I spent a lot of time this past year studying coaches. You know, the ones who are presenting themselves as business coaches, life coaches, mindset mastery coaches, etc.

And just like everything in life, there's some great ones and there's some shockers.

The worst tend to be absolute lone wolves out on their own without networks or any kind of accountability, drumming up followers and clients like they are leaders of some kind of Kool-Aid-drinking death cult.

The best tend to have several things in common that I think could form a bit of a checklist if you are strongly considering getting a mentor, a coach or some kind of advisor for your career or business.

Specific about what they do and who they do it for.

As I sifted through the websites, the social media channels and the reviews of a lot of these coaches I looked for patterns. And there are certainly a lot of them. But there are a few things that seem to occur with all the good ones.

First, they are specific about what they do and who they do it for. And this is important.

This year I watched a coach flip and flop from one cohort to another and then off to yet another before she finally gave up on it all when it got too hard.

She had no specific point of view, no specific focus area and no specific target client. She just had a whole lot of motivational quotes lifted from various hard-hitting famous coaches that she rebranded with her own logo and then went on a six month rant about how she is a global powerhouse.

Of course this approach did nothing to draw in any clients beyond an a few lost souls who were willing to part with a few thousand dollars but failed to become testimonials at the end of the experience.

When you're not sure who you are, who you're for and what you can do for them, you'll start throwing darts at anything that looks like it has money in the hope that someone will become your client.

The trouble is that when you finally do talk someone into taking you on, you will have nothing to give them because you have no idea how to work with them.

They have a framework or belief system.

I usually run a mile from anything religious, but another emerging coach I followed closely this past year was a Christian woman who had an a very tight target she was working with.

Unsurprisingly, it was Christian women.

But what I was impressed with was that she didn't pretend to come up with all her ideas and frameworks herself. She credited her own mentor for many of her ideas and approaches.

So I went and looked into her mentor and found that she too credited another more well-known Christian life coach. It looked like this "coach of coaches" had an established and tested framework for helping Christian people integrate their faith into their everyday lives in a way that would help them be successful, but also true to their beliefs.

Their overall approach was based on Biblical principles that were cherry-picked from oddly specific passages of the book that could have applied to almost anything as they were so vague, but they managed to shoehorn the ideas into a pretty simple to explain way of effecting change in someone's life.

There are some universal truths when it comes to working with people to bring desired changes to their lives. And every single approach that a coach or framework takes borrows from psychology, ancient wisdom from some religious movement or from other gurus and coaches.

Good coaches don't seem to claim that their ideas are all their own.

The ones I would be concerned with are those who refuse to acknowledge the sources of what they teach.

They give away a lot of free wisdom and time.

There has been quite a movement in this coaching world to hide wisdom and knowledge behind paid communities and high-ticket online courses.

The reality is that almost every coach bases this "wisdom" on things they've learned from other coaches who have posted endless content online out in the open - for free.

There are so few life-changing ideas you are going to get behind a pay wall when it comes to life coaches, business coaches and mindset coaches that it feels almost criminal that they make people pay for these online "resources."

You could essentially generate the same coaching program as they have behind their membership gates in about 30 seconds on ChatGPT.

You know why?

Because these programs are all basically the same thing, repackaged with a few different words and using a few different stories and wrapped up in some kind of origin story that the coach leans on to draw you in with. And that is usually around some kind of hardship they had to overcome on their way to the success they have right now.

The good coaches know this, own this and they just put it all out there.

Their approach is known.

Their story is known.

Their inspirations are known.

You know what you're going to get if you work with them.

And that's the key difference.

Because you know so much about them, you could, in theory, take on all the wisdom that they are putting out into the world, apply it to your life, career or business and do pretty well for yourself.

But let's face it, you're not going to dive into the back catalogue of all their social posts, blogs and newsletters and reverse-engineer yourself a plan for your life. Because, from what I've been looking into, the value of a coach doesn't come from what what they say, it comes from something more.

So what does a coach offer?

That's really what I was setting out to discover.

What are they actually good for?

I'm a pretty sceptical person when it comes to most modern nonsense and honestly, coaching has felt a bit like that to me for a long time.

And then I got a coach back in 2020 that made all my worst fears about business coaching come true as I was given the worst advice for my life and business that I ever could have been offered.

It was truly shocking and that individual's business coaching operations have subsequently collapsed since then.

Yet the whole concept of coaching comes up again and again.

People are getting value from it.

People are recommending their coaches.

Coaches are making money and changing lives, so there must be something in it.

And here's what I think that something is.

1. Life is complicated, busy and stressful. We can't be expected to know everything, handle everything and be everything we need to be.

2. We have all the information in the world available to us, but information alone can't help us make sense of the world.

3. People are hard-wired to be guided, trained and mentored by people. There's nothing magic about that, but empathy from another human being helps the knowledge be better absorbed, better retained and better acted upon.

And that's what is missing if you simply unpack all that coaches are about and attempt to create your own program based on that information.

ChatGPT may ask questions, give you ideas and talk back to you in a session, but it's really just an enthusiastic servant that only wants to please you.

It won't challenge you when you say you don't like what it said. It will simply adjust itself to better suit you. And that's not a coach - that's a sycophant.

A book, a chatbot or a reverse-engineered plan you've ripped from a PDF can't hug you when you feel like a failure. It can't give you that look of exasperation and disappointment that you need to see what you haven't done what you committed to do. And it can't press you harder than you are comfortable with because it doesn't know that you can be so much more if only you can breakthrough your barriers just a little to get to the other side of what's stopping you.

I think that's what a coach brings.

Agreement, but also challenge.

Inspiration, but also perspiration.

Reassurance, but also tough love.

I'm not sure if that's helpful, but I was quite fixated on the whole idea this year to the point where I spent too much time analysing how these people work.

I thought I was going to expose a massive scam industry and make a YouTube video to tell the world that we're all being ripped off.

Instead, I'll be looking for a new coach myself in 2025. And might even take on some of what I've learned to do better at my own training and advisory activities.