Becoming a Spiritual Life Coach
Discover how to start a spiritual coaching business by following seven steps that cover everything from finding a niche to creating a legal entity.
Current estimates state that there are around 40,000 life coaches in the United States, with many of those coaches applying a spiritual tinge to their work. Like most life coaches, spiritual coaches provide guidance and support to their clients, leading them down the appropriate paths in life and business.
The key difference is that spiritual coaches do this while helping clients get in deeper touch with their spiritual side – their beliefs, religion (if they have one), and how their sense of self impacts their personal journey. It’s a terrific career path for those who are interested in bringing meaningful, positive changes to other people’s lives.
If you’re interested in becoming a spiritual life coach, this guide is here to help. Below, we’ll look at what spiritual life coaches do, the benefits of this work, and seven simple steps to becoming a spiritual coach. We’ll also explore ways to build up your life coach business, like using BlurBay to share your wisdom in video form.
What Is a Spiritual Life Coach?
First, the basics. Before becoming a spiritual life coach, it’s important to understand what this title actually refers to. As stated above, a spiritual life coach has much in common with a regular life coach. So let’s start with a definition of life coach.
A life coach is quite simply a person who encourages, guides, and motivates people through their lives. The nature of their work can vary from client to client, depending on each client’s life situation and aims. However, it generally involves helping clients become happier or lead more fulfilling lives, or aiding them with making key choices and changes to help them reach their goals.
Life coaches, for example, might aid people with relationships, personal health and wellness, career challenges, and so on. Spiritual life coaches work in similar ways and have similar aims, striving to help clients become happy and fulfilled. However, their work is oriented around the spiritual side of life.
Spiritual life coaches have similar aims and objectives. Their general purpose is to help people feel happier, more fulfilled, and more at peace with themselves, their lives, and the world around them. The big difference is that spiritual coaches – as their name implies – focus more on the spiritual side of life.
Becoming a spiritual life coach is therefore about helping people explore their spirituality. It’s about aiding clients to get in touch with their inner selves, their beliefs, values, and energies. In doing so, they can help clients learn more about their desires, overcome challenges, and establish better connections with themselves and those around them.
What Do Spiritual Life Coaches Do?
If you’re interested in becoming a spiritual coach, you’ll naturally want to know how you’ll be spending your time. But the truth is that this is a very versatile line of work, with a lot of possibilities. Every day and client can be different, resulting in lots of unique problems to solve and working experiences to enjoy.
However, at a very general level, becoming a spiritual life coach will involve lots of communication. You’ll have meetings and talks with your clients to understand their needs and situations. From there, you’ll use your skills and training to develop spiritual plans of action for your clients to help them achieve their aims.
For example, you might have a client who feels unhappy or stuck in a rut, either in their personal life, professional life, or both. Through communication and spiritual connection, you can discover some of the root causes of their problems. Then, you can develop a plan to help them learn, grow, and lead a happier life.
That plan could involve all sorts of spiritual practices, like meditation, visualization, daily affirmations, etc. As explained earlier, it’ll vary depending on who you’re working with and what kind of practices tend to suit them best. This is one of the big draws of becoming a spiritual life coach – it’s a really varied and versatile line of work.
There are even multiple types of spiritual coaching roles to consider. Many people become generalist spiritual life coaches. Others opt for becoming a spiritual coach with a particular specialty or niche focus, like energy healing, reiki, or tantric coaching. Others are even more specific, offering services like business coaching for spiritual entrepreneurs to help business people thrive and prosper through spirituality.
The Benefits of Becoming a Spiritual Life Coach
As we can see, spiritual life coaching takes many forms. Each of those forms functions differently, albeit with the same ultimate aim of helping people lead their best lives. That can be a wonderfully rewarding experience and a big motivator for many people. But, you might still be wondering whether or not becoming a spiritual coach is the right step for you.
To help you find out, we’ll now dig into the pros and cons – or “benefits and challenges” – of this line of work. Let’s begin with the benefits.
An Engaging and Rewarding Career
Arguably the No. 1 benefit of becoming a spiritual coach is how rewarding this work can be. Indeed, that’s true of all fields of life coaching. Many people find that this type of work simply makes them happy, as it can be so fulfilling and pleasant to help other people.
In this kind of work, you’ll regularly have clients come to you with their problems or challenges. It’s your role to help them solve those problems and overcome those challenges. It’s not always easy, but when you succeed, the feeling is one of the best in the world.
Lots of Options
As touched on earlier, becoming a spiritual life coach is also quite a versatile career choice. It gives you lots of options. You can become a generalist and offer general spiritual guidance and advice, or you can follow a more specific path, focusing on a particular area of spirituality.
What’s more, your career might change and evolve over time. You might start off as a generalist and gradually find your passion for one particular niche a while later. Or you might discover that you work best with business clients, possibly creating your own business coaching for spiritual entrepreneurs service.
