Coaches on Instagram - Are They a Waste of Time and Money?
Coaching is both a profession and a set of skills. You can coach without being a full-time coach, and thanks to Instagram, you can call yourself a coach without doing any coaching. A relatively new industry, it is about 30 years old. It’s unregulated, meaning there are no legalities around calling yourself a coach, and is open to what I would describe as wild misunderstandings of what coaching means and the boundaries around the service a coach provides. There are Instagram coaches for everything: your business, your health, your confidence, your style, etcetera, etcetera. But what do they actually do and are they to be trusted?
In September 2018, I became an Instagram coach. I had experienced the power of coaching in my corporate job and gone through some in-house training. I fell in love with the idea of helping people reach their potential with this new skill. Because that is what coaching is. Helping people reach their potential is the heart of coaching.
Indeed, coaching is the belief an individual has the capacity to solve their problems, the potential to overcome adversity and thrive. It’s a set of tools and skills that support an individual (or group) by enabling them to reflect, inspect, adapt, and flourish. To define and own their unique ambitions and desires.
For me, coaching is enabling someone’s self-actualisation.
So, when the Instagram algorithm flashes an ad on my screen for a coach who, and I quote, HAS ALL THE ANSWERS, it pisses me off.
The copy is laden with a long description of the pains you’re experiencing and paints a vivid picture of how good life could be if only you knew x, y, z thing. The coach luxuriates in your feed, giving you a cheeky wink.
They sell to your insecurities, promising wild success with little work, going so far as to anticipate on your behalf what success means for you whilst glazing over the part where they explain their approach.
Are they a coach or a mentor? Or are they going to teach you? Do they know the difference? It’s possible there are some actual coaching conversations going on between them and their clients, but the line between coaching, mentoring, teaching, and telling is clearly a blurry place. So, what do we get for our enormous financial investment in them? Perhaps we’re coached. More likely we’re told. Do this, because that’s how it works. That’s how you get what I have. This isn’t coaching, it’s a pyramid scheme.
It’s a sad situation. Coaching works, it’s a real thing and it can shift people’s lives for the better. But Instagram Coaches are not consistently providing the real thing, at best there’s some coaching, at worst they’re telling you how to be more like them and less like yourself.
But what if you want to be more like yourself? What if you wanted greater solidity in your own identity, your own life, your own ambitions?
How could you access coaching safely and affordably, through your favourite image-sharing platform? There are loads of coaches out there, but as you come across them, these points can be your survival guide.
1) Qualifications. Qualifying as a coach is an ambiguous affair. You can train via email, in person, online, from two days to two years. From a certificate created by a private training provider to a Ph.D. awarded by Oxford Brookes (an international centre for researching coaching and mentoring). So being a ‘qualified’ coach is slippery as there is no one designation of ‘this is a qualified coach’. Here are the standards I now look for in coaches I would work with, this may be a useful starting point for you too:
Coaches who are members of, or accredited with, the International Coaches Federation (ICF), the European Mentoring and Coaching Committee (EMCC), or the Association for Coaches (AC). These three separate professional bodies create standards of practice and ensure a code of ethics is adhered to by their people. Coaches who are trained in ICF, EMCC, or AC accredited programmes will have a rigorous academic and practical understanding of their coaching practice.
For life coaching, I really recommend coaches who have trained with the Beautiful You Coaching Academy (BYCA). BYCA consistently produces compassionate and educated coaches, who are generous and a pleasure to work with.
There are other specialised training routes for coaches, like creativity coaching, or group facilitation, so the routes I’ve outlined are not exclusive markers of being a qualified coach. The key is to ask your coach in the intro call what training they’ve done and how they chose it, (PS: always have an intro call). If they don’t have a formal qualification, what experience do they have? Does it give you confidence in their abilities?
2) Think about what change you’re hoping to make. Would counselling or psychotherapy support you better? An informed and educated coach will be able to talk through this with you in an intro call.
3) Never spend more than you can as an attempt to buy success, or growth (I speak from first-hand experience). Find a coach who offers payment plans or sliding scale options. Because of the pandemic, there are coaches who are offering discounts to key workers and NHS staff as well, I can offer some recommendations if that’s useful.
4) Ask the potential coach what they understand their role to be. It’s a red flag if they think it’s anything other than ‘enable and empower you to find your own way forwards’ or a variation thereof. While you're at it, ask them what their experience of being coached is like - a coach who has never been coached is also a red flag.
5) Be wary of a coach who promises to give you a system or a structure. Just because it has worked for them, doesn’t mean it will work for you - you have your own path to your own version of success, their way might not be your way, and that is a-ok. A good coach will be rooting for you to find your own version of success.
In a nutshell, beware the coach who says, “I have the secret to success, I’ve solved it, hire me and I’ll give it to you.”
Talk to the coach who says “I trust and believe that you have everything you need inside you and if it feels right, I can support you on the path to trusting your skills, experience, and intuition. You’ve got this.”
And you know what? You really do.
Written by Kate Maxwell
After closing the doors to her first Instagram Coaching business in lockdown, Kate is in pursuit of a new way to coach curious humans online. She’s a corporate-creative hybrid on a mission to bring people together around their creativity, empowering them to make more art, what ever that means to them. You can find her on Instagram at @kate.max.arts or on her blog www.katemaxwellcoach.com