Choosing the right Life Coach is extremely important. A powerful coach/client relationship can help you go further than you ever thought possible, accomplish your goals, realize your dreams, and experience more fulfillment, ease, and joy in your life.  

#1 - CONSIDER CERTIFICATIONS 
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While there is currently no legal certification required to say that you are a Life Coach, there is a governing board called the International Coaching Federation (or ICF).  The ICF makes sure that coaches have adequate education hours and client hours to offer you the highest level of coaching.  I highly recommend choosing an ICF-certified coach.  That being said, I have collaborated with amazing coaching who were not ICF certified.  Trust yourself and your judgment. 

For me, as a coach, ICF certification was important.  In 2010, I graduated from IPEC, one of the most highly acclaimed coaching schools in the world.  IPEC's coach training program exceeds all requirements set forth by the ICF. 

#2 - INTERVIEW COACHES

​Almost every single coach offers some kind of free consultation or free mini-session. I recommend scheduling several.  While ICF coaches will all have similar education, each coach brings to the coaching relationship their own unique gifts, skills, and experience.  Asking your coach what unique gifts they bring to the coaching relationship during your free consultation is a great idea.  You can also ask them to describe their style of coaching, or outline the process they use to help clients reach their goals.  Remember - you are interviewing someone for the position of GUIDE on your journey of life.  If you were going to trust a guide to take you to the top of Everest - you'd ask a few questions. This is your one wild and precious life, be intentional about the people you surround yourself with.   

Remember, each and every life coach is a good fit for some people and not a good fit for other people.  No coach is a good fit for every single person.  This is a good thing. There are many amazing coaches out there that are not a good fit for you.  If a coach is not a good fit for you, it doesn't mean anything, so there is no need to feel weird about it. 

#3 - TRUST YOUR GUT

This is the most important part of choosing a Life Coach.  You have a thing inside of you - call it your knower, your intuition, your higher self - whatever language you use to name that thing doesn't matter.  What does matter is that you learn to trust it.  That thing has the answers for you (and only you), and it is there to guide you in your life.  When choosing a coach, let your gut guide you. 

#4 - DISAPPOINT WHOEVER YOU NEED TO

It is your job to disappoint whoever you need to in order to follow your inner knowing.  That means that you might have to disappoint the coaches that you had a free consultation with.  You might have to disappoint a partner or friend who had an opinion on who you should coach with.  This is not only okay, it is a practice that you must become an expert at if you are going to live the life that you were born to live.  You didn't come here to be a people pleaser, you came here to shine your light. 

#5 - A NOTE ON BEING UNCOMFORTABLE VS. BEING UNCOMFORTABLE

There are two types of discomfort, one you should feel while working with a coach and one you should never feel while working with a coach.  When you pay attention to how you feel in your body, you can recognize the two feelings and how they are different. 

When you feel uncomfortable on the inside, in your chest - like a start exploding outwards - that is the good kind of discomfort.  This discomfort is accompanied by clarity and a sense of openness in your heart.  That means that you are growing, or that you are about to take an action step that is going to result in your growth and development as a human.  This feeling is an indicator that you are on the right path and doing the right thing.  

When you feel uncomfortable from the outside, like pressure pushing down on your shoulders, in on your chest, or squeezing your head, like you're in a vice or a meat grinder - this is the bad kind of discomfort.  This discomfort is accompanied by confusion, fuzzy thoughts, trusting another person over yourself, or shoulding on yourself.  This means that something is out of alignment - and it's an indicator that it is time to stop, step back from the situation, and spend some time alone so that you can assess the situation. 

I mention this because it's of utmost importance to understand as you go through your journey of life, but also because it pertains to finding a coach.  If you feel pressured during your coaching consultation- if you feel that type II uncomfortable, that is a sign that the coach is not a good fit for you, and I recommend that you continue to seek free consultations until you find a coach/client relationship that feels safe and uplifting.

Life Coaching sessions are exciting, they are boring, they are fun, and they are challenging. 

Like any journey, the journey of life and the sections of your path that you walk with your coach will contain a vast array of emotions and experiences.  There will be fun times and there will be challenging times.  Some sessions will include huge epiphanies that are earth-shaking and life-changing, other sessions will feel almost boring as you plod along the path to your goal.  Some sessions are filled with laughter and they are incredibly fun, as you begin to live into your entire being and play full-out in life.  Other sessions can include processing things like sadness, grief, or shame and they can be challenging as you begin to set your burdens down and release the things that have been holding you back.   

