16 Coaches Share Why They Became A Coach

Introduction

Making the choice to become a coach can feel like a life-changing decision! Whether it was a calling, a life circumstance, or a breakthrough that pushed them into the profession, pretty much every coach has a story to tell.

In this blog post, we’ll talk to real coaches and get insight into what kind of realizations can motivate you to enter this career path. They share real stories about what inspired them and how they knew that coaching was their calling.

Let’s dive right in!

16 Reasons To Become A Coach

1. You have an affinity for lightbulb moments.

“I’ve always been addicted to the lightbulb moment when I’ve helped someone remove barriers and build confidence. Throughout my career, I’ve been in some sort of teaching role, whether in post-secondary classrooms, boardrooms, in my office as a people manager, or, for nearly 20 years, facilitating online workshops. With decades of experience developing talent, I was at a crossroads after my entire department was shut down during a massive org downsizing – which turned out to be a gift I didn’t know I wanted. I chose full-time study to complete my masters while I figured out my next steps, and past connections immediately began reaching out for help with courses and presenting. I quickly realized I could turn my knowledge into a business. Nearly 4 years later, I have two employees and small team of subcontractors to help me keep up with demand!”

– Tisha Parker Kemp, shiftED Academy

2. You don’t know what’s next in life, but you know you want to help others.

“I worked for 30 years as a software developer for various Silicon Valley startups and when I was finally laid off from my last job, I didn’t want to do that anymore. I also had no idea what was next for me. After a big reset that included 4 months of solo travel around the world, I was inspired by my own coach of 10 years to become a coach and he subsequently trained me.

The more I coached, the more I learned, and the more I developed my inherent coaching skills. I also realized my calling to help others overcome the things holding them back from a truly joyful and satisfying life. You see, I’ve struggled with anxiety, depression, and poor self-esteem throughout my life and helping others to overcome those same difficulties is the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done.

That’s how I became a coach and that’s why I’m still coaching today.”

– David Perry, PureCoach

3. You see your past hardships as powerful life lessons.

“I got into coaching because of my own past trials, traumas and tribulations. I am a firm believer that we experience things in life because we’re here to help others.

I had my first breakthrough when I started Hypnosis as a tool to work through some of my own subconscious blocks and limitations. It was then that I realized I wanted to help others live a life free from the binds of the subconscious mind.

I decided to become certified in Hypnosis and then began my journey into the coaching world and soon became a certified Empowerment Coach as well.

Working as a full-time coach and hypnotist has given me the most rewarding and fulfilling career I could ever ask for because I am making real impact in peoples lives. I will never do anything else.”

– Kori Koch, Empowerment Coach & Hypnotist

4. You’ve experienced financial success and want to help others do the same.

“After identifying my passion and determining that I could help others achieve financial success, I became a financial coach. In my human resources career, I was constantly helping to advise others on how to develop their skills to advance in their profession and increase their income. In my journey, I managed my family’s finances and eliminated all of our debt, including paying off our mortgage in 8 1/2 years. Being debt-free motivated me to want to help others like me to achieve their definition of financial success.”

– Annette Harris, Harris Financial Coaching

5. You’ve mastered a platform and love teaching about it.

“In 2008, I opened my first Etsy shop, and from that first sale, I was hooked.

I went on over the next few years to open multiple successful Etsy shops, which enabled me to work from home while raising my 3 children.

As others saw my success on the platform, I started to get asked for advice and help with other people’s Etsy shops – and eventually, this “side hustle” of helping other people grow their Etsy shops, turned into my full-time gig and I discovered I LOVED helping other people reach and exceed their goals with their Etsy shops. (more than I loved making products for my own Etsy shops!) So in 2015 I made the decision to pivot, and focus entirely on coaching other Etsy shop owners to scale their own Etsy shops to 6 figures – which is something I’ve been doing full time over the last 6 years.”

