I’m a life coach, you’re a life coach: the rise of an unregulated industry | Life and style | The Guardian
I n November 2020, Olivia* was ready for her life to be transformed. She had just stepped away from her long career in business and paid $18,000 for a six-month program to become a life coach. “It was a big decision financially, but it felt right,” she said. “I wanted to start bringing the work I’d done on myself to see if I could help others.” The program, she believed, was the key to a career that would be both lucrative and emotionally satisfying.
Throughout her life, Olivia had explored her inner world via spiritual retreats, therapy, and psychology books. But she’d been dismissive of life coaching, which she regarded as “bullshit” – until she heard about Brooke Castillo.
Castillo, a lean, blond Californian who lives in Austin, Texas, was once a small-time self-help guru, the author of self-published books with titles like, If I’m So Smart, Why Can’t I Lose Weight? Over the past handful of years, she’s become the reigning queen of the world of life coaching, thanks to her savvy marketing techniques, fusion of new age therapyspeak and girlboss rhetoric, and the parasocial relationship she cultivates with listeners to her popular podcast, the Life Coach School (LCS). Castillo doesn’t merely coach people to improve their lives. She’s built a multimillion-dollar business by persuading her fans that they, too, can find meaning (and money) by becoming life coaches.
illo Olivia initially discovered Castillo through the Life Coach School podcast, which regularly ranks among iTunes’s top business podcasts; its episodes have more than 45 million downloads. In episodes with titles like Self-Image and Why Change Is Hard, Castillo delivers firm but friendly advice about boundaries, time management, and emotional regulation. She is accessible and direct; she sounds like a no-nonsense big sister who wants the best for you.
Castillo tells listeners that their problems are not caused by external circumstances – bad bosses, difficult mothers-in-law – but rather their inability to manage their own thoughts. She opens up about her own struggles with weight and anxiety, and punctuates her anecdotes with a warm, trilling laugh. “When you work with a therapist, you’re talking to someone who doesn’t necessarily share your issues,” Olivia said. “This felt more like, ‘I’m on your plane, let’s figure this out together,’ which was very appealing.” She began to eagerly await new episodes, which drop every Thursday – Castillo hasn’t missed a week since she began her show in 2014. Olivia has gone back and listened to the program starting from the very first episode, taking notes on particularly revealing insights.
Like many of Castillo’s listeners, Olivia was a successful professional middle-aged woman. And, like many, she found Castillo at a time when she felt an itching dissatisfaction with her life. On her podcast, and in her persona, Castillo offered the promise of something better. She had learned to manage her mind and was rewarded with a fulfilling life: a happy marriage, two teenage sons, a pristine home and a thriving multimillion-dollar business helping other people self-actualize. Soon, Olivia began considering quitting her job to become a life coach, too.
Coaching is an entirely unregulated industry – there are no oversight boards, no standard curricula, no codes of ethics; if I wanted to hang out my shingle as a life coach tomorrow, no one would stop me. Coaching is distinct from therapy, in that it tends to focus on helping functional people improve their lives, rather than treating people with clinical issues – although those lines aren’t always clear.
Castillo, who has an air of efficiency and an undergraduate degree in psychology, founded the for-profit Life Coach School in 2007; in the years since, she has inspired thousands of people to enroll in an online certification program that costs as much as a year of college. If they complete the program successfully, she proclaims them to be “certified” life coaches. The certification is not recognized by any outside authority, but Castillo likes to say that in the unruly world of coaching, her program is the gold standard, the “Yale of life coaching schools”.
The Life Coach School caters to the idea that anyone who works hard can build a thriving career as a life coach. Last year, with more people than ever anxious, indoors and online because of the pandemic, the company made $37m in gross revenue. As employees left their jobs in droves, seeking better working conditions and more fulfilling careers, LCS trained a record number of aspiring life coaches. “Our enrollments went way up,” Castillo told me. “People that had been on the fence about changing their lives, this was a good catalyst for so many of them.”
But the rapid rise of Castillo and the Life Coach School also raises questions about an unregulated industry at a time when the demand for mental health services is outpacing supply. Operating in the murky realm of “empowerment”, where personal development and financial success blur together, LCS is certainly having a moment; its revenue more than quadrupled between 2017 and 2019. Is Castillo empowering her largely female client base with the tools and support they need? Or selling them an unattainable fantasy?
