Life coaching is my primary occupation so to me it makes sense that I get paid to do this work. Years ago when I wasn't practicing as a coach I hired coaches to work with me and every time I paid the bill I thought it was quite a hefty bill. It felt so bad to continuously spend money on coaching so one day I made the big decision: I stopped coaching.
You really see the difference coaching makes when you get coaching and then stop. This makes it sound like coaching is a perpetual loop that locks in buyers. I'll talk about that in a bit, but money aside what is the difference?
Coaching gives you the ability to move forward and find progression in life. As a side effect of moving forward, you're going to be in a territory of life where you've never been before. And that's scary! Fortunately you have coaching to help you ground and navigate through a new experience of life.
What happens when you stop coaching in a new life territory? You're going to want to go back to the life that you know. The fact is, even if you're working with a coach and going to new territories you'll be wrestling with the inertial force to go back to your usual self all the time. Without coaching you'll snap back with extra momentum, full with whiplash.
The Non-Money Side
For everything else, there's Mastercard. This simple advertisement showed us that some things in life, you just can't buy. We can (and will) measure the ROI of coaching with money, but I think it's important to think about the non-monetary benefits of coaching or the opposite: the non-monetary loss of not pursuing a life you could have with coaching.
I don't know about other coaches, but I consider my life coaching a form of death coaching. Out of all the reasons to suffer is there a greater reason to suffer than our eventual demise?
Given that, let's fast forward to our time of death. I'd be willing to bet that there would be a lot of things on your mind. Death has been studied and thoroughly analyzed; we have an entire system of five stages of grief and studies have been done about the biggest regrets people have about life.
These may not be definitive, but they will definitely strike a chord.
- Living a life others expected of them
- Working too hard
- Suppressing feelings to keep the peace at the expense of happiness
- Neglecting friendships because life got too busy
- Ignoring personal happiness
This has nothing to do with money. And coaching is not the only way to arrive at happiness in life. While I can't speak for all life coaches, for me it's my job to care for and cultivate your happiness and freedom from suffering. Your happiness, that's what you're leaving on the table when you don't do the inner work that coaching gives.
The Money Side
Now let's talk about the money side of things. Is coaching expensive? It depends on your perspective. The most "reasonable" coaching rate is at about $100/hr and to the general public even that might seem high, especially when coaching programs have a significant time investment in the scale of months or even years.
When we try to reason with any kind of expenses we think about the ROI, which is what motivates this writing in the first place. When I'm feeling the need for a quick pick-me-up, a $10 pack of cigarettes (which sounds super high to me compared to when I used to smoke) gives me what I need. But for spending $1000 I better feel pretty damn amazing at the end.
When we think about coaching this way, I don't think it makes a lot of monetary sense because it won't necessarily make you feel good in a stimulating way. In fact it will usually end with sessions that make you feel sorta worse as you contemplate about the deeper topics in your life.
But when you don't contemplate those things, what are the costs?
- Housing: If I have a need to buy or rent housing that's out of my financial level because I need to keep up appearances or never want to go back to what I consider poor, what's the aggregate sum you pay over time?
- Transportation: When you buy new cars and multiple cars to satisfy your needs, what's the aggregate sum you pay over time with registration, gas, insurance, and etc?
- Food: Many people use food as a buffer for their feelings. How much money would you spend on food you eat (or wouldn't eat, just to rot in the fridge) when you don't connect to your feelings?
- Health: Life is commonly experienced as stressful, and stress will accumulate negative health effects over time. How much money will you spend on recovering your health damaged by stress?
When you look at the credit card line item for life coaching, it may sting to spend this much money. But this is money you actually spend on yourself and nothing else. It doesn't feed any desires, it doesn't distract you from anything. And as a result, it ends up saving a lot of your money.
The Endgame
As I mentioned in the beginning, I understand that coaching can feel like an infinite money sink to a lot of people. In fact I felt the same way when I was being coached and when I coached people.
This is why I developed my approach to coaching. The endgame of my coaching is practice. I want you to be a practitioner, a deep diver to the self who stands fearlessly in front of the world.
Had this been a trivial matter that could be taught in a few lessons, I would give everyone the lessons and the world would be a happy place. But the nuanced path of the middle way is something that requires internalized experience and that is what I aim to provide you with my coaching.