Transitioning from a Corporate Career to Becoming a Life Coach

If you’re (just barely) surviving corporate life, you might be looking around at other career options—ones that won’t give you the stomach flip over an after-hours email or the Sunday Scaries as you brace yourself for another week of Slack notifications and trying to find a file in Microsoft Outlook while it unhelpfully pulls up every single email you’ve ever sent that contains the word ‘the.’

Coaching isn’t for everyone—it’s important to explore whether becoming a coach is right for you—but if you’ve always been drawn to personal growth, have an interest in becoming a therapist but don’t want to work with psychopathology, and like the idea of a flexible career that you can grow quietly without blowing up your entire life, you might be considering coaching.

Transitioning from Corporate Work to Life Coaching

At CLCC, we recommend a slow and sustainable process for transitioning from a corporate career to life coaching. That might sound like “common sense,” but we are aware that some coach training programs tell their coaches in training that it’s a sign you “don’t fully believe in yourself” if you do anything other than quit your job tomorrow and go all-in on coaching.

While going all in is a fantastic level of enthusiasm, it can also bring financial stress, and we want something different for your experience of being a coach. We like to use the image of a plane taking off—for a plan to take off, it needs both speed as well as a long enough runway. The speed variable is the effort you put into building and scaling your business, and the length of the runway is time. When you align those two, you’ll “take off.”

We want you to build a sustainable path to this transition, so that it’s not as jarring for your nervous system or your bank account.

Here’s what you need to know about creating the transition successfully.