The seedy underbelly of the life coaching industry | Hacker News Reader

The seedy underbelly of the life coaching industry

bbc.com

51 pointsBrajeshwar57 comments

I wish this article covered the more nefarious side of these organizations and "Coaches". Broken families, ruined relationships etc...

Here's the quick and dirty of my brother.

Full disclosure, I have not attended any Wright Foundation courses Myself.

My brother did however, and we are now sadly estranged. Since he joined Wright Foundation he has:

- Estranged himself from our whole family

- Got into serious debt - These courses aren’t cheap. There‘s a reason prices aren’t listed

- Forced a sale of our family business, of which he was an equity partner

Wright Foundation operates like the Landmark Forum and NXIVM. Ropes you in, and breaks you down (question your beliefs and worldview in a group setting), and sells you courses to build you back up again. All the while estranging yourself from those closest to you.

Don’t believe me? Check out the Salon and New York Times articles below.

https://www.salon.com/2020/05/15/betsy-devos-directs-500000-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/us/politics/betsy-devos-c...

While it’s hidden now, the Wright Foundation owns

www.wrightinstitutecult.com

How do I know? If you search that url on waybackmachine.com and go back a few years, you’ll see it’s their own site they created dedicated to prove how NOT a cult it is

This kind of shit is why I think a “defense against the dark arts” class should be standard in high school. It should cover, among other things:

1) How cults recruit and retain members. How to recognized it and tell them to fuck off before they get their hooks in you. Ditto MLMs, et c.

2) How to lie with statistics.

3) All the stuff from Cialdini’s Persuasion

I intend to give my kids such a course at home, since schools don’t do it.

Really, I think schools would have trouble adding such a course. I think too many families are involved in one part or another of all that, and would agitate to end it.

I'm not convinced it would help that much. One of the main reasons cult recruitment tactics are so effective is that they are also the mechanisms of wholesome human connection. If you universally reject people reaching out to you in these ways you will reject most good faith connections as well. And especially the retention techniques. Cults abuse the forces of social cohesion, but even being aware of that you are still bound by those forces. You will still feel the pain of rejection, the primordial terror of being cast out of your ingroup.

And I suspect it is similar to addiction, where having knowledge of the risk factors and mechanisms is at best a partial protection, at worst false confidence. Just as doctors and social workers become addicted to drugs, people who know how MLMs and cults work still join MLMs and cults.

The only personal-level skills that protect you are deep life shit like being honest and self aware about your own periods of loneliness, pain, vulnerability and being able to identify what is and isn't good for you at those points. You're not effectively teaching that in a high school class I don't think.

I think practicing scenarios and developing fallback heuristics and patterns could help. You don’t need to think when you have a rule to fall back on (“I never, ever buy anything from a salesman who approaches me unsolicited, period, end of story”) and a lot of people just need practice saying no and “being rude” (when someone else is in fact already being rude, by trying to get you to do something that’s a bad idea)

I agree with that, especially against MLMs and direct scams, that sort of practice is probably very valuable. It gets harder with the more straightforward social-spiritual stuff, and the most effective MLMs blur into those I think.

But yeah, I'm not saying you can't learn & practice techniques to reduce the risk of these things. Mostly just that the false positives of those techniques can have real costs too, and thinking you're immune is itself a risk factor.

Yeah, I’m under no illusions one could eliminate this stuff via education, but scams and scam-adjacent behavior part people from so incredibly much money every year that even reducing that 10% or 20% would be a pretty big deal.

Especially for cults. None of them walk up to you and say "we're a cult". They start out with positive interactions. Usually they find someone who needs help and seem to be offering something positive. It's not until later that they slowly start creeping in the more dangerous aspects like control and isolation.

It's a lot like an abusive romantic relationship. Most people aren't getting punched on the first date, instead they're interacting with someone who seems wonderful.

Is there any good book on 1?

Gaslighting: recognize manipulative and emotionally abusive people—and break free (2018) by Stephanie Moulton Sarkis PhD.

By the way, googling that I think you mean the Wright Graduate University for the Realization of Human Potential? Googling Wright Foundation goes to www.wrightfoundation.com which I think is a different kind of thing.

Interesting, this is the organization I was referring to: https://wrightfoundation.org/

But I wonder if the two are related?

https://wrightgrad.edu/

>Life coaching is a sprawling, multi-faceted industry that can include career coaches, financial coaches, happiness coaches and empowerment coaches.

Seems like the word "coach" is being used to avoid any sort of formal credential requirement. You need to be licensed to hang up a shingle as a therapist, but anyone can be a life coach. You need to be licensed to be a financial advisor but anyone can be a financial coach. Etc.

