Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

“I haven’t experienced enough in life to become a life coach.”
“I’m still working on my own life. Who am I to coach others on theirs?”
“I’ve made every mistake in the book. Who is really going to listen to me?”

The three statements you’ve just read are symptoms of a common disease currently plaguing thousands of perfectly capable coaches, and worse yet, potential coaches who just don’t have the confidence to pursue this career.

The disease is called Imposter Syndrome, and if you’re like me, you’ve probably battled it once or twice in your own life, too. While curable, its effects have been known to stop would-be coaches dead in their tracks before they’ve even begun their careers.

Before diving into the origins of imposter syndrome and strategies for combating it, let me start off by repeating this mantra:

Yes, you have what it takes to become a life coach.

No matter what struggles you’ve faced or challenges you’ve had (and are still having!), there is nothing stopping you from becoming an effective coach, confidant, and catalyst for change in a person’s life.

In fact, I would argue that it’s those exact experiences in your life that make you uniquely qualified to coach someone else fighting that same fight.

What is Imposter Syndrome?

The concept of high-functioning individuals feeling like a fraud or unworthy of their status or title was first coined as the “imposter phenomenon” in a paper by Dr. Pauline Clance and Dr. Suzanne Imes in 1978. The paper defines this experience of unworthiness as follows:

An internal experience of intellectual phonies, which appears to be particularly prevalent and intense among a select sample of high achieving women.

It probably won’t surprise you that the authors found imposter syndrome to be much more common among women than men, although today we know that all individuals–regardless of sex, gender, or any other identifying label–can fall victim to feeling less-than or unqualified despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary.

In my own conversations with coaches of all different types, I’ve found that the feeling of unworthiness is at its apex at the very outset of a coach’s career. I’m talking about the in-between period after a coach has completed their certification but before they’ve had very many clients (if any at all). Intuitively, this makes sense. It’s hard to feel like an imposter if you’re not purporting to be anything quite yet. On the other end of the spectrum, it’s also difficult to feel like a fraud if you have 10 years and hundreds of satisfied coaching clients under your belt. You can physically see the positive impact of your work every single day.

But it’s that awkward phase in the middle that does it for most coaches. You have your certificate. You’ve got the letters after your name. You might even have your own website with the words “Certified Life Coach” emblazoned at the top in big, bold letters.

And yet, in your office it’s eerily quiet.

The phone isn’t ringing, your inbox is dry, and you’re not really doing much of anything. And so it begins: the sting of feeling like a fraud hits you square in the jaw. To make matters worse, you have all the time in the world to ruminate and find confirmation of your own negative biases.

The Missing Piece

OK, so at this point you’re probably saying “Get out there and get some clients, and the imposter syndrome is fixed!”

You could be right, but in my opinion, this isn’t the most elegant solution.

Basing your sense of self worth around what other people think of you is what caused the feelings of self-doubt in the first place.

Going out and collecting clients left and right just to prove to yourself that you’re worthy is succumbing to the same underlying issue, but on the opposite extreme. The missing piece isn’t getting more and more approval from the outside world.

The cure to feelings of imposter syndrome is knowing that you are enough.

Your Story Is the Solution

Unless you’ve lived under a rock your entire life and have no life experiences to draw from, your unique story has laid the foundation for you to become an effective coach. The key to this whole exercise is to understand precisely what kind of coach your life has prepared you to become.

Let’s look back on some of the statements I shared with you at the beginning. We’ll start with the first one:

“I haven’t experienced enough in life to become a life coach.”

This one is exceedingly common and, like most feelings, is probably rooted in some truth. Someone who claims they haven’t experienced enough in life is likely someone who is young, relatively new to the workforce, and just wants to help others but doesn’t have the broad range of experience to relate to a wide array of clients.

If all or some of these sounds a lot like you, what I can tell you is that you in fact have experienced enough to become a life coach, but you have some inner work to do to determine exactly what kind of coach you’ll be best at.

