Types of coaches, and what each one actually helps with

The main types of coaches are life coaches, career coaches, health and wellbeing coaches, relationship and family coaches, business and executive coaches, money coaches, spiritual coaches and skills coaches like communication or public speaking. Each group helps with a different part of someone's life, and the big split is who pays: the person themselves, or a company paying for staff.

Below is the list, grouped, with what each type of coach helps with and who usually pays. The groups come from our own mapping of the coaching market, where we found 117 coaching niches and 918 smaller markets underneath them, all worked out from what buyers are already spending money on.

Why are there so many types of coaches?

Because there's no rulebook. Wikipedia's page on coaching points out there's no required training or licence for life coaching, so nobody stops you inventing a new title. Somebody calls themselves a "mindset coach", somebody else a "breakthrough coach", and before long there are hundreds of titles for what's often the same job.

That's confusing if you're looking for a coach. And it's even more confusing if you are one and you're trying to explain what you do. We scored 10,954 live coaching websites and 86% of them fail the five-second test, which means a stranger can't tell what the coach does or who it's for within five seconds. A vague coaching title is a big part of that.

So here's the list in plain English, grouped by what part of someone's life it helps with.

The types of coaches, at a glance

The "who pays" column is my reading of how these markets work, not a survey. Nobody tracks it properly. And I'll be honest, I've no experience of the company-paid side of coaching. All my selling in coaching was to people paying out of their own pocket.

Life coaches

A life coach helps one person change something in their own life. It's the broadest group, and on its own "life coach" tells a stranger very little. That's why the useful titles underneath it are the specific ones. Types of life coaches include:

• Confidence coaches, for people who hold back at work or socially.
• Mindset coaches, usually about how someone thinks about themselves and what they're capable of. The title is vague, so the good ones say what changes.
• Habits and behaviour change coaches, for people who keep starting things and not finishing them.
• Midlife or reinvention coaches, for people in their 40s and 50s who want a different life.
• Transformational life coaches, who aim at a bigger change in how someone sees themselves rather than one goal. There's a full post on what a transformational life coach does.
• Mental health and recovery coaches, like anxiety, burnout, ADHD or sobriety coaches. These work alongside medical help, not instead of it.

The person pays, almost always. They're buying because something in their life isn't working and they want it to. If you're one of these, the thing to remember is that buyers search for their problem, not for "life coach".

Career coaches

Career coaches help people get the work they want. That includes job hunting and interviews, changing careers, going back to work after a break, redundancy, and getting promoted.

The person usually pays, especially for job hunting and career change. Sometimes an employer pays, for example as part of a redundancy package or for someone they want to promote. If you're a career coach, the post on what to put on a career coach website is the practical next step.

Health and wellbeing coaches

Health coaches help people change how they eat, move, sleep and deal with stress. In our mapping this is a busy group, with markets like gut health and nutrition, menopause, sleep, chronic illness and pain, men's health, running, and quitting smoking or vaping.

Types of coaches here include health coaches, nutrition coaches, fitness coaches, sleep coaches, menopause coaches and wellness coaches. The person pays, and they're often comparing you with a gym, an app or a book, so they want to know exactly what you'll do that those don't. There's a whole post on how health coach websites scored if you're in this group.

A health coach isn't a doctor or a dietitian, unless they also happen to be one. The good ones say that plainly.

Relationship and family coaches

This group covers everything to do with other people. Dating and finding love, strengthening a marriage, infidelity, divorce, co-parenting, blended families, parenting teenagers, special-needs parenting, fertility, grief, and family estrangement all came up as separate markets when we mapped them.

So the types of coaches include dating coaches, relationship coaches, divorce coaches, parenting coaches and grief coaches. The person pays, and they're often buying at a very emotional moment. That's why vague words like "connection" don't do much here. Somebody whose marriage is falling apart wants to know you understand their actual situation.

Business and executive coaches

Business coaches help owners run and grow their business: sales, marketing, systems, hiring, and making it less dependent on them. Executive and leadership coaches help people inside bigger organisations lead teams and perform at a senior level.

This is where the "who pays" question really splits. A small business owner pays for their own business coaching. An executive coach is often paid by the employer, who wants something for the company out of it. That changes the sale completely, because the person being coached isn't always the person signing off the money. Like I said above, I've no experience selling that side, so I'll leave it there.

One thing I do have opinions on. I've been approached by people who want to be business coaches and haven't owned or grown a business themselves. In theory, a coach's questions can do the work without them knowing the client's field. In practice, business owners buying help want someone who's done it.

Money coaches

Money coaches help people with their own finances. Getting out of debt, budgeting, saving, couples arguing about money, and feeling anxious about money all sit here.

The person pays, which is awkward when the problem is that they haven't got enough money. That's one reason money coaches need to be very clear about what someone gets and what it costs. And a money coach isn't a financial adviser, so they shouldn't tell people what to invest in. Plenty of places regulate financial advice, and coaching doesn't get round that.

Spiritual coaches

Spiritual coaches help people with meaning, purpose and faith. It can be a specific faith, like Christian coaching, or broader spirituality. Faith is interesting in our mapping because it doesn't sit as one niche, it turns up across several, which is covered in Christian life coaching niches.

The person pays. Buyers here are often wary of being sold to, so proof and plain words do a lot of the work.

Skills coaches

These coaches help with a specific skill rather than a whole part of someone's life. Communication and public speaking is the obvious one, along with writing, presenting, voice and accent, and learning a language.

Who pays depends on why they want it. Someone nervous about a best man's speech pays for themselves. Someone who needs to present to a board might get it paid for by work. If this is you, how to become a communication coach goes into that one in detail.

Then there are coaches outside the personal and business world altogether, like sports coaches and vocal coaches for singers. They share the name but it's a different kind of work, mostly teaching a skill.

Which type of coach are you?

If you're reading this because you're a coach trying to describe yourself, here's what I'd do.

Find your group in the table above, then go one level further down to the specific problem you help with. "Life coach" is a group. "Coach for nurses who can't sleep after night shifts" is a type of coach somebody can recognise themselves in.

And watch out for one trap. Niche coaches often build their marketing around their own story and assume their audience is just like them. Sometimes that's right, the way a broken clock is right twice a day. But your clients didn't live your life, and they don't use coaching words like "clarity" and "abundance". Those are words coaches use, not buyers. Write the type of coach you are in the words the buyer would type into Google.

If you can do several of these and can't pick, how to choose a coaching niche helps you decide without giving up the rest. And the full list of 117 coaching niches and what each one buys is the next thing to read.

Questions coaches ask about this

The figures here come from our own corpus of 10,954 scored coaching websites and 918 mapped coaching markets. How we built and scored it.

Read next

• Transformational life coach: what it means to a buyer
• Career coach website: what to put on it to get clients
• Health coach website design, scored against 10,954 others