I live in a small surf town on the Portuguese coast. If you gathered everyone in the main square and divided them by job title, a large portion of them will tell you that they’re either a yoga teacher, a surf instructor or a coach. I say this with affection, because I’m one of them. I also say it with a healthy dose of scepticism, because the word coach has become so elastic that it now stretches to cover almost anyone with a wifi connection and something to say about living your best life.

There are coaches whose primary credential is a dramatic personal story and the transformation they’re selling is their own. Whether it translates to yours is a different question altogether.

There are coaches promising seven-figures in ninety days, or a complete identity overhaul by the end of the program. Human change doesn’t always come with a delivery date and promises like these are designed to speak to desperation rather than possibility.

There are coaches who’ve built their practice on visibility alone, whose authority rests on follower counts and the confidence of their captions. In an attention economy, being loud is easily mistaken for being good.

All of this contributes to confusion about what coaching actually is. Allow me to slice through that confusion.

The noise problem

In a previous essay, I wrote that social media arrived with a genuine promise of connection, creative independence, the proliferation of a variety of perspectives and democratised reach. What followed was the explosion of that promise into an industry. Suddenly, everyone was a brand competing for the same finite resource of human attention.

The coaching industry didn’t cause this, but it has been reshaped by it. The result is the conflation of coaching as a discipline and the influencer coach model. Those two things are not the same.

What gets lost in all of this, is the kind of coaching that has rigour. It’s one of the few spaces that operates in deliberate opposition to the attention economy. It asks you to turn down the volume of other people’s opinions and listen more closely to your own. In an economy that rewards noise, it’s a genuinely countercultural space.

How we got here

These days, you can find a coach for almost anything. The proliferation reflects a growing demand for a particular kind of support: personalised, non-judgmental and focused on the individual. We are more psychological aware, navigating more complex transitions and we expect more from our working and personal lives than previous generations were encouraged to.

Some of what has emerged is genuinely useful. Some of it reflects a market that has grown faster than the standards meant to regulate it. When a market gets crowded, the burden of discernment falls on the consumer, which, my guess, is partly why you're reading this.

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How did the coaching industry become so bloated?

Well, it all started in 1974 when Tim Gallwey published the book, The Inner Game of Tennis. The premise was that every player faces two games simultaneously:

1. The outer game: the physical contest between you and your opponent on the court

2. The inner game: the mental battle against self-doubt, over-thinking and interference from the conscious mind

Gallwey’s insight was that traditional sports instruction amplified the problem, rather than solving it. The more a coach told a player what to do, the louder the internal critic became. The coach’s job was to quiet that interference, allowing the player’s natural ability to surface. He went on to apply the same framework to golf, skiing and music.

Corporate adoption followed soon after, thanks to John Whitmore, who took Gallwey’s principles into the business world and developed the GROW model in the 1980s – it’s one of the most widely taught coaching frameworks. Organisations began embedding coaches into leadership development programs and executive coaching flourished.

Then came the professionalisation of coaching in the 1990s, when Thomas Leonard founded CoachU and the International Coaching Federation. These institutions gave the field training standards, credentialing pathways and a community of practitioners who referred to themselves as coaches.

In 1998, Martin Seligman stood before the American Psychological Association as its incoming president and argued that psychology had spent a century studying what goes wrong with people and almost no time studying what goes right. Together with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (the psychologist behind flow theory), he founded positive psychology – the study of human flourishing rather than human dysfunction. The question shifted from "What is broken and how do we fix it?" to "What does a well-lived life actually require?" It built on the work of Carl Rogers (more on him later) and Abraham Maslow, but gave it scientific rigour and institutional legitimacy. The idea that investing in your own development began to take hold outside corporate environments.

The democratisation of content accelerated it further. Podcasts, YouTube channels, blogs and later social media brought personal development to anyone with a phone. Self-help became a genre and an aesthetic. Concepts that had previously lived in psychology textbooks began circulating freely, repackaged for mass consumption. For many people, this was their first encounter with the idea that inner life was worth examining.

Digital platforms like CoachHub and BetterUp then reduced the cost of professional coaching delivery, making it a standard employee benefit for progressive organisations. In 2025, the ICF estimated 123 000 professionally affiliated coaching practitioners worldwide. That number doesn’t include those operating under the coaching label outside any professional framework.

The rapid growth is part of what has created the quality variance problem. Which is how we ended up here.

How I got here

I used to roll my eyes at coaches.

