It’s a mixture of feelings, of disgust, guilt, and feeling like I may have missed the boat. There are so many other life coaches, and business coaches, and health coaches, and parenting coaches, and every other kind of coach imaginable now online. I see them in my news feed every single day. I see their stories of how they were broke and look at them now all tanned in a holiday location living the mobile lifestyle. Otherwise I see the ones that are just starting out who are still in their office slash bedroom telling you how they can help you change your life. I don’t believe them all. I can’t.
I mean, how do you know who to trust afterall? I paid ten grand for a program that wasn’t actually ready to be taken, by a couple of coaches who had incredible marketing skills and a fast talking salesperson who boasted that she was great at NLP, which I now know is basically the ability to use words and ideas to convince you that you made the choice yourself. It’s all kinda bullshit. I took the course as it was being developed, and I got in on the “discount” early bird price because I was told it was going to double in price, even though they had just started out. Now when I look at their website, nothing has changed, and their social media presence pretty much stopped at the same time I had to stop to have my baby. Perhaps none of us were ready. However, if I am going to spend that much money, I expect that they know what they are doing, what they are talking about, and are able to actually help me along.
This industry of coaching has certainly tapped into the more ambitious self help people out there. Those of us who know we have more to offer but for one reason or another, continue “healing”. I cannot underestimate the power of spending time on yourself and learning what makes you tick. It is important, it does help you understand why you are a maniac when it comes to hearing other people eat, or why you have to have order in your life to feel productive. The thing is that once you are in that healing phase, it’s actually hard to climb out of it and actually use it. So much insecurity arises, so much doubt, so much wanting to be the one who is taking the coddled journey. It’s low risk if you are only helping yourself, and for someone like me who wants to help others and does help others every single day but not in that big grand internet coaching way that I see advertised to me every 8 posts on social media, it can get discouraging.
to be continued…