Today a dear friend reached out via text and said she wanted to talk with me about life coaching. I say she is a dear friend, and she is. However, she lives across the country and our lives are radically different in many ways so we don’t talk very often. Sometimes not even for a year or more. So it is always great to hear from her. And I gotta tell you, her topic of choice has me intrigued. I think she thought I was bat-shit crazy, to quote something she would say, when I did my whole coaching journey.
Of course, in many ways I was crazy. Now here she is asking me about it and after some text exchanges (we haven’t connected to talk yet) I am soooo glad she reached out! I am looking forward to speaking with her and giving her the straight truth that she is so famous for giving me over the years.
You see, it seems she has stumbled upon what seems like milllions of coaching programs out there. She mentioned two and that one was $5,000 and the other is $10,000. I am not AT ALL surprised at those numbers but she was. To be candid, I spent that and waaaaaay more in pursuing my coaching career a few years back. Even just recently, I spent $2,400 for a program to teach people how to create programs. Ha! Isn’t that amazing? Jury is out on whether it will be worth it but I suspect this one is actually providing more value than many of the others I have bought. Not yet, because I realize that I am still far from creating a program. But back to my friend.
She was asking me about it because she is practical. Yay for her! She is not thrilled with her current job and I strongly suspect that she stumbled upon this idea, this promise, that you can replace your full time professional income with coaching. I suspect she is thinking, like I did – I like to help; I know a lot of things; I could do this! Certainly that was my thinking back when I quit my job and went all in spending tens of thousands of dollars to do the coaching thing. What I didn’t know could fill a book. Several books.
But it ain’t that easy. It ain’t that quick. And for the vaaaaaast majority of folks, it ain’t gonna happen the way the sales page promises or at all. I do not mean to down it. I think coaching is an excellent service. I believe strongly that receiving coaching can change your life for the better and that coaching, for people like me and my friend, I believe, can be very rewarding.
It is just that there is so. Much. BS in the online space. There is so much circular logic and “limiting beliefs”, “money story” and “possibility” vs real logic, soundness of thinking, straight talk and speaking in terms of probability. But that is how the circle grows. I simply cannot play that game. I am not going to get on some high horse and say that I would never! Because I tried. I drank so much koolaid that I actually did try it that way. It was a disaster.
So I am super excited to speak with my friend and help her on her path with the wealth of wisdom I acquired. She will not be duped the way that I was.
Photo by delfi de la Rua on Unsplash