How to Become a Life Coach in Mississippi

If you’re the kind of person who enjoys helping friends and family work through challenges, you can turn your gifts into a life coach career. Life coaches help clients through life issues and to achieve difficult goals. Their time is spent recruiting new clients, having in-depth conversations to understand clients and their needs, and providing emotional and motivational support regularly.

Life coaches give helpful advice but don’t fix clients’ problems for them. Instead, they focus on helping clients learn how to solve their own problems in effective, motivational ways. The benefits gained from a life coach are long-lasting, because clients learn valuable life skills that can be used again in the future. Life coaches are often self-employed, but some work for large organizations such as universities and fitness clubs.

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Getting Started

The practice of life coaching isn’t regulated or monitored by any official agency, but you won’t be able to effectively coach clients until you’ve gained life experience and coaching skills through training. After you graduate high school or earn your GED, you’ll be able to enroll in a life coach training program. To ensure you learn the skills needed for success in your career, choose a school that’s accredited by the International Coach Federation (ICF), the leading life coach certification agency. When you finish training, you can begin taking steps to become certified by an organization like the ICF to show potential clients that you’re well-qualified as a life coach.

Online Study Programs

Lots of quality life coach training programs are available online, making learning the skills of life coaching available to anyone, anywhere. These are just a couple of the ICF-accredited training programs available for distance-learning:

  • Success Unlimited Network. Based in Virginia, this school offers a 125-hour program that’s available completely online or over the phone. One hundred of the hours are spent learning life coach skills either privately or in small group settings, and the other 25 hours are composed of training customized to your interests, such as business marketing, mindfulness and aging coaching.
  • Coaching Changes Lives. This fully online program offers a Mastery of Coaching foundation program to help students become professional coaches. The program takes 70 hours to complete and offers 24 hours of coach mentorship. Graduates may pursue two higher levels of coaching certification as they grow in their careers.

Certifying Agencies for Life Coaches

When you’re done training, it’s time to get certified. You can earn life coach certification from many places, but those organizations with higher prestige, such as ICF, will help your career the most. This is because clients will recognize better-known and well-respected credentials and feel more confident in choosing a life coach that holds them. The ICF offers three levels of life coach certification, which can be earned with increasing levels of training hours and coaching experience hours. The three credentials are Associate Certified Coach (ACC), Professional Certified Coach (PCC) and Master Certified Coach (MCC).

Job Availability and Income Rates

According to ZipRecruiter.com, Mississippi has a very active market for life coach jobs. In October of 2019, Mississippi life coaches’ salaries varied widely, from $9,407 to $126,999 per year. The average income for life coaches in Mississippi that year was $53,331.

The wide range in Mississippi life coach income suggests that salaries for life coaches in Mississippi are largely dependent on experience and qualifications. Self-employed life coaches have the power to choose their own rates of pay, provided they’re reasonably based on experience level and competitive with the pricing of other life coaches.

Choosing Where to Start Your Life Coach Career

How do you know where to start your life coach career in Mississippi? It’s best to focus your career efforts on areas that have the demographic of clients you want to attract. Large cities present more opportunities for you to gain clients. Good places to begin your career might be the cities of Jackson, Gulfport or Southaven. As of October 2019, Jackson life coaches made an average salary well above that of the whole state, at $60,497 per year.

No matter where you choose to get started, take comfort in knowing that life coach careers are very portable and flexible. Your career and earning potential will keep growing with added training and coaching experience. Moving to new places shouldn’t disrupt your career, because life coaches are in demand everywhere and often work online or over the phone with clients. As a life coach, not only will you help people reach their dreams, but you’ll enjoy a self-controlled, flexible career, too.