3 Fatal Flaws of Uninspired Executive Coaches
How to avoid wasting time, energy, and money on sessions that won’t provide lasting results
Coaching is a booming business
Despite the ongoing global pandemic and a corresponding 9.6 percent decline in industry, the estimated market size of business coaching is currently $11.6 billion in the US alone.
As more companies and startups begin to identify the advantages to be gained working with an expert in mental and emotional fitness, coaches with wide-ranging backgrounds flock to identify as a life or executive coach with the hope of working with ambitious, achievement-oriented individuals.
Unfortunately, with the lack of qualifications required to call yourself a coach — none, in fact — there’s no quality control to ensure that the rates you pay will benefit your growth.
Most coaches lack credentials
At the highest level of coaching certification, a Master Certified Coach with the International Coaching Federation, requires that you have “coaching-related training” for 200 hours and accumulate a total of 2,500 hours with clients.
By comparison, earning a master’s degree in counseling psychology requires two full years of near-constant training, completing classes related to all aspects of human development, and over 2,000 direct hours with a diverse range of clients.
That’s not counting the ongoing competency assessments, supervision with licensed practitioners, case presentations, and research projects designed to teach students to critique themselves and their clinical work. It also doesn’t include licensing examinations and the continuing education units required to maintain the license once earned.
If the most rigorous coaching certification — something the vast majority of coaches do not possess — is less thorough than the bare-minimum master’s in counseling program, coaches are less likely to have a well-rounded understanding of psychological functioning.
That lack of knowledge directly impacts how coaches interact with clients.
Most coaches tell you what you want to hear
They appeal to your ego by selling you on the idea that they can “solve” your “problems.” That they can maximize the strengths you already possess, improve your habits, and change your emotional state by modifying your thinking.
Oh, and they’ll do this by focusing on using a logical and rational approach to meet your goals, building “accountability” through checklists, and only talking about things happening right now or in the future.
Ingesting this snake oil might make you feel better at first, but as your coaching engagement ends, you’ll find yourself right back where you started — sick to your stomach — and frustrated that you paid for results that didn’t last.
The problem with traditional coaching methods is that they fail to understand the complexities of the human psyche.
They focus on a “top-down” approach to mental wellbeing, one that has several fundamental flaws.
Most traditional coaches make three key mistakes:
They assume that you are aware of the blocks preventing your development.
They assume that you can use rational thinking and logic to change your mood.
They assume that more effort towards establishing habits and building discipline will help you reach your goals.
Each of these presumptions is naive but taken together, they amount to a lack of understanding of psychological functioning.
Below, a closer look at these three fatal flaws of most traditional coaches.
1. Most people are not aware of what’s preventing them from reaching their full potential
Most ambitious individuals have ideas about what they should do to improve themselves. They often have a running list of habits they want to implement into their already-busy lives.
But that doesn’t help them make lasting changes.
Often, the tasks they want to add, like more meditation, are at odds with their schedules, mental state, and opportunity cost.
Most coaches play along with their client’s understanding of the problem:
“You’re the expert of your experience. If you need more meditation, I’ll help you achieve that goal by holding you accountable and tracking your progress.”
This is a fatal flaw
Your coach is colluding with your ego, trying to add solutions to a problem that is not yet fully comprehended.
With the high-functioning clients I work with, the solution isn’t as simple as adding ten minutes of meditation into their daily routine.
One of my current clients, a newly appointed senior manager, grew up worrying about burdening others. As a child, his father — a busy and successful banker — often gave the client the impression that he was an inconvenience, a waste of his father’s valuable time.
To compensate for that emotional pain, my client tried to make himself useful. Throughout his life, he focused on providing value for others, saying “yes” to every opportunity, and never asking for anything in return.
This mentality of placing other people’s needs above his own makes him a high-functioning manager. He works hard to please leadership while maintaining an alliance with his employees. He’s quick to offer help, is self-reliant, and works at a relentless pace. But his mentality also contributes to other challenges, like self-imposed pressure and anxiety.
For this client, taking ten minutes a day to meditate feels selfish. He perceives prioritizing time for himself as taking it away from others.
Even if he added a ten-minute meditation into his daily routine, after a few months he’d fall right back into this modus operandi of overextending himself.
