Sent to you by dai of all via Google Reader:
Obviously I also suggest reading my insightful post How To Become a Life Coach for more in-depth information, but other than that, I'm struggling.
After another e-mail this week I started to wonder whether it would be worthwhile to join an affiliate scheme with a training company that I trusted and knew could offer a brilliant introduction to Life Coaching.
With that in mind I started trawling Google to see which training companies I could talk to and get a feel for. There was one in particular calling itself The Coach Training Alliance which seemed to be popping up all over the place with pay per click, so I decided to check out their site. (I really don't want to send them traffic by linking, but if you want to take a look you'll find them easily enough).
What a thoroughly depressing experience that was.
This site had it all. Annoying voice overs, silly life coaching quizzes designed to tell everybody they'll be great for coaching (and I know this because I took it and gave dumb answers and was still told I'd be suitable to become a Life Coach), awful advice to potential affiliates (including saying that making money from affiliate marketing was easy!) and long letter sales pages full of hype.
I think I would have immediately backed out and headed elsewhere if I hadn't been stunned by this comment on the landing page.
"Life Coaching has been named one of the top home businesses of the century. You can enjoy the financial rewards and personal fulfillment of owning your own business while making the world a better place."
I have no idea who declared Life Coaching one of the top home businesses of the century because there is no attribution. However, I do think it would be wise to hold fire on that opinion for another 70 or 80 years to see what else pops up.
Unless that is, it was meant to mean the last century, in which case it's completely unsubstantiated bollocks. Life Coaching as it is now wasn't even available for most of the last century and the explosion to some extent has grown on the back of the advances in cheap telecommunications.
Either way, it doesn't look good for the person who wrote it. Unless that is, the point was to mislead people into thinking they'd stumbled on the promised land. And that once they'd handed over the money for their training services they'd have gold-plated clients beating a path to their door and waving blank checks in their face.
I suppose theoretically there could be many reasons for wanting to become a Life Coach, but to my mind the most important by some margin, is having a strong desire to help people.
It's not making money, not having a lovely home business and amazingly enough, it's not even a desire to make the world a better place.
For a Life Coach Training company to be encouraging people to be a Life Coach to enjoy financial rewards and because it's a great home business, is just ludicrous and counter-productive for an industry in its infancy that's struggling to gain main stream credibility.
I once read a stat suggesting 90% of Coaches make less than $20k per annum in the US. Now even if that is a tad low and the real figure is, let's say $30k, it's still not likely to seduce anybody into believing being a Life Coach is a short cut to owning a small Caribbean Island.
The reason for this post is not just to slam the company in question, although they deserve slamming in my not-so-humble opinion, but to ask a much deeper question.
If you can have what makes you happy in the first place (a job you love goes along way toward that) then money above and beyond your basic needs becomes much less of an issue.
So the question is this.
Should the potential financial rewards be a consideration when choosing what you want to do as a career? And when I say a consideration, I mean ANY consideration whatsoever.
Should it even enter the debate?
You don't have to be combination of Hercule Poirot and Scooby Doo to know what my answer to that question is, but I'm more interested in your take.
By the way I published a post on the How To Be Rich and Happy blog (What would you give up for fame and fortune?) confessing to watching American Idol. Feel free to mock me, I probably deserve it.
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