Two days ago, the New York Times published a not so flattering article about life coaching: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/02/business/life-coach-debt-savings.html?searchResultPosition=1. The premise of the article is that life coaches and the life coaching industry can take financial advantage of vulnerable people. I think its worth a read, and I don't disagree with it. Within the realm of life coaching, there are many coaches who sell programs to other coaches with the offer of further improving their coaching skills, teaching them how to sell their coaching, or do marketing for their coaching. Is this a problem? I'm not so sure.
It is true that life coaching is unregulated. Anyone can call themselves a life coach, set a price, and try to sell you something. This has pros and cons. The obvious con is that there are no governing bodies ensuring the quality of coaches. If you are interested in working with a life coach, I would ask what type of training they have done. There are several coaching programs and an International Coaching Federation that does credentialing. It was important to me when setting out on this venture that I was well trained. I completed two courses and obtained an ICF credential. The benefit of being unregulated is that we have much more freedom to actually try to help people. In my primary occupation as an ophthalmologist, the industry is so regulated that all the compliance adherence, documenting, insurance negotiating, and billing actually interferes with the taking care of patients. How refreshing it is for me to meet with someone in my life coaching practice, give them my full attention, give them a generous amount of time per session, then just document the major things for myself to remember for the next session. I feel we both (my client and I) benefit from that freedom.
I actually have no problem with the entrepreneurial spirit seeing needs within an industry and filling them. If someone is naturally good at sales, marketing, or a particular style of coaching, by all means they should create a product and attempt to sell it. I personally hate to sell people on anything, and have no knowledge in marketing. I have read about personal development, self-improvement, and coaching for decades and love it. I could read about coaching and do coaching all day. But I'll take all the help I can get in making it into a business.
Just like in other professions however, there are your unsavory characters and practices. In medicine, education, religion, and law, etc, there are those that are dedicated to bringing their best to others, and to earnestly serving. And there are those that see and take any opportunity to personally financially profit. And sometimes there are people that actually do both. We all must do our research and trust our reliable instincts to guide us away from the surgeon who tries to upsell, the clergy who uses fear-based fundraising, or the fishy overpriced educational course. The problem I see in this article is that it is highlighting people who made repeated poor financial decisions. This can happen with getting college and graduate degrees, with investing in real estate or business ventures, or even just overspending on your lifestyle. It is up to each of us to make responsible decisions with our money and our time. It is true that there are absolutely hard-selling life coaches out there who will try to convince you that paying for life coaching trumps all other things you could possibly pay for. I personally have never been a pushy sales person in any job. I feel that the work should speak for itself and if people are interested, I'd love to help them. If not, they should put their hard earned money towards whatever they find valuable. But ultimately, financial decisions are the responsibility of the person entering the credit card number or writing the check.
Ironically, one of the most valuable pillars of life coaching is recognizing that you are never a victim. Once you really internalize this, you start to take full ownership for your choices, your words, your actions, and your overall life. It is incredibly empowering and can lead to people making many healthy life changes. This article, however, presents the main characters as victims. Exactly the opposite of what the life coaching programs I assume they completed would have tried to teach them.
Life coaching takes its cues from Buddhism, stoicism, and cognitive behavioral therapy. The core ideas date back well over 2000 years and stand the test of time. Cognitive behavioral therapy and life coaching itself have been scrutinized with randomized control trial research studies and have been repeatedly shown to be effective interventions. I know coaching is powerful and that it works. In my own life, the benefits have been many. I stew less, exercise more, procrastinate less, focus on the present more, set firm boundaries with work and my time, refuse to ever feel sorry for myself, don't subscribe to body shaming, and I shrug and laugh a whole lot more. Things that used to seem like major big deals I now recognize are small. And things that used to seem unimportant and small I now recognize as the major big deals. My inner life is very different than it was fifteen years ago, and I have all of this reading and work to thank for it. But just like religion, or weight loss techniques, or financial planning strategies, you do you, boo. Find what speaks to you and what is right for you. Trust your instincts. And don't spend more than you make on any of it.
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