The challenge of life coaching as a business is getting customers. But, marketing is a skill that can be learned with enough time and effort. It's not a pyramid scheme and you can build a sustainable business without having to train other coaches. In this case, life coaching is not a pyramid scheme.Life Coach School is not a pyramid scheme.
There's no “head coach” at the top sending out tasks for coaches below it to do. Instead, the focus was on winning and generating paying clients with a lot of non-traditional marketing and offering life and business coaching programs and advice on how to run your own successful coaching business. Life coaching is an excellent concept, except for the part where more than 99% of people who do it end up worse off financially. Just to say, I met a bunch of life coaches the other night at an event and they made me so angry that I had to go home and rant. She earned a master's degree to become a certified weight and life coach, and began building a school that would become Harvard's Life Coach School.
Before going to Life Coach School, I would like to invite you to watch this training instead. A company called The Secret to Life Coaching (TSTLC), which is now being investigated by the government, organized the retreat. She paid thousands of dollars expecting to be paid many more thousands of dollars to train others to be coaches like her. Navigating the Life Coach School belief system aims to help you instill new beliefs in your clients as quickly as possible, helping them achieve success. Working with an inferior quality coach and being dissatisfied is painful, but it doesn't make all training fraudulent.
Here's another caveat for coaches out there, and a better explanation of my findings on life coaching. This is why most of the life coaches you see appear to be completely unqualified and like the last person who should give life advice. It's no wonder that people genuinely believe that this is a pyramid scheme, including my husband (a view I don't share yet, since there are genuine coaches within the industry whom I have had the pleasure of meeting and even having attended workshops thanks to my former employers), due to the lack of guarantees and tangible results and success in running a business like this, or even getting your own life coach to change your life, when you can do it yourself at no cost. She also tells people that she is earning a living as a life coach, but that she actually works a 9-5 job that she hates. Essentially a “coaching contract,” the lawsuit explains it as a “percentage of commission or fee rewarded to coaches who recruited coaching clients or taught coaching classes themselves. It's where you learn how to build a life coaching business or practice and train others to be effective coaches.
