Is Life Coaching Bullshit?
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Main Feature: What’s the deal with life coaching? - Seinfeld Voice
Personal and Professional Updates
Is Life Coaching Bullshit?
“Everyone’s weird aunt that is a bit off-their-rocker is inevitably a part-time ‘Life Coach’,” joked a colleague.
This barb came in the midst of a discussion on coaching executives who wind up discovering the desire for a career change during their coaching engagement. The conversation – when does executive coaching morph into career coaching? – sparked a larger discourse on the state of the coaching industry.
Inevitably, life coaching came up. Which made me uncomfortable. Because while I would rarely acknowledge it publicly (hello? anyone here?), I must confess that when I hear that someone is a ‘life coach’ my natural reaction is one of slight skepticism.
Okay, that’s not really fair – I’m hedging because I don’t want to upset anyone. Let me be more honest and direct: my gut reaction is an outright eye roll.
Since I took my first courses on executive coaching over a decade ago, I’ve been skeptical of the life coaching trade. Coaching someone on… life? At best, paying for life coaching struck me as paying for overpriced friendship. At worst, dangerously untrained clinical psychotherapy. If executive coaching is Western Medicine, life coaching is homeopathic naturalism: it might offer the occasional remedy but it’s generally a spurious enterprise.
As it often does, this criticism may say much more about the criticizer (me) and their insecurities than it offers insight into the topic at hand. Is my dismissal of life coaching just an attempt to legitimize my own trade – executive coaching and development – by comparison? Perhaps it’s just a case of projection. By “othering” life coaching am I trying to reify my own validity?
This is entirely possible – if not probable. I’ll own that.
But I can’t help thinking that my skepticism might be warranted. Even if my snarkiness toward life coaching can be reduced to professional competitiveness and imposter syndrome, I might still be right – even if tangentially – that life coaching is, well, bullshit. So it was worth it to investigate with more rigor.
An Artificial Distinction
My main criticism of the profession is that life coaching is just friendly advice and question-posing that amounts to untrained psychotherapy.
The top Google search results on the topic include articles and blogs that list out the key differences between life coaching and psychotherapy. They include statements – like this one from NaturalHealers.com – offering that “coaching explores what you want to create. Therapy explores what you want to fix.” The popular website Zencare concludes that “therapy is rooted in the past and present; [life] coaching focuses on the future” and “therapy helps you learn to heal; coaching empowers you to achieve goals.” The extremely popular Tony Robbins’ website also argues that “therapy involves more unstructured sessions that are guided by the client as well as the type of therapy. Life coaching sessions are much more structured and focused on actionable strategies and visible growth.”
(Zencare also advises that “when assessing fit with a therapist, prioritize your comfort level and their expertise; for life coaches, seek inspiration and check credentials.” Talk about a distinction without a difference!)
In sum, the loudest proponents of life coaching attempt to distinguish it as shorter-term, highly-structured conversations that are forward-looking and next-behavior-focused. Psychotherapy, by contrast, gets pigeonholed primarily as an exercise on uncovering one’s past.
This is a straw-man argument that drastically undersells psychotherapy. While it is true that the historical underpinnings of clinical psychotherapy are in traditional psychoanalysis (think: laying on Freud’s couch and unpacking your childhood), this is a massive oversimplification of psychotherapy. (Famously, in a seminal address that then-president of the American Psychological Association, Martin Seligman, delivered at the APA’s annual meeting in 1998, Seligman offered that the field of psychology had been far too focused on human deficiency and neuroses and largely ignored it’s pre-World War II mission to enhance human flourishing. This, in part, gave rise to the study of what is often called ‘positive psychology’ and helped clinical therapy focus on optimizing life rather than managing sub-normative experiences.)
Modern psychotherapy is far more diverse in focus, methodology, and structure than old school Freudian analysis. Clinical psychologists are not just personal historians trying to help you write a better autobiography. Attempts to understand one’s past, relationships, behaviors, fears, etc. are all in the service of a better life moving forward. Which is, if you read these articles, supposedly the exclusive domain of life coaching.
This is not to say that there are no meaningful differences between therapy and life coaching. Yes, clinical psychotherapy is the sole domain of working through diagnosable mental illnesses in ways life coaching is explicitly not. I’d also agree, as many of the articles illustrate, that life coaching is more likely to be short-term whereas therapy can be a much longer-term project (although current insurance demands keep pushing clinical therapy patients towards short-term care that often fails to yield sustained results, but that’s an article for another time).
