What to look for in a coach

It’s intimidating to look for a coach, because there are amazing coaches out there and terrible ones, and it’s hard to know how to tell them apart. I posted about some red flags to avoid, but what green flags should you be looking for?

Why certification isn’t a silver bullet

The most common answer to how to identify a good coach is to hire one who’s certified. But coaching certifications vary wildly. So a “certified coach” could range from the most competent and ethical person you’ve ever met, to someone who fell for what’s basically multi-level-marketing scam.

Organizations have sprung up to accredit coaching schools or vet coaches across schools. By virtue of being so large and comprehensive, though, they can be a bit generic and a bit influenced by what corporations want in their coaches. I don’t think they’re bad, but I currently think that my path to being the best coach I can be is to spend my time and money on lesser known but more cutting-edge workshops rather than the accredited courses that would get me a corporate-friendly stamp of approval.

So what are you to do? While being aware of a coach’s training and credentials is still a good idea, I think it’s important to take ownership of the decision yourself. In order to make that more feasible, I want to demystify the coaching industry for you a little bit and give you some guiding principles to use.

What kind of coach do you need?

The word “coach” implies someone who’s so good at doing a specific thing that they now teach others how to do that thing. And sometimes, that is what it means. But oddly enough, “life coaching” and “pure coaching” don’t mean that. A life coach is not someone who’s so good at life that they’re going to teach you how to be better at life!

In order to vet a coach well, you have to know what they’re trying to do! So let’s look at some general styles of coaching.

Subject-matter experts

When you’re under-informed about a specific area, like marketing or publishing or digital organization, you want a subject-matter expert. Subject-matter experts call themselves a variety of things:

• teachers
• course creators
• mentors
• advisers
• consultants
• coaches
• strategists

Going to a subject-matter expert is a lot like having a sports coach. The expert can tell you how to get started, the way a sports coach might tell you to practice the game three times a week and run sprints twice a week. They can assess your performance and give you feedback on how you can improve it, the way a sports coach can tell you that you’ll run faster if you shorten your stride length. They can give you pep talks. They can ask you what your goals are and give you exercises tailored to those goals.

They’re great! I use them to learn how to run a business. But they’re not always what you need.

Are you under-informed, or stuck?

In our culture, we tend to think that more knowledge and skill is the answer to every problem, so it may be hard to imagine a time when you would want a coach who mostly asks you questions instead of a coach who mostly gives you advice. But there are actually lots of times when more knowledge and skill won’t do the trick.

If you’ve ever said to yourself:

• “I know it doesn’t make sense, but for some reason that’s still how I feel.”
• “I know what I need to do, but I can’t get myself to do it.”
• “I keep reading more books and taking more classes but it’s not getting any easier. At this point I think I’m just learning to procrastinate on doing.”
• “I keep swinging between one extreme and the other. There must be a more balanced approach, another option, but I can’t find it.”
• “I don’t know what’s wrong. I just feel stuck.”

…then you’ve run into one of those times.

When you’re stuck like this, you’re not missing know-how. You’re running into an emotional blocker.

For instance, say you want to publish an essay, but you’re terrified of what people will think. Your first instinct might be to do more research and make the essay air-tight so you can answer any possible rebuttal (adding information). Or you might want to take a writing class to make your writing beyond reproach (adding skill). But if you already know that your essay is good and you’re still frozen in fear, then all the research and classes in the world won’t help.

You’re not lacking confidence in your essay — you’re lacking confidence in yourself, or what you might call self-worth.

Based on the idea that “more information and skill are the answer to every problem,” you might want someone to convince you to believe in yourself or to teach you to be confident.

But that doesn’t work, because self-worth is not a piece of information that someone can give you or a skill that someone can teach you. It’s an inherent human quality. You can’t get it from outside yourself.

But fortunately, you’re not lacking it, either.

We all have unconditional self-worth somewhere inside, but it gets covered up by a layer of fear.

When we notice that fear, we try to counteract it by telling ourselves “it’s bad to be driven by fear, be more confident!” This adds a layer of shame on top of the fear, which ironically just reinforces the way the fear covers up our self-worth.

With our self-worth nowhere in sight, we resort to some kind of knock-off, like conditional pride (“I’m good whenever my essays get a lot of likes”), or arrogance (“when people dislike my work it’s because they’re too stupid to get it”), or faking it till we make it (“I’m terrified but I’ll click ‘Publish’ really fast and try not to think about it”).