A client recently joked that all the coaches he’d seen online wore hats. “What’s with the hats?” he asked. I laughed, because I knew exactly what he meant.

There’s something about the way certain coaches present themselves that used to make me recoil. What I eventually realised was that I was recoiling from the performance of coaching.

My own path to coaching came via a long detour. For a few years, I followed threads of curiosity into yoga, somatics, trauma theory and adult development. I was interested in human potential and the specific question of what gets in the way of a person becoming who they’re capable of being.

A conversation with a friend gave me the permission I needed to try coaching. I joined a group coaching program as a participant first. What I encountered there sent me looking for more. So, I enrolled in a training program. I announced to my cohort that I wasn’t here to become a coach. The training was merely a career experiment.

What I didn’t anticipate was how much I would learn about myself in the process. The practice asks things of you that professional life trains you out of. In one of our first sessions, we were asked to use silence deliberately. The task was to ask a question and then wait, without rushing to fill in the awkward silence. It was harder than it sounds. Most of us, having arrived from corporate backgrounds, had spent years filling every available space with performed competence.

In the silence, you begin to notice the story running just below the surface of what someone tells you. You start developing an awareness of how much more is communicated outside of the words people use. Sometimes, the words themselves are the last thing to tell you what’s actually happening. The slight hesitation before an answer. The subject that keeps being circled but not named. The moment the energy shifts. The sense that something is being held back. Learning to attend to all of these subtleties changes how you listen and therefore how you respond.

About a year ago, some friends asked me what I’d be doing if I could have any job in the world. I didn’t have to think much. I told them I’d be coaching. Sitting with another person while they find their way back to themselves is one of the most extraordinary things to witness.

Coaching and its neighbours

Coaching sits adjacent to several other disciplines – consulting, mentoring, therapy and spiritual guidance. The boundaries between them aren’t always clearly drawn. Some practitioners exist on a spectrum between two or more of them. For example, therapists who have trained as coaches and move fluidly between healing and growth work; mentors whose guidance shifts into coaching as the relationship deepens; practitioners who weave contemplative traditions into frameworks grounded in western psychology. These hybrids can be incredibly effective, but it also makes it harder to know what you're signing up for. Better doesn’t necessarily mean more, nor does it mean choosing a pure category. It’s more about knowing what kind of support you actually need.

A consultant is the expert in the room. You are paying for their knowledge and good judgement. A good consultant will diagnose the problem and make clear recommendations about what the solution should be. A mentor draws on their own experience to guide you. They have been where you are trying to go. The value that a consultant or mentor offers is directional and advice-led: this is what I did, this is what I learned, this is how I would approach your situation.

A therapist works primarily with what has already happened. The focus is on understanding how earlier experiences have shaped present patterns, processing what has not been processed and building the psychological foundation needed to live well. Therapy is clinical work, which requires a specific type of training, ethical framework and relationship with the client.

Spiritual guides, teachers, gurus, shamans, energy healers, wisdom keepers draw from a wide range of ancient and contemporary traditions. Their role is to help people access meaning, transcendence and a sense of connection to something larger than themselves. There can be real value in that. The challenge is that spiritual communities tend to attract people at their most vulnerable: unmoored, searching, open to almost anything that might give them solid ground.

A coach, in the humanistic tradition, brings a quality of attention that allows another person’s own intelligence to surface. Carl Rogers was the psychologist who founded person-centred therapy in the 1950s. His ideas have become the philosophical backbone of modern coaching. The premise is that human beings have an innate drive toward growth, what he called the actualising tendency, and that this drive needs the right conditions (unconditional positive regard, empathy and congruence) to emerge. Those conditions are not techniques so much as a quality of presence.

If you want to see what those conditions look like in practice, watch Carl Rogers counsel Gloria. This session, filmed in 1965, is one of the most extraordinary demonstrations of person-centred work. Rogers doesn’t advise, interpret or lead Gloria toward a conclusion he has already reached. He simply listens with a quality of attention so complete that Gloria begins to hear herself differently. By the end of the session, she arrives at her own answer through a process that Rogers barely directs at all. It is a demonstration of what’s possible when a person is given the conditions to trust themselves.

The premise that connects Gallwey and Rogers is that the person in front of you already has more access to their own answers than they realise. It has just been buried under years of noise, expectation and learned patterns of thinking. The coach’s job is not to provide the answer. It’s to reduce whatever is preventing the person from hearing themselves clearly.

