Teodor asks for the bill before Benedetta has finished her question.
They're on a terrace by the Abu Dhabi Corniche on a Saturday, and she's spent most of lunch circling it. She's an architect. For nine years she's drawn other people's buildings, and for the last two she's been reading about coach training late at night, telling nobody. Teodor is the only person she knows who did it. He coached for four years, then went back to running operations for a logistics firm.
So she finally asks him straight out. "Was it a good career?"
He takes a long time to answer. "It was the best work I've ever done," he says. "And I wasn't ready for it."
He tells her about the sessions he loved, where a client walked in tangled and walked out with something settled. Then he tells her about the other kind. A client describing the year her father stopped speaking to her. Teodor heard himself suggesting action steps, a plan, a timeline, anything to fill the quiet, because he couldn't bear to sit inside it with her. It happened again with other clients, in other forms. In the end he stopped.
Benedetta drives home along the E11 with a better question than the one she brought to lunch.
Is life coaching a good career?
It can be, for a particular kind of person. Coaching is usually a practice you build over time, and it asks you to stay steady beside other people's hardest moments for years. Whether it's a good career for you depends less on the market than on whether you're ready for that.
Plenty of answers to this question start with how big the coaching industry has grown. Size can't tell you how a Tuesday afternoon of this work would sit in your body, so this guide starts somewhere else: with what the work is, who it suits, and where people like Teodor get stuck.
If you're where Benedetta is, with nothing decided yet, Robert's free book Why 88% of Life Coaches Fail is the read we'd put in your hands first. Or read on.
What is the work actually like, week to week?
Less glamorous than the course pages, and more interesting.
The sessions themselves can take up fewer hours than you'd expect. Around them sits everything that keeps a practice alive: notes, preparation, your own supervision and learning, and the slow work of letting people know what you do. That last part can catch new coaches off guard. People rarely hire a coach they've never heard of, so being visible, in conversations, talks and introductions, is part of the job from the first month.
The rhythm is uneven. Some weeks are full and some are quiet, and a private practice can be a solitary place to sit through a quiet one.
Then there are the sessions. Most are ordinary, useful conversations. A few go much further than either of you planned, and those are the ones that decide whether coaching feels like a calling or a strain.
If you want an ICF credential, the early years also carry a logbook of coaching hours. Our guide to how to become a life coach in Dubai sets out the whole route in order, hours included.
Who tends to do well in this work?
Background decides less than people fear. People come to coaching from engineering, teaching, HR, architecture and much else, and in our experience the CV says little about who will take to it.
In our experience, the people who stay share four things.
They're more curious about the person than about the solution. A client's problem interests them less than how the client is holding it.
They can sit with not knowing. A session that hasn't resolved by the fifty-minute mark doesn't feel like failure to them.
They're willing to be seen. Saying "I coach" out loud to a room of colleagues doesn't have to feel comfortable. It does have to be possible.
They've done their own work. Not read about it. Done it, with someone steady across from them.
You'll notice that none of those is a qualification you can buy. If you're worried you're starting from zero, our guide to becoming a life coach without experience looks at what actually counts.
What makes a capable new coach stop?
Teodor didn't stop because nobody wanted coaching. He stopped at the moment the work asked something of him he hadn't been asked before.
In our experience, that's where new coaches most often stall, and it rarely looks like the reason. It looks like a coach who over-prepares, or who keeps every session safely on goals and plans, or who quietly starts dreading Thursdays. Underneath, a client's moment has touched something in the coach, and the coach's attention has turned inward to manage it.
In the RS Method we'd describe Teodor's reaction as a thought fused to a charge, a memory with the weight the body put on it. The thought sounded professional: "If I don't offer something, I'm failing her." The charge was much older. He grew up in a house where a long silence meant something was about to go wrong, and his body still treated every quiet room as a warning. He could have explained every bit of it over lunch, and the explaining never reached the place the reaction came from. Insight can tidy the story. Removal works lower down: the weight comes off, and a quiet room is allowed to be just a quiet room.
That's why RSCI is built on the Inner Work First Principle: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained. Before anyone hands you a client, your own material gets its turn, inside the cohort and under supervision. A reaction like Teodor's surfaces there, in a room built to hold it, instead of across the table from someone who's paying for your steadiness.
If you'd like to look at this side of the decision properly before you choose anything, start with Robert's free book, Why 88% of Life Coaches Fail. It's about forty pages, roughly an hour's reading, and it looks at why capable graduates can still struggle in the room, and what to look for in a training.
How can you test the fit before you commit?
Write one ordinary Tuesday. It takes about forty minutes, and it tells you more than a career quiz.
- Write a realistic Tuesday in a coaching practice, hour by hour. Two client sessions. Notes afterwards. One message to someone who might introduce you to a client. An hour of your own learning. A cancellation at short notice. A long gap in the afternoon.
- Read it aloud, slowly. Hearing it lands differently from reading it.
- Beside each block, write what your body does. Lifts, drops, or braces. Don't edit the answer.
- Go back to one of the sessions and let it go off plan. The client's voice goes flat while they describe the year everything changed. Notice where your attention goes: toward them, or toward getting the session back on track.
- Look at the quiet afternoon. Does an empty diary feel like space, or like proof of something about you?
- Circle the block you'd most like to delete. Then ask one question of it: is this a skill I haven't learned, or a feeling I haven't met? Skills get trained. A feeling like that marks where your own work begins.
If most of the Tuesday lifts you, take that seriously. If one block made you brace, that isn't a no. It's the most useful line on the page. Our guide to choosing a coaching niche shows how the ground you've already walked can shape who you serve.
If the answer is yes, what should your training get right?
A good career in this work starts with a training that prepares the person, not just the CV. Look for three things.
- It begins with you. Your own reactions are met and worked on inside the cohort, under supervision, before a client ever meets them.
- It puts you in a live room. RS Method Coach includes 2 days of live practitioner training, with hands-on work and supervised practice. RS Method Complete includes 5 days of intensive live training and application, in Dubai.
- It says exactly who awards what. With ICF education included, RS Method Coach is AED 18,000 and includes ICF Level 1 education. RS Method Complete is AED 35,000 and includes ICF Level 2 education. The ICF-accredited education inside our programmes is designed, delivered and certified by the Institute of Coaching and Mentoring (IICM), an ICF-accredited organisation. The ACC and PCC credentials are awarded only by the ICF.
You can see both programmes, and every option, on our life coach training page.
Our razor says what we're training for in three short lines. To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
Marko Mladenovic did his own work with the method, and three years afterwards he wrote: "I am still in such a peaceful, blissful, joyful state. I feel like I have finally found the answers on my question, Who am I?" That's his own result, in his own life. It predicts nothing about yours, or about anyone you'll coach.
If you're still deciding whether this is your work, the next step is free: read Why 88% of Life Coaches Fail.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. Benedetta's question changed on the drive home, from "is it a good career?" to "am I ready for what it asks?" If that's your question now, give it an hour this weekend with the free book, before you open a single course page.