A Cinderella story-style stagecoach powered by DALL E3
If you were a coach twenty years ago, people asked “which sport?”
Now the world and her wife are ‘coaches’. Not to mention AI coaching. In our growing gig economy, advisors and consultants are ‘coaches’ and in the digital realm, ‘coaching’ is a go-to-market strategy for the cottage industry of our times: Content Creation.
So, if you’re a certified coach struggling to distinguish what you do, or someone wondering whether coaching IRL might support you, here are 6 ways to distinguish real coaching from other 'coaching' out there :
1. Real coaching is about our world not the coach’s
‘Content creators’ have to create and own niches to get attention. Whether rigorous research from Ivy professors or the lived experience of TikTok life hackers, the issue is not quality of content but applicability.
Creators entice us to “scroll up, scroll up”, click for the magic beans of information and climb a monetization beanstalk. In our brave new digital world, it’s easier to sell a silver bullet than a struggle and once you've made a content hammer, even a really useful one, everything must become a nail.
But there is no single playbook for Life and IRL, where all the stress, stuckness, and suffering happens, context, not content, is King. Real coaches are trained to help us explore and embrace our world, not theirs.