Leadership and Management
Final Project
Leading as a Life Coach
Overview
Not Your Average Life Coach is a life coaching business I created as part of my postgraduate studies.Â
I would love to be able to say that I always had a grand vision to spin-off a life coaching business from my Leadership and Management studies… but that was not the case at all.
All the pieces I needed to build my own life coaching side hustle were already cultivated by my life experiences and the knowledge I gained from my MTA Portfolio.
The really amazing thing is how all those pieces came together, with very little interference from me.
When it came time to think up a final project for my Leadership and Management concentration, Not Your Average Life Coach was already sitting there as the perfect candidate.
Being a life coach has required me to be both a leader and manager; it has developed my confidence, sharpened my emotional intelligence and exercised my abilities as an entrepreneur.
Collected on this final project page are six key components that explore the thinking behind my side hustle and all the lessons I have learned from being a life coach.Â
“A life coach is a type of wellness professional who helps people make progress in their lives in order to attain greater fulfillment. Life coaches aid their clients in improving their relationships, careers, and day-to-day lives.“
Cathy Wong, VeryWellMind.com
Goals
This project must…
- Be a practical synthesis of what I learned in my Leadership and Management concentration.
- Explore how my self-coaching experience, creative thinking and understanding of leadership and management has cultivated my ability to successfully coach others.
- Demonstrate how my understanding of business and marketing have allowed me to start and run my own side hustle.
- Further develop my web design skills in the building of a website for my coaching services.
- Provide reflection on what positive and negative lessons I have learned from the experience of being a life coach.
Components
Timeline
2017 – Started coaching for free to complete the assignments for a selection of my Leadership and Management courses.
2017-2019 – Continued to coach on the side and to charge for my services.
2018-2019 – Conceived of the ‘Not Your Average Life Coach’ branding and the design of the website. Also decided to use my life coaching side hustle as my Leadership and Management final project.
2020 – Stopped coaching so that I could focus on my web development projects, which included my life coaching website.
2021 – Started coaching again with my new website. Eventually compiled together this final project compendium and decided to move on from life coaching.
2024 – Added in my reflection on how being manager strengthened my practice as a life coach and vice versa. Then signed off on this project.
Blog Posts
Wrap-Up
The conception of this final project encouraged me to go back and rethink the overall design of the learning component of my Leadership and Management concentration.
There was a bit of a tug of war between the learning modules of the Leadership and Management concentration and the compilation of this final project.
The original version of my Leadership and Management concentration was called Positive Change Leadership
When I realised I was going to use my life coaching as my final project, I realised I had a prime opportunity to become much more widely acquainted with the science of coaching and personal development.
So I changed some of the modules and studied a few more courses as part of my Leadership and Management concentration.
This rethinking worked out very well because I was able to actively practice and refine all my new learning while I was coaching on the side.
Learning as a Life Coach took everything I learned in my Leadership and Management concentration and provided me with a sandbox in which I have honed my skills as a leader and a manager.
My life coaching side hustle has given me 4 years’ experience of being a life coach, being a web developer and building my own business.
I have come to better understand myself and now possess a razor-sharp focus of my career direction moving forwards.
In conclusion and after much consideration, I now know that I want to bring my side hustle to a close and move on from being a life coach.