Life coaching has become a major industry. Gone are the days when seeking out assistance for making life decisions; as people have become more comfortable seeking out psychiatric help, there have been a number of different ways in which they have decided to explore the help available. While some have gone a straight clinical path and seek out a psychiatrist to help them and others have gone a more holistic approach through meditation and similar approaches, others have sought a middle road: life coaching. The life coach is able to offer some counseling while at the same time offering advice on how to lead a much more fulfilling life. Suffice to say that life coaching training can be an interesting road in and of itself.

Strictly speaking, few colleges offer a degree in life coaching. Instead a person seeking training must either find an establishment offering a certificate in the field or a college that offers equivalent training. If the establishment offers a certificate course, it is usually six to nine months of training; an equivalent course at a college can take as long as two years. Besides time the college offers a wider variety of classes that help the student deal with a wider variety of issues than the certificate training. Nonetheless either direction is fine for those looking to be life coaches, and there is the possibility of on-the-job training depending on what kind of place the person goes to for training.

The training itself can take a number of different directions, but usually consists of a mixture of counseling techniques as well as some training in remedial career counseling and physical therapy. Life coaching tends to be a bit more intense than other counselling as the person is attempting to make a bigger change than normal counselling, and the training needs to allow for that. Because of that the counselor needs to be able to not only take a much deeper look at the person’s life but to also be able to affect change in those areas. While regular counselling merely looks at the psychiatric issues concerning a person, life coaching also looks at the person’s physical health and overall situation and seeks to correct any and all unhealthy situations preventing the person from leading a life different than what he wants to lead; training needs to reflect that more general focus.

Life coaching training can be one of the most educations that a person can receive due to how general the discipline can be.