Ange, one of the friends (of Deidre) that joined us for yum cha today, found out that I had started down the life coaching path, and she got very interested. To cut a long story short, I'm going to be her life coach as well.
This is excellent! Two people, within 3 days, want me to be their life coach!
I might have to start charging soon….
But seriously, charging will only happen when I believe I'm worth it. Right now I have no life coaching qualifications or experience, and so I don't feel qualified to charge for my services.
Interestingly, I've always started a new career choice by actually getting in there and just doing it, always for free, volunteering, building my skills and experience. Without actually studying for qualifications, I end up gaining experiene and employment in the career of my choice. This has been a pattern for me.
1989: I volunteered on weekends as assistant cameraman at Channel 7 News, one of the 3 major news stations in Adelaide. Within 6 months I was being paid as a freelance cameraman, on call at random times. Being a TV news cameraman was a childhood dream, unfortunately shattered when my back gave out and I was unable to carry the cameras any more. While my career was cut short, I was getting somewhere in a qualification-driven industry, by having experience instead of qualifications.
1996: taught myself web design
1997: got my first paid commercial client, at $200 per page
1998: was headhunted by an ISP as their web designer, moved into tech support and then management
2005: I'm still in IT today, still without any qualifications whatsoever.
My IT career is very similar to my cameraman career, where my experience has taken me where other people need qualifications to go.
For a while now, I've known that I've wanted to be a life coach. I tried looking for a course to do a year or two ago, but wasn't able to find anything in NZ. The closest were expensive courses in Australia, which I decided could wait until I ended up back there. Now that I'm actually moving into life coaching, I'm going to start seeing what courses I might be able to do.
UPDATE: there's still nothing available in New Zealand, and while there's other counselling / psychology related courses, they're all many thousands of dollars worth… I think I'll continue to work on approaching this from an experiential point of view, rather than from a study and qualifications point of view.
Honestly, I've been studying and applying these skills to myself and my life for so long now, it's second nature for me to have relevent experience for people. The only issue I've found, which prevents me from being so full-on with it, is that people want to be able to ask for help themselves, rather than having any help shoved down their throats. So for a lot of years now, I've just been sitting back waiting for people to ask. But really, why are they going to ask for help if they don't know I can help them? I think it's changing now, and I'm stoked!
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