For this client, engaging in “selfish” practices increases the likelihood that he cannot be as helpful to others and that he may need to ask for additional support. In short, time for himself triggers his deep fear of being a burden on others.
That core issue — of feeling like a burden — is not addressed by a coach focused on helping him meditate more frequently.
This superficial focus on the goal rather than the underlying state that creates the problem is a collusion between the client’s ego and the coach that keeps the real issue out of awareness.
Coaches that don’t account for implicit or unconscious motivations won’t help you move beyond the barriers preventing your growth.
Look for coaches who know how to work with the aspects of yourself you are not already aware of.
2. You often cannot use logic and reason to improve your mood
If changing your mood was as simple as thinking happy thoughts, then psychologist’s wouldn’t have jobs. It is rare that someone chooses to think themselves into stress, anxiety, and depression.
Here’s a mental exercise to see how much control you have over your thoughts:
Don’t picture an alligator!
What image or color just popped into your head? An alligator.
The truth is that while thoughts may be related to emotions, they do not necessarily create them.
Correlation is not causation.
Thoughts and emotions often come and go like puffy white clouds moving across a bright blue sky. Just because two clouds appear together, does not mean that one caused the other to formulate.
Focusing on modifying your thoughts to change your emotions is based on principles developed by Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).
Though popular in mainstream psychology and considered a central “evidence-based” treatment, CBT has been proven to be much less effective than first thought.
“Research shows that ‘evidence-based’ therapies are weak treatments. Their benefits are trivial. Most patients do not get well. Even the trivial benefits do not last.” — Dr. Jonathan Schedler
Your mood, something stable over time, is determined by implicit motivations that are much more difficult to change because they are not under conscious control.
Find a coach who’s educated and committed to their craft. Someone that goes beyond the popular, mainstream treatments that don’t sustain success.
3. Most successful individuals already have an abundance of effort and discipline
The vast majority of my coaching clients possess discipline, willpower, and high levels of effort. It’s part of what makes them successful — they consistently work hard.
While you may want to hear that psychic transformation is as simple as increasing your effort, it’s not.
Often, deep and meaningful change — change that lasts — requires developing latent potentials that are currently underdeveloped.
Psychological growth is more about cross-training than it is about amplifying strengths that already exist. This intuitively makes sense, when you think about it from a physical standpoint:
“Cross-training can significantly reduce injuries caused by repetitive strain. Cross-training gives the commonly used muscles in the sport some respite from the stresses exerted each day by reducing the amount of stress placed on weight-bearing joints, muscles and tendons.” — Core Concepts Physical Therapists
Like physical health, optimal mental health requires developing aspects of yourself that are underused. Cross-training in this manner improves your overall performance by bringing greater balance and less strain to your dominant functions.
When working with attorneys, engineers, and other logic-oriented thinkers, I often find that focusing on feeling, identifying, and expressing emotions has an exponential ROI.
These clients spend the majority of their time engaging in rational thinking.
Increasing their awareness of emotional functioning in session allows them to build a new muscle that facilitates better communication with other “more emotional” people. It helps them recognize and address feelings in themselves that were previously out of awareness. And improving their emotional communication reduces friction within themselves and their interpersonal interactions, helping them to focus and execute at a higher level.
When coaches exclusively focus on giving you more of what you already have, they are over-taxing your mental capacity.
Short-term, you will make changes and feel good about the things you’ve implemented into your daily routine. But it’s not sustainable. It’s no different than other moments of intensity where you power through discomfort to meet a deadline.
Long-term, you’ll fall right back into the same patterns that caused you to find a coach in the first place. Without recharging through cross-training, your resources will deplete because your psyche lacks the balance it needs to sustain success.
Focus on finding a coach who doesn’t just tell you what you want to hear.
Find someone who challenges you to think about yourself in new ways. And someone who works hard to continue learning and growing themselves.
Coaching is a significant investment
While you’re responsible for how you show up and engage in that process, finding a quality coach is also an important step.
Find someone who is qualified. Someone who understands the complexity of the human psyche. And someone who practices what they preach.
The rest will fail to provide lasting results.
A quick summary:
Look for a coach with degrees, licenses, and certifications (in that order).
Make sure your coach understands how to help you become more conscious of the things that are not yet in your awareness.
Notice if your ego is being sold more of what it already possesses rather than being challenged to develop something new.
Find a coach who is passionate and committed to their long-term personal and professional growth.