I'm sure there are plenty of good arguments against life coaching, but not being a part of the credentialcrats and government licensed businesses isn't one of them.

There's also a bit of marketing and psychology involved. A lot of people, especially men, would be embarrassed to say they're "going to see their therapist," but have no problem saying "I'm getting counseling from my coach."

Having taken training in the past for professional coaching (not this life coaching nonsense), it is made very clear that you are NOT anything close to a licensed therapist and you can get in Very Big Trouble doing something close to practicing without a license. The proper response is to cut that line of questioning off and tell the person to hire a therapist.

Generally coaching is intended to be forward-looking with an intent to solve a specific problem or question, specifically so as not to encroach on what a therapist does helping someone unpack their baggage from the past.

This is just another one of those sexist memes that needs to be forgotten. A person can have a therapist; a parody of an insecure man can have counseling from a coach.

Reminds me of when Dove tried to sell a "man scrubbing tool" because someone in marketing thought men were too stupid to buy loofahs.

I'm a man and I appreciate you saying this but it's not really a sexist meme in my experience. The vast vast majority of men i've ever spoken to about this have an aversion to therapy. I actually think any pro-therapy people wanting to reach more men would benefit a lot from rebranding it from therapy

I think that poster was saying that the meme of men having an aversion to therapy, ie "that men have an aversion to therapy," is a meme that needs to die. That most men have an aversion to something branded "therapy" is in itself a sexist meme that directly affects most men, and men would be better off if they stopped having this aversion.

Obligatory Peep Show clip: https://youtu.be/LMFBLJY9eW8?si=8uMPnYH3QH0OV8dp

Let's not forget the health coaches. Those are the ones who can, and sometimes do, kill.

I've actually seen quite a few (never used any though) who specifically say they're "certified life coaches," which generally seems to be some sort of credential given to them by a for-profit "academy."

The flipside is I know quite a few social work grads, especially with masters degrees, who have pivoted into the field because of how lucrative it can be.

I did a free become a life coach weekend course. I could probably say I'm certified now. The bar doesn't have to be very high.

There are formal credentials, they're issued by the International Coaching Federation, and they include an ethical component. Although this is geared more towards professional coaching, not the woo-woo life coaching crap.

This is a bit sensationalized.

> "In the first year alone, I spent $14,000 working with my life coach, and in the years that followed I probably spent $100,000," she says. She also spent thousands of dollars on additional courses and mentorships with other life coaches that her primary coach recommended. "I got sucked into it."

If they weren't getting value out of it, why continue the sessions?

I have an executive coach I meet with every other week. No psychology background, etc, but a lot of experience coaching people similar to me. She is insanely expensive, but I'm ok with that.

In my experience, the majority of these type of uncertified coaches don't go out of their way to mislead people into thinking they have more training than they do. For that reason I don't really consider it a scam. (I'm sure there are money hungry sketchy coaches that mislead people, but that exists in every industry)

It’s a bit more nuanced. An individual practitioner might not have malicious intent, but the industry itself could largely be fraudulent. Take for example a well meaning physic or purveyor of some pseudoscientific medical modality. The very existence and promotion of ineffective alternatives scams society as a whole, since the general public and by extension free markets are notoriously terrible at evaluating efficacy.

Tangent, but what is an “executive coach” and why do you see her?

It is like Plus, but instead of added leg room, it's got a wider overhead.

It's someone who offers you business advice. I know someone who uses one for their business. In my opinion it's just someone who spouts common sense truisms and then charges lots of money for it, but he seems to like it. A lot of overlap with life coaches.

Some people just like hearing they are right. Like the Indian guy in silicon valley who tells the guy what he says is enlightened.

It's like a therapist but focussed on your business life rather than personal life.

They typically work with other executives / business owners. Sounding board for talking through employee issues, managing people, or whatever else is going on in the business.

Basically things that would go over the head of a normal therapist.

I’m watching this happen to someone I know. Similar stories abound.

The way they rack up so much spending:

1) Cult-like sales tactics. I don’t mean that as a simple put down, I mean literally a lot of the same tactics cults use to gain recruits. “If it’s not working, you just haven’t committed hard enough, this is your fault” is universal, but far from the only example.

2) A pattern of coaches-coaching-coaches. Almost nobody makes money coaching normal people, in these systems. The actual market for that is tiny, and the number of people offering such services is enormous. Newbies drop out after muddling along for a year or two (paying coaches before and after starting their own thing) OR “graduate” to trying to coach coaches (for which they’ll need a coach, who will also try to refer them to their coach when they’ve gotten as much out of them as they can—it’s almost a self-organizing pyramid scheme). This intersects with #1 because they constantly demonize ways out of this cycle, especially getting a normal job (“ew, gross, yuck, don’t you want to be your own boss?”)

