Why Everyone Wants to be a Coach (and What Real Coaching is)

Scroll through TikTok or Instagram, and you’ll find an endless stream of people calling themselves coaches: life coaches, mindset coaches, hustle coaches and performance coaches.

Everyone seems to be selling some transformation to success, but most of it looks the same. The male-focused coaching world, especially, is flooded with 'bros', 'jocks' and misogynists - all with sizeable followings of men who want change and will throw any money at a problem to let someone else take care of things for them.

Coaching has become an industry of sizzle, without the steak. Most coaches promise success, money and a set of chiselled abs over values, purpose, mental and physical health and inner harmony. And now, anyone with a Chat GPT account can go and build a course and give the illusion they are 'goated' coaches because the industry is full of cowboys.

For those seeking purpose and meaning, the result is confusion and a lighter bank balance - with no discernible results.

Authentic coaching is being drowned out by sales funnels, downloadable PDFs, online courses, and self-appointed gurus who claim to make your life better, but once you sign up and hand over your hard-earned cash, you're met with people who know little about coaching or the principles of understanding how the mind works, other than manipulating marketing to sell.

The question isn’t why coaching has become so popular. The question is, why does every Joe Blow think they can be a coach, and what does this mean for those coaches who want to make a difference in people's lives?

I’m part of this problem, too, but I’m learning how I can best navigate the coaching, mental health and positive psychology waters, so I can be transparent about my process and learn as I go.

With all of that out of the way - let's jump in and see why.

Modern coaching exploded because of a few things: COVID, the enormous growth of online education and people's growing desire to find meaning as the world gets more and more complex to navigate.

For many male mid-career professionals, trying to climb the corporate ladder while it felt like the world was burning to the ground turned people away from pursuing progress and turned to safe mode for fear of losing their jobs.

The work environments and systems that once promised stability now suck energy, time, and identity from their lives. They clock on for work, wondering whether today could be their last before their employer lets them go, which then turns their thoughts to feelings of hopelessness and desperation.

Becoming a coach felt like a way out, a chance to turn life experience into meaning. And with so many people online sharing their version of the struggle with others allowed those seeking help to look to the 'everyday' coach over someone with years of professional experience and know-how to help others.

By my estimate, it was around the early 2020s at the peak of COVID when everyone started thinking their 'story' was powerful enough to monetise, and coaching started to lose its way.

What started as a calling to help people turned into funnel hacks and multi-level-marketing scams. That opened the doors for cowboys who would happily sell their own mother for a shot at the hustler lifestyle. The language and tactics used to prey on people looking for more in life have muddied the waters of what coaching is all about and have completely overlooked the end user.

Now coaching feels like everything is attached to 'personal branding' - i.e. if they like you, then they'll buy from you. In my humble opinion, when coaching becomes a brand, it stops being a two-way relationship. It's about the vanity metrics - dancing for TikTok views, merch and sales. The focus shifts from people to KPI's, from helping others grow to a selfish pursuit to grow a following and commodify it.

That's where authenticity turns into a steaming pile of dog sh*t, and real coaches lose their integrity because of those who want to make money from someone's vulnerability to seek help.

At its core, coaching is a conversation built on trust. It’s not just giving advice or motivational high-fives. It’s a space where someone can explore what’s holding them back and test their own assumptions.

Good coaching challenges comfort. It helps people understand their thinking process to unlearn habits that no longer serve them. It builds awareness before action. It asks better questions rather than provide answers.

Research in behavioural and positive psychology supports this approach. Real change happens when people identify their strengths, connect to what gives their life meaning, and align their behaviour with values. That takes time, patience, frustration and honesty, not just positive enthusiasm.

The best coaches are grounded in self-awareness. They know their own triggers, biases, and areas for improvement. They don’t project their journey onto others. They hold the space so their clients can find their own path.

I didn’t set out to become a coach. I set out to understand why I felt stuck.

I mean, I didn’t have any real struggle in my life, but the vanilla ice-cream life didn’t challenge me. That’s why I am developing my own consulting and mentoring business, because it doesn’t feel vanilla to me.

Not only that, I found that what I was learning could help me at work and in my personal life, so I wanted to unpack it, learn from it and improve myself.

After twenty years in the corporate world, I had reached the point where attempts at climbing the ladder felt like more pressure, having to pretend and in that process, losing purpose. I saw colleagues who had stopped being themselves for the sake of an increased paycheck and others who'd stopped growing altogether because they were afraid of what might happen if they tried something new.

These people (myself included) were falling into a trap either way.

That realisation and the fact that I was placed in a position where I had to choose between my family and my go-nowhere job were the turning point.

The choice was simple. Family.

