You know, I feel like “life-coach” is such a nice idea in theory. There’s so many people who would just love help getting their shit together or need help working through their unskillful behaviour. It just sounds so intuitively useful, but I don’t think I’ve ever met a life-coach who gave any real value to their clients, and they all just strike me as so pretentious and miserable.

Maybe it’s actually work that should be done piecemeal from a range of different people, usually for free - friends, parents, therapists, peers, partners, workplace mentors etc.

I guess the problem is the absurdly broad scope and the commercialisation of something that is so personal and lifelong.

Why do you think “life-coaching” attracts the people it does?

I wouldn’t have believed you - except that I’ve seen exactly the same thing in the permaculture world. People pay incredible sums for teachers lineage with their Permaculture Design Courses, in those courses people pay to learn farming ideas that only work with massive amounts of labour, and usually the courses involve giving a heap of free labour to the teachers project.