When someone says, “I haven’t experienced enough,” my immediate, visceral response is “Enough for whom?” If you’re a twenty-something fresh out of college looking to coach post-retirement seniors, then yes, you’re probably going to run into some experience-related issues down the line. If you’re a lifelong corporate employee looking to coach entrepreneurs who are trying to get their startup off the ground, there is going to be a knowledge gap there that will make effective coaching nearly impossible.

Nine times out of ten, though, people want to coach others who are more like them. Here’s a good rule of thumb: when in doubt, your ideal coaching client is basically you, five years ago.

Identifying Your Pain Points

If you spent 15 soul-sucking years in the corporate world and by the end of it felt a burning desire to go into business for yourself as a coach, a perfect niche for you would be helping others as a life transition coach. You know exactly what it takes to make the leap, and others who feel stuck in their jobs would pay a lot of money to hear your first-hand perspective.

If you’re a fresh college graduate looking to become a coach, you’ve already gone through the difficult conversations in your head about what you want to do with your life and what kind of work you feel best doing. Maybe you and your parents had a lot of arguments about your future and it may have even created a rift in your relationship. Other students in high school and college are having those exact same conversations with themselves (and their parents) every single day. Unlike you, they haven’t reached that light at the end of the tunnel quite yet. Having a coach to relate to and bounce ideas off of who has also gone through this difficult transition phase would be an invaluable asset to your clients.

Even if you feel you’ve never experienced anything in your professional life that has earned you credibility to speak with others about, you can look deep into your own personal life to uncover some unique challenges you’ve faced. Did your parents divorce when you were just a young child? Have you experienced a heartbreaking loss in your family? Have you overcome (or are you working to overcome) a physical or psychological challenge in your life?

Unless you’ve lived a truly charmed life (in which case, congratulations!), it shouldn’t be too hard to come up with some pain points that have taught you invaluable life lessons that you can draw upon to help others.

“I’m still working on my own life. Who am I to coach others on theirs?”

I hear this one a lot, too. There seems to be this pervasive (and false!) assumption that you must have all of your personal and professional ducks in a row — you must be a finished product, a perfect human being — before daring to coach others. Sometimes you hear people say, “Once I get it all figured out, I’ll be ready.”

This idea is a) ludicrous, and b) exactly opposite of the truth.

Someone who feels that they’ve “got it all figured out” is someone who has essentially decided to stop growing and stop learning. They’ve frozen themselves in time. This isn’t the ideal you should be striving for. It’s perfectly okay to be a coach who is a work in progress in your own personal life.

Never trust a coach who has stopped growing.

“I’ve made every mistake in the book. Who is really going to listen to me?”

This one is similar to the one above, but instead of feeling incomplete, the individual feels closer to a failure. Maybe they’ve been divorced (and maybe more than once). Maybe they’ve reached financial ruin. Maybe they’ve struggled with an eating disorder or had some other deep psychological challenge that they’ve had to work through, and are still working through.

Good coaches know how to channel their imperfect past into actionable wisdom that helps others create change.

Turning Failure into Fuel

This idea is easy to understand with some examples. Someone in need of a financial coach is probably someone who realizes they’ve been foolish or irresponsible with money for far too long and is in need of some simple guidance to get their financial life in order. They understand they need to save more for retirement and they have a basic understanding of investing, but it’s the behavioral aspect that is missing.

You tell me who is better suited to help this individual:

• A Wall Street type who has been in the personal finance world practically from birth and can dazzle you with his understanding of collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps
• A 30-something mother of two who dug herself out of crippling debt over the course of five grueling years and who understands the mental hurdles necessary to take control of your finances

Option A has more knowledge — no doubt about it. But in the real world, Option B has more wisdom. And wisdom is what your clients are after. Someone who seeks out coaching isn’t looking for a consultant. They’re looking for someone to bounce ideas off of and who can offer suggestions for transformative change that they’ve gleaned from years of studying how the mind works.

You are exactly who your clients are looking for — warts and all. Don’t sell yourself short by thinking you aren’t enough.

Yes, you have what it takes to become a life coach!