Everyone’s a Coach Now

We are experiencing a proliferation in the Coaching industry. You can have a life coach, a business coach, a spiritual coach, a health coach, parenting coach, and many other niche coaches for whatever part of your life makes you feel inadequate. No disrespect intended to the Coaching industry, just making some observations on the explosion in this arena.

Coaches are sometimes certified, sometimes not, and the origin of the certification varies widely when they do have it. Some have a college degree, others don’t.

I think the coaching industry has grown from two simultaneous happenings:

• First, people want to take their experience to teach others, and they don’t want to have to do that in a corporate environment. The vast majority of coaches are independent business owners, who feel the desire to be an entrepreneur, not an employee. Their desires and actions have driven one half of the explosion.
• Second, individuals are seeking coaches for a number of reasons. They are less grounded with family, and feel widely separated from their parents in their needs, and people now are more likely to listen to a professional than to a friend on many topics. There is so much information out there on virtually any topic, that you can research answers to any problem and find completely conflicting information, telling you to do two completely opposite things. Much of the available information is provided with advertising in mind, so it is hardly objective. Individuals feel that coaches are more objective in recommending possible solutions or helping them sort through the confusion of information.

Our world is changing radically, and it is having a profound influence on the kinds of services people will pay for, and the kinds of services people want to offer.

The explosion in the coaching industry is just one of the areas where changes are visible.