The world of coaching might seem like a tough place to navigate for a new coach – even for a veteran it sometimes is! That is why finding your own niche, from a list of different coaching niches, is important in order to help you understand what you stand for as a coach as well as integrate it with your passion and interest in order to create a career that is truly fulfilling.
Whether you’re new or you have been in the coaching business for some time and still don’t have a niche yet, now would be a good time to select one. From all the different types of coaching niches, picking one for yourself is not just limited to finding fulfillment in what you do as a coach – it also helps differentiate you from your peers and shows your ideal client your areas of expertise.
The clearer your niche is, the more apparent it will be to your prospective client whether you are a good match for them to work with, provided it is communicated effectively.
Need help finding your ideal client?
Read this article.
When it comes to coaching niches, there can be innumerable ones – with more specialisations coming up, the number of coaching niches keeps rising and it can be hard to keep up. We’re giving you a list of the broad categories of coaching that you can familiarise yourself with, in order to figure out which type of coach you are most suited to specialise as. How to find your coaching niche from some of the best coaching niches? A good place to start is to understand the major categories of coaching out there. Let’s begin with some most popular coaching niches…
Life Coaching
A life coach is one who helps their clients make progress in their lives in order to attain greater contentment. Life coaches aid people in improving their relationships, careers, and day-to-day lives.
If your niche is life coaching, you would be expected to help your clients clarify their goals, identify obstacles that are holding them back and partner with them to come up with strategies to overcome them. While most life coaches take a more general, all-encompassing approach, you can also choose to specialise in a particular arena.
Some of the different types of specialised life coaching niches include addiction & sobriety coaching, fitness coaching, mental health coaching, and spirituality coaching, among others.
If you’re looking for a life coaching niches list, you can check out this blog!
Leadership Coaching
One of the most sought after types of coaching niches is leadership coaching. As the famous saying goes, “leaders aren’t born, they are made”. And a leadership coach is one who can help clients become better adept at dealing with crisis and reaching their goals while keeping the team together. They generally work closely with corporate clients who typically are in managerial or leadership positions.
This can be challenging as these individuals control a small part of the entire puzzle and not the larger scope of things. That is why a good leadership coach needs to recognise how their clients behave as leaders to their own teams and how they respond to various circumstances.
Another important thing for leadership coaches to keep in mind is to incorporate a holistic approach to their business. Looking at your clients’ physical, mental, emotional, psychological and spiritual wellbeing – all these together would make it well-rounded & holistic approach – which in turn would have a direct impact on how they work in the organisation.
A term that is used interchangeably with leadership coaching is executive coaching. While leadership coaching can function for an individual within an organisation or even independently outside of the organisation (if they decide to hire a personal coach for themselves), executive coaching happens exclusively as part of an organisation.
An executive coach may be hired externally or may be part of the internal team, if the organisation is quite large in size and scope. But the essential aim of both leadership and executive coaching is to provide guidance to their clients on becoming better leaders.
Business Coaching
A business coach helps those with their own businesses reach their full potential and be successful. They help businesses deal with internal aspects (such as setting business objectives and finding a roadmap to their goals) as well as external aspects (like becoming better at providing customer support).
A business coach helps brands define their goals, polish their vision for the future and set in place strategies that will effectively help them realise their goals and ambitions. If you have a background as an entrepreneur and have had the experience of building a business successfully from scratch, business coaching may be a niche worth considering.
Career Coaching
Career coaching is to help individuals advance in their careers and sometimes even change directions in order to help clients find a fulfilling and productive career trajectory.
A career coach helps individuals discover (and sometimes re-discover) their career goals, perform better at job interviews, understand the job markets and even create an impactful and effective resume. They also help clients develop valuable professional skills like leadership, communication and inter-personal skills, which can be great additions to their professional profile.
Health and Wellness Coaching
Whenever you scroll through social media, we often see people looking to get sculpted abs or toned arms. Health coaches help their clients achieve their goals with regards to their physical health and fitness. Some of the popular health coach niches include weight management, muscle building and aesthetics, diet planning, as well as disease management.
It is important to note that the health coach niches are not just limited to physical appearance, but take on a reflective approach to understanding where a particular need or desire is coming from so that the coach and coachee can go deeper into the coachee’s psyche to understand their motivations and limiting beliefs.
So, while health and wellness coaching niches focus on a person’s physical fitness, it is actually quite integral to their complete well-being.
Relationship Coaching
One of the most popular coaching niches is relationship coaching. While it is the general assumption that relationship coaches help people fix broken relationships or find the perfect partner, there is more to this field than meets the eye. Often relationship coaching focuses on many aspects such as friendships, people skills, and family relationships through various life stages including dating, marriage and sometimes even divorce – and is not limited only to when there is trouble in paradise!
