How to Find a Life Coach Who’s the Best Fit

Brandi's hands holding a latte in a mint green mug on a table with her notebooks.

This is advice on how to determine if a coach is a great fit for you and will be able to support you in getting the results you want in your life.

It’s important to make sure your coach is a good fit for you and that you are a good fit for your coach for several reasons.

First, you want to feel your most comfortable to open up and be honest. This is how you make the most progress.

Second, if you’re not making progress, your wasting time and money for both you and the coach.

Third, you want a coach who is legit. With the industry being a fairly new one, you may wonder how to even know if your coach is legit and does that even matter to your success?

So, this article will help you figure all that out. I’ll preface it by saying this is how I would find a coach myself if I were looking for one and the things I think are important to know.

We’ll cover these topics:

Ways to Do Your Research

What It Means to Be a Coach

The school of coaching I come from teaches that there’s a difference between a coach and a teacher. There’s also a difference between a coach and a consultant. And we take those differences very seriously. If I were to take on the role of a teacher, I’d be very clear about it with you — but at that point, I wouldn’t be coaching you. I’d be teaching you. If I started giving you advice in a session, at that point, I wouldn’t be coaching you. I’d be consulting you.

Keeping all this in mind, here is the definition of a coach that I adhere to:

A coach is someone who partners with you to go through a creative process in which you are supported to gain insight to shift your behavior and create new results.

That definition is adapted from Moving the Human Spirit, my coaching school.

Coaches aren’t here to fix you. We’re here to support you and hold space while you process and find the answers you already have within. And oftentimes, having a coach support you through this helps it happen faster than it would if you did it on your own.

So, if you think you need or want a coach, it can definitely be an amazing experience. In fact, I chose to become a coach after having two very impactful coaches in my life over the years. The experience of being coached after a divorce and during the pandemic were some of the best investments I’ve made in myself aside from learning how to be a coach and take better care of my health and wellbeing. (I’ve now officially worked with a total of four coaches for various reasons.) But that’s a story for another day, so let’s get to it…

The Ingredients for Choosing the Right Coach

There are three main ingredients to choosing a coach who’s a good fit for you.

Know their credentials and decide if you’re comfortable with their level of education and experience. Do you consider them legit?
Know their focus and decide if it aligns with your goals.
Know their style and approach to coaching so you can decide if it resonates with you and will be the best support for how you need to show up currently.

You’ll want to research these ingredients to get the answers that will help you proceed in finding the best fit.

It’s also good to keep in mind that even though no one coach is for every person, not one person may use the same coach at all times. You may have different needs at different times that call for different types of support.

For example, if you’re a complex trauma survivor, you might need to heal with a gentle person who’s trauma informed before you aggressively tackle life goals with someone who is more direct and in your face. There are many other scenarios you can think through like this one. Another might be that you rebel with structure, even though you want it, so you’d do better with a more laid back, flexible coach than someone who is really rigid.

I encourage you to think through your specific situation and what works for you and what doesn’t in that way.

Whatever the case may be, it’s up to you to decide how to proceed and with whom. The coach should also discern if they should proceed with you too, and if they’re great at what they do, you can expect they’ll do this.

Ways to Do Your Research

To reiterate, be sure to do your research when choosing a coach. That means take the discovery calls and free consultations and don’t be afraid to ask the questions you need to ask in order to know what you need to know to make your choice.

Not only do you need to know what resonates with you, how you learn best, and what you need from a coach, you might also want to look at does this person have the personality and strengths to hold space for that?

If the discovery call or free consultation feels more like a sales pitch than getting to know one another and asking and answering the right questions, the coach may be more about getting the sale than finding the right fit. All coaches need sales, because we all need money in our society to sustain our lives, but I personally would want the focus to be on the right sale.

In addition to gauging the discovery call or free consultation, you can also browse individual coach websites and reviews as part of your research.

Look at the coach’s socials, if they have them too. Not having a presence on social media doesn’t mean the coach is bad, it’s just another way to gather information. A coach who is clear on who they serve will come through in their online materials, and should let you know right away if they’re even close to what you’re looking for.

Optionally, you can also check life coaching directories such as Noomii or the ICF Credentialed Coach Finder, for example. It’s usually free to use a directory, just like it used to be free to use a phone book (am I dating myself?).

Like I said earlier, which bears repeating: a great fit turns out best for you AND the coach in the long run. So, let’s dive even deeper.

Knowing What the Coach Specializes In

An easy way to narrow down your search for a coach is knowing what specialty area you want support in and then not looking at any coaches who don’t specialize in that area.

For example, if you want help with your business, you wouldn’t see a trauma-informed coach specializing in trauma recovery, like me. You’d want to search for business coaches. If you're a writer opening up your own shop, you might even want someone who coaches only writers on business. Either way would likely yield you good results.

If you want help with healing your trauma, you would likely not get very far with a general life coach who focuses on life without trauma.

If you want help with your career, you could likely do well with a career coach but also a life coach.