Overall, however, these distinctions between therapy and life coaching fall short of meaningful. Even if we imagine counseling on a continuum – on one end, focusing entirely on uncovering the past (therapy), and on the other focusing entirely on creating the future (life coaching) – that simply suggests that participants would be better off utilizing the training of a clinical psychologist to further their development. Given that we’ve dispelled the myth that therapists don’t help you focus on your future, why settle for a counselor of the life coach variety?
Everyday Counter-evidence
At this point, my bullshit-o-meter is flashing red. But there is some important empirical evidence staring me right in the face: People do get benefit from life coaching. Many people! And quite frequently!
Life coaching has grown in demand. I myself know of people who have unquestionably benefited from life coaching. I know a handful of people that offer life coaching who I trust deeply. Sure, it’s irrational to argue that life coaching must be valid simply because there is demand – plenty of products and services are empty calories nonetheless in high demand. But if life coaching had no efficacy it would be relegated to the likes of fortune telling and palm reading rather than the mainstream professional world, no?
Outside Wisdom
Searching for more perspective, I decided to pose the question to others I trusted. I opted to reach out to my friend and colleague Jay Caputo. Jay developed and runs his own coaching certification program and has spent countless hours coaching others. He’s the perfect person to weigh in on the topic. So I asked him point blank “Is life coaching bullshit?” and he responded, as always, with some wisdom:
I’m not at all uncomfortable saying that I agree with you… most of it does seem like bullshit. The industry is unregulated by most standards and therefore wide open to wild inconsistencies at best and abuse at worst. Fortunately, the abuses aren't likely leading to any real damage, psychological or otherwise, though that would be very difficult to measure. What is more likely happening is that a lot of people are paying for coaching and instead receiving well intentioned, non-expert advise.
The context “life” is just way too big. And who is qualified to be a coach about all of life? Jesus? The Buddha? (You see where I’m going with this.)
The reality on the ground is that most professional coaches who have been trained or certified in a legitimate way do have some sort of niche or specialty but often not just one, so the easiest term to use to encompass more than one focus is “life.”
For example, my wife was certified as an anti-human trafficking coach in which she learned in a formal and rigorous way how to support women who were caught up in the legal system often under charges of prostitution who were actually victims of human sex trafficking. They wanted a way out of that world and needed support from someone who could both empathize with them and work with them to design plans of action to put themselves on the right track to create the life they wanted. Sometimes the best support person in these cases is a qualified therapist, sometimes a qualified coach… often a blend of both. But my wife doesn’t just coach people within this context. She also coaches many others who have very different life experiences, needs, goals and aspirations. What should she call herself?
Whenever anyone has ever referred to me as a “life coach” (which is now rare), I’ve been quick to correct them and point out that regarding the part of my work that includes coaching, it’s not the focus that’s important (career, health, “life”, etc.) but rather the approach that matters more. I was trained to a transformative philosophy within my work as a coach, and often as a trainer. I realize the word “transformative” can seem every bit as vague as “life,” so to clarify, it stems from the three distinct approaches to mediation (part of my formal training)…
1- Facilitative: mediator asks questions of parties in conflict to guide them in finding their own solution;
2- Evaluative: mediator has some relevant expertise that they directly use in assisting the parties to make the best decision possible, or make the decision for them;
3- Transformative: applies the facilitative method yet includes questions regarding the quality of the underlying relationship between the parties in conflict so that they can not only come to resolution with their existing situation but also better understand their core differences and underlying needs that may have contributed to the conflict to begin with… the stuff below the surface evidence.
This approach gives the parties new territory to work on that can better equip them to deal with future conflicts… transforming the relationship itself (long-term), not just solving problems in the short-term.
My approach to coaching is aligned with the transformative philosophy… not simply supporting clients to achieve their short-term goals but also to transform their most important relationships along the way. For in the end, every goal a person has is immovably linked to (and sometimes dependent upon) at least one other person. Similarly, every type (focus) of coaching exists within the larger scope of life itself. Let’s just hope that those out there calling themselves “life coaches” aren’t as lazy as the title implies.
So What?
I’ve concluded that I’m being too harsh. I remain skeptical about the life coaching industry, which is far too unregulated given its vague and weak distinctions from psychotherapy. But I can see how this form of counseling could absolutely be valuable and worth the investment.
So where do I come down on the essential question: Is life coaching bullshit? No, that’s not fair. But it is a bit of the wild west – you’re much more likely to find bullshit and bullshit artists in the trade. So approach with caution!
Personal & Professional Updates
You may have noticed that I’ve started releasing a video series called ‘Org Bites’. I’m trying out new ways to provide some quick insight and ideas and this is my latest attempt. I have genuinely no idea how these are landing so please do take a minute to let me know what you think – good and bad – as well as what you’d like to see more/less of. Please!
I’m keeping this section short this month. Much more to come next time, I promise!