C astillo, now in her late 40s, wears her cropped blond hair swept to the side, her eyes ringed thickly with liner. She came of age in California during the golden age of self-help. Starting with Robin Norwood’s Women Who Love Too Much as a teenager, she embarked on a decades-long journey of self discovery. By day, she worked in a cubicle at Hewlett-Packard; in her spare time, she took long walks and listened to personal development gurus’ cassettes on her Walkman.
From inspirational speaker Byron Katie, she learned not to blame outside circumstances for her problems. From channeler Esther Hicks, she learned about the law of attraction (later popularized through the book and film The Secret), and practiced vibrationally aligning herself with tens of millions of dollars. From entrepreneurial guru Tony Robbins, she learned to claim her personal power and transform her life from ordinary to extraordinary.
In the early 2000s, she saw a trim life coach named Martha Beck on The Oprah Winfrey Show who specialized in working with over-scheduled women. Inspired, Castillo enrolled in Beck’s three-day coaching certification program, then began marketing herself as a weight loss coach. She visualized her ideal client: a woman standing in her kitchen at 2am, eating out of the fridge. Castillo taught that losing weight was more about mindset than diet or exercise; if her clients got in touch with the emotions that spurred them to overeat, she told them, the pounds would melt away. Other coaches began asking about her methodologies, and Castillo realized she could reach many more people (and earn much more money) by training groups of people to become coaches themselves, rather than working one-on-one with clients.
embed In 1995, the nonprofit International Coaching Federation (ICF), an independent credentialing body, attempted to impose a set of standards and a code of ethics on the industry, and met with middling success. Although tens of thousands of coaches belong to the ICF, many more – including Castillo, who has dismissed the ICF as clubby and ineffective – do not. Instead, she opted to create her own certification program via the Life Coach School, which she founded with her husband, Chris, in 2007. Initially, LCS trainings took place largely in person. A couple dozen students would gather at the Holiday Inn Express in El Dorado Hills, California, where they spent a week learning Castillo’s signature product, the CTFAR Model: all circumstances (C) are neutral; your thoughts (T) create your feelings (F), which inspire your actions (A), which lead to your results (R). Course materials promised CTFAR “can literally solve any problem”.
The model was essentially a simplified version of cognitive behavioral therapy with some power-of-positive-thinking thrown in. Her students found it transformative. “There were very powerful aspects to being in that room,” Kelly Hollingsworth, who enrolled in LCS training in 2015, told me.
By 2017, Castillo had simplified her business into two streams: for those who wanted to be coached, there was Self Coaching Scholars, a $297 monthly membership program; for those who wanted to become coaches, there was Life Coach School Certification, a six-month online course initially priced around $15,000. (The current course is three months long and costs $21,000; by comparison, some ICF-certified programs cost as little as $1,000, while tuition for Georgetown University’s professional certificate in life coaching runs $13,995.)
Castillo was open with her students about how much she learned from her own coaches, including a controversial man named Frank Kern. Kern, a self-styled internet marketing guru, was fined a quarter of a million dollars by the Federal Trade Commission in 2006 for making false promises. Around 2014, Castillo watched one of Kern’s free webinars, then enrolled in a $1,500 one-day brainstorming session. At the end of the program, she signed up for a year of one-on-one coaching for $36,000.
Kern’s advice turned out to be relatively simple: create a membership program, and spend an enormous amount of money on Facebook ads promoting it. Castillo credits Kern for helping LCS transform from a business that earned $300,000 annually into one that, just a few years later, brought in $10m. In 2018, Castillo announced a new goal; by 2028, she vowed, the Life Coach School would be a $100m-a-year business.
It was a lofty but attainable ambition, considering that the coaching industry was on the verge of its own boom. One industry group estimates that the number of life coaches grew by a third between 2015 and 2019. As permanent jobs gave way to a gig-based economy, coaching suited an anxious workforce scrambling to monetize side hustles and cope with burnout. It was like therapy, but more outcome-based; it could even help you make more money. Castillo’s methodology, with its blend of CBT, mindfulness and entrepreneurialism, all held together with the force of her personality, promised swift, tangible results to those who put in the work. “My work is very practical, but it’s also magical,” Castillo told me. “I don’t lose anyone, because I’m practical enough that I keep the engineers and woo enough that I keep the tarot card reader people.”
