The Coaching Profession — An Unregulated Industry That is Getting a Bad Name for Itself

I lost my job because I believed my role was primarily to help people. It wasn’t.

“Somewhere along the way, we must learn that there is nothing greater than to do something for others.” — Martin Luther King

I entered the coaching space in 2019. Primarily, I did it to make money. But I also knew that I had a lot to offer to people who were trying to build a business online, from the practical funnel-building and social media to the mindset training and necessary self-care.

It was a scary space to enter. Putting myself in front of people as an authority felt vulnerable, but I persisted.

I was dead chuffed when, in January 2020, I landed a position in a newly established coaching team with a top social media coach. This was a perfect way to establish myself in the industry and have an endless flow of clients, without having the added stress of marketing myself as someone who was still new to the space.

I threw myself in and was one of the most reliable and dependable members of the team. I was the first to open up my calendar when there were limited spaces, and spent most of each day entering the worlds of others, empathising and guiding.

It did, indeed, turn out to be the perfect way to fully launch into the coaching world but, as I discovered, coaching falls into many different boxes, and I didn’t fit the box I was given.

There is no exact label for what I do. It is essentially called Life Coaching, because that is basically a blanket term for coaching that covers a wide range of niches.

While I hold a certificate in Life Coaching, I don’t typically advertise my services as a Life Coach because, like many who fall under this wide umbrella, my expertise is more niche. I use descriptions such as Business, Mindset, Self-Empowerment, and Creativity to describe how I can offer help and guidance.

During 2020 I coached hundreds of wannabe success stories building their online businesses through the obstacles and challenges on their path. Needless to say, most people shared fairly common obstacles — time restraints due to jobs, family, and lack of self-belief or self-worth. I loved working with these people because I was able to positively impact their self-worth and self-belief every single time.

I was rewarded with amazing feedback and genuine testimonials. One lady declared to the boss coach that her ‘win of the week’ was talking to me and opening up about everything that was going on for her. The reason? I gave her permission and space to cry — that was it. But it was what she needed. I was able to reassure her that we had her back, no matter what, and she was able to pour her heart out and feel heard.

However, eventually, I was asked to step down from the coaching team because, despite the many hours I devoted to the clients, despite the absolute commitment to the meetings, admin, and team, and despite the total commitment I showed to these clients and their emotional needs, I wasn’t upselling enough of them into high-ticket coaching packages.

I wasn’t making the company enough money.

The motivation and the gaslighting are hard to differentiate

Recently, The Guardian did a feature on a Life Coaching Academy. It described the exact dream-selling that our coaching sessions were designed to deliver.

Sadly, this academy sold the coaching profession as a means to become 6-figure earners and the life of their dreams. Within that was a whole lot of gaslighting that, should they not feel that they were getting the value promised by the academy, it was, in fact, their own mind persuading them that the fault lay outside of themselves when it actually lay within their own mindset and belief blocks.

This, to me, is no different from recent scandals surrounding yoga centres where the revered teacher seduced women with sweet-tongued spiritual missives and a belief that they were chosen ones. Stories such as this, this, and this. It is as low down and dirty; coercive and emotionally controlling.

This ambiguity that lies in the field of personal and spiritual development, where the boundaries between personal responsibility and complete brainwashing become blurred, is where the problem in coaching lies. Unfortunately, the company for whom I worked, while being extremely authentic and honest, with extremely high standards, didn’t stop short of the selling model that is driven by greed and will rarely stop at anything to clinch a deal.

Now, I am not here to claim that the company that I worked for was gaslighting people and grabbing their money at every opportunity. It absolutely was not the practice and we delivered exactly what it said on the tin. But we also were required to deliver an additional, unspoken service – one that kept the clients wanting more and, ultimately, spending more.

The coaching packages that we offered really were amazing and absolutely worth every cent. Total guidance, proven strategies, and support were offered freely and generously to paying clients.

But, in order to fully benefit, it was vital that the client was in a position to take the time and action required to gain from every cent they paid. In addition to this, it was imperative that they also were able to invest that money without taking vital resources from their families or homes. Stress caused by money issues is paralysing and, ultimately, undoes all the good work that coaching offers.