These distinctions are important to grasp because the kind of support you choose shapes the kind of growth that is possible. In short, if what you need is guidance from someone who has walked your path, seek a mentor. If you need to heal what the past has left behind, work with a therapist. If you are searching for meaning through ritual and tradition, a spiritual guide may serve you well. If you want someone to diagnose a problem and tell you what to do, hire a consultant.

If what you are after is the capacity to trust your own judgement, to author your own life rather than live one inherited from expectation, then coaching may be the right container for that work.

The tells

You’ll know you’re in a good coaching relationship because of what it asks of you, not what it gives you.

Good coaching starts with a mirror. A skilled coach reflects you back to yourself with enough accuracy that you can finally see what you’ve been unable to see alone. The quality of the coach’s attention, their questions and their willingness to sit in the discomfort with you begins to change what you’re able to see in the mirror. The mirror starts to become transparent. You stop seeing only your own reflection and you start seeing through it. It becomes less of a surface and more of a threshold.

The best coaching conversations are ones where the client does most of the talking, where the questions are well-placed and where silence is used deliberately rather than filled out of discomfort. A good coach does not arrive in session with frameworks to present or insights to offer. Their curiosity about you sits above their enthusiasm for their own methodology.

A good coach also does their own work. They will have their own coach, and they may be in regular supervision, a practice borrowed from therapy in which coaches reflect on their own work with a more experienced practitioner, to ensure they are not bringing their own unresolved material into the space. Many also have their own therapist. Ongoing personal development is the foundation of doing the work responsibly.

There is one more thing worth saying and it comes from my own experience. My coach, supervisor and therapist have no significant online presence. All three have built their practice on reputation, referral, the quality of the work itself and the relationships that the work produces. The most effective coaches are the ones that people recommend to each other in the privacy of conversations that never make it onto Instagram.

The coaches worth finding are rarely the ones trying to find you.

What to expect

A coaching session is neither a motivational talk nor a therapy session. If you've never experienced one, it can be difficult to know what to expect.

A session usually lasts between fifty to ninety minutes. It begins with the client setting the agenda, not the coach. You arrive with something you want to think about, a decision you're sitting with, a pattern you keep noticing, a conversation you've been avoiding, an emotion that’s present. That becomes the starting point. In the early sessions, the coach may offer more structure to help you find your way in. Over time, you learn to arrive knowing what you need to work on. The shift from being guided into the conversation to initiating it yourself is a sign that something is developing.

From there, the coach’s job is to walk beside you, neither leading nor following. They ask questions, reflect back what they are hearing or feeling. They might offer an observation as a hypothesis to be explored rather than a conclusion to be accepted. The coach tracks not just the content of what you say but the way you say it – where the energy rises, where it flattens, what gets glossed over and what keeps returning. They create space for the thinking to deepen beyond the first and most obvious layer.

For many people, particularly those arriving from professional environments, the experience of being in a coaching session can feel disorienting at first because you’re not being assessed or advised. You’re being listened to with a quality of attention that most of us rarely receive, even in close relationships. That can feel unfamiliar and uncomfortable, but when it's working well, it can also be profound.

A coaching engagement unfolds over several months rather than a handful of sessions. The early sessions are often about establishing trust, understanding the presenting situation and surfacing the story under the story. The middle phase is usually where patterns become visible, assumptions get examined and experiments get designed and tested. The later sessions tend to consolidate what has shifted and prepare the client to continue without the container.

The work doesn’t end when the session does. Most coaches will ask you to take some kind of action between sessions, however small. These between-session commitments are the laboratory in which the insights from the session get tested against real life. The session is the thinking space. What happens between sessions is where the change actually lands.

What the client brings to this process is equally important as what the coach offers. You are expected to be honest, to show up prepared to be uncomfortable and to act on what you discover. A coaching engagement is not something that happens to you. It’s something you actively participate in.

Are you actually ready?

Coaching isn’t for everyone.

Coachability is a real concept. It refers to the degree to which someone is able to receive, reflect on and act upon what is uncovered by the coaching process. If you’re not yet ready to act on what you discover, the timing might be off. The focus is on growth and understanding what’s getting in the way and building the capacity to move forward. It’s not about intelligence or how much you want things to change. It’s about readiness.

A coachable person is willing to be honest with themselves. This is harder than it sounds. Most of us have spent years constructing a coherent narrative about ourselves, and coaching tends to poke at the seams of that narrative.

