Transform Your Life with a Holistic Life Coach

A holistic coach helps you align every aspect of your life—health, mindset, relationships, career, and spirituality—empowering you to create lasting, positive change with clarity and confidence.

The 13th century Persian poet, mystic, and scholar Rumi said, “Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.”

If this doesn’t exemplify the calling that is a life coach, I don’t know what does!

People who lead a life of significance—and guide others in doing so—are lamps, lifeboats, and ladders. They illuminate the way, they bring people to a better place, and they help them rise or ascend to new heighths of progress, accomplishment, happiness, and prosperity. High-profile life coaches that fit this bill include Deepak Chopra, Tony Robbins, Martha Beck, Robin Sharma, Esther Perel, to name a few.

Holistic life coaches help you choose the best path when you’re ready to turn your life into one of meaning, relevance, and purpose. They connect the dots and empower, support, and guide individuals in making positive changes across all aspects of their life, including physical health, mental wellbeing, nutrition, relationships, goal setting, career, spirituality, and more. They consider the interconnectedness of these areas rather than focusing on just one aspect, aiming to help their client achieve life balance and fulfillment through personalized guidance and support. One could liken this to functional medicine in a sense (the epitome of progressive medicine)—a holistic system that considers the whole person, including their physical, mental, emotional, nutritional, genetic, and, yes, even spiritual aspects.

Types of life coaches are quite diverse and aligned with the coach’s specific expertise (for instance, in one portion of my biz, I’m an Ayurvedic/MindBody Health coach given my specialty and training through the Chopra Center for Wellbeing). There are health/wellness, spiritual, mindset, embodiment, success, transpersonal, somatic, elder coaches, and more. There are even AI and nomad coaches (digital nomads working from anywhere in the world). At the end of the day, they’re all under the life coaching umbrella.

Life coaching is experiencing explosive growth (see statistics below) from the client’s perspective and among those exploring this career path. Following is some essential info to consider.

Life coaching is experiencing explosive growth from the client’s perspective and among those exploring this career path.

Coaching Fundamentals

Life coaches draw from specialized education, unique life experiences, and targeted training to help people and organizations identify and then work toward fulfilling personal development and life goals.

Coaches help clients boost self-confidence and self-awareness, achieve clarity around personal and professional goals, and develop more mindful, healthy decision-making behaviors. Clients learn to take strong determined action toward achieving goals and maximizing their potential with accountability being an elemental part.

Coaches guide clients through several specialized approaches, including targeted questioning, mindfulness practices, visualization techniques, cognitive reframing (looking at a situation from a different perspective), journaling, recommended reading, and more. Depending on background, some may also use methods borrowed from mental health disciplines.

Life Coaching or Therapy?

While coaching and therapy do share similarities, there are also significant differences. Both focus on empowerment through self-awareness and self-improvement. Both offer confidential, personalized sessions for addressing challenges and struggles. And certainly, both strive to help improve their clients’ happiness and personal fulfillment.

A major difference is that therapy generally has a core focus on confronting and resolving past issues using targeted, clinical approaches to explore past life experiences to clear any painful baggage they may present with. Although a client’s personal history is a consideration, coaches try to orient their clients toward empowered, decisive, future facing action.

As much as life coaches help clients improve their lives, they’re not mental health professionals. If dealing with a mental health concern, seek out a therapist or licensed healthcare professional. Therapists focus more on helping patients deal with traumatic or difficult past experiences and move beyond them. People seeking to identify and address barriers to their future personal and professional progress typically get the most value from life coaches.

Both therapy and coaching can help individuals find meaning, fulfillment, and happiness. Knowing which one to engage can be tricky. Picking the wrong one could delay an individual’s progress.

Importantly, if someone has not faced their shadow and done deeper healing work related to trauma or adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), it won’t matter how much coaching you go through to show up authentically and be the best version of yourself. This needs to be addressed before life coaching by some form of therapy. Conversely, therapy alone may not provide the resources and the clarity that someone may need to say, “This is the kind of person I’d like to authentically show up as in this world.” This is where the coaching piece comes in.

Regulation of the Coaching Profession

Coaching is an unregulated profession. Reputable organizations out there offer certifications, but these aren’t standardized. There are no specific educational requirements to become a coach practitioner.

Coaching has no governing board or licensing body that regulates the field. You can have no experience or training in coaching and call yourself a life coach. This allows some to market themselves as life coaches—whether well-intentioned or not.

While it can attract insincere opportunists, it also allows individuals passionate about helping people to have a wonderful livelihood without the huge investment of time and money to earn a healthcare providers license.

Potential clients need to give due diligence when searching for their life coach. Consider the amount of time a coach has been working in the field you’re considering. Find out if they have experience relevant to your goals.

Despite education being optional, nearly three-quarters of life coaches hold certification from a professional coaching institution. You can do a search online to find out more about the type of credential or certification a life coach holds.

The International Coaching Federation (ICF) is a great resource for all things coaching. ICF-accredited programs are generally considered the gold standard in the industry. Its website offers a helpful search feature to verify a coach has completed an ICF-accredited program.

Client testimonials can also be helpful. Look for specific details of how the coach benefitted them.

The Path to Becoming a  Life Coach

With no set path or standardization for becoming a practitioner (yet), some will draw on personal histories, unique experiences, as well as professional successes to attract clients. Many combine schooling with targeted training in their chosen niche. This might include graduate level programs in counseling and psychology. With coaching’s growing popularity, some top-tier universities are including coaching concentrations in their degree programs.

These programs help aspiring coaches build a toolkit of clinically tested and proven skills.

Again, do your research! The ICF has an excellent database of recognized and accredited programs that you can use to help in your research and is a good resource to learn more about coaching credentials and professional standards. And lastly, certification and training programs are so valuable for helping the aspiring coach learn how to approach and consult with a client as related to whatever it is you’re specializing in (if this skill is not already in your wheelhouse).

Life coaching can certainly fulfill our “dharma”—our unique life purpose or path we’re meant to follow in our time here on this earthly plane. It’s such a wonderful legacy to help improve humanity one client at a time. Mr. Rogers often said, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” (He would say this in response to seeing scary news stories as a child, and his mother would encourage him to look for the good in people.) Life coaches are definitely on the frontline of helpers.