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Cons of a Life Coach

A life coach can help a person navigate through life's choppy waters, such as relationship heartbreaks or career woes. Their focus is on transforming clients into confident winners with can-do attitudes through goal setting and support. Yet, consumers need to do their homework before hiring a life coach, says journalist A. Pawlowski in CNN's "Getting 'Unstuck': Does Your Life Need A Coach?" The field is unregulated, should not be substituted for professional counseling and might involve unusual techniques.

  1. Unregulated

    • The business of life coaching is not regulated, so there are no industry standards or universally recognized training, qualifications or certifications, A. Pawlowski writes in CNN's "Getting 'Unstuck': Does Your Life Need A Coach?" Instead, numerous schools, institutes and academies offer their own designations, which might be confusing to someone who is shopping for a life coach. Some coaches require a minimum three-month commitment at hourly rates that range from $40 to $500, regardless of their training or experience. Some coaches prefer to conduct sessions over the telephone. A consumer should speak with other clients as references and schedule a sample session with the life coach to discuss a real issue, not just on the coach's background or techniques.

    Mental Health

    • Life coaches are not mental health counselors. A life coach must recognize the difference between a client who lacks self-discipline and motivation, and a person who suffers from a mental health issue such as chronic depression. "Don't mix the boundaries," professor Stephen Palmer, director of the coaching psychology unit at City University, says in the online article "Personnel Today: Coaching And Counseling Can Be A Dangerous Mix." A well-intentioned but naïve coach could do more harm than good if a client needing professional psychiatric support is given a list of goals and objectives from his life coach. "The very nature of being depressed means that people cannot hold ideas in their head or become goal-focused," says Palmer.

    Unconventional

    • Life coaches are not bound by any professional standards, so their methodologies may seem unorthodox. Andrew West offers a first-person account of his experiences with a life coach in his online article "Wongablog: Life Coaching And How I Was Seduced By Nonsense." His life coach stunned him six months into his program by using neurolinguistic programming that made him uncomfortable. Mixing quantum physics and metaphysics, West's coach asked him to travel back to the moment in his life---perhaps even before his birth---when one pivotal event might have sparked a lifetime of unhappiness. The life coach believed that identifying that single moment would turn his life around. "The whole episode was swiftly undoing all of the good that had come before," West writes.

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