– Melissa MacDonald, Sweet Spot Marketing

6. You feel you’d find enjoyment if you could talk to people for a living.

“I didn’t set out to become a Coach. In fact, I did everything I possibly could to NOT call myself a Coach, until eventually, it was inevitable: I was already coaching clients, now all I needed to do was own the title.

I’ve always said, ‘It would be SO cool if I could get paid to talk to people,’ but my middle-class American ethos of ‘hard work = success’ kept me doing execution work I didn’t love doing simply because it was hard, instead of the coaching work that was so easy and came so naturally to me.

The only problem was doing ‘hard’ work I didn’t love doing was NOT making me successful. And the moment I stepped into and OWNED my title as Coach was the moment true sustainable success—or *consistent 5-figure months doing work you love doing, in the way you love doing it—*began to come to me.”

– Carly Jo Bell, WholeCo Media

7. You want to exit the corporate rat-race and start to impact your community.

“I’ve been coaching since before I knew coaching was a thing. Like many African American women, I grew up without personal financial instruction. I made countless mistakes as a young adult. I accumulated a ton of debt, my credit was terrible, I had no savings, and I was stuck in the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle. From my experience resurrecting my own finances, I found my passion and began helping family and friends with their finances.

I’ve always been called to help others. I had an epiphany before entering coaching full-time. I was helping the billion-dollar bank that I worked for secure their financial position in preparation for the worst, while my community, especially women of color, would be financially devastated in the event of an economic disaster. That had to change. I received formal training and certification as a Financial Counselor/Coach, and built a business helping women achieve financial success.” 

– Lana Hinds, Finance Coach

8. You’ve developed a skill that has led to sustainable success.

“I was inspired to become a Book Writing Coach based on my decades of professionally ghostwriting dozens of books, including for celebrities and other high profile figures, as well as authoring five of my own books. When I realized how much I learned from those experiences, especially the writing fundamentals, productivity, and mindset strategies required to write (and FINISH writing!) a great book, my next career move became obvious – help new authors navigate the process of writing their books! It also helped that I’ve always had the teaching gene, having been a church school teacher, CPR instructor and more. It brings me so much joy teaching others what I know and then watching them soar with that knowledge!”

– Christine Ink Whitmarsh, The Ink Agency

9. You want to support others in making lasting lifestyle changes.

“I’ve always been called to help others, which is why I became a registered dietitian. However, the training that I received to become a nutritionist didn’t provide the tools and techniques I need to help people make lasting behavior change, which is why I became a coach. Sure, I could tell people what and what not to eat, but I had no idea how to actually help them change their lifestyle.

I found out about coaching while working as a personal fitness trainer. I was at a workshop and one of the leaders said, “You’d make a great coach.” He suggested I check out Wellcoaches, which I did. Eventually I became a midlife coach, aka The Midlife Whisperer™. My big breakthrough came when I realized my clients were getting amazing results, yet I was incredibly stuck. I followed my own signature 7 step system and now am rocking midlife.”

– Ellen Albertson, The Midlife Whisperer

10. You’re totally okay if your curiosity with coaching leads to a life-long career.

“I became a coach when the industry was in its infancy (1995). I was a R.N. working for a county in California working with high-risk preemies after a long career in the Neonatal ICU. Part of my job was to train parents to advocate for their babies in a complex medical world when someone shared with me about this new profession of coaching. I researched it and enrolled myself in one of the original coach training schools, Coach U. I completed the program and was on the trainer team and building my coaching practice. I worked with businesspeople and gained clients simply through networking. Then my coach (all good coaches have coaches!) told me about a transformational educational program and I did that. I left nursing after that program and became a full-time coach – that was in 1997. I have had different iterations and expressions of my coaching through the years. And my life’s work has always been about positively impacting the people I work with, via one on one coaching or in training.”

– Janet Zaretsky, Business Coach

11. You’re the one everyone turns to for advice.

“I had been giving advice to my colleagues and friends for years when they had a problem with their manager or their spouse or looked for their next job. When I moved to London in May 2020, I realized that this activity actually had a name: “coaching”. I decided it would be my full-time job: it is what I am really good at, what I enjoy the most and it transforms people’s lives.

