UCWG 036: Isn’t Life Coaching Kind of Bullshit?

Life coaching is an industry notoriously rampant with frauds and con artists who spout magic and creates cycles of dependency in the clients who come to them for help with their personal problems. They rarely teach systematic solutions and genuinely help people reach new levels of independent thinking. Their income depends on their clients coming back to them over and over for more coaching, instead of moving on to greater things.

Marc Mawhinney is a coach who coaches coaches, helping them build better business models and promote themselves in their quests to tell other people how to live. He joins Gregory to discuss what’s right and what’s wrong with this strange and modern industry.

According to Marc, a professional coach is just someone who helps someone else accomplish a specific goal. Marc believes that coaches who offer real value in the attainment of strategic goals should price their services on packages related to those goals, not act as an ongoing crutch for emotional support.

Lesser-known life coaches fall into the trap of mimicking the actions and personalities of the big players in the industry. After the release of Tony Robbins’ recent documentary, I Am Not Your Guru, coaches across the industry seemed to adopt his salty language and outgoing personality overnight.

Clients who seek out life coaches should work with them for a finite amount of time to overcome a specific obstacle, so that they avoid the temptation to fall into a dependency cycle with their influence. The goal of any truly good teacher, mentor, guru, or master is to obsolete himself, so that his student, mentee, apprentice, or Padawan rises up to replace or surpass him. Even parents are subject to addiction to their social authority, being unwilling to step back when the time is right.

The coaching industry, as a whole, is suspicious because legitimately talented guides are lumped into the same category as overhyped motivational speakers, deluded people channelling fallacious spiritual entities, cult phenomenon, and outright con artists. The good teachers who are in a position to help people make huge leaps forward in their personal lives become overshadowed and stereotyped.

The single most important qualification a life coach can have is not their age, their price, their popularity, or any specific certification. It is their success at a specific task they claim to have mastery with. If they have done the thing you wish to be able to do, and have the skill of teaching, it may be a worthwhile endeavour to learn from them. The coach either  needs to have completed a difficult journey pertaining to

Things mentioned:

Natural Born Coaches:

http://www.naturalborncoaches.com/

The Coaching Jungle Facebook group:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheCoachingJungle

The Landmark Forum:

http://www.landmarkworldwide.com/

Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler:

https://www.amazon.com/Stealing-Fire-Maverick-Scientists-Revolutionizing-ebook/dp/B01GCCT3G6

Tony Robbins’ I Am Not Your Guru documentary:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5151716/

https://www.netflix.com/title/80102204

Abraham Hicks:

http://www.abraham-hicks.com/