If you want help getting hot and steamy in your sex life, you could also do well with a life coach, but there are coaches who specialize in relationships and sex too.

The same way life coaching is the top of the umbrella and then there are even more levels you can drill down into, a trauma-informed coach is the top of the umbrella for trauma healing (in the coaching world, that is), but there are coaches out there who drill down even further and specialize in grieving, for example. And then even further, not just grieving of any kind, but there are coaches who focus solely on widows who are grieving.

The further down you drill, the fewer coaches you’re likely to find in that area. You can find help anywhere within your umbrella of interest, however. Just don’t go to a completely unrelated umbrella, because that won’t get you far in your goals.

Knowing How Coaching Industry Standards Impact Your Search

Now that we’ve covered the coaches motivations for getting to know you and specialization, it’s also good to consider the schools of thought around coaching that a coach adheres too.

In other words, where and how did the coach get to be a coach, and how does this impact how they show up as a coach? What do they believe their job is? What do they value and what ethics do they adhere to? Is there any consistency between one coach and the next when it comes to values and ethics?

That all depends on their school of thought. And a coach’s school of thought is typically highly influenced by the training they’ve had and the foundation of where they started or came from combined with any real world experience filtered through their own experiences. But let’s back up for a minute…

At this point in the young industry’s growth, it’s possible for anyone to say they’re a coach. This results in wildly different coaching styles and ideas about what it means to be a coach.

There are many schools of thought on how to be a good coach and what that entails. People arrive at being a “coach” in many different ways as well. This all influences how a coaching session might go with any particular coach.

While you’ll see some similarities between different coaches, depending on how much coaching you’ve experienced, you might find that some coaches approach you completely differently.

Some coaches will focus on your personal journey and asking questions to evoke self awareness, learning, and growth.

Other coaches are experts in a certain discipline, like say, marketing, and they teach that discipline, then offer “coaching” sessions to mentor you or give you advice about how to improve your own marketing, for example. This could be true for any number of disciplines, including healing, creativity, health, intuition, empowerment, you name it.

All types of coaches in that regard are valid in their own way. I truly believe there’s a time and place for everything, and the role one coach plays for someone could change and improve their lives while it might not work for someone else, depending on what they need in that moment.

Does that mean some coaches can’t do harm? No, there’s plenty of that going around on the internet too.

Some trainings coaches have been through are better than others, and some people who call themselves coaches haven’t been through coach training at all — they just have something to teach you.

So, to learn more about a coach’s school of thought, you can dig into their education and credentials. One major player with a good reputation in coaching education and industry standardization is the International Coaching Federation. But coaching credentials come from many other places too.

The International Coaching Federation Green Light

The certification program I completed is by Moving the Human Spirit. They were the first coaching organization with a program on trauma-informed coaching to become accredited by the International Coaching Federation.

Why is this important?

When there’s not a lot of standardization (read: consistency) in an industry, it’s hard to know what to expect. For trauma survivors, consistency can equal safety and trust, which is important for the coaching relationship to work.

Any global standardization of ethical practices in the coaching industry that exist up to this point are set by the International Coaching Federation. It’s described as “the gold standard” in coaching.

Knowing that your coach has training from (and/or credentials from) the ICF or an ICF accredited program is one way to know your coach is legit. It’s not completely foolproof, of course, and it’s not the only way — there can be some people who don’t do what they’re supposed to do, as with any profession. And, there are plenty of legitimate coaches without ICF training or credentials too. However, the ICF is a huge green light.

That’s because seeing ICF training or credentials can clue you into certain things you can expect of your coach as they are required to adhere to a standard set of core competencies and ethics, which guide the nature of the coaching relationship with the client.

Full transparency: An ICF trained coach who isn’t credentialed through the ICF or an ICF member doesn’t have to be as strict about the core competencies and code of ethics.

A coach who is credentialed through the ICF has to prove they’re following the core competencies and ethics regularly to keep their credentials. It’s a rigorous process.

ICF trained coaches could be working toward a credential and in the meantime become an ICF member to still receive additional training and resources from the professional organization. As a member, coaches still have to abide by the code of ethics.

So, not all ICF trained coaches or ICF member coaches carry the ICF credentials.

This could be for several reasons, such as:

They decided they want to implement some of the ICF values but not all. For example, perhaps a coach wants to consult as part of their coaching without having to differentiate so clearly between the two.
They intend to get an ICF credential, but they’re in the process of gaining enough experience hours to get the credential. This can take a long time depending on what level the coach is aiming for and how long they’ve been coaching.
They have more training from another school or university and prefer to adhere to the standards set by that organization (some are more legitimate than others).

Regardless, an ICF affiliation (whether a credential or a membership) means there’s an enforceable ethical code. You can see it here.

Navigating Coaching Credentials

So, this leaves us with coaches with all kinds of different letters after their name that represent what they’ve been certified in or the type of coach they are.

Coaches have a vast variety of backgrounds coming into the profession. Some go to universities and get degrees in coaching while others, like me, go through rigorous certification programs run by other reputable coaches and professional coach mentors after having gotten degrees in other disciplines. There are likely other paths I haven’t mentioned here as well.