It put me in an extremely vulnerable situation where I didn't know how I'd earn money. After all, I live in regional Japan, my Japanese is ok, but not business-level, and my experience in marketing doesn't really translate all that well in the part of the country I live. Living in Tokyo would be another story, but we don’t live in Tokyo.

All this wrestling with my own internal monologue left me so confused as to what I could offer the world, but in mid-2023, I decided to audit my life and figure out a way forward.

That's when mentoring and positive psychology came back into my world.

I didn’t want to teach people how to climb higher on a ladder that might not even be leaning against the right wall.

I wanted to help men like me. Men who had built careers, achieved goals, and still felt like something there's something not right.

My desire to help people who've rowed the same boat as me gave me that outlet. My goal wasn't to rescue people, but it was to show that there's so much more to life than a corporate job. At first, it might feel like you're failing, but if you're failing forward, you're actually on the path to something special that only you can create.

You just need someone who's been in the same situation to be there to guide you because it's one thing to want a better life, but when you go about it without someone in your corner, or a plan, the road ahead can be unclear.

My approach is super simple.

We look at where you are, how you got there, why you feel stuck, and what you actually want life to look like.

From there, we develop a new way forward that incorporates a bit of positive psychology, some honest conversation, meaningful reflection and accountability (if you want to know more about how you can use positive psychology, I’ll be writing more on this very soon).

We talk about what life really means to you. What are your values? What do you want from this life?

We find what drives you and what sucks the life from you, and then we create a plan that fits who you are, not who you think you should be.

There’s no performance, no KPI's, no scripts, and no “one-size-fits-all” strategy. Just practical conversations that are designed for your situation, that lead to you taking some positive actions.

This is not corporate coaching. While corporate coaches have a place (and I know some great ones who've helped me along the way), this for people who want to understand who they are - whether that is if they want to continue working in their corporate job and accept the frustrations, but be at peace with that, or those who want to overhaul their lives completely and find out what they're capable of.

I coach people who are fed up and ready to take responsibility for their lives.

Let me be clear.

I won’t pretend for a minute that I’m not one of ‘those’ people trying to dive into coaching, capitalise on it and earn through the process. But I think there might be different approaches to how people define “coaching” that produce a varied range of understandings, rather than one definition. And maybe due to the different interpretations of the word, it makes it harder to agree on the definition.

That’s maybe what ends up creating different spectrums of quality.

I’m a pretty open guy about this stuff, so I’ll use the opportunity to explain why I’m doing this, and if that gels with you, I’m so happy to know.

The reason I’m writing more, spending money on advertising and building email lists and so on is that I’ve finished my postgraduate studies in positive psychology and I’m ready to scale up my practice.

I am building this business to genuinely make an impact in the world, but I’d like to make a living from it too.

I don’t see anything wrong with that, and wrapping my head around that it is completely ok to try to sell yourself is more of a me issue than it is anyone else's issue.

I have worked hard at university and in my personal and professional life, but I have never been able to find the right role for me in the corporate world, so I think mentoring and coaching is something I want to get good at. I spend a lot of time thinking and immersing myself in learning about the topic, the business world and the eternal quest to leave the earth in a better place than when you found it.

Working in this space is part of my own life plan.

Coaching should never be about creating followers or making money off of your feelings of hopelessness or despair. I feel it needs to be about the person coming to you, and that’s why I am not sure about Instagram and TikTok anymore for me. I don’t think I can say things as I would like to articulate in 30 seconds. I really enjoy the long-form writing and having the space to unpack the thought.

I don’t know how I’ll attack social media (particularly IG and TT) moving forward, but I know I need to consider its use somehow in the near future.

I’m finding there is an awful amount of noise around coaching online and mixed in with so much different information coming at you left and right, making the step into writing and other forms of content marketing might be the right thing for me. Writing feels a lot more focused than it does for me to make reels and follow trends to hack the algorithm.

It should be about helping people think for themselves by providing them with the space to feel vulnerable so that they can find their true value in life.

And the rise of coaching isn’t the problem. Hell, I'm one too. The problem is how easily it loses its meaning through the noise online and the over-marketing of the industry.

The world doesn’t need more people selling inspiration through their origin story. It needs more people willing to have real conversations, honest, sometimes uncomfortable, but always human.

Because it's not about the coach's story. It's about YOU!

That’s the space I work in.

If you’ve reached a point where you need to change and you're ready to start right away, then maybe I'm the right guy for you.

I offer a completely free first consultation so we can see if the fit is right for each other. There's no pressure to commit that way, and if you like the environment I create to help with your growth, then you can take the next step with more confidence.

Reach out to me anytime, and let's build the life you really want to live.