Hundreds of thousands of people currently claim to be life coaches, offering their services to anyone looking for help with their creativity, their career or even their confidence. Many are accredited and eager to help you, but some appear to be total charlatans, writes Hannah Ewens
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ithin minutes of my session with Andrea Crowder, one of the world’s top women’s business coaches, she asks me a question that she poses daily to herself and her clients: “Am I making decisions today that my 80-year-old self would thank me for?”
My eyes closed, I’m told to feel into my future self. I imagine her hands are wrinkled and wrapped in a soft pink knit sweater. I possess a quiet sense of satisfaction, shaped by a life of writing and lessons learnt. Right now, though, in the present, I’m feeling unable to connect with the work I’m doing – a common feeling I hope Crowder can help me untangle. I want to identify a way to care enough about what I produce to break through the barrier I have to self-promotion. Put simply: I write articles like these and then often don’t share them or talk about them online.
With a cool but approachable demeanour, Crowder specialises in coaching high-earning, high-achieving female entrepreneurs. She works remotely from her home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and promises transformation in “mind, body, spirit and bank account”, aiming to guide women to financial success through pleasure rather than relentless hustle. While talking to her over Zoom, I feel myself slipping into a calm, almost hypnotic state. “My clients call me human Xanax without the side effects,” she says with a laugh when I tell her this. “If I can make you feel more regulated, you’ll go and do the thing that makes you happy.” She manages to gain my trust quickly: I feel like I know where I stand with her. She’s someone I would want to share a bottle of wine with but who’d give me a stern talking to if I overstepped a boundary.
While I’m a freelance journalist – a kind of entrepreneur, I suppose – I certainly do not fit in Crowder’s typical bracket of clientele. I could’ve hired a creative career coach, or a writing coach, or a small business coach, or even a confidence coach; the market is now saturated with coaches specialising in almost anything you can think of. If you follow lifestyle podcasts or influencers, you’ve probably noticed that coaching is being marketed everywhere. It seems like everyone high-achieving has a coach now, evangelising about them rather than mentioning, say, a good therapist. This isn’t simply an observation: a significant study released last year by the International Coaching Federation found that in 2022, the estimated number of coach practitioners reached 109,200 – a staggering 54 percent increase on the 2019 estimate. But what does the reality of this coaching boom mean for us, the potential clients?
The industry remains unregulated, which means anyone can call themselves a coach, often blurring the lines between mentoring, consulting and genuine coaching. “There’s a big difference between a consultant and a coach,” Crowder cautions. “A consultant is teaching you a skill set and you’re learning to duplicate what it is that they are doing. A coach is going to help you figure out what you want and get there in your way.” The issue with the word “coach” becoming a nebulous catch-all is that people are paying for a service that may not deliver on the promised transformation. This also means that the ICF’s reported figures likely underestimate the true number of coaches, making the industry difficult to track and understand.
Real accredited coaching isn’t about giving advice, but about helping clients unlock their potential through deep questioning. Sharon Lawton, head of training and development at The Coaching Academy, the leading UK provider of accredited life coaching, explains, “Questions allow the client to take the opportunity to step back, take things from a different perspective, have language patterns reflected back to them that they’re not aware of using that might potentially be sabotaging their successes.” She advises only working with coaches fully accredited by an external coaching body, as she considers the alternative unethical on the coaches’ part. A coach herself, she truly believes in the power of this approach. “We’re much more motivated as human beings to execute actions based on the ideas that we have discovered for ourselves, with the help of probing and challenging questions, than the actions we’ve been told to do by somebody else,” she explains. “The internal motivator is very different.”
The coaching industry leads you to believe that spending large amounts of money is going to be the thing that makes you successful
Business owner Lisa Haukom, 51, had a wholly positive experience with her coach (Susanna Merrick), partly because she went in with specific goals: to help her create a PR media package for her company, The Golden Brand, and to prepare to write a book. “It was an eight-week, finite process. We’d have our calls and I’d go away and implement and integrate,” she says. “I don’t believe in working long term with somebody. In this day and age, we’re being told that we need a coach to get us to the ‘next level’ and I don’t necessarily agree with that, especially for just blanket coaches. I choose the people I work with really thoughtfully to enhance the thing I’m trying to bring out.”
However, there is a growing online community of people who’ve been burnt by coaching experiences (see the LifeCoachSnark subreddit forum for plentiful examples of scams or coaches charging £300,000 a year). Danielle Ryan, 32, had two negative coaching experiences that left her feeling foolish and isolated. The second coach encouraged her to start a coaching career for yoga businesses, despite the fact she was making less than £20,000 a year as a yoga instructor. “I never told anyone – other than my accountant who saw my bank statements – about the money I had spent on coaching because I was embarrassed of making such a seemingly bad ‘investment’,” says Ryan. It was that shame that drove her to start running a YouTube channel where she exposes the tricks of the fraudulent side of the coaching industry. “The coaching industry leads you to believe that spending large amounts of money is going to be the thing that makes you successful and failure to do so is what’s ‘keeping you small’ or ‘unable to be successful’. As a business owner now of over six years I can very clearly see that this is not true, but at the time I didn’t know any better.”
The pandemic, which drove people to seek purpose during uncertainty, coincided with the industry’s massive growth. “Not only was coaching this great opportunity for personal development, but now it was being marketed as the shortcut to financial success during uncertain and unprecedented times,” says Ryan. “With so many people looking for answers, the promise of self-made success resonated strongly.”
Marketing expert Máire O Sullivan, who lectures on multi-level marketing (MLM) schemes at Munster Technological University, studies the coaching industry’s MLM-like aspects. As in Ryan’s case, she’s noticed a pattern where “coaches are coaching coaches to coach coaches”. “There are fantastic coaches out there, but there’s a spectrum,” she says. “Some coaches might veer into ‘woo woo’ territory or manifestation or make unrealistic promises, like the dream of working from a tropical island.” She suggests investigating whether life coaches promising high incomes are genuinely making that amount by checking public records, such as Companies House in the UK.
If you’re seeking a reputable coach, Lawton recommends looking for one who offers a free discovery call to gauge compatibility. In sessions, the client should do most of the talking and feel empowered by the partnership. Don’t hesitate to ask for testimonials or case studies from previous clients to get a clearer sense of the results achieved.
Ultimately, Crowder feels that a coach should deliver tangible results quickly. “If you’re not winning with me, go with someone else,” she says. While she believes that success is co-created with client and coach, Crowder is wary of coaches who place accountability with the client. “The coach should be able to help someone move,” she says. “If they don’t win, it’s my loss, not their loss.”
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