To an outsider, Billiejo Mullett is someone who has his head on straight. She is smart and educated (a registered nurse who works for a health insurance provider) and balances her career with a busy family life.
In many ways, Ms. Mullett, who lives in Minoa, New York, seems to have things figured out, which is why she is still recovering from a life coaching experience she describes as a “pyramid scheme” that required dozens of thousands of dollars. her.
“I’m an intelligent human being,” Mullett, 46, said. “We all think this will never happen to us. “That’s the really scary part.”
She is part of a growing cohort speaking out about the more opaque and opaque side of life coaching, an unregulated industry with an often high price tag and significant cost that goes far beyond the funds spent.
With its earliest roots in the self-improvement trend of the late 20th century, life coaching broadly encompasses a program of goal setting and psychotherapy-style sessions aimed at improving an individual’s circumstances and well-being.
Businesses are thriving. The International Coaching Federation, the world’s largest nonprofit coaching association, estimated that the industry was worth $4.6 billion in 2022 and that the number of coaches increased 54 percent between 2019 and 2022. Because the industry lacks standardized accreditation, most likely it is larger, one of The dangers of life coaching is that anyone can claim the title of life coach.
And while many operate with integrity, providing thoughtful and structured advice to their clients to help them through difficult times, the unregulated nature of the industry can make it easy for people to take advantage.
an expensive dream
In 2018, Ms Mullett was tired of the grind of the corporate world and struggling to build an integrated family with her now husband when she discovered life coaching.
“My friend recommended a podcast to me and I immediately felt like this was what I was looking for,” she said. “The presenter was talking about how our thoughts impact our emotions and our behaviors. He hooked me.”
Mrs. Mullett began watching videos on the host’s website. The host, a life coach whom Mullett asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation and harassment, combined the language of successful businesswomen with the promise of a new career in which women could be in control of their own work and schedule. , help others and improve themselves.
There were videos “that talked about how the brain is the most valuable thing you can invest in,” Mullett said.
She withdrew $18,000 from her 401(k) to pay for her first course at a top life coaching school, hoping it would lead to a much-needed career change.
The course was not what she expected. Mullett described a confusing, low-quality program of online lessons (one hour a week for six months) in which aspiring trainers discussed chapters they had read outside of class and practiced coaching each other. She said that she often belittled the students and that she was discouraged from questioning the wisdom of the trainers who ran the course.
But Ms. Mullett remained hopeful and believed she had learned some valuable things—for example, that she had the ability to focus only on the things in her life that she could control. She had spent an extraordinary amount of money on the certification and held on to the dream she had been sold: making good money while fulfilling her passion of helping others.
“It’s hard to give up that dream,” he said.
After completing the program, Ms. Mullett became certified by the school and hoped to begin training. But although she had initially been told that her certification would give her “everything I needed to earn my first $100,000,” Ms. Mullett found herself without clients and struggling to earn any income. The solution they offered you? Spend more money on training.
“How can you sell someone the value of coaching if you’re not paying for the coaching yourself?” she said they told her.
Mullett felt pressured to spend increasingly substantial sums on business coaching and mentoring classes, ostensibly to help boost her budding career. She started with a $2,000 course and, when it seemed to slightly improve her business, she signed up for a similar course that cost $5,000 and then spent an additional $10,000 on coaching.
“I wasn’t making any money,” he said. “I was spending money.”
Vulnerable to exploitation
Máire O Sullivan, a marketing professor at Munster University of Technology in Ireland and an expert in multi-level marketing schemes, said schemes like the one that had attracted Mullett were part of the reason for the rapid growth of the life coaching industry.
“The boom is being driven by the appetite for life coaching, but also by artificial means,” Ms O Sullivan said. “There is a problem in the industry of coaches training coaches to become coaches.”
Although surveys suggest that trainers charge an average of $244 per hour, this rate is most likely skewed by a handful of big names in the industry who charge thousands of dollars for an hourly session. Some charge more than $6,000 for a half-day session and $200,000 for 50-hour packages. Most trainers are also limited by demand: most report training around 11 hours per week. This means that many trainers have to expand their businesses through other methods.
