What Every Woman Should Know Before Hiring a Life Coach (The Good, The Icky, and The Truth)

Before you spend another dollar on a coach, read this.

I hear this all the time from clients, and from so many entrepreneurs I meet along the way.

They feel absolutely defeated.

They’ve spent thousands of dollars on coaches. THOUSANDS. They’ve done the calls, watched the trainings, joined the masterminds and the group coaching sessions, and followed the “expert strategy,” and… nothing had really shifted. Not in the way They’d hoped or were promised. And the worst part? They blame themselves. They say things like:

“I must be the problem. I must not be coachable.”

They talk about programs they joined where they didn’t even have access to the coaches. They were told to just do the course modules. Or they’d show up to “group coaching” calls, but wouldn’t be coached.

And I’ve been sucked into it. Believing that these coaches had the same training or integrity I had as coach. It’s heartbreaking for all of us. Because here’s the thing — The “coach” was the problem, not the person who hired the coach. What most people are paying for wasn’t actually coaching. It was a packaged program with a fancy name and a lifestyle-flexing Instagram account behind it. And most people have no way of knowing the difference.

These situations haunt me all the time. It’s actually made me play small in my own business and out in the world because my integrity, my training, and my understanding of coaching does not align with the way the industry has shifted. And honestly, that’s why I’m recording this episode today.

I’ve been in the coaching industry for over a decade. I completed my formal coach training 11 years ago. After I worked with my first coach, I knew I wanted to be a coach. She had trained at the first Coaching Institution started by the founder of the coaching industry, Thomas leonard. The school is called Coach U. I spent a YEAR training to be a coach.

In the past 11 years, I have watched this industry go through a transformation — not always a good one. So today, I want to have a real, honest, BFF-style conversation with you about it.

We’re going to cover what coaching actually IS — and what it isn’t. We’re going to talk about how the industry has changed and what the “get rich quick” coaching boom has done to it. And then I’m going to share why, despite ALL of that, I still believe that working with the RIGHT coach can be one of the most transformational things you do for yourself and your business.

This episode is for you if you’re thinking about hiring a coach, you’ve been burned before, you’re a new entrepreneur who’s seeing all these “coaches” online and feeling confused, or you just want the unfiltered truth from someone who’s been in the trenches for a long time.

Let’s jump into it.

First: What Coaching Actually Is — And What It Isn't

There is so much confusion around the word “coaching,” and that confusion has been heavily exploited. So before anything else, let’s get clear.

Real coaching is not advice-giving.

It is not a coach telling you what to do, handing you a strategy, or sharing their “expert secrets.” That’s consulting. That’s mentoring. Both of those things have tremendous value — but they are not coaching, and they should not be sold as coaching.

Real coaching is a process where a trained coach uses powerful questions, deep listening, and specific techniques to help you access your own answers. A real coach is not the expert on your life. You are. The coach is the expert at helping you see yourself more clearly — at identifying and dissolving the mental blocks, the fear, and the self-doubt that are standing between you and what you already know you want.

Here’s a simple breakdown:

A mentor says: “Here’s what worked for me. Do this.” A consultant says: “Here’s the strategy. Here’s your action plan.” A coach says: “What do YOU think is getting in the way? What would you do if fear wasn’t a factor? What does success actually look and feel like for you?”

See the difference? It’s an entirely different experience. And it requires an entirely different skill set — one that takes real training to develop.

When I decided to become a coach 11 years ago, I didn’t just create an Instagram account and start charging people money. I went through a rigorous, formal coach training program. I learned methodology. I learned how to hold space. I learned how to ask the kind of questions that actually create breakthroughs — not just the ones that sound profound. I learned the ethics of coaching. I practiced under supervision. I was evaluated.

That training shaped everything about the way I work. And it gave my clients something they deserved: a coach who actually knew what she was doing.

Why I Became a Coach — And What the Industry Used to Look Like

I came to coaching through my own journey of reinvention.

I moved across ten states without knowing a single person. I walked away from a stable 9-to-5 to pursue something that both thrilled and terrified me. I followed a passion that made zero logical sense on paper and made complete sense in my soul. And along the way, I discovered what real coaching could do — and I knew, with every part of me, that this was the work I was meant to do.