For this reason, I remained mindful of what was truly going to benefit the client and used my own power of discrimination.

There is a fine line between inviting people to use one’s services to transform their lives and their businesses and persuading people to part with their hard-earned cash, without being truly honest about the implications. When they are not completely ready or able to really benefit from the coaching, yet lured by the dream that is being dangled in front of them, this is where the ambiguity of our ‘coaching practices’ became apparent.

I am not built to prioritise profit over well-being

The doctrine I rejected and refused to use on the clients was that making the investment was exactly what they needed, even if they were in denial. The problem was that I knew that some of these clients were never going to commit themselves, even if they committed the money. I knew that, for some of these people, investing that kind of money was going to be a highly stressful situation and extremely unhealthy for their mindset and well-being, not to mention the difficulty it could present to their families.

I knew that, despite the fact that good coaching is a powerful means to help someone advance in their business, there are ways that people can decide to generate the money to invest, before throwing themselves in at the deep end.

But, as a coach, that attitude was not welcome. In the coaching world, you are expected to sing the praises of coaching as a means to shortcut one’s entire journey to success, and that meant investing upfront and wasting no more time or unguided action. The unspoken promises being wielded — because you can’t directly make promises — were that clients could fast-track their way to success. Dreams were dangled like carrots, while Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) techniques manipulated them into thinking that they were giving up on themselves by not ‘investing in themselves’.

Having lived through and dealt with three highly manipulative and toxic relationships — one parental, two romantic — I see the red flags and the warning signs of any form of manipulation. Nothing will make me become that person selling a false belief. I will not do it.

While we weren’t selling the dream of coaching — we were coaches teaching people the skills required to build an audience on social media and gain customers through these mediums — we were still selling dreams.

There was a doctrine in the training that we underwent that never, and I repeat never, took any angle other than that the coaching that we offered was the best and only option that they truly had right now to change their lives. We were taught to use NLP techniques to lead them to believe that the life they were leading right now was less than satisfactory and a long way from their desired outcome and goal. That the only viable answer was to bite the bullet and hand over $3,000.

The clients’ objections always had a prescribed response — scripts saved in Google Docs ready for any occasion— and we were taught to see these objections as mere mind-games to talk themselves out of investing and justify their decisions. Our job was to illustrate this, to let them know that we could see right through their excuses, that we understood, but cared enough to show them that this was what was going on so that they didn’t waste this opportunity to get the help they needed for just $3,000.

At no point was the coaching conversation ever designed to listen to what they might really need help with in this moment.

If there isn’t just a bit of gaslighting going on there, then I will eat this article.

So, I lost my job, because I gave the clients the services that I believed were what a client should expect from a coach. I gave them the best of me, my empathy, and my ability to decipher emotional blocks.

I lost my job because I gave the clients reason to believe that they were capable of doing anything, whether or not they paid for coaching.

I gave the clients reason to believe that because they couldn’t afford to pour money that they didn’t have into a pipe dream that may or may not work out for them, they could muster enough fire and motivation to find their path to grow their businesses — even if it happened slowly. I gave the clients reason to feel supported in allowing that growth to be slow and steady, rather than the disempowering saying thrown around that ‘success loves speed’.

I gave the clients reason to believe that growth can and will take a lifetime, and that’s completely okay. That there is not one unbreakable boundary between success and failure that sits on the one decision that they make right now about whether or not to invest a huge amount of money. And that decision is not the make or break of them; no matter what decision they make right now, the endless possibilities before them remain just as much within their grasp.

The leader of the coaching team who recruited and trained us to be the best that we could be to serve his client was torn when it came to me. He was tasked with reducing the number of coaches, since he no longer required the service of all twelve of us, and I was the one he didn’t want to have to say those words to.

He discussed the issue that I didn’t put profit first, with the hope…the invitation to change my mind and my approach. I declined.

I gave up a good and reliable source of income to pursue my own dreams with integrity.

I have clients, though I have to find them and retain them alone.

I hope that the authenticity and ethics that I bring to them and the sessions I deliver affect them positively, and guide them in the best, if not the most profitable, way.

Coaching may be an unregulated industry but I have standards, and I will continue to stick by them.

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