Becoming a Life Coach

Tom Chiarella

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781501197680
• eBook ISBN: 9781501197703
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

A fascinating guide to a career as a life coach written by award-winning journalist Tom Chiarella and based on the real-life experiences of an expert in the field—essential reading for someone considering a path to this rewarding profession. Being a life coach is a unique career with the ability to change lives. Becoming a Life Coach takes us behind-the-scenes through the experiences of two top-tier life coaches who spend their days working one-on-one with clients to create new paths forward. The result is an entertaining, practical look at how one gets into and grows within this rewarding career.

1

---

NOT A THERAPIST

Pervis Taylor, 33

Brooklyn, NY

It’s 9:00 a.m. and along the streets of Brooklyn, Pervis Taylor carries his work in his front pocket. He’s a life coach after all. His cell phone is his best tool. The majority of his sessions take place on it, or on his laptop. He’s a bright young guy, thirty-eight years old, African American, with a loosely-cropped haircut, featuring a patch of bright white hair on the right side of his head.

Pervis, born in Texas, lives in Brooklyn and has been a life coach for six years. According to his website, he specializes in work with “young professionals and youth of all ages.” He deals with issues of masculinity and trauma, and has lately been creating a program to give young men of color a way to speak out about pain in their lives. A writer (he has three books available on his website), he’s gentle in his demeanor but tough in his examination of his clients’ problems.

Why start with Pervis Taylor? Well, he’s young. So you might question his wisdom and experience. But at the same time, he’s firmly established in his career, having made his living entirely from coaching for years now. Book royalties, presentations, appearance fees, one-on-one coaching sessions—all these have lent his career a look and a feeling of legitimacy. He has made as much as $90,000 in a given year and as little as $35,000 (slightly less when he was starting out). He connects to young people easily and readily. He has clients in the movie business. He has celebrity clients. He has written books, developed videos of his work. He is broadly qualified, with a master’s degree in clinical psychology from Columbia University, yet he has veered away from the practice of psychology because he finds life coaching more liberating.

He is unafraid of stating his feelings about religion, frequently citing his background as a Christian minister, but he actively counsels many clients who claim no religious affiliation. In those cases, he does not seek converts. His job won’t allow that. As a life coach, he says, his role is to draw the best decisions from the clients.

It’s no surprise when he answers my call from the streets of the city. It’s morning, and the background is a ruckus. Cacophonous. For a moment, it sounds like a piece of heavy machinery is toppling from a rooftop onto the pavement.

He’s promised to outline a day in his life as life coach, and starts in fast: “On Mondays, typically I wake up and pray, and then I go into the gym. I’m out of the gym by nine thirty. I send out some social media with my #BEGREAT hashtag. I never miss a day.”

He updates Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook every morning. He has people who count on him there. And he’s proud of his carefully constructed messages. He takes time every day to reflect on upcoming sessions with clients, for which he keeps a log and notes toward questions he might ask. He’s been constructing a daylong presentation with another life coach, which he’s hoping to implement as a long-term, extracurricular component with some outer-borough high schools. Then there is the outreach to potential clients. “It’s like any job. I’m not doing it well if I’m not dealing with every facet of the work,” he says. “Life coaching is much more than phoning a friend. I like giving my clients the time they need, but I need to be prepared for every call. I want to give them work to do, pose questions for them. Give them thoughts to rely on.”

Social media has certain principles of success, behaviors that lead to an expanding clientele. Including the frequency and timeliness of posting. Every day Pervis crafts an inspirational thought, hashtags it with his proprietary phrase (#BEGREAT!), and posts as close as possible to the same time as the day before.

His Facebook page is cross-promotional, one part life coach, one part youth minister. His Instagrams are casually illustrative, but accurate—where he is, who he’s with, and what excites him today. In his group meetings, he uses video to give voice to the young men of color he’s meeting in his early group presentations. He sometimes transports these moments to the social media channels as inspiration to newbie client, casual viewer, and avid follower alike. Every expression on social media is a representation of his trust in the process. He further documents his various appearances, on radio and speaking engagements. He ends many of his entries with his simple assertion #BEGREAT, often enough so that it easily becomes a kind of slogan. All this before ten o’clock, with a few jabs at his phone.

His Facebook entries often tell stories about the work he’s undertaking as a life coach. They are both expository and inspirational. One entry reads:

The director of the CUNY Black Male Initiative invited us to present for all the CUNY schools. I asked him curiously as to why we got the invite. He said, “Pervis, we get tons of proposals from many organizations. However, never have we been approached by two men of color teaching other men of color how to be whole.” These things are a reminder to always choose purpose over popularity. Be Great!