If you’re empathetic in nature and have a knack for understanding different perspectives in relationships, then relationship coaching is something that you can consider.
Financial Coaching
A financial coach is a one who helps clients improve their relationship with money and stay on track to meet their financial goals. Like a personal trainer helps a person understand their relationship with food and exercise, creates strategies to prevent their desires from derailing their efforts and encourages them to stick to a plan, a financial coach does the same for one’s finances.
A financial coach helps individuals by creating day-to-day money management tactics and planning investments to attain long-term financial goals. They help clients identify the problem areas in their finances and develop strategies to overcome them.
If you have a background in finance and have a strategic understanding about investing, saving, and other money-related matters as well as with a strong desire to help others achieve their financial goals and freedom, financial coaching is what you could specialise in.
Other Areas of Coaching
There are different types of coaching niches, with many sub-niches within those niches, which you can specialise in, depending on what your certifications qualify you for and also where your interests and experience lie.
One such area is NLP coaching where coaches are trained to detect minute clues in the behaviour and communication of their clients. An NLP coach is equipped to understand their clients in a better manner and resolve conflicts that might not be too apparent in the beginning by using the nuances of the human neurology and linguistics.
Further, NLP coaching also helps in communication and therefore also is useful in the fields of consulting and sales. To become an NLP coach, you will need to complete a training that certifies you as an NLP Practitioner or Master Practitioner, after which you can get certified as a coach and use the tools and methodology of NLP to coach your clients in your area of specialisation.
Another area to specialise in is neuroscience-based coaching. If you specialise in neuroscience coaching, you would work with clients and help them become more self-aware and create new habits, while simultaneously breaking old patterns and dismantling self-limiting beliefs, doubts, anxieties, narrow perspectives, and biases.
This will enable you to create a new roadmap to form positive habits, thoughts, perspectives, and actions for your clients.
Other specialty coaches include sales coaches – who can help you make better sales in your business, communication coaches – to assist you in developing interpersonal communication skills, and transition coaches – who can help you move from one aspect of life/career to another. Then there is also the mindset coaching niche that addresses mental blocks and internal obstacles that deters the growth of an individual in many areas, including careers, relationships, or just life in general. Of course, there there are many niches other than these!
In conclusion, choosing your specialised area of coaching is going to be a very personal thing.
While you may be tempted to choose the area of specialisation that will make you the most money, we recommend that you choose a field that genuinely interests you and that you know is your area of expertise. In this way, you will be able to make a valuable contribution to the lives of your clients while finding fulfillment and sustenance in your line of work.
Eventually, your passion for coaching along with the urge to genuinely help people in aspects that you have found success in is essentially what is going to help you figure out the niche that’s right for you. We wish you all the best on this beautiful journey!
FAQs
1. Can I specialize in more than one coaching niche, or should I focus on just one?
As a practice, it is better if you specialize in one coaching niche – this helps your prospects be clear about your offerings and how you can fit into their lives and solve a pressing issue in their life/business/career/relationship or find ways to grow in it. Specializing in more than one niche is not a no-no, it does work for some coaches who have been in the industry for a while and have found their footing. But for a new coach, it is a better idea to focus on one to begin with.
2. What are some of the types of coaching niches that professionals can choose from?
Some of the most common coaching niches are life coaching, leadership coaching, relationship coaching, career coaching, executive coaching, business coaching, and mindset coaching. There are several other coaching niches that can branch off these major categories to become their own niche of specialization.
3. What are the hot coaching niches in 2023?
Some of the hot coaching niches in 2023 are career coaching, health coaching, mindset coaching, life coaching, financial coaching, relationship coaching, nutrition coaching, weight loss coaching, public speaking coaching, confidence coaching, productivity coaching, etc.
4. How do I find my coaching niche?
There are a few factors you should keep in mind while narrowing down to a tight niche:
- Find out if the niche is in demand
- See if it fits your profile and interest
- If the niche in demand has very few representation, it could be a right choice for you
- Find out if people are willing to pay for the niche-specific service
- Explore if the niche can be narrowed down further and be the first one to practice it
- Zero in on a specific client profile or industry you wish to work with
About Simply.Coach
Simply.Coach is an enterprise-grade coaching software designed to be used by individual coaches and coaching businesses. Trusted by ICF-accredited and EMCC-credentialed coaches worldwide, Simply.Coach is on a mission to elevate the experience and process of coaching with technology-led tools and solutions.
Writer
Mary has worked as an editor, writer, copywriter, team manager, social media strategist, SEO writer & content creator over the past 9 years. She currently freelances with various organizations including DBS Bank based in Mumbai. If she wasn’t a writer, Mary believes she would’ve been a photographer by profession!
