Life coaching certification: The complete basics course

Coaching unlocks a person's potential to maximize their own performance by guiding learning rather than teaching. It uses conversation and an environment to move focus from problems to solutions.

Discover what it takes to be a great coach using the coach framework—centered, open, attention, connection, and hold—to stay present, listen to the client, and hold space with confidence.

learn essential coaching skills: distinguish coaching from therapy and consulting, build rapport, listen without judgment, work in the client's reality, stay independent of outcomes, and use questions, frustration, and support.

Apply Milton Erickson’s five principles: clients are okay as they are, have inner resources, make the best choices, act with positive intentions, and accept change.

Build contact and rapport to establish trust, security, and being heard, essential for effective coaching. Establish a contract on goals and conditions, and assign responsibility to the client for outcomes.

Coaches place responsibility on the client by creating a trusting environment where clients decide and act with their resources, while offering observations or abstract ideas instead of directing them.

This lecture defines the coaching contract as a verbal agreement on time, topic, and interaction rules established at the first meeting, including pre-contract steps, scheduling, payment, and goals.

Apply Milton Erickson principles: work with clients who are okay and have resources, stay within your competency zone, and refer those not suitable to appropriate professionals.

Identify and avoid common coaching mistakes, such as giving answers, stepping into the client’s reality, and overtalking. Emphasize listening, asking questions, setting boundaries, and pacing progress.

Develop rapport with clients by identifying verbal similarities across places, activities, interests, values, and experiences, while listening and guiding conversations to build trust.

Develop verbal rapport with clients and calibrate non-verbal cues based on neuro-linguistic programming, observing posture, breathing, speaking speed, facial expressions, and voice tone, then adjust naturally.

Build rapport and trust by listening deeply in coaching, avoiding judgment and premature replies. Listen till the end, notice intonation, energy, and emotions, and understand context to guide next questions.

Discover how to use support and frustration in coaching to affirm achievements, prompt risk-taking, and challenge goals to boost motivation and client agency.

Ask open questions to drive client transformation by eliciting long, thoughtful answers, while closed questions invite short responses. Avoid why questions and frame how questions to encourage reflection.

Explore open questions, questions starting with how, clarifying questions, and transforming questions, with concrete examples and tips to elicit specificity and expand possibilities.

This lecture teaches verbal instruments of softening and repeating in coaching, with phrases like 'May I ask you a question?' and using clients’ exact words to build trust.

Continue exploring verbal instruments in coaching, learning to explain the result with transparent motives, give non-judgmental feedback, and offer non-direct interventions using sample phrases.

Master the grow model, a four-stage coaching framework: goal, reality, opportunities or obstacles, and will. Use practical questions, document notes, and a downloadable worksheet to apply it in sessions.

Explore the T-model as a companion to the GROW model, using widening for expansion and narrowing for focus to uncover opportunities and top priorities.

Use scaling to clarify clients' current and desired states, measure progress from 1 to 10, and plan step-by-step actions, including inner-scale questions on priority, certainty, and commitment.

Learn how the smart model guides goal setting by ensuring specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-framed criteria, with practical questions and a downloadable worksheet.

Learn to craft a dreams plan by visualizing a five-year life, setting smart goals, and mapping them backward with yearly checkpoints to turn long-term aims into action.

Utilize the wheel of life balance to help clients rate happiness across life areas—family, career, finance, health, personal growth, spiritual growth, leisure, and friends—and plan movement to higher scores.

Explore Dilts neurological levels for coaching by addressing environment, behavior, capabilities, values and beliefs, identity, and purpose, identifying the root cause, and planning effective change.

Use the Descartes quadrant to help clients decide by listing four outcomes: what happens if you do it, what happens if you don't.

Learn the 4-position model to resolve client conflicts by exploring perspectives—from the client and the other side to a significant person and the overall system—ensuring thoughtful, consequence-aware solutions.

Use the Eisenhower matrix to prioritize tasks in four quadrants. Prioritize urgent and important tasks, plan strategic work, and delegate routine duties.

Learn to use SWOT analysis as a coaching instrument to evaluate strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for a person or project, through four quadrants of internal and external factors.

Use visualization to have clients imagine the life they want, shift from the current state to the future, and plan backward from that finish point to now.

Practice association-dissociation to shift from an associated state to a dissociated state, viewing feelings and plans from the outside to see the bigger picture and the four-position model.

Finish the course with all the knowledge, instruments, and techniques to start coaching, and practice fearlessly to improve. Email your full name to receive your certificate of completion.