#334: The 3 Things Most Health Coaching Schools Don’t Teach (But Should)

Michelle:
Hello there, health coaches. You know what today's going to be a little bit different today is for those of you who are thinking about becoming a health coach, because I know you're out there and you're listening or maybe you're already certified, but you're feeling like you miss something along the way. You don't quite feel ready or I know this comes up too, maybe you got certified like a heck of a long time ago and you almost feel like you're starting from scratch. Hey, it happens. So if that's you, I'm glad you're here. Tell me in the chat which of those categories you fall into or none of the above. Maybe you just have this curiosity factor. Hey, Ashley and Chris and Janelle are so glad that you're here. After working with thousands of coaches, what I've noticed is a really frustrating pattern where coaches finish their certification and yet feel totally, entirely unprepared to actually start doing the work of Health Coach.
Like you're passionate. I know that, but you don't either have the tools to coach or the tools to start a business. Many health coaches are graduating, having never worked with a single client. I feel like if you told me that you graduated from automotive repair school, having never touched a car, it's crazy to me. So I'm here of course, year in and year out. I've been doing this for a long time. I'm here to help health coaches find clients and market yourselves and build your businesses. Yes, and this is why I had to bring up this topic. I can't help if on the inside you're terrified of actually having to work with someone or put yourself out there because you've never done it because it's just all new because you graduated missing key components that every health coach needs to succeed. So that's why I'm here today and I created a free guide that goes deeper into all of this so you don't have to take notes today.
I got it all spelled out for you in a lot more detail about how to choose the right health coaching school, and you can grab that free guide at healthcoachpower.com/school. Now, today's episode reminds me of a client that I worked with, oh gosh, years and years and years ago. She had a whole bunch of health issues, many of which were very obscure and I didn't know much about it. She told me she had this problem, that problem, and I probably just smiled and nodded, but inside I'm like, what? And that happens. It actually happens pretty frequently. So I think our inclination is to find a school that teaches a ton of nutrition, science and medical information and functional medicine and covers this type of disease and that type of disease. But you would have to do years and years and years and years and years of studying to really learn everything.
And I'm saying everything with air quotes. I mean it's impossible. How often have you gone to a doctor even and they don't know what you're talking about. So one approach is to try to pick a health coaching school that will teach you a lot about nutrition and health topics, and I know we're all interested in that. Me too. I know what your bookshelf looks like at home. It looks just like mine book after book. We love this stuff. But in terms of getting certified, another approach and my recommendation is to get used to the idea and maybe even comfortable with the idea that you're not going to know everything. You'll never know everything. Like this client I started telling you about, I had 10 years of experience as a health coach under my belt at this point, and I had no idea what her health issues were all about.
I had never heard of them before. So that's going to happen whether you like it or not. So it's like how do you best prepare for that? I'm just looking over here in the comments. Chris says, almost done with the program and feeling lost if I had a nickel for every time someone told me that I know. I mean, of course anything that's new is going to be like, I don't know what I'm doing. But the point of school is to prepare you for that, right? Maureen says, always love to hear what you have to say. Lost my connection. Oh, okay. So anyway, whether you're here because you're going to school for the first time or you're just in my community, I think this will be interesting. Also, health coaching schools have really changed through the years. So I have the benefit of seeing so many of you on the other side of your schooling and what happens and what fears you have and if you're feeling lost or if you're feeling some coaches march right out and have a million clients.
That's not most anyway. So like I was saying, you could have all the schooling in the world and I guarantee you, you're still going to come across clients that you're like, you have, what do you want? You're just going to have no idea what it's, so it's almost not worth trying to think that you're going to be able to learn everything and we'll talk more about this one important note. The opposite will happen of course, too. Sometimes you will know a lot about a person's health issue as a health coach. Maybe you went through the same problem yourself, maybe you've done a lot of reading about it, whatever, but when a lot, you tend to want to try and fix them, and that's not what a health coach does. So you can actually get into some tricky legal territory by knowing too much. I think it's so ironic.
We always want to learn more and learn more and learn more. But in terms of a health coach scope of practice, is it really that helpful? Because we can't diagnose and we can't prescribe and we can't tell people what to do. So in some ways it's like a little bit of a curse to know lots about a particular health diagnosis because when you do, it's so easy to go outside your scope of practice. Now, I'm not here to say that we shouldn't have any knowledge about health and wellness. It certainly can be helpful and it's definitely very, very interesting to learn about these health topics, but I am suggesting you're never going to know all the answers. It's probably for the best. It's actually better in many ways to just get comfortable with that not knowing. And you will learn a ton, you'll get an unofficial PhD just by working with clients so you don't have to know everything and it can become a liability when you do.