Making a Living From Your Spiritual Side
Perhaps you’ve always been a spiritual person, attuned with energies and the universe around you. However, it’s often tricky to find a career that truly allows you to express your spiritual side or put your spiritual expertise to good use.
Becoming a spiritual life coach is the solution. It’s one of the best ways to combine your spiritual life with your professional life. What’s more, the most successful spiritual coaches earn impressive salaries and lead comfortable lives.
Making the World a Better Place
Another beautiful aspect of becoming a spiritual coach is that it quite simply helps to make the world a better place. Every day, you work to empower people, to inspire, guide, motivate, and help them.
As a result, people will often walk away from your sessions feeling more joyful and content. Knowing that you’ve spread a little happiness and peace each day can help you enjoy plenty of job satisfaction.
The Challenges of Becoming a Spiritual Coach
Of course, it’s not all smooth sailing and positivity. There are also challenges and potential downsides to take into account before becoming a spiritual life coach. Here are some challenges and negative points to take into account:
An Increasingly Competitive Field
A few decades ago, very few people were interested in becoming a spiritual life coach. But times have changed. Spirituality is an increasingly big part of many people’s lives, and lots of life coaches are looking to assist with that.
This means that there’s more competition than ever before. Lots of other coaches are out there, all offering similar services and vying for the attention of the same kind of clients. You may have to work extra hard to stand out and gain loyal clients.
Demands a High Level of Adaptability
Spiritual life coaches require a range of key skills. Adaptability is one of the most crucial pieces of the puzzle. Every day will be different in this job. Every client is different, too, with their own needs, situations, and beliefs.
You have to be flexible enough to adapt to each new person you work with. That involves adjusting your approach to meet their needs and help them get the results they want. This can be challenging for those who prefer a more fixed or rigid way of working.
Becoming a Spiritual Coach: Step by Step
Now that we know what spiritual life coaching entails, it’s time to look at the process of becoming a spiritual coach. Below, we’ll break the whole process down into seven easy steps, helping you on your journey.
Step 1 – Figure Out Your Niche
Your first instinct may be to try and be all things to all people in spiritual terms. In other words, you have no niche. You simply offer general spiritual guidance.
That may not work for two reasons.
First – you can’t possibly be an expert on every single religion or aspect of spirituality that your clients present to you. And that lack of expertise could lead to clients who are seeking something more specific choosing to go with another coach. Secondly, generalists often have to accept that they’ll get paid less because they can’t confront specific issues. They can only offer vague advice.
So, your best course of action is to choose a specific niche to which you’ll sell your coaching. Digging down into that niche requires you to ask a few questions of yourself:
- What religion, if any, is your specialty?
- What specific goals do you help your clients to achieve? For instance, you may focus on helping people achieve prosperity or work with them to align their spiritual selves with what they do in work and life.
- Are there specific pain points you help your clients to overcome?
Know yourself and you’ll know which niche to pursue as a spiritual coach. Most look to how their own spiritual journeys have affected them in their daily lives, with those instances giving them direct experience that they can focus on as their niche.
Step 2 – Get Certified
Credibility is the key ingredient to any successful coaching business.
In the spiritual arena, you need to display to your clients that you’re capable of providing them with appropriate guidance. In other words, you can’t just rock up, claim to be a spiritual coach, and expect people to follow your lead. You need to give them some proof (social or otherwise) that you’re the real deal.
As your business develops and you build a cohort of happy clients, you’ll have all of the social proof you need to build your credibility.
But in the early days, it helps to have a spiritual coaching certification. Though not a requirement – you can be a spiritual coach without being certified – the simple fact that you’ve undergone training is enough to convince many people that you’re worthy of their time. This will make it much easier for you to obtain clients and provide business coaching for spiritual entrepreneurs.
More than that, your certification also provides you with foundational knowledge on how to build your business and apply what you know to your clients. As for which certification to choose, there are many options. The “Spiritual Coach Certification” program on Udemy is a good starting point, as are any coaching programs accredited by The International Coaching Federation.
Step 3 – Choose an Appropriate Business Entity for Your New Company
You’re building a business, which means you need to develop a business entity that aligns with state and, in some cases, local requirements. You have several options when becoming a spiritual coach, with the following three being the most common:
- Sole proprietorship
- Limited liability company (LLC)
- C Corporation
A sole proprietorship is the easiest of the four to create – you just need to register yourself as the business owner and you’re ready to go. However, this structure provides you with no personal liability coverage. In other words, there’s no separation between your business and personal assets, so any financial issues the business faces could blow back onto you.
Both an LLC and C Corporation provide liability protection, making them preferable to a sole proprietorship. Of the two, an LLC is easier to create, offers more flexibility in how you structure your business, and, crucially, usually offers pass-through taxation. With this tax structure, the company doesn’t pay corporation tax on its income, with tax only paid at the personal level. In the C Corporation structure, you’re taxed twice – once at the corporate level and again at the personal level.
