The life coach con: Can you really trust someone to solve your problems?

A friend I know and admire recently booked to see a life coach for help in making some key decisions. Sadly, the session proved less than fruitful. In fact, ‘it was a total waste of time and money’, apparently.

But as life coaches have been rumoured to have been used by the likes of Bill Clinton, Jennifer Aniston, Madonna and Kylie Minogue, I wanted to get to the heart of this growing industry and find out a little more about it.

There are courses in life coaching advertised in the back of magazines. Recently, I saw one that claimed you could ‘qualify’ in six days, at a cost of £1,760.

I use the inverted commas because the odd thing is that despite being a mass-market, multi-million-pound industry, it is entirely unregulated.

There is no supervisory body or universal standard of practice or training, so, in reality, you can’t really be ‘qualified’. Anyone can call themselves a life coach – and they can’t be struck off.

Before I ring the number for my course, I do a Google search on ‘life coach’. More than 98 million results are returned.

Apparently, it all began in the U.S. about 20 years ago, and it has been estimated that there are more than 100,000 coaches now practising in Britain.

The job, it seems, is to assist people in achieving their goals – whether these are to lose weight, make a career decision or select where they go on holiday.

I ring the number advertised. The company – which for legal reasons I’m not naming – claims to use ‘accelerated learning techniques’ to get students qualified quickly.

They claim other courses slow the process down by getting their students to read ‘five books upwards’.

The man I speak to tells me they’ve been used by the National Health Service, the house of Commons and Kensington & Chelsea Borough Council. What, I wonder, are these bodies getting for the taxpayers’ money?

The man tells me that I sound like a ‘people-person’ and I’d make a good coach. It’s a fairly snap judgement on his part – especially when you consider we’ve been talking for only two minutes.

When he offers me a place on the course, I tell him I need to check some dates, but he takes this as indecisiveness.

He tells me to decide quickly because there’s only one space left. Over the next few days, I get pestered by phone calls encouraging me to sign up.

This hard sell is nearly enough to put me off, but when I relent the pressure changes.

They, want the money now – nine weeks before the course begins. I counter-offer a deposit. he sounds unconvinced, but says a third of the price will do. I pay £586 and am committed to paying the rest in three weeks’ time.

I hear nothing until the balance is due, when I receive an email and three calls asking for money. I pay up and hear no more until the course begins. When I learn from one of the tutors that the company was set up by a former timeshare salesman, it all slots into place.

On day one I report to an anonymous-looking office building in Central London, which I imagine has been hired by the day.

The air inside is stale, as if no one has been there for a while. There are 14 of us on the course, eight men and six women – among them a wild-eyed criminal law barrister who wants global fame as an inspirational speaker, a quantity surveyor and a secondary school teacher. Most of my fellow students are in their late 30s and 40s.

Apparently, the course was popular with bankers after the economic crash. It’s not surprising. A life coach can charge anything for their services. At one point in this course, I am told that a coach was paid £5,000 for a 45-minute session with a major businessman who needed to make a quick decision.

For a more typical one-off, individual, hour-long session, life coaches can get around £130.

As the class settles down in front of flip-chart easels and chairs, it feels like we are about to receive a company sales briefing.

One of our four tutors, Anne, a businesslike woman in her early 40s, exuberantly welcomes us. She tells us she knows something about us – that we are all elite, ‘or you wouldn’t be here’.

Anne actually knows very little about us except our names; I didn’t have to disclose educational qualifications or work history. She certainly doesn’t know I’m a journalist.

Another tutor, Kay, says, ‘we are going on a magical journey’ and that ‘we will see changes within ourselves’. Rachel, the third instructor, was a police officer for 30 years. John is a former chef who has worked in a bank.

On day one we learn what a life coach is – someone who helps people help themselves. The tutors define what a coach does, or rather, doesn’t do.

We are not mentors, counsellors or consultants. We don’t direct, advise, analyse, judge or look into the past. All our questions should be open- ended and not leading or suggestive. ‘How would you feel if that happened? What do you think you could do to change that?’ The client should provide all the answers to their problems themselves.

We’re instructed to follow a method of questioning called TGROW, which stands for Topic, Goal, Reality, Options, Way forward. These five areas will form the key weapons in our life-coach arsenal.

There’s a lot of jargon. We will be in a ‘learning cycle’ and discover how to ‘walk our talk’.

I lost count of the amount of times someone was told to ‘park that’ – meaning hold on to a thought for a day or two.

We’re set to work ‘coaching’ almost straight away. We don’t coach real clients, but practise our techniques on each other.

I am paired with fellow coach-to-be ‘Jennifer’, who is not without her own issues. She is obsessed with making a ‘to do’ list and gets stressed by having to complete all of the tasks on it.

‘How would you feel if you didn’t make lists?’ I ask. She says she must make lists.

According to TGROW, we have to agree a course of action to help her achieve her goal. She suggests she could take some items off and ‘transfer them to the second list’.

‘What second list?’ I ask. ‘I have four,’ she says. ‘You didn’t tell me that you had other lists,’ I say, breaking away from the non-judgmental approach.

‘I suppose I could colour-code the lists, then, in order of importance.’I begin to laugh.

She laughs and looks less stressed. The trainer passing by tells me off and says: ‘You must never laugh at people’s problems.’ Instead, you must get your clients to leave with a goal. That way, the client feels like they’ve achieved something.

A demonstration is given to show how an experienced coach handles a session. The coach looks uncomfortable. At one point he thanks his coachee for smiling.

They discuss the coachee’s wish to lose weight. The coach repeatedly asks him what he could do to achieve this. eventually, he agrees to go for a bike ride. Since the suggestion comes from the client and he already owns a bike, it seems that all he’s done is announce his intention of riding it.

Most of the fellow students I talk to are dissatisfied in their jobs. They all have something in common: they want to change their lives and are attracted to the idea of being their own boss, helping others and qualifying for a professional career within a week.

We’re a group of mixed abilities. Some seem to have a talent for asking open-ended questions and identifying a small goal for their client, while others appeared to lack basic empathy.

I had a feeling that no matter how bad I, or anyone else, was at coaching, we would still walk out of the door clutching a certificate after the six days. I was right. One of my fellow students missed a day and still left with his diploma.

There’s an emphasis on the money-making potential of coaching, and much of the course seems to be an exercise in stating the obvious. We have a very long class on how to establish ‘rapport’. Apparently, we ‘only like people who are like ourselves’ – so we are encouraged to ape clients’ body language and speech patterns.

The odd thing about life coaching is that you know little about the background of the person helping you.

When you see a doctor, you can be pretty sure he’s got a medical degree or two. But if you see a life coach, they may have ‘qualified’ in just a few hours and have less ability to assist you than your next door neighbour or the woman from the Post Office.

Tags: Kylie Minogue, Lifecoaches

Posted by Tom Mitchelson on Monday, September 6th, 2010 at 5:56 pm.

Filed under Lifestyle, News, Tagged as: , Kylie Minogue, Lifecoaches.