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Impactful Coach
Episode 34Becoming a coach40 min

Becoming a Career Coach with Lucy Higgins: Reinventing Careers After Motherhood

with Lucy Higgins, Life Coach

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Show notes

On this 'Making of a Coach', Tobi meets Lucy Higgins to unpack how she became a career coach and built a private practice around a career change program for ambitious mothers. They contrast non-directive coaching with a more directive coaching offer and walk through Explore - Dream - Discover as adapted from Fireworks Coaching.

Lucy connects her own matrescence journey to clear positioning, pricing, and the balance between platform work (BetterUp) and private clients - useful if you want to become a coach with a tangible, outcomes-based offer.


Key Learnings:

  • Decide when to use non-directive coaching versus a structured career change program: map client readiness (tweak vs reinvention), define deliverables, and set clear package lengths and outcomes.
  • Productize your expertise into directive coaching: adapt a framework like Explore–Dream–Discover, add your own exercises, and price for both session time and between-session prep.
  • Bring a motherhood studies lens where relevant: normalize systemic barriers, coach identity shifts post-matrescence, and translate insights into skills like stakeholder communication and personal branding to help clients move.


Resources:


Episode Chapters:

00:00 Welcome & Framing The Career Change Program

00:03 Platforms vs Private Work

00:04 Mission: Helping Women Navigate Systems

00:06 Motherhood As Catalyst For Career Change

00:12 What Is Matrescence?

00:17 Non-Directive Coaching Packages

00:20 Directive Coaching: Explore, Dream, Discover

00:23 Tackling Fear, Identity & Systemic Barriers

00:31 Pricing: Packages And Corporate Rates

00:36 Advice To New Coaches: Lean Into What You Love

Transcript

Full transcript, edited for readability. Every timestamp jumps the video to that moment.

Lucy Higgins: I recognize that it took a lot of work, a lot of investment in myself, to come to that conclusion, because I don't think anyone's going to do it for you. I think that you have to make that commitment to yourself, otherwise you'll just get told what to do and your life is not really your own. Tobi: Is there any final advice you would maybe have given to yourself, if you were now able to meet the younger Lucy who is building up this career coaching business? How do I build a successful private coaching practice? How do I turn my passion, my personal story, into a business, and Tobi: how can I really help transform my clients' lives? These were questions that we discussed sort of generally on our last session on the Making of a Coach, together with Lucy Higgins, a successful career coach and coach trainer. Back then Lucy was mainly speaking from her experience as a coach trainer and the questions she's getting there. Today we continue this conversation, but we make those questions very applied. We unpack, pillar by pillar, how Lucy has answered them for herself in her very own real practice. Small spoiler: the central point of Lucy's practice is her career change program, a directive coaching program that helps ambitious mothers redefine their career. Lucy has developed this from her own personal story, as well as from her experience of a few years of non-directive coaching practice, and by now it really has

Read the full transcript

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