Pretty sweet morning, his work executed solely by using his phone, while crouching over a cup of expensive coffee. Most independent life coaches have a measure of this kind of control over their days. Oddly, the life coaches consulted for this book rarely wanted to share information about their living circumstances, their hometown, even their favorite restaurants. They preferred the anonymity allowed by distance, the control that an agreed-upon time and date for client meetings over the phone offers them.

After the updates, Pervis is quite clear that the work does not stop. The whirlwind of self-motivation keeps him moving. “For the rest of the morning, I’m either prepping for client calls,” he says, “or developing the Black Male Initiative that my partner and I are trying to get going at a local college. Right?”

What’s involved during the late morning hours, that time that Pervis—he wants to be referred to as just Pervis—calls “prepping”? Lesson plans, curriculum review, rehearsing? “Reading mostly,” Pervis says. “I’m trying to stimulate my thoughts, before I get to the clients and stir up theirs.” He is moved by the same material that tends to affect his clients. He acknowledges this is a pattern that comes from his training as a Christian, where he used the Bible as inspiration, and he brought gospel with him to his learning. But he’s broadened his reading somewhat recently. This morning he’s reading The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, a classic of personal-growth literature, and How People Grow, by Henry Cloud and John Townsend, a book on the connection between personal growth and Scripture. Those, followed by the Bible.

Yes, life coaches plan. They prep. But life coaching—one-on-one sessions with a trained individual, a person devoted to helping you improve your life—is also highly improvisational. It demands a flexible approach, which allows for changes from week to week, if not on the fly. “You have to be pretty fluid,” Pervis says. “That’s why it helps to read a lot. It’s more busy than it probably seems. Some days, pitching for a program presentation feels like the most important component of the job. Other times, I can’t wait to get past that, to my sessions with the clients.”

A signed contract for ongoing group work can represent an essential part of building a career as a life coach. The importance of the programs that Pervis creates lies in the fact that they include more people, a wider audience, and so, when planned right, the sessions can be more easily duplicated, increasing volume of potential clients. A life coach must be a businessperson first. They must ensure their own financial survival, without throttling their audience with matters of cost. A good presentation brings on more clients, more work. Pervis is happy to work that end of the job, since it gets his message to young men who need the help. “We have a contract with the city universities of New York with our Black Male Initiative program, which we’re calling Alchemic Solutions, where we are coaching young men of color in emotional intelligence.”

“Emotional intelligence” sounds a little buzzwordy, doesn’t it?

Pervis laughs. “We’re teaching them how to develop an emotional lexicon and how to process their emotions. They need to express their hurt.”

In connecting with clients, Pervis is part healer. Pitching classes afterward to school administrators, he’s part hustler. Working with his partner, fellow life coach Jeffrey Ulysse, also in his early thirties, on the program to empower young men of color, using feedback from public-school teachers, he’s a fully integrated professional. It’s a broad dynamic of work—inspirational, emotional, pedagogical. He needs to do well by his various programs every day. They are his bread and butter.

His writing is another way of delivering his message to clients. His new book provides an income stream as well as forming the basis of the program he’s building for young men of color. He self-published the book, which to his mind makes him more of an entrepreneur, not less. Most life coaches seem to claim “best-selling” as an adjective of choice for their books, when listed on their own web page. Pervis uses the term “internationally sold” on his books, which is a bit confounding. He’s got a new one, with a pretty cool title.

“It’s called Surthrival Mode,” he says. “A book that teaches men how to deal with their emotional traumas by processing them.” A car horn blares on the street behind him. “The book does the work I try to do as a coach and teacher, by navigating through barriers and enabling the client to show up in life and within their relationships.”

It sounds a little like he’s reading copy off the back cover of his own book just then. And the blurb doesn’t tell much. I repeat the title—or at least what I took it to be over the low din of traffic. Survival Mode.

“No, no,” he says. “I bridged ‘thriving’ and ‘survival’ together. I made a new word. Surthrival.” He pauses there. Lets it sink in. “Surthrival Mode. Yeah. Just a sec,” he says to me. We’re on the phone. He’s walking, carrying his phone at his side. The street is all clatter and banging. I can hear him greet someone, excuse himself, at some doorway. He’s arrived at a coffee shop. He quiets himself when he sits. It’s nice to feel him settle.

“Pervis,” I say, “please tell me that you don’t walk around the city like this while you do your sessions.” He’s young; it seems possible. This sort of urban traipsing around might be a kind of “surthrival” mode in itself. “Tom”—he laughs—“of course not. I have to be very focused for my sessions with clients. I owe them that much.”

