What is life coaching? An integrative review of the evidence-based literature

Life coaching as an industry fully emerged in the 1990s and has exploded to become a $2 billion global industry with nearly 50,000 certified life coaches (ICF, 2012). With the rapid growth and many different programmes and educational platforms, there is a need for defining the exact scope of what life coaching entails (Segers, Vloeberghs, Henderickx and Inceoglu, 2011). The purpose of this study was to conduct an integrative review of the evidence-based life coaching literature in order to develop a comprehensive objective characterisation of coaching that would capture the nature of the industry in the most concise manner and hopefully provide the objectives for establishing life coaching as a profession.