Words by Lavender Au.
Not your therapist, not your friend: What accounts for the remarkable rise of the life coach?
In certain circles, life coaches are seemingly everywhere. Over the past year, for example, I have heard about their merits from sources including a New York gallery owner and a Filipino businessman in the shipping industry. Then, at a dinner party in Düsseldorf last month, I was seated across from a coach who coached other coaches to lead seminars.
I was skeptical about this multibillion-dollar industry and the language of positivity that surrounds and fuels it.1 Critics of the self-improvement industry as a whole see it as born from the woes of late capitalism: With social mobility so out of reach, self-improvement creates a facade of progress. Obsessing about the self is easier than reforming society.
But this truth, which is structural, doesn’t necessarily mean that there isn’t value to be found in life coaching on a personal level—if you can afford it. The gallery owner credited her coach with helping her feel lighter and happier, and being a better leader. She says she became more accountable to herself and those around her, and had a greater sense of self-worth. Life coaches say that their clients—or “players,” as some prefer to call them—are not coming to them to be cured. They simply need some help in the game of life. They seek change, to become their best possible selves.
So I book myself in for a free taster session with Charlene Birk, the gallery owner’s coach. We meet on Zoom, since Birk is based in Florida and I’m in Germany at the time of our call. Her Zoom background—a spacious office lobby with potted plants—was chosen, she explains, for its “calm, focus and simplicity.”
Birk begins by telling me that coaching is not giving advice, since “clients have the answers.” When I tell her about things I want to do, she gives positive reinforcement: “That’s absolutely within your reach!” When I talk about what I consider to be my achievements, she exclaims, “Congratulations!” There is none of the emotional payback or reciprocal listening you might have to do for a friend. Within my session, I hear nothing about Birk’s own life experiences.
Many life coaches work directly with companies to coach high-value employees; although life coaching is a holistic industry, success at work features heavily within it. If you’re paying for it yourself, the services of a coach would cost somewhere between $275 and $1,500 a month, which might include three to four sessions and email follow-ups. A certain level of material privilege is needed to afford this service, which leads to an obvious paradox: The client paying for a personal quest of self-discovery is already quite successful, at least in terms of income bracket.2 Just as we’re increasingly outsourcing physical labor to apps and their workers to get things like groceries, those who can afford it are now taking their thoughts to coaches, rather than to friends or family.
“Social media has democratized
coaching, and led to its blurring with
other forms of aspirational content.”
Though life coaching may seem like a new phenomenon—an offshoot of the Instagram-fueled idea that our whole lives should be inspiring—it has a long lineage. Beth Blum, author of The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching for Advice in Modern Literature, tells me, “There have been individuals eager to profit from people’s desperation for good advice long before modern capitalism came around.” (Life coaches might disagree with her characterization, since, as Birk had explained to me, they don’t give advice.)
“It’s always been there,” agrees Marion Goldman, author of The American Soul Rush: Esalen and the Rise of Spiritual Privilege. “People want their lives to be better. It’s one of the reasons why they get involved in various mainstream religions.”
Goldman says that life coaching has its roots in earlier forms of alternative guidance. From the 1930s onward, a number of spiritual and psychological disciplines set up shop in the United States. The Human Potential Movement (HPM), which took root in California in the 1960s, was particularly influential in the formation of life coaching as we know it. It disrupted the previously dominant understanding of the good life as one that involved holding down a stable job. A key tenet was that everyone could take the steps necessary to fulfill the extraordinary human potential that lay within them.3
“It’s really a sort of Wild West.
You could call yourself a life coach.”
The format of life coaching today is less explicitly spiritual than its forebears, however: It’s self-improvement for a growing demographic that shies away from organized religion (although they might embrace practices like meditation). While the industry is not regulated, multiple credentialing bodies are vying to validate new coaches.4 “It’s really a sort of Wild West,” says Goldman. “You could call yourself a life coach.”
One of the groups training life coaches is the International Coaching Federation (ICF), whose founder, Thomas Leonard, has as good a claim as anyone to call himself the originator of the contemporary movement. He had a front seat to Erhard Seminars Training or “est,” which ran workshops in the ’70s that promised attendees radical personal change.
Leonard later named and claimed the territory of life coaching and held teleclasses with hundreds of coaches around the world to define the field. His friend and fellow coach Dave Buck, with whom he founded the life coach training academy CoachVille in 2000, says their vision of coaching is as an anti-hierarchical “movement towards egalitarian co-creation.”5 In the early days of coaching development in North America, Buck and Leonard talked about creating communities and accreditation: “When you have certification, you have authority, right?” This thought seems to run counter to the egalitarian ethos of coaching that Buck ’s just told me about, and his own profile lists him as the seventh most influential person in the history of professional coaching. He acknowledges, somewhat cryptically, that there is a “tension between what is and future potential.”
The last ICF survey estimated that there were 71,000 coaches worldwide in 2019, a 33% increase on the 2015 estimate. It might seem like there are more life coaches than the market can hold, but economic precarity, which has worsened through the pandemic, seems to have increased supply. For those who have lost jobs, it is a field that has a low barrier to entry. In one Facebook group for new life coaches that I joined out of curiosity, more than a few people say they used to be hotel managers or bartenders. Goldman says that many life coaches work part-time in other professions.
Social media has also democratized coaching, and led to its blurring with other forms of aspirational content. Sixteen-year-olds on TikTok are “manifesting,” by which they meditate, reflect, set goals, then break them down. Although they might not use the label, they are something resembling a life coach to their followers.6
Life coaching might not address the structural problems in our society, in which too many find it difficult to attain even the base of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. But I can see its attraction for individuals stuck in the middle who want to reach the top. Near the end of my session with Birk, the language of commitment started to seep in: We’re looking to “scaffold” and take “the little steps.” I pledged to do things. If I’d been a regular client, in two weeks’ time, she’d check that I had. Life coaching gives you the feeling that you are able to change something, if not everything else.