That blend of empowerment and self-improvement was particularly appealing to professional women in middle age. “Brooke is marketing to people who are kind of stuck. New retirees who are bored, empty nesters whose kids are going off to college, stay-at-home moms who are tired of baby talk all day long,” an LCS staff member told me. “People who want something more.”
Illustration: Maria Medem/The Guardian M eg Blatt found coaching at a fraught time in her life, shortly after she’d lost her job and her mother, with whom she’d had a difficult relationship. Listening to Castillo’s podcast made her feel she could gain a measure of control over her trauma.
Over and over again, she heard Castillo present coaching as a dream career. “You get to make a beautiful living. A living that is very lucrative and helps the planet,” Castillo said in one episode. “Helping the mental and emotional health of the human species is a reward in and of itself, and on top of that, you get paid for it. It’s a beautiful thing, my friends.”
On the podcast, in Scholars materials, and at LCS live events, Castillo showed off her students who had gone from being coached to having lucrative careers as life coaches. Blatt signed up for Scholars and soon decided she wanted to become a coach, too. “You’re sitting in a massive conference room in a lovely Dallas hotel, and there are coaches who are multiple-million-dollar earners sitting all around you, being called on to talk about their experiences and the challenges they went through,” Blatt said. “Like, this person was just certified two years ago and they just hit their second seven-figure year. And that possibility felt really tangible in that moment.”
It was an enticing pitch: earn a living by helping other people while working from home and making your own schedule, with no training or credentials necessary beyond the LCS course. Those high-earning LCS coaches, with their neat hair, pristine rooms, tidy minds and seven-figure incomes, seemed like proof that it was achievable.
Olivia, the Castillo acolyte who took notes on every podcast, also enrolled in Self-Coaching Scholars, where she studied modules on relationships and goal-setting. “Not only did I do the workbooks and the homework and attend every call, but I also gave myself additional assignments,” Olivia told me. “I’m kind of insane that way.”
Enrolling in Scholars felt like being inducted into an exclusive club of women working to live their best lives. LCS sent new students a pen studded with Swarovski crystals. Castillo made regular appearances on live calls and shared behind-the-scenes videos about her life. “Every month, you got a new workbook in the mail. And when that book dropped, social media would explode,” another student told me.
When Olivia quit her job and enrolled in the LCS certification course, she justified the significant cost as an investment in her future business coaching other professional women. She looked forward to a higher level of material and deep engagement with fellow coaches. “It is the very next deepest level of the work that I have to offer the world,” Castillo has said about the certification program. “It is my best work, it is what I’m most proud of.”
But within a month, Olivia was disillusioned. The training largely consisted of material that had already been covered in Castillo’s other programs. Once a week, Olivia and a dozen other students had an hour of discussion with an LCS coach, one of the company’s many contract employees, who seemed harried and distracted.
Olivia diligently did her homework, making videos of herself coaching, but says she never received any feedback. She took tests on LCS concepts, but wasn’t told the results. (Erika Royal, who left her role as a partner in Ft Lauderdale, Florida, law firm Holland & Knight to become LCS’s CEO late last year, told me that this was a sign Olivia was doing well. “If your submissions are just fine, you don’t get a lot of feedback. You’re doing just fine. You just proceed.”) Students were discouraged from asking questions and told not to email their instructors.
embed Castillo was hardly present at all. “She’s part of the product – you’re buying her,” Olivia said. “These other coaches step in for her, but, you know, I want her , I want the real thing.”
When Olivia complained to customer service, she was met with a reply straight out of the LCS playbook: the problem was just in her thoughts. “Which is very convenient, right? Because it means they can never be wrong,” she said. Sarah Foutz, who was a LCS contract employee for two years and has appeared on Castillo’s podcast, told me she met with similar pushback when she complained about being asked to work extra hours without additional pay, or receiving inadequate training: “They would tell us to ask, ‘How is this perfect for me?’” she said. “It’s using the tools they teach us about changing our thoughts to make a crappy situation feel better. It keeps us quiet.”
By the end of the program, Olivia was so fed up that she tried to fail the final exam just to see what would happen; she passed anyway. Castillo didn’t attend the virtual graduation ceremony. “It felt like get em in, get em in, sell, sell sell. And once they’re in, it’s like, – well, I gotta go sell to more people,” Olivia said. She’s working to develop a career as a coach, but she’s no longer able to listen to Castillo’s podcast. “I still harbor a lot of anger and disappointment.”