> In my experience, the majority of these type of uncertified coaches don't go out of their way to mislead people into thinking they have more training than they do.

Oh, and this part? Lying about their personal history, past entrepreneurial work, success at coaching, sometimes media coverage they’ve had or clients they’ve worked with, et c, is nearly universal. Many also hold bullshit credentials from other coaches who’ve reached the top of the pyramid. They also often have very misleading offers, especially for group-course sorts of things.

I’ve been going down a bit of a rabbit hole on this since discovering the whole thing exists, and have been surprised both at how huge it is, and how similar all the people doing it look, as far as the ways they exaggerate to “sell themselves” and the ways they scam with their offerings (but if there’s one thing these scam courses teach, it’s… how to scam. Like, really, that’s often the only material curriculum)

[edit edit] oh and you’re unlikely to “naturally” end up seeing this stuff if you’re a guy. The industry is overwhelmingly women, selling to other women. Many bill themselves as “helping women succeed and become entrepreneurs” and otherwise have a feminist coat of paint on their operation, which is incredibly gross because their business model is scamming women.

> coaches-coaching-coaches

This is the punchline of all the self-help books reviewed by the If Books Could Kill podcast.

See also: “how to get rich selling a ebook online!” (Offered as an ebook, sold online—guess what it’ll tell you to do?)

I’m not sure how popular that still is but my god it seemed like every other website was operating on that model for a few years.

Also, their whole business is something like “Are you the perfect mark? Then you can pay me to help you.”

Many of the courses offered by the folks a level or two “up the pyramid” include instruction on finding people who are a good fit for your coaching—which, I shit you not, includes not asking too many of the kinds of questions they absolutely should be asking. It’s all about finding someone who’ll fall for your pitch and then directing the rest of the sales conversation away from questions that would reveal you have no expertise or track record of success or wanting to pin down exactly what the intended beneficial outcome of the coaching might look like in concrete, specific terms, and quickly dropping anyone who is too resistant to staying within the lanes you want them to.

This can happen to anyone who accepts external authority on psychological matters. If you want to build a bridge, obviously you need an expert. But if you can't be a light to yourself and presume that you need a guru, therapist, coach, shaman or whatever to teach you things you couldn't possibly find out for yourself, well, there are no shortage of people (well intentioned and not) who will keep you in the role of the helpless by assuming the role of the helper.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with listening to other points of view, but ultimately one needs to be a light to themselves and observe deeply what rings true.

> 1) Cult-like sales tactics. I don’t mean that as a simple put down, I mean literally a lot of the same tactics cults use to gain recruits. “If it’s not working, you just haven’t committed hard enough, this is your fault” is universal, but far from the only example. 2) A pattern of coaches-coaching-coaches. Almost nobody makes money coaching normal people

My family got sucked into Amway back in the 90s, and that MLM scheme relies (or relied) on both of these. It started with the "motivational" tapes which sounded like cult indoctrination, and then once you're hooked you learn that the people that make the most money aren't the "leaf nodes" who sell a few products, but the people who have more suckers "under them" in the tree. So, they have a huge focus internally on coaching you to recruit others into the scheme, and coaching you on how to coach them to recruit. Nasty stuff.

>> "In the first year alone, I spent $14,000 working with my life coach, and in the years that followed I probably spent $100,000," she says. She also spent thousands of dollars on additional courses and mentorships with other life coaches that her primary coach recommended. "I got sucked into it."

> If they weren't getting value out of it, why continue the sessions?

Because Homo economicus is a lie, and real people don't act like that in real life. It's worth considering the full quote:

> Angela Lauria, 50, discovered life coaching when she was struggling with postnatal depression and had been recently fired from her job. Initially interested in a coaching programme focusing primarily on weight loss, Lauria signed up for a $2,000 (£1,595) retreat. "In the first year alone, I spent $14,000 working with my life coach, and in the years that followed I probably spent $100,000," she says. She also spent thousands of dollars on additional courses and mentorships with other life coaches that her primary coach recommended. "I got sucked into it."

That sounds like a desperate person with a lot of serious problems casting out for a lifeline. Life coaching presented itself as that lifeline, so she grabbed on and persisted because she hoped it would work.

I think it's a valuable news function to highlight that some of these coaches may be somewhere from misleading to fraudulent. That said, I think there's an paternalism to a lot of articles of this variety, where implicitly messages of type "thing X is bad" and "thing X should be regulated/illegal" are mixed together.