I think we sell ourselves short and set ourselves up for disappointment when we expect any particular experience to be all one certain way.  The truth is that being a human is complicated and nuanced, and life is complicated and nuanced. The universe is filled with chaos that we can't control and it impacts our lives in ways we don't fully understand, and while I'm usually a pretty science-driven, analytical gal, the truth is that this is a magic in all of this that I can't explain.  Life is both the mundane and the extraordinary - and that is what your sessions will be too. 
While each coaching session is unique and each client is unique, the average coaching session looks like this:

1. Get present.  The coach will work with the client to become centered and fully present so that the coaching work can be done.
2. Homework check-in/Identify current issues/Celebrate successes.  This is the process of identifying where you are on the map.  As part of the coach/client relationship, you will have identified where you are - and where you want to go.  This part of the session allows for the client to practice accurate self-assessment and for the coach to evaluate where the client is between the starting point and the goal. 
3. Investigate & discover.  This is the meat of the session and the part where deep investigation happens, epiphanies are had, shifts are made, healing takes place, potential is discovered, gifts are unlocked, and things are realigned.
4. Design the next action step.  This is the stage in the session where the next step towards the goal is identified and support is built around that action step.
5. Reflect & closing.  In this final part of the coaching session, all loose ends will be wrapped up, if any challenging work was done, those feelings will be resolved.  This is a time for the client to reflect on their work, the coaching session, and identify what is working for them and where they can increase their gratitude (because gratitude is a powerful force, and one of the bio-hacks that a coach will train you how to use).

In 2010 Mindy Amita Aisling graduated from iPEC, one of the most highly acclaimed coaching schools in the world, far exceeding the requirements set froth by the International Coaching Federation.  Immediately after graduation, Mindy launched her life coaching business, serving clients all over the world, and was highly successful both locally and internationally. 

In her second year of coaching, she was featured in the New York Times as a successful coach under 40.  Mindy wrote grants for community members to attend workshops free of charge, and she developed curriculum for educational courses on life and How To Be Human. She was a keynote speaker for a variety of groups, offered a series of classes and workshops, hosted community enrichment & advocacy events, and coached individuals and businesses both locally and remotely. 

In addition to her education as a coach, Mindy is also a certified mediator and has served as a mediator privately, and for the Deschutes County Courthouse. 

Currently, Mindy focuses almost exclusively on one-on-one coaching work with individuals and businesses who are seeking to have a more authentic and aligned life and/or business.  Mindy is also in the process of revising her curriculum from in-person courses to online DIY Coaching Courses for fellow autodidacts.

What unique gifts do you bring to your coach/client relationships?

I am highly empathetic.  Yup, I'm one of those people that is brought to tears by life almost every single day.  Some days they are sad tears, but some days they are tears of awe and wonder, or joy and gratitude.  I am seriously moved by life and the experience of being human.  This natural empathy allows me to connect to my client's experience of life in a very real way and allows them to feel tremendously seen and heard. 

I am direct. I say what I mean and I mean what I say.  I don't beat around the bush, or sugarcoat things.  Often times when people say they are direct they are actually using this as an excuse to be mean, or "brutally honest" - nope, that is not what I'm talking about.  When I say that I am direct, I'm referring to this natural inclination - or need even, to be completely transparent and authentic.  I talk about the things that all humans experience but most humans shrink away from giving voice to, like shame, desire, fear, insecurity, resentment, yearning, hope, and love. 
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I am curious.  My wild curiosity is one of the things that I love most about myself, and my clients have reported that the space of curiosity that I bring into our sessions has been valuable in our coach/client relationship.  I find the world, the experience of being human, and each individual's unique story, gifts, challenges, and traumas... all of this is endlessly fascinating.  I have no space for judgment in my life or my work because judgment cancels curiosity.  Judgment and curiosity can not exist at the same time, and given the choice between feeling judgment or curiosity - I'll choose curiosity every single time. 

What is your coaching style?

My philosophy is that every single person already has all of the answers for themselves and their life, they only need to remove the obstacles that are in the way of accessing their inner wisdom and clarity.  Many times when clients come to me, they have a belief system that they are somehow not whole, that they have to be someone or something different in order to succeed - that they are not enough.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  When I am coaching, I am holding the space for my clients to realize their wholeness, and to come home to who they really are.  My clients gain the ability to stand so firmly rooted in who they are, that even life's biggest challenges don't shake their roots. 

What are some of the goals that you've helped your clients reach?