Now, why am I talking about this? It's important because in choosing the right health coaching school, despite everyone's first impulse, including mine when I first started out, I'm going to encourage you to not make it all about which school is going to turn you into a health expert like a mini doctor. That's not what this is. And weirdly, it's what a lot of health coaching schools have been teaching and have been promising. And I know because I meet their graduates and the graduates that come out of these schools have learned a lot and they've generally loved the education because we're all a bunch of health nerds. I get that. But these graduates do not have clients, and they're worried about going outside their scope of practice and they think they're going to get a job working for a clinic or a corporation, and a few of these opportunities pan out here and there.
But please hear me on this. It is incredibly rare for a health coach to find a decent paying job working for someone else. Is it impossible? No, I see it happen here and there, but I am talking about being in this field for 16 years. We have over 15,000 health coaches in our community, and yet it is the rare one, two here and there that find a job, like a job that pays more than minimum wage. So I think that is really important to hear upfront because some of these schools are going to tell you otherwise, they're going to kind of gloss over it and make you think you have all these options to acquire a position in all these different places. It's just not quite there. We'll talk more about this in a bit. Chris says, for me, it's more about the business side.
We are going to talk about that in a second, Chris, I'll get to it. So anyway, if you're looking at schools that are doing the real science heavy stuff, the real functional medicine heavy stuff, does that work? You will get an education. I just don't know that you're going to get a career. And I do know that you'll sink a lot of money into those programs because of that in depth science curriculum. It's almost like going to college or med school. And I've done programs like this. So I'm speaking from my own experience in addition to what I see. Is it really that useful? Big question mark. Many programs, this is the bottom line here on this one point. Anyway, many programs are heavy on health and nutrition. That's fine, but they're light on actual coaching skills.
Mimi saying over here, yes, locally in the Denver area to work for someone that only pays 18 to $24 an hour, not sustainably. And sometimes it's even worse than that if you can believe it. What we want is a school that is teaching coaching skills in addition to slash instead of going real deep into the health and medical information, because coaching is not about giving information or giving advice, being a coach is not about figuring out what's wrong with someone and then fixing them. Coaching is about guiding a client towards change. And a lot of schools are just not teaching that or they're not teaching it adequately so that you feel comfortable sitting down. You should feel comfortable sitting down anywhere, anytime, any place with anyone and coaching them. You don't need a program. You don't need any client management system. I mean, just the act of coaching is something that could happen, like sitting on a park bench and someone sits down next to you.
If you have coaching skills, this is easy. That's all you need. Just create a container for coaching right there on the spot. Now, you might be thinking, all right, Michelle, so what did you do when you have this client that I was telling you about and she had all these terrible health problems and you couldn't help her in the sense of knowing what she should do to solve her problems? I couldn't, couldn't give her answers. I couldn't give her a plan to follow if I wanted to because I did not know. So I did what a coach does, and I asked her the questions that really mattered. And guess what? Between just having these conversations and her just really being engaged as a client, she was a fantastic client. We had amazing conversations. We talked about things like her career. We talked about what was going on in her whole life, not just the food, not just the exercise, right?
And within a couple of months, she was able to leave this job that she was in that was totally stressing her out, and she found another job that had the exact same pay but part-time hours. This is a woman who is very, very highly educated out of the best schools and she didn't want to work full-time anymore. And we manifested that together because she and I had a conversation about what she was looking for in her career. She named this arrangement, she spoke it out loud, she wanted to work, and a week later, she got an offer for exactly that, which is incredible. She didn't even have to look. Now, I'm not saying that we can do magic as health coaches, but sometimes just by voicing something, you know how powerful that is. We explored other things too, topics that were on her mind and weighing her down about being a woman, a mom, like I said, a very well-educated, high achieving person.
By the end of our time together, you guys, she had stopped coloring her hair, she started riding a motorcycle. She was working, she was spending more time with her family. And you know what happens when someone really finds themself like that? Those nagging health symptoms have a way of lessening, and that's what happened for her. Now, did I fix her? No. Was she cured? No, of course not. But she found her path forward and instead of her health issues taking up like 90% of her thoughts all the time, they became just this small thing in the background that she had to deal with in the context of living a larger, happier well-lived life. And if that's not health, I don't know what is. So this is all to say nutrition matters, but it's not the make or break piece. If I could go back and redo my health coach training, which I did in 2009, I'd put way more emphasis on learning how to coach people through change.
How to coach people that think they want one thing when they actually need another thing. Think of how many of our clients come to us to lose weight, and that's rarely the most important change that takes place during the course of a coaching relationship. That's what we need to do, not just explain to our clients what we think is healthy. So like any practical skill, you can't learn to coach from a book. You can't really learn to coach just by watching people do it. You need to practice coaching real people. You have to actually coach real people. So when I was in school, I had eight paying clients. By the time that I graduated, that was the best thing that I ever could have done because while I was still in school, it was low pressure. I felt like, okay, it's like an internship. No one expects me to be perfect at this.
