Last updated on September 26th, 2023.
If you are looking for a new rewarding career, a job as an integrative life coach might be for you. The ability to work with people and help them grow can be a life-changing and stimulating life. The process to become one is relatively straightforward but will help you to be successful in your career.
The steps to becoming an integrative life coach depend solely on a person’s interests. Each step requires them to choose a pathway and how being a life coach interests them. These are the steps to become an integrative life coach.
- Choose a field to specialize in
- Complete training
- Earn your credential
- Develop your resources
- Create your business
Each of these steps is crucial to helping you become an integrative life coach. These steps will help you to grow and establish a business that has a good reputation and be self-sustaining. Read on to determine how you can become successful in your new career as an integrative life coach.
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What is an Integrated Life Coach?
An integrated life coach is trained to help people determine what they want out of life and help them heal from past experiences. Their certification training is more intense and time-consuming, focusing on how to heal people.
Instead of focusing solely on helping you reach your future goals, integrative life coaches help you heal your past problems to create good action plans to change your life.
The focus of an integrative life coach relies heavily on the unconscious mind and how it influences behavior. An integrative life coach helps reprogram clients’ minds and make attainable goals based on new neural pathways.
An integrative life coach is quite like that of a therapist but does not require the qualifications needed to be a therapist. Integrative life coaches also use hypnosis techniques to prime the unconscious brain instead of focusing on therapy CBT techniques.
What Does an Integrated Life Coach Do?
An integrated life coach helps you establish a plan for your life that allows you to heal from your past experiences. They utilize healing techniques that have you confront past pain and move on from it.
An integrative life coach focuses heavily on repression and memory consolidation to reprogram clients’ minds to achieve their goals. They utilize hypnosis like strategies to help their clients achieve their goals.
Also, integrative life coaches use action plans with their clients to help them develop these skills independently and allow them to reach their goals based on their changes.
In training, integrated life coaches will learn to do the following:
- Reconsolidate bad memories and reestablish new neural pathways for their clients when thinking about past foundational memories. These past foundational memories can limit a person’s goals, and when reconsolidating them, a person will be more likely to be successful.
- Delve into the unconscious mind and prime it to understand new healthy triggers. When seeing a positive catalyst, a client will be more inclined to complete a task and reach their next goal.
- You will learn techniques to rewire your brain and eliminate compulsive behaviors. A person’s brain will stop bad behavior by becoming rewired and creating more positive behaviors.
- Learn anti-procrastination methods and techniques to set action plans.
- Neutralize negative triggers and overcome harmful habits regarding health and wellness. Such as understanding food and body image relationships clients have ingrained in their thoughts.
- Resources to help you take action towards your client’s goals. Such as journaling, hypnosis, value circles, and just conversation
- Learn ways to problem solve to create personal efficacy and self-confidence
Each of these lessons will help you learn how to direct conversation with your clients to help them reach their goals. Much of these things are focused on the unconscious brain and help the clients overcome bad memories and establish a focused, plan-driven future.
The rewiring of a brain is crucial to integrative life coaching, and your job will require you to influence your client by hypnosis conversational techniques to control the unconscious mind.
5 Steps to Becoming an Integrative Life Coach
There are five steps to becoming an integrative life coach. Each one is critical to the development of your profession and helps you to achieve success.
Becoming an integrative life coach is not for everyone. With a little time and energy, you can discover if it is right for you and create a rewarding career focused on helping others and unlocking their true potential.
Discover Your Field
If you decide you want to become a life coach, it is essential to determine your niche. A niche is something you want to specialize in and help your clients focus on to reach their goals.
An important thing to note when choosing your niche is that it is a field you know about and is something you feel you can help clients achieve success in. If you were to choose a field that is not something you know, you might struggle in helping your clients overcome past pain and create action plans for their future.
Here are some possible fields you can specialize in when becoming an integrative life coach:
- Business: Someone may be interested in changing careers or getting a promotion.
- Romantic Relationships: Someone may be interested in pursuing a romantic relationship and need to work on past pain to help heal.
- Academic Issues: A person may be struggling in their academic pursuits and want to achieve their goals.
- Spirituality: Someone may be interested in learning about different religions or becoming more spiritual.
- Aging: Understanding the aging process and how it affects them.
- Work-Life Balance: People may have difficulty realizing the work-life balance they have chosen.
- Health and Wellness: Dealing with past pain and triggers can help people have better health and wellness.
All of these fields can be chosen to work in from an integrative life coach lens. You can help heal from past pain to be successful in their desired goal.
Complete a Training Program
If you have completed a degree that would help you achieve a career as a life coach, you may want to meet a training program on integrative life coaching. The specific coaching program will help you gain a more in-depth understanding of your individual life coaching branch.
Completing a training program gives you the skills and accreditation you need to become a certified life coach. By participating in a training program, you can even gain a network of people who will help you throughout your career.
There are many different training programs you can take to become a certified integrative life coach. Some are more singularly based, while others have more collaborative elements. It all depends on how quickly you would like to finish your program and what you hope to get out of it.
A training program will teach you how to help your clients heal from their past pain and reprogram their minds to help them create action plans to reach their goals. An integrative coaching program focuses more heavily on the brain than other coaching programs.
Earn Your Credential
After you have completed your program, you should earn your credential. The credential can be achieved when you have already started your business, but it is crucial in developing your reputation and business.
Some integrative life coach programs provide pathways for you to complete your credential after completing the program. You need to make sure that the program is accredited by a national/international coaching accreditation agency. If not, your accreditation might not be valid and could lead to problems with your business.
Some national agencies such as the international coaching federation offer an accreditation after you complete five hundred hours of coaching and have twenty-five clients. If you already have an already established business, this may be the route for you because it allows you to work and gain the accreditation you need to be more successful.
Accreditation will create a trust for your future clients because someone else has verified that you are good at your job. Trust is crucial to being an integrative coach because you help people work through difficult and deeply personal issues.
Develop Your Resources
You may have gained some resources and materials from your training program, but you must keep cultivating resources. Every client will learn differently and need different materials to help them overcome their obstacles.
For example, the wheel of life is something that all life coaches utilize. An integrative life coach would build upon that wheel and establish the next steps for the client, such as journaling.
Journaling is a crucial tool for clients who need integrative life coaching. It helps them confront past pain and move past it. An integrative life coach might want to find some writing prompts or visualization exercises to help the client become better.
Finding resources is a constant activity that will require patience and practice for you. New neurological and therapeutic resources are coming out all the time, and you will need to know them to keep helping your clients effectively.
Create Your Business
Once you have gone through an accreditation process, you can establish your business. There are a couple of ways to do that depending on your financial stability and understanding of the company.
If you are financially stable, you can apply for a business license and begin practicing as a licensed integrative life coach. Create a website and scheduling platform for your business. These are essential to any client-based business.
After that, you may begin marketing your business and accepting clients. You need to make crucial decisions on meeting clients and what the terms will be for a typical contract. These are the preliminary things necessary for any business, and you will be successful as long as you accomplish these things.
Where Can I Find Out More About Becoming an Integrative Life Coach?
You can find out more information for integrative life coach programs on the International Coaching Website and the various academies that offer integrative life coaching programs and accreditation.
All of them provide information about what a life coach does and what you will learn in each program and help you decide best for you.
Outro
Becoming an integrative life coach can be a rewarding career. Helping people and learning about how memory and triggers work can help you with your problems and help you succeed.