We Need to Talk About Coaching’s Predatory Reputation
In 2016, I started out as a freelance writer. Like most folks new to the wild west of freelancing, I turned to the Internet to learn more about how to turn my skills as a writer into an income. It didn’t take long for the cookies in my browser to shake hands with a vast array of retargeting networks, sending a deluge of targeted ads my way from “coaches.”
You’ve probably seen the ones I’m talking about. 99.99% of the time, it’s a conventionally attractive white guy in a tropical location or a swank penthouse hurriedly assuring you that he has discovered some crazy tricks to accumulate massive wealth, high-paying client lists, or insane revenue growth. Sadly, there just isn’t enough time in the commercial for him to teach you everything, so you have to sign up for his email list or his $1,000 course.
He brands himself as a coach and is happy to throw empty platitudes at you and show you that he knows how to draw marketing funnels (devoid of any details) on a dry erase board. The guys who make these ads are masters at selling folks on the idea of an easily-acquired success and the allure of a passive income. And yet, their only visible credentials or paths to wealth that we see are the courses they sell. I’ve even seen some in which the person in the ad claimed to make $10,000 per month selling courses, and wants to teach you how to do the same– all you have to do is sign up for his course at a discounted rate of $750.
Out of curiosity, I did a bit of research on some of these courses. I looked up the specific personalities in the videos and found virtually nothing– no credentials, no formal training, no awards, no success stories that couldn’t have been copied and pasted from another website. On the contrary, I found reviews indicating that the high-priced course consisted of nothing but information that could have been found in a simple Google search, or encouraged a recruiting mechanism reminiscent of what goes on in MLMs.
The deeper I went down the rabbit hole, the more frustrated I became. I felt angry at the fact that these folks exploited the aspirations and insecurities of others with empty promises and shallow sales tactics; more than that, I was angry to know that they likely profited handsomely off of these sales tactics.
But you know what the biggest plot twist of this journey is?
I’m a coach.
Distinguishing Coaching from “Coaching”
It probably doesn’t make for the best branding to decry the predatory nature of “coaching” and then turn around and call myself a coach, but that’s okay. I think it’s necessary if we’re going to distinguish between coaching and “coaching.”
“Coaching” is what I’ve described above. It’s the vast population of self-proclaimed gurus who make lofty promises of easy wealth, one-week six-packs, and prefabricated business plans that all but guarantee you’ll be making millions in no time. If you’ll indulge me in repeating the word success too many times in a single sentence: these are folks who put on the facade of success to sell others on the idea of success without actually having any other success to back it up. Their secret to success is that they can sell others on the secret to success. That’s it. It doesn’t go deeper.
So, what is coaching (sans-quotation marks)? If you want a textbook definition, I would recommend checking out the International Coaching Federation (ICF) website. By training, I know that I’m supposed to answer this question with an explanation of the co-creative process and powerful questioning. Instead, I think coaching is most easily understood as a form of interactive journaling with built-in accountability.
Starting with my first exposure to “coaching” ads online, I was skeptical of anything branded as life coaching. It was all snake oil to me. In my life, understanding that if something sounds too good to be true it’s because it is has served me well. Up until early 2020, I also hadn’t seen or experienced real coaching, though.
In February of 2020, I had the opportunity to attend a writing retreat that was hosted by one of my favorite recent authors, Sam Horn. The retreat wasn’t branded as group coaching. It was just branded as a writing retreat to help those in attendance clarify the projects we were working on and the direction we wanted to take with those projects.
At the retreat– once I got over the dumbfoundedness of getting one-on-one mentoring from someone I admire– I found myself in an experience where those around me were asking me about my goals and ideas, questioning my assumptions and self-imposed limitations, helping me reframe my perspective, and challenging me to think bigger. Before lunch break on our first day, I was hooked.