My clients knew that I was in school. They knew they weren't paying me full price either, and I'm sure they witnessed me feeling my way through those coaching moments. It's like learning to ride a bike, right? Sometimes you're a little unsteady, but here's the thing. By the time I graduated, I'm so glad that my school encouraged me to actually work with real clients. I graduated, I was fully confident in my ability to work with people. I didn't have that fear holding me back anymore, and I knew I could handle it because I already was handling it. So when you're looking for a health coaching school, in addition to finding a school that teaches skills, find a school that's going to have you working with clients early and often, something that's going to hold you accountable to doing the work because real life experience builds the confidence that you need.
Now, in that free guide I mentioned, I go into greater detail about what sort of coaching skills and real life experience you want during your health coach training program. So remember, you can get that free guide at healthcoachpower.com/school. Alright, so now we're going to go back to that part where we talked about how most coaches can't find a decent paying job working for someone else. And even just now as I'm recording this episode, some of you are piping up and saying, yes, I've had that experience. I know, right? We have so many coaches in our community and a few have found jobs that offer decent pay, but by and large, they're very difficult to come by and they often are asking for lots of further credentials. But health coaching itself does not require advanced credentials. My very, very, very first paying client lost a ton of weight, saw her skin clear up after a lifetime of eczema and trips to the doctor and various prescriptions, and after a few months of working together, listening to her body and experimenting, it was like voila.
She saw huge changes. And that's super valuable. If you know how to coach, you can get someone there. Even if you're brand new like I was, all you got to do is hold space for someone to figure out their own next steps. You do not need advanced credentials, so don't get freaked out when you see these job listings asking for all these degrees just for a health coach position. But what you do need if you're going to be able to sustain yourself and turn this into a career, this leads me to the third thing that most health coaching schools are not teaching, but definitely should is you need to learn how to connect with clients. You got to be able to find them or else you won't be helping anyone. You can be a really, really great coach over here in your bubble, but if you don't know how to market yourself, it's just going to feel like an expensive hobby.
And what I hear over and over from health coaches who have graduated from various programs is I posted to Facebook a couple times, still no bites, and they're really disappointed. I don't know why health coaching schools are perpetuating this myth that you can post to social media a couple times and that's how you're going to find clients. Posting online and crossing your fingers is not a business plan. That is a recipe for frustration. So the way I see it is health coaching schools should be providing the necessary business training that is part and parcel to this type of, we're not dentists. People aren't finding us through their insurance company's website listings. So it's my opinion you shouldn't graduate without at least the basics of business and marketing training. No one's born with this knowledge. I didn't know how to do any of this stuff in the beginning either.
You have to either learn it painfully by making mistakes over many, many years and figuring it out, or it needs to be taught to you. And honestly, a lot of health coaches give up before they ever get there. You should know how to schedule appointments, accept payment from onboard new clients, what to do in a client session. You should be holding workshops. You should have started a mailing list. To me, this is like baseline stuff for starting your business. You should have an offer that's ready to sell something that people actually want to buy because without that stuff, there's no job. There are no clients. There's no impact on anyone's life. Like Chris is saying, over years, when to set up an LLC, get a checking account, registering your business. You know what? I can tell you, Chris, that you don't need any of that stuff to get started.
I am telling you right now, you don't need any of that stuff to get started. But your school should have told you that. They should have given you some guidelines as to how to do these things so that you don't get hung up there and then you never actually go out and find the clients or do anything else. Do you know what I mean? I just think that there's something missing. So if you are considering a health coaching school, and I know many of you go through multiple certifications because you feel like something was missing in the one you did before, anyone, I hear it all the time. Here's what really matters. Number one, are they teaching real coaching skills? Number two, are you getting hands on coaching time? Are you practicing with real people, not just other students? And are you learning how to find and work with clients because about to invest, right?
It's your time, it's your energy, it's your money, and you deserve to feel confident about your decisions. So there you go. That's what I've seen from all of you for the past 16 years. Just reflecting back what I see must be missing from the many, many different curriculums out there now, I created this free guide that walks you through everything we've talked about today and more breaks down what to look for, what to avoid when choosing a program. You can grab it at healthcoachpower.com/school, and I highly recommend doing that before you enroll anywhere, if it's your first, your second, or your 10th certification. Thanks so much for joining me today. If there is a certain topic that you'd like to see on an upcoming show, you can text directly to healthcoachpower.com/text. You'll get the number there. You'll be able to send a text message. I do see all of these messages and most of our 300 plus episodes have come from your questions and suggestions. So keep 'em coming and I'll see you soon. Everyone. Take care.