Why I Quit Coaching

I have a box and a half of business cards that have my name and the job title: COACH. I ordered them in a fit of enthusiasm and blind optimism two years ago. As far as I know, they have resulted in zero hires and zero pennies of income. They were my first-ever business cards, and I put a huge amount of thought into their design, but now they sort of just annoy me. I’m done.

Let me first say that coaching is obviously a poor fit for me. That’s enough reason right there not to keep doing it. Other people may thrive on their coaching work, and I wish them every success! It’s definitely better for everyone if there are fewer, better, more dedicated and highly skilled coaches reaping a greater concentration of the available pool of clients.

That being said, I have some pretty strong suspicions that there are methods and philosophies of coaching that basically just don’t work for anyone.

I’d love to be proven wrong! There’s very little I enjoy more than watching someone break through a limiting belief, change an unhelpful behavior, open up to a special someone, start a new career, blast into excellent physical transformation, or otherwise fall in love with life all over again. Anything that moves people in that direction is great.

Okay, so my personal issues, in varying order:

1. Coaching doesn’t scale. There’s simply an upper limit to how many individual people can work directly with one coach. If I were the best coach who ever lived, and I worked for fifty years, the number of people I could touch would only be in the thousands, possibly even just the hundreds.
2. Coaching is also becoming a commodity, meaning it’s easy to find a competent coach at an affordable price, which means increasingly more effort to differentiate oneself at a higher value for a lower rate.
3. I’m a writer. Writing is the thing I can’t not do. I’ve written product reviews on Amazon that reached a broader audience than the number of individual clients I could coach. It doesn’t make sense for a crabby, neurotic, yet hyper-productive text-oriented person such as myself to focus on coaching at the expense of the written word.
4. The client never presents with the true issue that is at the heart. They come with some side issue, and then when we stumble upon the secret root cause, they tend to want to shy away. Viz: I want to work on running, but really I’m a workaholic and I don’t know how to make myself vulnerable to a love interest. Or, I want to space clear my house, but really it’s time for a divorce. Or, I want to change my diet, but really I don’t, especially if it involves doing deep inner work on my shame and self-loathing and trying to *gag* learn to love my own body.
5. Chat-based coaching is a farce.
6. Accountability coaching, I strongly suspect, DOES NOT WORK. By its nature. The more a person feels, “What I need is an accountability coach,” the less likely that approach will lead to successful graduation from the problem. Paradoxically, I think the desire for outer accountability is a total rejection of inner accountability. “Somebody make me do this or it will 100% never happen.”
7. All someone has to do in order to give into resistance and avoid facing the work is to: not open the app, not respond to notifications, not reply to email, let their focus wander during the call, not schedule the next appointment, not do any exercises, avoid journaling, etc. No coach can reach into someone’s psyche and turn a valve that shuts off inner resistance. It’s an incremental adjustment, like learning to do pushups. There are no shortcuts to inner work.
8. Bargain hunters. I never got paid for the dithering that clients would do to try to get longer calls at the same rate, ask to pay less per hour, attempt to negotiate cheaper methods of contact, or of course the free weeks. Let me get this straight. You love working with me so much that you want to reward me with less money as we go?
9. Coaching platforms that offer a FREE WEEK to all comers! I wound up giving out free weeks to about half of my incoming clients, none of whom ever had any intention of paying cent one for anyone’s time. Scarcity mindset.
10. Clients never once scheduled calls on the days I set aside for calls, but universally wanted my weekend afternoons.
11. For reals, I had to be available in some way seven days a week, including vacations, holidays, and days I was shaking with flu. At 10x the income it still would not have been worth it.
12. A platform that apparently misconstrues how chat-based coaching works. I lost count of how many “new clients” would sign up for coaching between 9 PM to 2 AM on Fridays and Saturdays, then cancel 15-20 minutes later and rate me as “unhelpful.” They apparently were led to believe that “chat-based coaching” means instant availability, that “coaches are standing by” even when it’s one o’clock in the morning. This is a white-hot opportunity for anyone who actually wants to provide that type of service. I, however, enjoy occasionally sleeping or stepping into the shower.
13. Basically I love helping people, but I’m severely and pathologically annoyed by lowest-common-denominator behavior.
14. All problems are universal, predictable, and pretty darn boring. It’s the SOLUTIONS that are infinitely diverse, fascinating, unique, and particular to the individual. But the tendency is to turn our backs toward that special pathway, stare fixedly at the problem, believe in it utterly, and want to discuss its intricacies. I don’t even wish I had the patience for this problem-stroking. In future it will all be done by chatbot.
15. Managing sales and billing. Like expense reports for a traditional employer, this is an inherently aversive manner of task. The choices are to do it oneself, or outsource it by giving a chunk of one’s income to a service/platform/agent etc.
16. Ultimately, I realized that even multiplying my coaching income by 100x would still make me feel ambivalent at best.

This is what I think. I think that ‘coaching’ is like ‘massage therapy’ in that it feels like a very beautiful, fulfilling way to make money and help people. It’s a vision-board kind of thing. (Just like every little kid wants to be a marine biologist). Yet, when it’s among the most obvious choices for anyone who wants to push away from traditional employment, it becomes over-subscribed. Everyone wants to do it, and that drives down the rates. For instance, I can get a massage in my area for $30 an hour, which is ludicrous, because in a foofoo salon it can (AND SHOULD) cost $100. For a coach, that would start to put it in the area of “how can you give me life advice when you would earn more as an office assistant?” (I say that with great respect, and pragmatism, because it’s what I used to do and at least it offers predictably free evenings and weekends).

For someone who has felt a firm, lightning-bolt inner conviction that It’s Time, it’s definitely worth paying for value and hiring a coach in an extremely specific specialty. For instance, working with a personal trainer who focused in recovery got me answers about my persistent ankle pain that an osteopath, two MRIs, and six months of physical therapy never did. Then just a few sessions with a trained shiatsu massage therapist actually resolved it! In future, I would go directly to the shiatsu table. When I started paying 4x more for gym classes instead of a commodity gym membership, I started getting 10x results. Same thing in other areas: I’d hire a certified dietitian, a tax accountant, a fiduciary financial planner, a professional editor, or the most highly rated business coach I could find. I’ll never waste my time shaking the trees for discount bargain cut-rate professional advice in any area again. I’d sooner get a side hustle to pay for a top-level professional opinion, knowing it always pays for itself, saves huge amounts of time, and usually results in my ability to earn more.

Here’s my best advice, free and worth every penny:

1. Figure out what you need to do to become a total accountability person. If you know someone who fits that description, ask them about it and take notes on everything they say. When they see that you are committed, they’ll keep tossing you “pro tips” as fast as you can absorb them. Mmhmm, free of charge.
2. Hold yourself accountable for having difficult conversations.
3. Don’t allow yourself to indulge in your preferred default behaviors. If you’re not consuming passive entertainment or wallowing in avoidance activities, what ARE you doing? How will you fill the time?

What I have learned to do is to ask myself, “What would a coach tell me about this issue right now?” (As I wrote those words, a large flock of chattering wild parrots flew past my window, which I regard as an omen that I am onto something). The answer always seems to pop up immediately, an unattractive and awkward answer, something that is Not Me, something that I feel deeply reluctant to do. The more it feels like I Do Not Want That to Be the Answer, the more likely it is to be. Approach it with curiosity in a sense of adventure.