Life Coaches and Money – That is an interesting one and I doubt that those two concepts are related! (Thank you Grumpy Cat!)
Short Answer: NO. Not Really in my Experience.
Please don’t think I am being a “Hater” or anything. I am just being dead honest with you as almost never do I see actual “Life Coaches” make it these days. Very very few actually make it part time, let alone make it a full time profession and there are a range of contributing factors to this result.
If you consider what Coaching actually means, I can tell you from first experience why few pay for it:
– Because most think it’s silly, “Life Coaches” rarely practice what they preach and asking people a bunch of stupid questions about how they feel is not only pointless but insults people’s intelligence.
This is what I came to today when I was speaking with the Awesome Mariane Barakat and this is the reality of what the market tends to think when it comes to “Life Coaching”. Personally I couldn’t agree more, the “Traditional Model” of Life Coaching I think is incredibly lame and I am hardly alone in this view.
What I have personally found and observed is that no one in their right mind pays for “Life Coaching”. They pay for “Awesome Results” and this is where I find the people who actually make it aren’t “Coaches” at all. They are usually the “Mentors & Consultants” who just tell people straight up the answers.
If you have read some of my previous articles, I actually did a Life Coaching Course from a Private College in Melbourne. I am a Marketing Mentor / Consultant and I found some of it to be great, but some of it to be completely lame. A lot of the training was around asking people at times silly questions about how they feel – instead of just cutting to the chase with the answer.
What I have found today is that if people are say paying me $250 / Hour, they want the answer there and then! Not for me to walk them through some time wasting process of self-discovery.
This reminds me of funny story from my Life Coaching Course. As part of the studies we form these phone groups of three called “Triads”. Basically you practice coaching one student while another Senior Coach gives feedback. I had 3 x rounds of this with Senior Coaches and the first 2 x rounds were fantastic!
I had a Coach by the name of Sean who was really a mentor. An intelligent and successful driven business owner who was called a “Coach” but was hardly that. He was a pillar of advice and just cut to the chase. I then had another coach which was brilliant too.
But the last one! To hide her identity she totally sucked and had no idea whatsoever. The other two Senior Coaches complimented my skills and this evil woman I had told me to say to my practice client the following. This is NO KIDDING too, she told me exactly to say this word for word as far as I can remember:
– So what Goal do you want to achieve?
– If you achieved this goal, how would it feel?
– How would it taste?
– How would it look?
– How would it smell?
And so forth! I am not kidding, the first time she asked me to do this I thought it was a complete joke. When I did it, the practice student thought I was a complete idiot. This woman then tried to push me around and then I went and complained to the private college and she backed off.
This is the Life Coaching Stereotype I am talking about. Actual “Life Coaches” that know what they are doing are reasonable people that know the answers of how to get through challenges in life. They are more Mentors in my opinion in that they aren’t asking you pointless questions, but just telling you awesome answers.
However, this woman who pushed me around had no idea. And later on I found out she didn’t even have any “Real Clients” – gee! What an expert I was listening too?
In short, I think that many Life Coaches out there completely fail because they just ask silly questions – they don’t actually give great answers to help people solve their problems once and for all.
My advice? If you are in this industry and call yourself a Coach or Not – please don’t mess people around with pointless commentary and questions – just be straight up and give them awesome advice.
Hope this helps! Mentoring Rules and go Coaching where people give straight up answers!
Edward Zia – Marketing MENTOR. Not Coach. Yay!
2 Responses
I couldnt agree more Edward. I too took a course as a Life Coach and was very disappointed with how much it was based around the dream of earning 6 and 7 figure incomes. When the reality is out of all the people I trained with, the best is struggling to earn $40 an hr and he is one of the few genuine people who desires to help. Despite this he still struggles to get clients. Those who need him the most have little money.
The rest of us are back to doing the normal 9-5 and helping a select few friends for free. The truth is you need a lot of experience to become a true Life Coach, not just a course and some “different questions”.
I salute the few who are prepared to do the work to become excellent.
Thank you David for that frank Answer and sorry to hear you had that experience. It’s exactly that I think and the Coaching itself I think is fairly overdone by the market. You really need something quite exceptional from your old life that is a skill that people want. I was very lucky to bring my own Marketing Mentoring experience from my old life which has totally rocked. Great post! I think that college really did push the dream, but the actual financial results from logical mechanics is something else. Nice one!