How do you start as a Kids Life Coach?
As an ex South African, I started my first Kids Life Coaching practice there in 2003. I was a teacher at the time and developed my coaching programme as part of my University Honours Degree. My assignment was to write a parent programme but in the end I realised through my research that I preferred a "family resilience" approach. Needless to say my angle was completely different to what my lecturers were expecting! I turned their theory of parent coaching on its head and I was encouraged to pilot my "family approach" to see if it worked in practice.
So, I decided to work on the weekends launching my “assignment” (I got 100% for that assignment by the way) by running my Family Resilience Coaching programme as a pilot with 15 families. I got local family volunteers with children in three age groups between age 5 and age 13. I initially saw two groups every Saturday for 4 x 3 hour sessions. In week 1 and week 4, the parents attended with their children and in week 2 & 3, children attended on their own.
This very programme has since been tweaked and is still being used by our global network of Kids Life Studio Brand Ambassadors! We also now have a Family Resilience Club we run and it is a great hit!
After the pilot programme, the need grew and I started getting requests from the parents for individual coaching for their children. This prompted me to develop a 7 month individual coaching programme and by 2005 I had left teaching and started my full time Kids Life Coaching practice. By 2008 I was seeing 60 children a week and had waiting lists....
Which is when people started approaching me to learn to do what I was doing.
The rest as they say is history.
Fast track to today and we have trained people in 30 countries through our Kids Life Coach Academy school!
It feels good to think back on how I officially started my journey of coaching children!!! Although, the unofficial story is that I started way way before that when I started teaching in 1996! I saw the need in my classroom and I was a natural coach but the mistake I made was not having a system and proven method! It took me a few years to realise that a "hit and miss" approach is not sustainable....even with all the good intentions in the world! I wouldn't want you making the same mistakes I made....which is why if you are reading this article, I urge you to think carefully before embarking on a wild goose chase to "figure things out" or "reinvent the wheel"! I say that with the greatest of respect...because you probably CAN figure it out! BUT....do you really want to waste time doing that when children need you NOW?
This is why we love working with passionate professionals such as teachers, social workers, therapists etc. They have the ingredients to be awesome coaches but they don't always have the right recipe for using those ingredients and they push their ego aside because they simply want to help children.
So our Level 1 Kids Life Coach Theory Training and our Level 2 Kids Life Coach Training support them in putting the puzzle pieces together so that they can get results and earn an income doing what they love! For those that realise the power of being backed by a global network of like minded Childrens change makers, move onto their Level 3 Kids Life Coach Advanced certification
I am super proud of our Kids Life Studio Brand Ambassadors who are doing amazing work around the globe with the children in their local communities!! All of our collective hard work as a team to raise the profile of life coaching for children is paying off!! Especially since we were recently published in the World Social Psychiatry Journal and we have a few more papers being published in prominent journals soon!
Want to join our team?
https://www.kidslifestudio.com/become-a-coach/
Wishing you well in your Kids Life Coaching adventures and can't wait to hear your story of how you started as a world-class Kids Life Coach!
Regards with Zeal,
Zelna
Kids Life Studio & Kids Life Coach Academy founder