This can be by employing other life coaches and taking a cut of their profits, creating what is known as a downline, or selling things like coaching certifications to your fan base.
Sunny Richards was first introduced to life coaching through a friend. Ms. Richards, 52, lives in Dallas and previously earned six figures working as a project manager in information technology. She had been struggling with loneliness after being forced to move for her husband’s job and being fired from two jobs in the space of 18 months. She said she was “in a state of depression” when she signed up for a life coaching course, which cost her $300 a month.
For Richards, this was the beginning of six “emotionally and financially devastating” years. She upgraded her course to one that cost about $3,000 a month in hopes of becoming certified as a life coach. Once she became certified, she said she was “bombarded” by other trainers trying to sell her additional courses or qualifications.
“The industry eats itself,” he said. “There were famous coaches, and then there were the rest of us, and the rest of us were competing for a coaching spot.”
Although Ms. Richards became skeptical of the industry, she said her stubbornness kept her going. “I’m not a give-up person,” she said. “I saw the problems a long time ago, but walking away was too difficult.”
Ms O Sullivan said this experience was common among people who were swept up in the expensive offers of life coaching. “Life coaching attracts people who are vulnerable to exploitation,” she said.
The pinnacle of this exploitation has been laid bare in recent high-profile legal battles and criminal charges against several coaching organizations. In the United States, the founder of Nxivm, a multi-level marketing scheme and sex cult that began as a training program for executive success, was convicted of human trafficking, sexual crimes and fraud in 2019.
In Britain, a life coaching organization called Lighthouse was recently closed after its members said they were isolated from friends and family, told to cut back on mental health medication and encouraged to sell their homes to pay. the tutoring.
“Coaching is a self-regulatory industry, meaning anyone can establish a coaching practice regardless of their training or professional experience,” Carrie Abner, vice president of credentials and standards at the International Coaching Federation, said in a statement. She said clients should make sure they work with trained, experienced trainers who have credentials.
Ms. Abner said coaches with International Coaches Federation credentials agreed to abide by a code of ethics. “If a client feels that a coach has acted in a way that is not aligned with professional or ethical standards, the client has a formal process available to hold the coach accountable,” she said.
An industry with two faces
Stories like Ms Richards’ are familiar to Eva Collins, who found life coaching after becoming heavily involved in yoga and self-improvement around 2010. Ms Collins, 40, was a life coach for several years and worked in sales and marketing. teams from some of the industry’s top coaches. This is where she began to notice the “insidious pyramid scheme element” of many of these companies.
“They harass people for money,” he said. “You are not allowed to question the head coach. He is not allowed to dissent.”
Collins, who lives in Sacramento, now runs an Instagram page that shares anonymous comments about some of life coaching’s worst offenders. She said she received dozens of messages a week from people who had fallen into debt. Some even had to remortgage their homes to pay for the training.
Ms Collins believes many trained life coaches are legitimate and doing good work, but said the industry also had a serious problem with scammers.
“Most people get into life coaching because they love helping and supporting people,” she said. “They don’t start out thinking they’re going to ruin people or take all their money. But sometimes that’s what happens.”
For Mullett and Richards, the process of retiring from the world of life coaching has been long and difficult.
Mullett said he had to seek therapy because of the financial and emotional damage. And after leaving the industry last year, he has struggled with the guilt and shame of having spent so much time and money on what he now considers an elaborate scam.
Ms. Richards estimated she spent more than $30,000 on life coaching and said she consistently spent more than she earned. Still, the decision to walk away was not easy.
“To finally come to terms with letting him go is emotionally devastating,” she said. “This was going to be my dream. I went from receiving six-figure benefits and a 401(k) to desperately trying to find a minimum wage job, at a time when I thought I would be at the top of my game. I didn’t think I would try to start over at 52 years old. “I didn’t see the end of the story like that.”