Is life coaching quackery?
TLDR - the verdict is out.
What I used to think life coaching was:
Paying for friendship.
False promises that cause harm.
Unsupervised charismatic people giving bad advice to vulnerable people. Or, if I’m being really honest,
A silly waste of money for people who are not smart enough to figure out their lives themselves.
Until recently, my only frame of reference for life coaching was horror stories from friends of friends trying out a coach and it being ‘meh’, at best, or going horribly awry, at worst. That friend whose neurodivergent brother tried a career coach who gave him terrible advice that set back his confidence; that friend’s husband who went to a leadership coach at work who just kept telling him to find the answers “inside himself”, when he was stuck and couldn’t think of any solutions himself and needed help.
Then add the media portrayals of life coaches being long haired, unserious, spirituality-lite gurus who slowly whisper paradoxical platitudes like “you must go in… to go out”. MMMMM. AHHHH. The crowd sighs. Such wisdom.
Serious people like me, I would tell myself, laugh at people who are so easily swayed by these quacks. Right? I’m too smart to fall for this “life coachery” scam.
But then I met Jess. She’s the CEO of the company I work for and a seasoned executive coach. Almost everyone she meets could write a before and after transformative life story that has, smack dab in the middle of it, this sentence: “But then I met Jess”. Being coached by Jess is a watershed moment in the lives of countless people. Including me.
After I met her and started working with her, she would coach me without me knowing it. Her management style is coaching first then work. And the empowerment it offered me started seeping into my mindset. Maybe I was capable. Maybe I was deserving. Those new beliefs led me to find a therapist. Believing I was worthy helped me reach out to a nutritionist. I started working on myself and making plans for a beautiful future I slowly started to believe could be for me.
And then she kept insisting I could be a great coach too. “You have what it takes”, she would say, “you’re a natural.” A couple years of that kind of unwavering belief, and several months of learning how to coach under her tutelage made me go out and start looking at life coaching training programs.
Because the cognitive dissonance was starting to grate. How could life coaching be all quackery if my experience being coached was truly transforming my life… could this thing be… real? Effective? Helpful? Maybe even… pause for dramatic effect… legit?
The life coach role is only recently becoming better understood in the cultural zeitgeist. But still, some people like me, have almost no frame of reference for professional coaching outside of the above examples or a loosely held comparison to sports coaches.
Even still, people mistake life coaching for therapy. Others mistake it for consulting. Some look to coaches to get them jobs or become better entrepreneurs. Some people know that managers have coaches, but only after they’ve been put on a performance plan, so no thank you to that. Others know that executives have coaching because it’s a status symbol to be able to pay thousands of dollars an hour to have someone in your corner.
So, is life coaching legit or is it quackery?
What I’ve learned is that it’s both.
Professional coaching is a bit of free for all. It is not a regulated or accredited profession. Literally anyone can say “I’m a life coach”. Your super toxic aunt who always body shames you and never takes responsibility for her actions could set up shop and start charging people for life advice and call herself a life coach. Your egocentric manager at work who mansplains to everyone around him, yells profanities at the interns and refuses to answer the phones because he’s “too important” for that kind of work can also call himself a leadership coach.
Organizations like the International Coaching Federation and others like it have taken on the gargantuan (profitable?) task of reigning in and standardizing the professional coaching world. They have set up standards, codes of ethics, accreditation for coach training schools and ongoing continuing education for coaches. They take the work seriously. As they should. Unqualified coaches can do a lot of harm.
But not every coach out there is a quack. In fact, some of them are doing incredible, life changing work. Coaches are helping people recover from addictions, get big promotions that provide financial stability, resolve ongoing conflicts that improve quality of life, find capacity for a hopeful life after grief and loss, and generally cope with life in 2024.
Coaches can give you space to explore your own values and beliefs so you can make better decisions and hold better boundaries. They can hold you accountable to your own goals and plans and transform “I wish” to “I can”. They can help you reframe helplessness to find where your power lies. They can support you through leadership challenges and personal setbacks.
They also can’t do some things. They can’t diagnose, heal or treat you. If you are struggling with depression or anxiety or panic attacks or other mental health struggles - that’s what therapy and psychologists can help with. They can’t tell you what to do. That’s what consultants do. And they can’t do your work for you.
A good coach helps you. A great coach helps you find your own power to help yourself. (Insert my own internal MMMM. AHHHHH. Such wisdom. Ok, so maybe there’s a teensy bit of paradoxical platitudes… I couldn’t help myself.)
So, here is where I’ve landed. Is life coaching:
Paying for friendship? It can be but it shouldn’t be. A life coach shouldn’t validate your self-pity or bash your exes with you. That’s what friends are for.
False promises that cause harm? It can be, but it shouldn’t be. A life coach can’t promise you anything except an intentional listening ear and a set of curious questions that help you get to your own awareness.
Unsupervised charismatic people giving bad advice? It can be, but it shouldn’t be. A life coach shouldn’t be giving you answers - their job is to help you find your own in a way that is aligned with your values and goals. Their job is empowerment not dependence.
A silly waste of money? It can be… but that’s not my experience. If you can find a great coach, trust me, it will be worth it.
So how do you know if a coach is legit?
Here are a few questions to reflect on:
When I met this coach for the first time, were they curious about me and my story and goals?
Have I left our sessions with greater awareness or perspective on my situation that I came to myself with their guidance or did they tell me what to think about it?
Do I feel shamed, blamed, confused and unheard, or safe, understood, challenged but clear on what’s next?
Have I been able to apply what we talk about in sessions to my real life in ways that make things more aligned and meaningful to me?
Finding coaches who have received coach training and education and a certification like the ICF accreditation can help you filter out who is qualified and going to be a good coach. But not all great coaches have gone that route because, and let me tease my next piece in this series… coaching and becoming a coach has largely been the practice of people with access to resources. Or so it seems.
Stay tuned for more on that.
What tips you off to who is out here selling quackery and who is legit? (And don’t say baby life coaches writing pieces about life coaching on Substack. I get it.)