What’s With All of These Different Coach Specialties?

Question –  What are the differences between all of those coaching titles - Career coach, wellness coach, transition coach, executive coach, business coach and on and on?

Jennifer – When a coach chooses one of these titles, they are specifying their life coach specialty. However, all the coaching should stay the same. Coaching is coaching. By niching, a coach is simply bringing coaching skills and competencies to the client under a specialization.

For example, executive coaches are mostly working with executives because they share some experience in that world and understand the struggles and challenges of executives. Say it’s a health and wellness coach - a client comes to them because they need support and coaching in that specialty. In all these cases the coach has some background in the area they are specializing in. This allows them to offer more than just coaching to their clients and will likely include some level of mentoring. As you probably know by now, mentoring is not coaching. But coaches who specialize often blend the two skills.

Keep in mind, if you are thinking of claiming to be a certified “whatever” coach, you must actually go through the trouble of getting certified in that area. There are organizations or courses that will certify you as a wellness coach or certify you as a leadership coach. But if you're just certified in life coaching, you really cannot call yourself a certified wellness coach.

I know some coaches who claim to be certified in a specialty but really aren’t.  They took a life coaching course and then claim, "I'm a certified wellness coach." Sorry - you're not. You need to go pass a class for that.