Online Coaching and Mentoring Software Programs for you
Final Thoughts
Virtual coaching is only becoming more popular, as it offers endless opportunities for business growth and professional development.
If you’re ready to start offering your services digitally, use this guide and your $1 Quenza trial to get you off to a head start.
Pretty soon, you’ll be delivering impactful, personalized virtual coaching solutions that help others in your own unique way!