The process is one of slowing down enough to understand the actual problem, which is often not the one you arrived with. It requires a person to sit with uncertainty without immediately reaching for a solution. It produces insights which are only useful if they lead to change. Understanding why you do something is not the same as changing it. Change requires repetition – new behaviours practised until they become habitual, new ways of relating to situations, new neural pathways formed through action. A coaching relationship holds you accountable for the gap between what you know and what you actually do.

None of this means you need to have everything figured out before you begin. You just need to be honest about where you are.

A coachable person also has sufficient emotional stability to confront difficult truths. This is where the boundary with therapy becomes important. If you are in acute crisis and you are struggling with your mental health in a way that requires clinical support, coaching is not the right container. Coaches and therapists work different parts of the same terrain. Therapy builds the foundation. Coaching builds on top of it. Therapy asks what happened and how it shaped you. Coaching asks what you want to do with who you are now. Used well, the two are more like consecutive chapters than competing alternatives.

Questions worth sitting with

Coaching is an unregulated profession and there is no legal requirement to hold a qualification or belong to a governing body. Anyone can call themselves a coach, which is exactly why credentials matters.

The three most recognised professional bodies in Europe are the International Coaching Federation (ICF), the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC) and the Association for Coaching (AC). Membership to each professional body is voluntary, but it signals that a coach has met minimum training hours, demonstrated their practice through assessment, committed to a code of ethics and ongoing professional development. When you’re evaluating a coach, ask which governing body they’re affiliated with and what level of accreditation they hold. It won’t tell you everything, but it tells you they’ve been held accountable to something beyond their own judgement.

Before you begin looking for a coach, it’s worth spending some time with a few questions.

Questions to ask yourself

• What are you hoping coaching will give you?

• How willing are you to do the thinking yourself, rather than being guided toward an answer?

• What is it that you already know (a decision half-made, a direction already forming) that you might be hoping a coach will give you permission to act on?

• What would you need to feel safe enough to be genuinely honest in a coaching relationship?

• How well-resourced do you feel right now, and is there anything that might be better held by a therapist before coaching becomes useful?

Question to ask about the coach

• What training does the coach have and where did they get it?

• Who do they turn to for their own personal development?

• In the discovery call, who did most of the talking?

• How did you feel when you ended the discovery call – heard or sold to?

• How much of their approach tries to fit you into a framework they’ve already decided on, versus how much of their approach accounts for your complexity?

• What do the people who’ve worked with them say?

Coaching is a relational practice which means the relationship itself is the work. The quality of the coach’s attention, their ability to be genuinely present with you, their willingness to sit with your uncertainty without rushing to resolve it – these are the mechanisms through which change happens. The conditions for growth (unconditional positive regard, empathy, coherence), cannot be manufactured through good methodology alone. They require genuine human contact.

I wrote this piece partly to think clearly about the industry I’m operating in, with all of its contradictions. Practising responsibly means being willing to name what’s wrong with it.

It also means questioning whether I’m doing it well. I bring things to supervision, coaching and therapy. I sit with the uncomfortable questions about whether the things I say or do are in the client’s best interest or mine; about whether I’m the right person for a particular client and whether I’m growing as a human being at the same rate I’m asking my clients to. This is the part of the work I find most alive.

This article will sit as required reading before anyone books a discovery call with me. What I offer is slow and durable, and if you arrive at that call having read this, we can begin from an honest place.

Earlier in my coaching career, I used to buckle in my boots when people asked me what I did. I’d watch their faces for signs of scepticism and compensate by over-explaining or hedging. I don’t do that anymore. I have enough evidence, from the people I’ve worked with and from my own experience of being coached, to know that this is one of the most honest journeys a person can choose to go on.

The best kind of coaching gives you back the ability to trust your own decisions, and that is worth being discerning for.

If you want to understand what coaching looks like from the other side of the relationship, this account written from the client's perspective makes for a great read. It’s honest about the resistance that came before the results and specific about what actually changed for them. I’d love to hear how this article landed for you in the comments below.

About Work Worth Doing

Work Worth Doing is a space for people who’ve outgrown a professional career they’ve spent years building, and aren’t sure about what comes next. You’ll find essays on identity, purpose and finding fulfilment outside of work too.

I work 1:1 with people transitioning from a professional career into meaningful work. To learn more about how coaching can support you, book a consultation or learn more below.