When I returned home from the retreat, I decided to learn how to facilitate the kind of growth and self-enrichment that Sam had for me. The idea I once had of “coaching” had completely escaped the forefront of my mind; I had experienced the kind of growth and motivation I had been longing for, and I wanted to dive in head-first. Just a few months later, and I was enrolled in an ICF-accredited coach training program, and completed my 62-hour training program by the end of June.
Out of the coaching program, though, I quickly found myself straddling two separate worlds: the world of professional coaching I had first experienced under Sam Horn’s tutelage, and the world of scammers and con artists who branded what they did as “coaching.”
Making the waters even murkier, I found that within the realm of folks who did consider themselves professional coaches, there was a lot of variability. In various coaching forums and Facebook groups, I would see folks making posts in which they wanted to know how to do cold outreach en masse (ew) or looking for advice on how to treat a client’s mental illness even though they weren’t a credentialed psychologist or healthcare provider. There were seemingly hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in communities that were branded as being for coaching professionals who gave themselves frankly absurd titles and who seemed to brand themselves on the same lofty promises as the “coaches” whose ads flooded my various feeds– they just packaged it in more industry jargon.
On a personal level, it’s hard to not let elitism cloud my vision. Everyone has to start somewhere, and not everybody can afford formal training.
At the same time, when a self-proclaimed “Spiritual Awakening and Personal Fulfillment Coach with a Focus on Divorce, Harnessing Individual Empowerment, and Psychic Awakenings” enthusiastically adopts the moniker of coach and is presented as a coach in the same way that I’m a coach, the field gets muddied. You can still play ball on a muddy field, but you’ll have to expend more energy slogging through the muck to score a goal than you’d like.
How do we Better Define Coaching and Solve These Problems?
I’m not going to pretend that there is an easy solution to solving the problems created by the conflation of co-creative relationships, con artists, and new-age enthusiasts as a singular industry. To say that there is an easy solution would be to step firmly into the territory of trying to sell folks on an idea of something that’s too good to be true. Re-read the first few paragraphs if you’ve forgotten my sentiment on that.
For years now, there has been an ongoing debate within the coaching industry as to whether or not coaching should be more heavily regulated. I’m of the mind that should be, but I also don’t know how much that would do to solve the problems of scammers co-opting the field. Where there’s red tape, there’s a convenient pair of scissors to cut through it. In a world in which coaching is more heavily regulated, I can already see the ads that highlight “the same tools professional coaches use” as a marketing hook.
Beyond that, I’ve also seen it suggested that coaching and coaching organizations should have a greater barrier to entry. More expensive training courses or more extensive programs could certainly deter folks from enrolling, but that leads to the same problems as a more regulated field in which folks claim parity as a marketing tool. Plus, this already exists to an extent– in public coaching forums, there is already a contingency of folks who rail against the ICF and other accrediting bodies, claiming that they can do just as well as a self-taught professional (and they very well may). On a personal level, I’m also not a fan of making it harder for folks to accessing educational opportunities; if only the wealthy and privileged can enter a field, then that field will only exist to serve the interests of the wealthy and privileged.
As a third solution– or perhaps it would be more accurate to refer to it as a pseudo-solution– and the option that I’m sticking with for the time being is to carve out a distinct brand outside of the coach/ “coach” titles. While it has certainly been a hurdle in my efforts to connect with potential new clients, I’ve opted to only rarely refer to myself as a coach. In fact, on my website, one of the variables that I look at in A/B testing in a few locations is the way in which I refer to myself, and whether visitors are more responsive to reading about me as a coach, strategist, or another similar role.
To be honest, it breaks my heart that I, as a fairly new coach, already feel the need to distance myself from coaching in order to also distance myself from predatory practices that have entered the public view of coaching. The experiences that I have had receiving coaching, especially in the context of Sam Horn’s writing retreat, were magical and transformative; there’s nothing I enjoy more than to be able to facilitate those moments for others. And yet, in spite of this, any time I refer to myself as a coach, it comes with a disclaimer.