The women I wanted to serve were new and aspiring female entrepreneurs on the cusp of something big — women who had the dream, had the passion, had every piece of the puzzle — but whose self-doubt was so loud it was drowning everything else out. Women who knew what they wanted but couldn’t quite get out of their own way. That’s my person. It has always been my person.

When I started, coaching was still a recognized, respected profession. There were established certifications, established methodologies, established ethics. If you called yourself a life coach, there was a general understanding that you had gone through some kind of meaningful training to be able to do that. It wasn’t a perfect industry — no industry is — but there was a foundation of integrity.

And then, slowly at first and then all at once, things started to shift.

What Happened to the Coaching Industry

I have a lot of feelings about this part. A lot. So bear with me.

About eight years ago, social media — Instagram especially — started to completely reshape the coaching landscape. With it came a new wave of what I’d call “lifestyle entrepreneurs”: people who had achieved something — built a following, made money, grown a business in a specific niche — and then turned around and said, “Now I’m going to coach you on how to do what I did.”

Here’s the thing. Mentorship is valuable. Sharing what’s worked is valuable. But this is where things went sideways: these people started calling themselves coaches. They started charging coaching prices — thousands of dollars. And what they were actually delivering was a packaged program, a course, a set of “expert strategies.” A PDF with a few Zoom calls sprinkled in.

That is not coaching. That is consulting at best. And at worst? It’s grifting.

Then the “money mindset coaches” and the “six figures in 90 days” crowd arrived, and things got really messy. Suddenly you’d see someone who had made money — often by selling courses to other people about how to make money — repackage themselves as a coach. Their marketing was all lifestyle: the laptop on the beach, the dream vacations, the income screenshots, the “I made $30K in a month and you can too!” promises.

And women — smart, ambitious, hopeful women — were paying thousands of dollars for what turned out to be… not much. No real personalized support. No one asking them about their fears or their vision or what was actually blocking them. Just strategies. Just “here’s what you do.” And when it didn’t work, they blamed themselves.

Just like the woman who reached out to me believing she wasn’t coachable.

The harm wasn’t just financial — though wasting thousands of dollars is absolutely harmful. The deeper damage was to their trust. Their trust in themselves for not “making it work.” Their trust in the very idea that coaching could help them at all. So many women walked away from what could have been a genuinely transformational experience because they had a terrible one with someone who had no business using the word “coach.”

How I Got Lost in the Chaos Too

Here’s the part I don’t talk about enough. Because I wasn’t just watching this happen from a safe distance. I got caught up in it too.

As this wave of loud, flashy, high-follower “coaches” flooded the online space, I started to question everything about what I was doing. I’d scroll Instagram and see coaches with tens of thousands of followers, selling $10,000 masterminds and “VIP containers,” posting income testimonials and before-and-after stories about clients who’d completely transformed their businesses and their bank accounts. And then I’d look at what I was offering — genuine, heart-led, one-on-one coaching at an accessible price point — and I’d think: Is this enough? Am I enough?

The comparison was brutal. On paper, I looked small. My offers were lower-priced. My audience was smaller. I didn’t have a signature mastermind. I just had the work — the real, quiet, powerful work of sitting with a woman and helping her find her way back to herself.

And then there was the marketing. Oh, the marketing.

The fear-based, urgency-soaked, “you’re leaving money on the table” copy that was absolutely everywhere. I tried to keep up with it. I really did. I tried to write the bold, provocative, “this is your sign” captions the gurus said I needed. I tried to position myself the way the marketing coaches told me to.

Every single time, it felt like wearing someone else’s clothes. It felt icky. It felt like a betrayal of the very thing that made me good at what I do — my genuine love for the women I work with and my deep belief in what coaching, done right, can actually do.

How do you sell heart? How do you compete with someone selling a million-dollar business blueprint when you’re selling confidence, clarity, and the quiet magic of a real mindset shift? How do you stay visible and stay yourself when the loudest voices in the room are promising things you’d never feel comfortable promising?

I didn’t have good answers to those questions for a long time. There were moments where I genuinely wondered if I had a place in this industry anymore. Whether I should just pivot into something else entirely. Whether I should become one of them.

But I kept coming back to the women. The ones who found me not because I promised them a six-figure income — but because something in how I showed up made them feel seen. Like finally, someone was talking about the real stuff. The fear stuff. The “who am I to do this?” stuff that no strategy or course was ever going to fix.