Wow, over the past 12 years of coaching, I've also grown as a coach and a human, and I've tried on different niches of coaching to see where my greatest strengths are.  When I first started coaching, I was also an NFPT fitness trainer, so I focused primarily on health, wellness, balance & self-care.  Then I went back to school for more training, became certified as a mediator, and focused on communication, emotional intelligence, conflict resolution, and relationship.  Given my rich past in entrepreneurship, I've worked with a plethora of clients on opening businesses or changing careers.  For a short time, I branded myself as the 'clarity coach' and helped people who were stuck in making a decision for their life.  Now, I would say that my primary focus is authenticity - and that path includes many of the previous areas of my expertise.  I would say the top 5 goals that I've helped my clients achieve over the years are:

1. Developing Self-Trust/Self Love
2. Improving Health/Wellness/Life Balance
3. Starting a Business/Growing a Business
4. Improving a Marriage/Primary Relationship
5. Finding Your Life Purpose (Authenticity)

What is the process you use to help your clients reach their goals?

Each client is a bit different, so the process isn't always this linear, but in an effort to over-simplify the answer, so that it's easy to communicate, I'd list the steps as something like this:

• Build a safe space so that everything is welcome in session, and an open investigation can occur.
• Identify the client's goal and the why behind the goal (Sometimes we find that a goal can change when we remove all the "shoulds" or shame, align the goal with the client's values, or allow a desire to exist that was previously subdued)
• Build an action plan to achieve the goal
• Take action, evaluate, change and update as needed, take action again, etc. (This process can be complicated and requires serious investigation skills to dig deep and uncover the internal hurdles to achieving a goal.  Usually, the external hurdles are pretty straightforward, it's getting the internal stuff aligned so that the external hurdles can be mastered that is the fun part.  This is also where we might discover that healing that needs to take place to unlock full your potential, new habits and routines might need to be developed, or changes to your environment might need to take place). The action plan for your goal is a living, breathing plan and will change as we move closer to your goal. 
• Celebrate.  

I also have coaching package designed with a specific goal in mind, and the process for these is slightly different.  

When people ask the question, "How much does Life Coaching cost?" they are usually referring exclusively to money.  While I'll address that in this blog, I also want to talk about the other valuable commodities that we invest in anything and everything we do in our lives (because I don't think we talk about them enough). Life Coaching is an investment in YOU - you will need to invest time, effort/energy, and money.  Let's talk about it. 
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Life Coaching: The Time Investment
Most coaching sessions occur one hour per week.  This can vary based on the client's needs, and possibly, on requirements that the coach has.  Some coaches require a certain level of commitment, and other coaches are more flexible in their approach.  
Outside of session time, you will need alone time for reflection and processing, time to do your homework/action steps, and time for increased self-care.  The amount of time that you spend on these things will determine the speed of your personal growth and the accomplishment of your goal.  Depending on your unique situation, and the work that you're doing within your sessions, this could be an additional hour a week, or several hours a week.  You can discuss this with your coach during your sessions. 

Live Coaching: The Energy or Effort Investment
The biggest cost that you pay to achieve anything in your life is your energy.  Each of us has a different level of core energy, and our life circumstances and level of health can also impact the amount of energy we have to spend on the various things we need to do in life.  While the "spoon theory" is lingo used for chronic illness, the concept can be used universally.  You have a limited amount of energy to spend every day, and you have to consciously and intentionally choose where you are spending that energy.  Any form of personal growth & development, including life coaching, is going to require you to spend energy.  At the beginning of a coaching relationship, the amount of energy you have, and how you spend that energy, is something that you should discuss with your coach. 

Life Coaching: The Money Investment
Life Coaching, like the exchange of any service, requires payment.  Life Coaches charge anywhere from $25/hour to $2,025/hr - there is a vastly wide spectrum of rates.  The most common rate is $150 - $250/hr.  Many coaches offer discounts for packages or sliding scale rates. You can discuss rates and packages with your coach during a complimentary session.  Remember, there is no shame or weirdness in talking about money - that is a limiting cultural belief system, and I recommend you don't buy into it.  Money is just another form of energy - and how much you have or don't have doesn't define who you are.  It's okay to talk bluntly about money with your coach.  

Remember, you are not paying for that single moment in time while you are working with your coach.  You are paying for all of the time they invested in education, training, certification, etc - to get to that moment and have the ability to coach you - and you are paying for all of your future moments that will stem from coaching with them.  The growth and discovery you make as a client will impact the rest of your life, and those future moments are the moments you are paying for.  If you live for another 50 years, that's 438,000 hours.  If a 3-month (12 hours/1 session per week) package with your coach facilitates a shift in you that impacts the rest of your life - that's a pretty good ROI.