Why I'd Never Become a Life Coach — or Hire One

At a dinner with friends not long ago, someone said to me: "Peter, you really ought to become a life coach — you'd make a killing!" I'm fairly sure I never will, because I genuinely have no interest in giving it a go.

The impression most of us have of a "life coach" probably comes from the TVB programme The Leftover Ladies' Big Battle, which aired a good ten-odd years ago. The show's self-styled life coach, Winnie, was withering towards the participants — sarcastic, sharp-tongued, and hard to warm to — yet Winnie believed she could teach others how to live their lives.

To be fair, though, not every life coach is like that. I know a few people in the trade myself, and they are sincere and genuinely glad to help. Even so, I think the very concept of life coaching is flawed.

Life Isn't Swimming — So It Can't Really Be Coached

Why? In short, a good life comes in too many forms; life is too vast, with too many paths and too many skills worth pursuing.

Take an example. Mandela spent thirty years of his life in prison, and in exchange won the liberation of Black South Africans; my neighbour spends his evenings with his family, doting on his grandchildren. Seen through different lenses of meaning, both are Great Lives — yet they sit at opposite extremes. Which one should I be chasing? Which one should a coach teach me to become?

To borrow a metaphor from video games, having a coach for CS (a first-person shooter) makes perfect sense, because the goal of the game is simple: rack up more kills, die less often. But if Minecraft or Lego came with a coach, that would be downright odd. Life coaching is the same problem.

Look up "coach" in any Chinese or English dictionary and the word carries the sense of training a specific skill. Hence we have "swimming coaches", "public-speaking coaches" and so on — but life is not a specific skill. A good life calls for a combination of different skills. As for which skills you combine, that comes down to your personal values and disposition.

Coaching has one essential prerequisite: you yourself must be highly proficient in the knowledge and skills of a given domain, and then pass those skills and methods on to the person being coached. So to be a life coach is to take the one approach you happen to think works and impose it on your client. That needn't always go wrong, of course — it may even benefit the client — but only on the condition that both sides are chasing something similar. The most reasonable rebuttal to this view, naturally, is that life coaching isn't about imposing a viewpoint at all, but about helping clients explore their own values. The trouble is, that no longer fits the definition of "coaching" set out above; it becomes something else entirely — which is exactly what I'm about to talk about.

A Companion, Not an Instructor: Life Can Bloom a Hundred Ways

For my part, I lean more towards the sensibility of the great psychologist Carl Rogers. In his model of psychotherapy, the therapist is a fellow traveller. The journey of life is full of fog, and no one comes holding a map — but with a fellow traveller, you can hold up a lamp together to find the way, watching each step as you go.

Plenty of people who lack confidence or feel lost will want to find a life coach, because a clear-cut answer is so appealing to them. To broaden my own perspective, I once took a "life course". There's no denying it: the speaker's eloquence and presentation skills outstripped mine. Their command of cadence and pauses, of momentum and energy, was excellent, and they kept signalling the message that "my way is the answer" — which, I'm sure, draws in a good many people.

So why did it not work on me? It's because the philosopher Socrates is my idol, and he once said: "The only thing I know is that I know nothing." Set the two side by side and the difference in depth is plain to see.

I bear no ill will towards life coaches or their clients. Wanting clear-cut answers and resolving every problem with a simple idea is part of human nature — but at the same time, you may, without realising it, be simplifying and flattening your own life. This is something that you — whether you mean to become a life coach, or hope to find one to solve your problems — would do very well to be utterly clear about.