I have always done jobs where I was helping others: paramedic, community manager – even carrying academic research in history was to improve myself and be better to others. There is a logic behind all this. Now, I am a full-time life coach.”

– Noemi Poget, Life Coach

12. You really like asking questions.

“Becoming a full-time coach is a natural extension of what I’ve been doing most of my life. As an introvert, I found the best way to manage social situations is to learn to ask great questions and then let others do all the talking. Without realizing it, I was practicing to be a coach. I got into coaching after years as a counselor because I saw an opportunity to work with business owners who are invested in helping their staff thrive and grow. It is very fulfilling to be part of bringing change to a whole corporate environment; to see employee engagement, motivation and job satisfaction soar after just a few months into our coaching relationship.

I currently work locally as a leadership coach helping non-profit agencies improve their employee retention rates.”

– Susan Scott, Life Inspired Inc.

13. You feel called to support an underserved group of people.

“Men are an undersupported part of our population when it comes to mental health and relationships, and it became very apparent to me after working with men in Finance for nine years that many were suffering alone.

Being a part of that industry, and traveling abroad, I witnessed the struggle men faced balancing their careers and love lives, and felt called to step up and do something about it. I had also experienced many twists and turns in my own love life, and knew I needed to learn from my past in order to improve my future. I started working with my own coach for many months, who supported me to rip open the doors to my own inner world. It was a transformative experience that lead me to resign from my corporate career and step into the unknown of running a coaching business.”

– Kimberly Hill, Dating & Relationship Coach

14. You feel destined to become a coach.

“I was destined to be a coach! I’ve always loved helping others but of all the different fields I studied for & worked in, none of them were right and it always felt like something was missing. I tried Nursing, psychology, community work and various healing & therapy modalities. I’ve studied extensively and although I enjoyed it all, I was unfulfilled. Then I realised that all the people I’d been mentoring over the years for free, were getting better results than those who were paying therapists & healers a small fortune! After some research I decided to study life coaching, then realised that as a coach, I could do things differently and combine ALL of my qualifications and skills to tailor programs to suit the individual, instead of following rigid processes. PLUS my decades of experience in spiritual development & magick could also be included – and so, I developed my signature Spiritual Coaching program.”

– Alissandra Moon, Spiritual Coach

15. You’ve realized life is too short to not follow your dreams.

“I didn’t set out to be a coach, but a turning point came in my life when my mother passed away suddenly. She worked hard her entire life and was suddenly gone before she got to enjoy the passions she had put off. And that was a major wake-up call for me because I was heading down the same road. So I decided right there to pursue my own passions. And surprisingly I discovered I was inspiring others to do the same, so you could say at that point I found my coaching calling. The teary-eyed thanks I get when I help someone see their worth, and the possibilities in their life is indescribable. And it’s why I do it. Coaching is the most unselfish selfish thing I can do.”

– Chris Lee, Level Up Coach

16. You like helping others find their own sense of clarity & confidence.

“I became a coach to help women have clarity and confidence around food and lifestyle choices. Life is too short to beat yourself up over your choices. Health and lifestyle can work together, and I work with my clients to create a plan that serves both. Being healthy can be easy, and I feel called to help women realize how to make that realistic and achievable.”

– Lindsey Kaszuba, Integrative Nutrition Health Coach

Final Thoughts

Now that you’ve heard from real coaches, you can choose any of the reasons above as motivation to move forward with your calling to become one, too. You have everything you need to follow your dreams and become a coach! 

As you saw in the post, coaches are special, and their life experiences are what shape their ability to lead, teach, and share their passions to make an impact in the world around them. If aspiring coaches do not embrace their own motivating forces, they may miss out on the opportunity to experience a fulfilling career and lifestyle.

But, before you get started, please make sure you leave a quick comment and let us know which story was your favorite and what motivated you to become a coach as well.