---

EVERY LIFE COACH HAS a different habit when it comes to their clients. Some carry long lists of active clients to whom they speak at regular intervals. Once a week is typical. Once a month appears to be the outer edge of what’s acceptable. Most calls are scheduled, often in big chunks of time in the evening or afternoon. It’s not unusual for a life coach on the East Coast, like Pervis, to have clients in western time zones, making it easier to place calls late at night.

Availability is an absolute, but training clients to trust the schedule is essential too. “When you have six people who need to speak with you, you can’t have them calling anytime they want to,” Pervis says. It is a matter of maintaining focus and purpose in your communication. “Random calls can take things over, and pretty soon you aren’t coaching anymore,” he says. “You’re just answering the phone.”

To combat that possibility, Pervis doesn’t cling to an hour-long format. He reserves several hours a week for his sessions. Like most of the other life coaches I spoke to, he purposely calls these meetings “sessions,” and allows them to range from forty-five minutes to more than two hours. Same price either way. “I like to use the end of the day or early evening for my sessions,” he says. “I don’t ever stack them all up on one night.” He currently carries a load of five to six clients, and calls this typical. “There’s a natural limit,” he says. “You can’t just treat it as a matter of volume,” he says.

Five to six clients, each averaging a session a week; most clients are spoken to in the afternoon or evening. I have to ask him what he charges. It’s always a difficult question, asking someone what they make. I expect some throat clearing, a little hemming and hawing. “What do you charge?” I blurt.

Pervis doesn’t hesitate. He knows people are curious, that life coaches are still sometimes regarded as charlatans and confidence men. “I charge $350 a session,” he says. He makes no apology. He and his partner are charging $1,800 for the group work in the city schools; if they can develop it into something regular, on contract, he knows this too could be a good income stream.

“I’m worth it, Tom,” he says confidently.

At one point, I ask Pervis the same question I ask of all the coaches . . . I want to ask about giving advice. Pervis is savvy, quick-witted, and experienced at defining life coaching for others. I expect he might acknowledge that leading clients to form their own answers seems like it might be construed as a form of giving advice. I half expect he’ll have a direct answer to my question: How do you know the best advice to give a client?

But in response, Pervis just makes a sound like “Nah.” He’s silent for a while. “I don’t give advice.”

“Never?”

“Rarely,” he says, leaning back in his chair now. “I’m not there to provide answers for my clients.”

Don’t they want advice? Don’t they ask?

“They learn not to,” he says. “No life coach gives advice. I think the thing most coaches believe is that you have the best answer within you.”

He pauses, then sips a drink. “I mean obviously I have thoughts and opinions of my own. I could give advice. Yeah. But ultimately a client is more empowered when they come up with an action or a resolution themselves. That’s what coaching is about, unearthing the greatness and the power within.”

“Within what?”

“The client,” he replies.

Where did he learn that? The not-giving-advice thing. Do life coaches know this instinctively?

He thinks for a moment. “I’m a minister too,” he says. “In that role, I might give advice based on Scripture, sure. But that’s a different muscle. Coaching is a whole different matter. The answers aren’t there when you sit down. I need to stir up the mind to find the answer.”

Where did he learn this? Pervis didn’t go to a program in life coaching, and doesn’t mention any specific training on his website. He answers, brave and bright. He’s as earnest as an apple. “I have a degree in business administration, and I’m finishing my master’s in psychology from Columbia,” he says. “And I read a lot. I start and end every session with a question for the client. I might draw that question from any of these backgrounds. Life coaching isn’t very old. The field is still developing. I’ve had life coaches myself. I asked constantly about the way they worked.”

He goes on to note that life coaching is not an exact science, in the same way psychology is not an exact science, the same way therapy is not an exact science. “We’re a diverse group, offering diverse perspectives and experiences. I think all coaches would agree that being a life coach is about coming to a place where your client is empowered. That is not therapy. I’m not a therapist. Because I’m not treating anyone.”

Pervis thinks for a bit. “The thing about giving advice is: People are not monolithic. Situations are not monolithic. There are so many variables involved that to give a broad, homogenized piece of advice is a little dangerous. Life coaches work to know their clients best. You have to aim to make the client into your expertise. Better to help them develop the tools to figure it out themselves.”

Pervis te...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1. Not a Therapist
• 2. Not a Mentor
• 3. Not a Teacher
• 4. Not a Friend
• 5. Not a Psychologist
• 6. Just a Life Coach. Maybe.
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright