Great Coaches Aren’t Perfect. They’re Real…

The coaching industry is filled with a number of things. Shame is one of them.

If I told you the number of new coaches who feel insecure, unsure, and ill-prepared to do the one thing they feel most called to do, you’d be shocked… and the source of this sense of what I’ll call coaching unworthiness is something VERY FEW people in the coaching industry want to talk about:

Shame.

There’s this glamorous portrayal of coaches coming from the self-help and personal development world, a portrayal that involves the ‘big name’ coaches in the industry- coaches who’ve spent the last ten to thirty years showing people that it’s up to them to live their best lives, that anything is possible and that everything they want exists on the other side of fear.

Sound familiar?

But, in all of this pump-you-up and take-action-now talk, what’s not being talked about is this:

The coaching industry is bloated with platitudes and oppressive with shame.

There’s an undercurrent of toxic positivity that has filled the coaching industry, a strand of “You can do anything” without the grounded, inclusive message of “It’s more complex than that.”