And eventually I realized: the fact that I felt out of place in the loud, bro-marketing, overpromising version of this industry wasn’t a weakness. It was the thing that made me the real deal.

Staying true to my integrity while the industry around me got buried under inexperienced “experts” and get-rich-quick schemes has been the hardest thing I’ve done as a coach. And I believe, genuinely and completely, that it has made me a better one.

Why Real Coaching Still Works — And Why I Still Believe in It

After all of that, you might be wondering why I’m still here. Why I still believe, with my whole heart, that finding the right coach is one of the most powerful things you can do for yourself and your business.

It’s because of what real coaching actually does — things that no course, no book, no podcast, and not even your most supportive friend can replicate.

A real coach helps you get out of your own head. When you’re deep in your own fear and self-doubt, you cannot see clearly. You are too close to it. A real coach creates the space for you to zoom out, look at your own story with fresh eyes, and find the clarity that was genuinely impossible to access on your own.

A real coach asks the questions that crack things open. Not “what’s your strategy?” — but “what are you most afraid of?” and “what would it mean about you if this didn’t work?” and “whose voice is that, telling you you’re not ready?” Those questions, asked at the right moment in the right way, can create shifts in a single session that might otherwise take years.

A real coach holds the vision for you when you can’t hold it yourself. This is the one that gets me every time. I have sat with clients who could not see their own potential — who were so deep in doubt that the dream felt completely unreachable. Part of the sacred work of coaching is holding that vision of who they could become until they’re strong enough to hold it themselves. You cannot get that from a course. You just can’t.

I think about Priyanna, who said a year after we worked together that she couldn’t imagine where she’d be without coaching. Laura, who was approaching midlife, spinning in anxiety about what SHE actually wanted for the first time ever, who through our work together found her passion and started building the life she deserved. Nicole, who said it felt like I knew her better than she knew herself — that after one session she finally tapped into what she truly wanted, not what she thought she “should” want.

Those transformations are real. And they are why I refuse to let the icky side of this industry define what coaching is.

How to Find the RIGHT Coach

If you’re thinking about hiring a coach, here’s what I want you to know before you do.

Get clear on what you actually need. Coach, mentor, or consultant? If you need mindset shifts and to get out of your own way, that’s a coach. If you need someone who’s walked your exact path to show you the ropes, that’s a mentor. If you need a specific strategy built out for you, that’s a consultant. Knowing the difference will save you thousands of dollars.

Ask about their training — and don’t feel bad about it. A real coach will answer without hesitation. If they pivot to talking about their income or their own results instead of their methodology, pay attention to that.

Watch for the red flags. Marketing that leads with how much money they make. Testimonials that are all about income and never about personal transformation. A discovery call where they pitch more than they listen. These are not the coaches you’re looking for.

Look for the green flags. A clear process or framework. Great questions — even on the first call. Testimonials that speak to real transformation. Honesty about what coaching can and can’t do. And a coach who seems genuinely curious about you before they say a word about their program.

And above everything else — trust your gut. The coaching relationship is intimate. You will be sharing your fears, your dreams, your messiest inner stuff with this person. If something feels off, even if you can’t name why, listen to that. The right coach will leave you feeling seen and energized, not pressured and confused.

Why I'm Still Here

After 11 years. After all the noise and the comparison and the moments of wondering if I even belonged in this industry anymore — I am still here.

I’m here because of every woman who has shown up to a session saying “I don’t know if I can do this” and gone on to do it anyway. I’m here because the work is real and it matters and it changes lives — not just bank accounts, but actual lives. The way a woman sees herself. The way she talks to herself. The courage she finds to finally take the leap she’s been circling for years.

That doesn’t get old. It doesn’t get less meaningful. And no amount of grifters with ring lights and income screenshots can take away what real coaching does for real people.

So if you’ve been burned before — I’m sorry. You deserved better, and I hope this helps you feel a little more equipped to find it.

And if you’ve never worked with a coach but something in you has been nudging you toward it — maybe this is your sign to stop scrolling past that nudge and actually listen to it.

If you want to talk about whether coaching is the right next step for you, I’d love to have that conversation. You can book a free 30-minute Momentum Call with me — no pressure, no pitch, just a real talk about where you are and where you want to go.

Because that’s what I’m here for. It always has been.