The Short Answer
Three jobs, repeated until something changes.
A life coach runs structured conversations that do three things: get you clear on what you actually want, surface what is stopping you, and turn that into specific commitments you have to report back on. The coach owns the process and the questions. You own the content and every decision in it.
Most of the visible work is asking, listening and reflecting things back in your own words. That is why a first session frequently feels strange. People arrive with a problem expecting a recommendation, and get questions instead.
The core of the job
A coach is not paid to know your answer. They are paid to make you say it out loud.
For the broader definition of the practice and how it differs from consulting and training, see what coaching is.
What Happens in a Session
Forty five to sixty minutes, following a fairly consistent arc.
Review what happened
The session opens on the commitments from last time. Did they happen, and if not, what got in the way. This is where most of the useful material comes from, because the reason something did not happen is usually the actual problem.
Agree what this hour is for
A good coach will not let the session drift. You name the one thing worth spending the time on, which is itself often the hardest question of the session.
Explore it through questions
The bulk of the hour. The coach asks, reflects back, notices what you skip past and points at contradictions between what you say you want and what you keep doing.
Land on something specific
The session closes on one or two commitments precise enough to be checked. "Think about it more" is not one. "Send the email by Thursday" is.
Sessions typically run every one or two weeks over three to six months. The gap is not downtime, it is where the change actually occurs. Coaching weekly for a short burst generally works better than monthly for a year, because the accountability stays close enough to bite.
What the Rest of the Week Looks Like
The coaching is the smaller part of a coach's week.
Hours of coaching delivered per week
Clients a typical active coach manages
Average session rate, globally
Source: 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study. Fuller figures in our coaching industry statistics.
If you are asking this question because you are considering the job rather than hiring one, this is the part worth knowing. A typical active coach delivers under twelve hours of actual coaching a week. The rest of the working week goes on finding clients, answering questions between sessions, rescheduling, writing up notes, marketing and admin.
The unpaid tail around each paid hour is the defining feature of the job, and it is why the average coach earns considerably less than the hourly rate implies. If that is your interest, the practical version is in how to become a life coach.
What a Life Coach Does Not Do
The boundaries matter more than the technique.
Treat mental health conditions. Coaching is not therapy and is not regulated as healthcare. A responsible coach refers out to a licensed clinician when something clinical surfaces, rather than working around it.
Work through your past. Coaching assumes you are functioning and starts from where you are now. Where therapy often works backwards to explain, coaching works forwards to move.
Make your decisions. A coach who tells you what to do has quietly become a consultant, and you have lost the thing you were paying for.
Guarantee an outcome. The work happens between sessions and the client does it. Anyone promising a specific result is selling something other than coaching.
The therapy boundary is the one that matters most, because life coaching is unregulated and the people who arrive are not always the people it can help. Willingness to refer out is one of the clearest markers of a competent coach.
Two Schools of What the Job Is
The profession does not agree on whether a coach should ever tell you anything.
Most articles answer "do life coaches give advice" with a flat no. That is one tradition's answer, stated as though it were the whole profession. The two largest accrediting bodies genuinely disagree, and it changes what the sessions feel like.
The ICF position
The International Coaching Federation frames coaching as partnering with a client in a thought provoking process that helps them maximise their own potential. Coaching is a discipline defined against advice giving: the coach draws the answer out and does not supply it. Mentoring is a separate practice.
The EMCC position
EMCC Global began in 1992 as the European Mentoring Centre and accredits coaching, mentoring and supervision as one interconnected field. In that tradition a practitioner's own expertise is something to contextualise and share where it helps, not to withhold as a matter of principle.
Neither is wrong. They are different answers to the question of what a client is buying, and a coach trained in one will run noticeably different sessions from a coach trained in the other.
The practical upshot when hiring: ask which tradition they trained in. If you want someone to pull your own thinking out of you, the strictly non directive school is what you want. If you are hiring partly for what they know about your industry, a purist coach will refuse to give it to you and you will both be frustrated.
What People Actually Bring
Rarely the thing they booked the session about.
The presenting problem is usually a proxy. People book a life coach about a career decision, a business they cannot get started, a habit that will not stick or a sense that things are fine and should not feel this flat. Underneath, the recurring themes are narrower: avoiding a conversation, wanting two incompatible things at once, or having no way to tell whether they are making progress.
A large part of what a coach does is notice that the stated problem is not the real one, and ask the question that surfaces it without announcing that is what they are doing.
Does It Work?
Strong organizational evidence, messier individual evidence.
Average return on coaching investment
Of companies report full ROI recovery
Productivity boost, HBR research
Sources: ICF study conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Harvard Business Review research.
The organizational numbers are good and they are the ones everyone quotes. Treat them with the caution any self reported ROI figure deserves: companies that invested in coaching are the ones being asked whether it was worth it.
The individual picture is harder to generalise, because outcomes depend heavily on the fit between coach and client and on whether the client does the work between sessions. The most reliable predictor is unglamorous: whether the person actually wants to be there, as opposed to having been sent.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does a life coach actually do?+
A life coach runs structured conversations that help someone get clear on what they want, work out what is stopping them, and commit to specific actions between sessions. The coach supplies the process, the questions and the accountability. The client supplies the content and makes the decisions. Most of the visible work is asking, listening and reflecting back, which is why a first session often feels strange to people expecting advice.
What happens in a typical life coaching session?+
A session usually runs 45 to 60 minutes and follows a loose arc: review what happened since last time, agree what this hour is for, explore the situation through questions, then land on one or two specific commitments before the end. Sessions are typically every one or two weeks, because the gap is where the actual change happens.
What is the difference between a life coach and a therapist?+
A therapist is a licensed clinician working in a regulated profession, treating mental health conditions and often working backwards through a person's history. A life coach is unregulated, assumes the client is functioning well, and works forwards from where they are now towards a goal the client chooses. A responsible coach refers out when something clinical surfaces rather than trying to handle it.
Do life coaches give advice?+
It depends on the tradition they trained in, which surprises most people. The International Coaching Federation holds coaching to a strictly non directive standard, where the coach draws answers out rather than supplying them. EMCC Global accredits coaching, mentoring and supervision as one field, and in that tradition a practitioner's own expertise is something to contextualise and share when it helps. Ask a coach which school they work in, because it changes what the sessions feel like.
How often do you see a life coach?+
Most engagements run every one or two weeks over three to six months. Coaching weekly for a short burst tends to work better than monthly for a year, because the accountability gap stays short enough to matter. A typical active coach manages 12.2 clients at a time and delivers 11.9 hours of coaching per week, according to the 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study.
Is a life coach worth it?+
The organizational evidence is good: companies report an average return of 7 times their coaching investment in an ICF study conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, 86% report full ROI recovery, and Harvard Business Review research concludes coaching boosts productivity by 44%. The individual evidence is harder to generalise, because outcomes depend heavily on the fit between coach and client and on the client doing the work between sessions. The single best predictor is whether you actually want to be there.
The questions that repeat can answer themselves
Coaches use Personify to train an AI clone on their own frameworks, so the foundational questions are handled between sessions and the hours go to the work that needs a human.
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