What it Takes to Be a Professional Life Coach

A Practical Guide for those Who Want to Do This Work Well

If you’re training as a coach, or already working with clients, there’s a moment most people reach where enthusiasm meets reality. It’s when you realise that coaching isn’t just about good intentions, empathy, or wanting to help. It’s about how you show up, how you structure the work, and how you create change without overstepping, fixing, rescuing, or burning yourself out.

The following guide brings together the core foundations of ethical, effective coaching practice that’s taken from real training conversations with our coaching students: answering the questions they ask, the mistakes they worry about, and the skills that truly matter once you’re sitting across from a client.

Whether you’re brand new or years into practice, these are the principles that protect you, your clients, and the integrity of the coaching profession.

1. Coaching Is Not Therapy

One of the most important foundations for any professional coach is understanding what coaching isn’t.

Coaching is not:

• therapy
• counselling
• trauma processing
• advice-giving
• fixing someone’s past

Coaching does not stay in the story. And it doesn’t endlessly revisit what went wrong. Instead, coaching is about:

• forward movement
• insight and awareness
• choice and responsibility
• helping clients take meaningful next steps

This distinction builds an ethical foundation of coaching practice. When coaches blur the line between coaching and therapy, they risk:

• working outside their scope
• unintentionally activating unresolved trauma
• leaving clients dysregulated or unsafe
• carrying responsibility that doesn’t belong to them

Professional coaching begins with clarity about what this type of work is designed to do (and not do) in partnership with your client.

2. The Session Must Have a Focus (Or Nothing Changes)

One of the most common mistakes newer coaches make is allowing sessions to drift.

Without a clear focus, sessions tend to:

• wander across multiple topics
• become venting or storytelling spaces
• feel emotionally busy but directionless
• end with clients saying, “That was nice… but nothing really changed.”

A professional coaching session always starts with a question like:

“What would you like to achieve in today’s session?”
“What would feel most helpful to focus on right now?”

This does two things:

1. It places agency back with the client
2. It creates a container for progress

Each session should help the client take one step forward, not solve everything at once. Helping the brain focus on rewiring one shift or change at a time supports the process of neuroplasticity via consistent actions

Structure doesn’t limit coaching, it liberates it.

3. Presence: Regulation Comes First

Clients don’t just hear your words; they feel your state. If you arrive (or start your virtual session) rushed, scattered, stressed, or dysregulated, your client’s nervous system will pick that up immediately.

Professional coaching requires coaching presence, which means:

• being grounded before the session begins
• regulating your own nervous system
• creating an environment that feels safe, calm, and contained
• showing up prepared, not reactive

This is especially important in holistic and nervous-system-informed work. Before you support someone else, you must ask yourself:

• Have I settled my body?
• Am I mentally present?
• Can I hold space without needing to lead, fix, or prove myself?

No-one is expecting ‘perfection’ here but you do need to be resourced (i.e. actively using your own regulation tools), before you can confidently hold space for a client-centred session and co-regulate with them.

4. Active Listening Is a Skill

Listening in coaching is not passive, it’s active. You show active listening by not waiting for your turn to speak, thinking about your next question, or planning your ‘advice’. Coaches do not give advice.

Active, reflective listening means:

• hearing what the client is saying
• noticing what they’re not saying
• observing tone, posture, breath, pace
• reflecting patterns back without judgement

Often the most powerful moment in a session isn’t a clever question, but when a client hears their own words reflected back and realises something they hadn’t seen before.

Awareness is the gateway to change.

5. Asking Questions With Purpose (Not Curiosity)

Professional coaches don’t ask questions because they’re curious. They ask questions that are intentional. 

Effective coaching questions:

• are open-ended
• deepen awareness
• link thoughts, emotions, and behaviour
• invite reflection rather than defensiveness

For example:

“What happens in your body when that shows up?”
“What do you notice you do next, almost automatically?”
“How would you like this to feel different?”

Questions aren’t about digging — they’re about illuminating.

6. You Are Allowed to Interrupt When It Serves the Client

Many coaches worry about interrupting clients, especially when they’re emotional or telling an important story. But sometimes not interrupting reinforces the very pattern that keeps a client stuck.

Interrupting can be ethical and supportive when it:

• brings the client back to focus
• disrupts rumination or looping
• highlights an unhelpful pattern
• supports forward movement

When done professionally, interruption sounds like:

“May I pause you for a moment? I want to reflect something back to you that feels important.”

This polite interruption sets the scene to frame your feedback so the client can ‘hear’ themselves. Instead of repeating the story, the client can gain a new perspective or insight about what’s stopping them from changing the old story.

7. The Client Does the Work (Not You)

One of the most relieving truths for coaches to learn is this: You are not responsible for changing your client’s life.

Your role is to:

• facilitate awareness
• support insight
• co-create realistic action steps
• provide accountability as agreed

Your role is not to:

• carry their motivation
• chase their goals
• work harder than they do

Action steps must be co-created, realistic, and meaningful to the client. If the client doesn’t choose the action because it’s meaningful to them, they’re unlikely to sustain it.

8. Accountability Is a Conversation

Different clients need different levels of accountability. Never assume your client won’t need some type of accountability, whether it’s from you or themselves.

A professional coach asks:

“How much accountability would be helpful for you?”

“What support do you already have around you?”

“What tends to get in the way during the week?” “

What can I do to help you stay on track this week?”

Sometimes accountability is:

• a check-in
• a reminder
• a conversation with a partner
• restructuring their environment

Coaching doesn’t happen only in the session. It happens in how clients live between sessions. Problem solving ahead of time creates a ready plan B when the client needs to pivot. They know themselves best, so help them take ownership of their time and choices by planning ahead. 

9. You Don’t Need to Have All the Answers

Many people hesitate to coach because they believe they need to be:

• fully healed
• highly confident
• perfectly regulated

In reality, what matters most is:

• humility
• willingness to learn
• ethical boundaries
• an open, grounded presence

You don’t need to know everything. But you do need to know how to:

• listen
• ask
• reflect
• guide
• stay in your lane

That’s professional coaching.

Why These Foundations Matter

When coaching is done well it doesn’t just feel supportive, it feels empowering! For both you and your client.

Clients leave knowing:

• they are capable
• they are not broken
• they have choices
• change is possible

And coaches leave knowing:

• they worked ethically
• they stayed grounded
• they facilitated real movement
• they didn’t carry what wasn’t theirs

These foundations are what sustain a professional coaching practice over time, and if you didn’t learn it, you’re not aware of this, or if you’re struggling because you haven’t been abiding by them, course correct now.

If you need professional (holistic) life coach training that also includes the latest mind-body science and nervous system support, check out our certification courses here.