Are you curious about starting a coaching business and wondering how to become a life coach?
Let me tell you a story…
I was sitting on the side of the road, eyes wet with tears, feeling so much sadness and rage welling up from within me.
I was on my way to a potential client appointment. Being a life insurance agent was not something I enjoyed, but it paid the bills.
Why couldn’t I just *make* myself do this? Why was I having so much resistance to going to this appointment? Everything inside of me was screaming, “NO, NO, NO I CAN’T DO THIS!!”
I had pulled over because I was sobbing so hard I could no longer see the road.
I called my coach for guidance. She had been supporting me for only a short time, and was available for emergency situations like this.
I was so upset I could hardly talk. “WHY can’t I just make myself go to this appointment?” I asked her. It felt forced, difficult like wading through quicksand only I was stuck and sinking fast.
“I don’t think this is what you’re meant to be doing,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Excuse me?” My ears perked up as I dried my eyes.
“I just don’t think this is what you’re meant to be doing with your life, Lauren. What would you do if money wasn’t an issue? If you had one million dollars in the bank?”
Not hesitating for a moment I said, “I would just help women.”
At the time, I had been a volunteer at a non-profit organization called Mentor-CONNECT for over a year, mentoring women struggling with eating disorders. I personally had recovered from bulimia and anorexia the years prior and mentoring had become quite a passion of mine. But I never thought of how to become a life coach.
I mentored these women on the phone, wrote long conversations back and forth via email, and texted with them on a weekly, sometimes daily basis.
What was amazing to me was that in a short period of time, each and every woman’s life began to transform!! Miraculous healings of body, mind, soul. Relationships reunited. Eating disorder behaviors disappearing. Confidence restored. Careers restarted and passions ignited.
I was hooked. I would think to myself often, “I could do this forever!”
When I was on the phone with these women supporting, encouraging, coaching, teaching and sharing my story with them, I felt like time would stop. Sometimes hours would go by and it would seem like only a few minutes. I had unknowingly stumbled upon my passion and purpose.
As I was sitting there in the car speaking to my life coach, it felt like a no-brainer. “I would just help women!”
I knew exactly what I was going to do.
I can’t remember if I ended up going to the insurance sales appointment that day, but it doesn’t matter.
Right then and there, I quit that business.
A week later, Healing for Eating Disorders was born.
I thanked my life coach for her wise advice and hired an e-commerce coach from her same company.
He taught me everything there was to know about starting an online business. Every week he would give me action items to do. Set up WordPress. Research SEO keywords. Design your blog like this. Make YouTube videos. Create a free giveaway product. Build your email list this way. Etc.
I moved forward slowly but surely. To my astonishment it actually worked!
I got my first paying client 6 months later.
She was a college woman who didn’t have much money to invest into a program, so I told her — “what if I gave you a discount on my program, in exchange for a testimonial for my services, only if you feel that I deserve a good review and are fully satisfied at the end of our time together?”
She agreed!
We worked together and she ended up giving me a glowing review:
“I found Lauren was most valuable in changing the way I view my relationships. I felt that the most important lessons I took from our sessions involved focusing on self-respect and developing an awareness of how I reacted to situations, and strategies to take control and work towards changing my behavior. I will never forget the idea “relationships replace eating disorders” because I’ve found that holds a lot of truth.
I also appreciated how available she was, and knew that while I didn’t always reach out to her, she was consistently there for me and dependable.
When I first started working with Lauren, I was at a very low point with my eating disorder. I’d recently come out to my family and a couple of my friends and started counseling, but I couldn’t get over the feeling of being so alone in my struggle. I knew that people cared about me, but they didn’t fully understand what I was going through or know how to give me the help I needed. Calling Lauren was a big step in my recovery- it was the first time I was able to speak to someone who had been through similar experiences and could really relate to my situation.
Lauren was able to provide me with relevant advice and constant support that had a visible effect on my perspective. Instead of feeling so hopeless, Lauren inspired me and sometimes was the only thing motivating me to continue the recovery process. Without her, I wouldn’t have been able to step outside of myself and realize that I wasn’t crazy, that other women had been through the same things, and there were clear reasons I developed an eating disorder. She helped me see that I didn’t need it anymore and I was able to make vast strides in recovery through her assignments and weekly calls.
I would definitely recommend Lauren as a coach to anyone battling an eating disorder. She is someone to trust, who never makes you feel judged and is there to support you every step of the way.” -Hannah H., Washington, USA
This led to more and more clients. More and more satisfied customers
With each new client I got better and better, learning how to coach more powerfully and create shifts and behavior changes more rapidly.
I learned how to support clients through healing their trauma and the delicacies involved in supporting people who have been raped or sexually abused (an extremely high percentage of people who have eating disorders have rape and/or sexual abuse in their history).
I began to support women who had chronic eating disorders, the worst of the worst. I would see the people who had been to treatment 10-20 times or had been suffering for 20, 30, sometimes 40 years or more. It became my specialty to be able to support these women skillfully, compassionately, and authentically and help them not only recover their bodies, but their lives.
After a while of doing 1:1 work with women, I began to notice patterns emerging in my work. It seemed like the clients would come to me with the same or similar issues, in a familiar sequence, that I began to recognize.
I thought to myself that if I could create materials to address these different stages they were going through, I could help speed up the process. Then I wouldn’t have to spend so much time teaching the concepts during our sessions, because they could just read my materials and do the exercises outside of the sessions, and we could coach on more relevant things during our time together.
Over the next few months I put together worksheets, workbooks, training videos, and guides that became my first course, “The Healing Your Eating Disorder E-Course” which I launched in 2013.
This became my “signature system” that I guided every client through:
- Awareness & Change: The Jumping Off Point
- Roots & Nourishment: Physical Healing
- Power & Feelings: Emotional Healing
- Think & Recover: Mental Healing
- Healing From Within: Spiritual Healing
The course had a total of five e-books with over 240 pages of content, exercises, journaling prompts, action steps and trainings.
This leveled up the results for my clients DRAMATICALLY. Not only was I able to help them 1:1 in our private sessions and in between when they were utilizing my support, but they also had these materials they could work through in their own time. It was a game changer.
Then I realized that I could offer a group program with this content and take a group of women through the course at the same time. I could spend the same amount of time on the phone, but have a greater impact if I could help more than one person at a time.
The Butterfly Healing Circle was born! It was my first group membership program I launched, and it was SO amazing!
I had about 15 women enrolled in it, it was a low-cost program that took about 6 weeks to go through all the content together. We had an online forum to connect in (this was 2013 so we didn’t have FB groups lol) and it was magnificent. My clients were raving, and most importantly they were transforming their lives.
I was absolutely LOVING what I was doing. It was challenging, fun, and very rewarding on a deep level for me.
Constant improvement was something I strived for. I recorded every coaching call with private clients and groups, and I would listen to every single recording back again.
I’m not kidding. I listened to every single minute of every single coaching call for years. Even my videos — I would listen to them over and over so that I could identify things that I wanted to improve upon.
It was very interesting, as I would NEVER criticize myself for anything about these calls. I would just notice, “OH! I said LIKE and UM way too many times.” Or notice a specific example that resonated deeply with clients, and take note that I wanted to use that again. Or whatever it was. I took the learnings and got better through every training, call, and workshop I did.
I just wanted to show up powerfully and serve these women in the best and highest way I could. I was humble, kind, bold and audacious. I would challenge them, love them, encourage them, and believe in them every step of the way.
Miraculously, women would RECOVER and BREAK FREE from their eating disorders. I received literally hundreds of testimonials over the years from women, and this always blew my mind.
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