Choose your business entity early and complete the appropriate forms (usually Articles of Organization or Articles of Incorporation) in your state so you have an “official” business set up.
Step 4 – Develop Your Offer
There’s one question you need to answer when becoming a spiritual life coach and developing your offer:
What will your clients get as a result of your spiritual coaching?
It’s a big question, too. If you can’t point your clients toward a definitive result of the work they do with you, they’re going to feel like the work is pointless. They’ll have no goal. No clarity. And eventually, they’ll start questioning why they’re spending money on your coaching at all.
Start with an overriding result. Perhaps you help clients to develop a stronger connection to their deity, or help them to attain happiness in their personal lives. Your spiritual coaching could apply to their relationship (i.e., building a stronger marriage). Whatever the goal is, it needs to be clear and made front and center in your offer.
Your niche (which you chose earlier) is often your guiding light for your offer. When you know who you’re coaching, you’re better able to identify the issues that your audience faces and come up with an offer that speaks to those issues.
Step 5 – Choose Your Platform
You know what you’re offering, you’ve formed an official business, and you have a certification that offers credibility before you have any clients to provide social proof for the effectiveness of your work.
Next – getting your coaching out there.
There are myriad platforms you can use to host your coaching materials and courses. Some choose social media, such as Facebook, because they can set up dedicated groups and, later on, point people toward membership websites where clients pay more to access content.
Speaking of membership sites, those are effective if you have a lot of written course material that you can divvy into tiers based on the level of coaching your clients require. But beware – hosting your website comes with challenges. Beyond the time and money put into building and maintaining the site, you also need to handle bookings and come up with a secure method of payment.
Alternatively, trust another platform to handle those complications for you so you can focus solely on delivering your material. For example, BlurBay offers budding spiritual coaches a place to host their business coaching for spiritual entrepreneurs videos behind paywalls. This essentially creates a pay-per-view experience for your clients. The platform requires no subscription and only takes a 5% commission on your sales, making it easy for you to upload your content. And because the platform is set up and ready to go, you don’t have to worry about handling payments or setting up a website – it’s all done for you.
Regardless of your choice, you need a platform to host your coaching materials. That’s even the case if you offer one-on-one coaching – your platform could provide supplemental materials that support your clients outside of the sessions you hold with them.
Step 6 – Get Your First Client
Your foundation is in place.
You have a legal business entity (with certification to back you) and you’ve developed both an offer and course materials hosted on an appropriate platform.
Now comes the tricky part – getting your first client.
That client is far more than somebody who’s going to pay you for your services. They’re your ticket to a testimonial (assuming you do a good job) and the social proof you’ll be able to leverage to get more clients in the future.
The only challenge is that you don’t have a marketing network in place to land that first client.
So, you focus on building your network. Start with the people you already know, as there may be somebody in your friend, family, or even business group who could use your services. Failing that, use social media platforms – Facebook is a great choice – to get involved with groups related to your niche so you can start connecting with people who require your services.
There are also directories you can add yourself to that make it easier for people to find you. CoachCompare is a good choice – it helps people find coaches (i.e., you) in whatever niche is relevant to them.
Your goal is to simply get that first client under your belt. Having somebody purchase your services – be they videos, course materials, or one-on-one coaching – gives you an instant shot of credibility. Plus, you now have a source of referrals and positive feedback you can use in later marketing.
Step 7 – Design Your Company’s Logo
Speaking of marketing, there’s one little piece of design work that goes a long way to helping you build a brand that people can recognize – your company’s logo.
The humble logo is the most powerful piece of branding that you have. In fact, 75% of people say that they recognize companies based solely on seeing their logo, which is far more than those who recognize businesses based on visual style (60%) or their voice (25%).
That’s not all – a staggering 60% of people say they’ll actively avoid companies that have logos they find odd or visually unappealing.
That fact alone means you shouldn’t go cheap when designing your logo. If you happen to have some artistic skills, you may be able to handle the design work yourself. But failing that, work with a graphic design company that’s capable of creating something that communicates your personality and the nature of your work, rather than opting for the first cheap freelancer who says they can draw.
Dive Into Business Coaching for Spiritual Entrepreneurs
You can divide the steps for becoming a spiritual coach into the practical and provision categories.
On the practical side, you handle everything that goes into building any business – choosing a business entity, marketing to your first client, and creating a logo. Then, hone in on how you’ll provide your service. That starts with identifying your niche, allowing you to build an offer that speaks to a specific clientele. From there, it’s about what you’ll use to make your coaching materials accessible, with platforms like BlurBay being ideal for video content, whereas building a membership website may be a better choice if you have written course content.
Ultimately, success in becoming a spiritual life coach comes down to knowing yourself. By understanding your own experiences, and how those experiences influence your understanding of your spirituality, you can more effectively guide others down their own divine paths.