The nature of being adults with money and agency is that people will be trying to sell you things, and you will largely be permitted to give them money for their product. If you don't like the product, don't buy it. It's one thing if we're regulating something like food or drugs, where the average consumer can't possibly verify if e.g. an ingredient list is misleading, but here you're just straightforwardly getting some advice/coaching -- kinda up to you to decide whether it's worth it.

Hiring someone to paint your house? Sure, it’s worth it or not. But anyone in the advice-giving business can easily end up in a relationship with their clients that is more like a therapist. And therapy is extremely prone to creating unexpected levels of influence on decision-making. Remove all professional standards, licensing bodies, or even job titles, and of course the MLM-type manipulators will show up to the party.

I did some digging and found out that the motivational speaker industry was tangled up with multilevel marketing pyramid schemes. Motivational speakers may have done legitimate business for large institutions back in the 80s and 90s, but those institutions must not have seen the results they wanted because by the early 2010s, the big names were all speaking for Amway, Vemma, etc. to large crowds, to encourage/pressure people to stay in the program even when it was obvious they were losing money. Any time you see "power of positive thinking" type stuff, chances are it's propaganda for an MLM or MLMs in general. Most of the "thinkers" cited in Rhonda Byrne's The Secret were MLM affiliated. The rest were running scams of their own.

The best part about this discussion is seeing all the people pop up to defend the money (sometimes fantastic amounts) they have spent on their business/executive coach.

I'm sure the industry as a whole is shady, it's ripe for con men/women. But there's good people in it too. I have a weight loss coach that falls into the umbrella of life coaching. I pay her $50/month and we talk twice a week, set goals for the week and she checks to see if I achieved them and offers suggestions on how to attain them.

It's simple accountability and she's pleasant to talk to. I certainly don't feel like I've been taken advantage of, and she's helped me reframe some of my thinking so I can set achievable goals instead of beat myself up over missing them.

Anecdata: I know several life coaches and the main thing they have in common is that their personal lives are all a hot mess.

It's one of the most depressing examples of "those who can't do, teach".

Life coaches are the new yoga instructors.

It’s a similar model.

There’s not enough demand for yoga instructors so you make money by coaching coaches. To do this you have to convince prospects there’s a big market for it (there’s not). “Winning” in the market is graduating to coaching coaches of coaches. It’s entirely sustained by extracting money from dreamers who are guaranteed to fail. The amount of actually useful service delivered by the entire field is shockingly small for the amount of money it absorbs.

To make money from "coaching," one must either sell through the Internet, thus potentially reaching thousands to millions of people, or sell expensive individual 1:1 lessons.

This bifurcation has been observed, for example, in jiu jitsu, where the most profitable business opportunities are selling "instructionals" via DVD/digital download to thousands of people for over $100 a piece, or selling 1:1 coaching sessions for over $300 an hour. Owning a gym/teaching 150-200 students (kids + adults classes) may give a decent salary, but certainly not wealth.

If someone says they're a "life coach," I just assume they're a con artist.

Ironically there seems to be an over-representation of these life coaches, yoga instructors, motivational speakers and crypto types in US ex-pat communities in Central America. It'd be interesting to know what attracts these people to move there.

Cheap, instagrammable, “look at me living my best life in a tropical paradise don’t you wish you were too so buy my courses“ ?

It’s probably not the whole story, but having tropical locales in which to film your marketing materials (which is often videos of yourself, these day, for most or all of the categories you mentioned) can be part of selling your image as a smashing success, which is very useful if your spiel is “pay me and I’ll teach you to be as successful as I am!”

Lower cost of living probably also helps if you’re not as successful as you’re letting on.

So many people out there must have been in the same frustrating situation as myself, there are lots of investment websites that will only steal what you have to invest . Scrutiny has shown that the people in charge of these scams are hard to trace because they stay in third world countries and they know how to revive money in ways that will keep them away from the strict hands of the law. I lost $153,000 to an investment I was Induced. Fortunately I successfully got my money back through (MONEYRECOVERY001 at SOLUTION4U dot COM). You're in safe hands in their expertise trust me.

I find it most disturbing that many of these so-called life coaches seem to have a degree and that’s it with little to no accomplishments themselves.

“Business coaches” who’ve never had a successful business of note aside from selling business coaching (and usually, the impression of success at that is just them “faking it until they make it”—aka lying, which is to say, they have had zero successful businesses of note, if any at all).

I recommend watching the series when Jeremy becomes a life coach in peep show.

Little surprise here, given the two most contemptible people I've ever known in my life are both in that line. Neither is good for a damn lick of honest work, but keeping an eye on them over the years has made several grifts easy to spot.

Seems like LLMs have a chance at disrupting this particular pyramid scheme.

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