Life coaching is an extremely satisfying job. Helping people to fulfil their potential and find lasting happiness has got to be one of the most useful occupations in the world - and you can do it, if you want to, from the comfort of your own home. If this sounds attractive to you, you should look into becoming a life coach.

It is easy to set up as a life coach. At the moment, you don't legally need any qualifications; all you have to do is find some clients and start coaching them.

However, this is clearly not the best way, for you or for your clients. Coaching people to overcome their fears and achieve their ambitions may appear to be a relatively simple task but actually it takes great expertise to do it successfully. You have to learn to look beneath the surface of what the client presents to you, in order to find their hidden insecurities and hang-ups. A life coach is not just a sounding-board or a cheer-leader; he/she is a skilled professional. You may know a lot about life but it doesn't automatically follow that you will be able to coach somebody else to excel at it.

Some training, then, is a sound investment. There are all sorts of different courses available in how to become an effective life coach - intensive or longer term, face to face or distance learning - and you should have no trouble finding one you like.

Alongside the training, something else that will benefit you enormously is to have some life coaching yourself. If you really want to be a life coach, you coach will keep you focused and help you to maintain your enthusiasm through the first few months. Also, watching an experienced coach in action will give you a clearer idea of how the process works.

Although it is possible to make a lot of money through life coaching, if you go into the profession with that as your goal, you will probably neither enjoy life coaching nor succeed at it. To an extent, life coaching is a vocation, like teaching or nursing. If you are doing it for the money, you may not find it worth the effort.

You should also bear in mind that you are, of course, paid only when you are specifically working and it may take a while to build up enough clients that you can live on your coaching earnings. If you are thinking of giving up a job in order to become a life coach, see if you can just cut down to part-time until you get the life coaching business off the ground.

Because life coaching is still a comparatively new phenomenon, there is still plenty of scope for working in this field. As word spreads of the power of coaching, demand for it is rising. On the other hand, new life coaches are emerging every minute, so, if this is what you want to do, seize the day.

Life coaching requires energy and discipline but it can also be great fun. If you reckon you would make a good life coach, go for it!