Painful Productivity: A Guide to Avoiding Toxic Coaches

This is the annotated version of my April Fool’s post, Painful Productivity. I’ll break down the toxic patterns I see in the coaching industry to help you spot them.

Are you wasting your life away in your mom’s basement because you’re too lazy to follow through on anything?

Toxic coaches judge your pain points. Good coaches empathize with them.

If you don’t get out soon, you’ll never be able to catch up! You’ll die alone!

Toxic coaches stoke fear by pretending they can tell the future.

Are you willing to settle for that?

They ask leading questions to prime you to agree to with them.

You need to get your life together. You could try to buckle down, but who are you kidding? You’ll fail. You need to hire a coach if you’re going to stand a chance.

Toxic coaches claim that you need a coach to succeed. Good ones know they’re just one option.

Introducing Painful Productivity!

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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.

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The difference between coaching and therapy

The most common question I get is “what is the difference between life coaching and therapy?”

And I’ll answer it, I promise. But unlike most articles on this topic, I want to start by acknowledging that they are similar and explaining why that’s okay.

Convergent evolution of the helping professions

I think it’s a really good sign that some therapists, coaches, and spiritual guides are starting to converge on similar methods and share their modalities with each other. I think that’s happening because we’re finding what works for the human psyche.

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When to fire me

A lot of service providers have an onboarding process. Not many of them use that process to tell you when to fire them. But after watching The Shrink Next Door and reading about the true story behind it, I decided that it’s essential to my ethical practice.

The Shrink Next Door is the story of Isaac Herschkopf’s thirty-year career of exploiting his clients to such a degree that he even ended up taking over client Marty Markowitz’s house. Finally, Markowitz had a wake-up call, freed himself from Herschkopf’s spell, and reported him to the health department in 2012. Seven years passed without an investigation. In 2019, two things happened, and I don’t know which happened first, but I have my suspicions: a journalist found the story and made a podcast about it, and the department finally started investigating. Two more years passed before Herschkopf’s license was finally revoked in 2021.

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