You will find great coaches who took either path.

The thing to know about credentials is that more doesn’t always equal better, but more does usually indicate someone who values learning. It does take time and effort to get credentials, no matter where they’re from.

Someone with a lot of credentials but no coaching experience could be out there as a coach just as well as someone with hardly any credentials but a lot of experience.

Is a more experienced coach better than a newer coach? Not necessarily. Sometimes it can be harder to get into more established coaches because they’re amazing and more in demand. And someone with less experience could be more accessible to you and still be just as good.

As with most of what I’ll say about choosing throughout this article, it really comes down to what you’re looking for.

However, some credentials are better than others, as in all cases, right? There are so many different types of credentials for coaches, it would take all day to go into each one, so my best advice around that is to look into what the credential stands for and the reputation of the credentialing agency behind your coach’s credentials. Is that place legit? Are they accredited in any way? What are the values and ethics they promote?

And, as we noted earlier, some people call themselves coaches without any credentials at all. Is that even okay?

I’ll just say that if someone is calling themself a coach without any coaching credentials, it’s likely because they’re teaching or mentoring in a discipline they perhaps are credentialed in.

This does’t mean they’re bad or not legit, but it does mean they might not technically be coaching. They could be more focused on training and leading. This is, of course, a generalization, so just be aware to ask about that if the coach you’re looking into isn’t credentialed as an actual coach, but has more expertise in a specific discipline, like marketing or health, for example.

As with all generalizations, that’s not to say that someone who specializes in a discipline is not credentialed as a coach too. This is just something to be aware of when you’re researching which coaches are a good fit for you and what you’re comfortable with.

You can ask your coach about their credentials and experience. The best way to decide if they’re legit is to check on a case-by-case basis.

Determining the Coaching Style that Works for You

Coaching styles are as vast as personality types, and I’d say that personality type influences coaching style immensely. For example, I prefer to not interrupt you if I don’t have to and like to maintain a gentle, methodical, and slower-paced presence when possible to help with co-regulation of the nervous system.

But, I’ve been to other coaches who like to be direct, interrupt more often, and combine teaching with coaching, for example.

Some coaches are willing to tell you how to do certain things while others want you to identify that for yourself. Some will do a combination of telling you about their experience and then encouraging you to explore yours to find a solution.

What would you prefer?

In addition to what you prefer, it’s also best that you know what personality types you gel with and which ones trigger you. Then, you can watch videos of the coach to gauge their personality and style, if they post videos, and also take their discovery call (also known as a free consultation) to see how they interact with you.

Were any of your buttons pushed? Did you feel triggered? Do you think you’ll get along with the coach because they remind you of a friend or family member who acts that way, but deep down you don’t feel comfortable? Don’t ignore that feeling. It's there for a reason. And even if it takes longer to find the coaching style that works for you, patience is your friend in this phase of your self reflection and research.

Taking the time to find the right style means you will still like your coach, even when he, she, or they must challenge you. And challenge you they will.

Determining the Coaching Approach that Works for You

Where style is more related to personality, a coach's approach to doing his or her or their job is largely based on education, credentials, and then working preferences.

For example:

You can find a variety of preferences around whether or not the coach or the client should take notes during the session.
Some coaches may prefer to actively hold you accountable while other coaches encourage you to build that accountability through your personal support system.
Some coaches love to focus on one-on-one coaching while others prefer to focus on group programs or even teaching and mentorship, which is technically different from coaching, as I mentioned in more depth above. Some coaches prefer to do a combination of all these activities.
Some coaches focus on putting all clients through one program while others tailor programs to each client.
Some coaches give homework assignments while others let you decide the action steps you want to take based on what you’ve discovered in session.

All coaches bring their own biases, life experience, preferences, and even wounds to the table. A good coach has examined himself, herself, or themself enough to know what those are and can set them aside to be inclusive, welcoming, and non-judgmental for clients.

However, as everyone is human, sometimes it can be impossible for even the best of coaches to not filter life through their own perspective at times.

The thing that separates a good coach from a great one is their ability to recognize when they do that and then self correct to stay open and available to your lived experience and how you experience life.

If you feel seen, heard, trust your coach, and are making healthy progress, then the coaching relationship works.

The Importance of Knowing Yourself

The one thing all ingredients to finding the right coach for you have in common is that you must know yourself and how you best thrive and work. You have to be confident in what personalities you work well with and which styles and approaches promote your peace, harmony, and success in a working relationship. At times, this type of self knowledge can be hard to come by, and it would just be easier if a coach could help you get there.

And perhaps you will sign on with a coach who helps you get there, and then you realize you need something else. As one of my favorite teachers always says, “It all belongs.”

Maybe that had to happen as part of your journey so you could learn the lesson you needed to learn and know yourself in a way you might not have otherwise.

But the better you know what you’re looking for in a coach, the better fit your coach will be.

You’ll find the right one. Keep looking until you do!