Life coaches

Life coaches can help you separate these layers inside of you. As you peel them back, you can find the natural self-worth that they’ve been hiding. Once you find that, life gets easier.

In our essay example, you’d be able to notice a weakness in your argument without feeling like a failure as a person. You’d be able to receive a negative comment without feeling unlikeable as a person. Feedback on your writing would no longer feel like a verdict on whether you deserve to exist. And that would make writing and publishing a lot easier.

So instead of being an expert in, say, publishing essays, your life coach needs to be an expert in guiding you to navigate your inner terrain so you can find your hidden self-worth and then allow that revelation to alter your habits.

Life coaches don’t necessarily call themselves life coaches, because getting more specific helps the right people find us. But if you ask, a coach will usually be able to tell you if they’re a type of life coach. They might also describe their work as “transformational,” which refers to how it changes the situation inside of you rather than pushing you to do the thing even while it continues feeling terrible.

Hybrid coaches

Some coaches blend these approaches.

My business coach, Mark Silver, is both a subject-matter expert in business and a Sufi healer. Sufi healing isn’t the same as life coaching, but it has the same layer-separating, quality-revealing effect. He has a way of alternating between giving business advice and supporting people in their inner work.

Other coaches blend the two in a different way, like doing life coaching with the energy of a subject-matter expert. Instead of helping you peek under the layers of your personality and rediscover your self-worth, they’ll do something like give you a strengths or values assessment, help you write a plan, and hold you accountable to that plan.

Vet your prospective coach

Now that you know what kind of coach you’re looking for, what are some clues that you’ve found a good one?

How to assess a subject-matter expert

One thing to look out for when hiring a subject-matter expert is to make sure that they have the expertise to help you do the thing.

Some people succeed at doing the thing themselves, and think that’s enough. While life experience is definitely a meaningful credential, and in some ways more informative that just taking classes about the subject matter, it’s not the only credential that matters. People and circumstances vary a lot:

• Someone who became successful ten years ago might have faced a different set of challenges than you face now.
• Someone less marginalized than you might not have to clear as many hurdles as you do.
• Someone with a different neurotype than you (ADHD and autism, for instance, are neurotypes) might benefit from different approaches than you do.

Subject-matter experts can do harm if they represent “what worked for me” as “what should work for everyone.”

When vetting a subject-matter expert, look for evidence that they can help you even where your identities, means, interests, and so on differ from theirs.

How to assess a life coach

If a coach tells you they help people transform, find their true selves, get unstuck, release emotional blockers, and all that “life coach” jazz, then here are some things to look for:

• They should be non-judgmental, since shame is usually one of the layers we need to help you peel back.
• They should be comfortable being wrong. Since the self-worth we’re digging for is inside of you, you are the expert on how the process is going.
• They should be accepting of “negative” emotions. When we accept them, they loosen and we can peel them back. When we reject them and try to replace them with “better” thoughts and feelings, they don’t actually go away — they just get covered with a layer of shame for having them.
• They have to be able to resist the temptation to do problem-solving when validation, empathy, and trust in your inner wisdom are called for.
• They should know the boundaries of their scope of practice, be trauma-informed¹, and know the risks of harm in a coaching relationship. This work can be vulnerable, so coaches need not just a modality but also an ethical foundation.

Trust your gut

Finally, I just want to encourage you to tap into your own feelings about any coach you’re considering.

Do you feel safe in this person’s presence, or anxious?

What does your heart feel like—open or guarded?

What does your stomach feel like—knotted or calm?

You may be concerned that it’s dangerous to listen to your resistance to hiring a coach, because that resistance might be the same self-sabotage that you’re hoping a coach will help you through. Could be! But that means a good coach for you will know how to work with your resistance rather than against it. So tell them what you’re feeling, and see if they respond in a way that relaxes you, or try to convince you to bulldoze through your feelings. I recommend avoiding the bulldozers.

Up Next

Now that you know the difference between a subject-matter expert and a life coach, you may be wondering what the difference is between a life coach and a therapist. I’ll be covering that next time, so make sure to subscribe.

1. To be trauma-informed means to operate in a way that minimizes the risk of retraumatizing people. Trauma-informed care is marked by clarity and consistency so the client knows what to expect, and is based on consent so the client is empowered and free to make the changes they need. Delivering trauma-informed care is different from treating trauma — ideally, everyone would be trauma-informed. ↩︎

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