Life coaching is big business. The life coaching industry was worth $1.5 billion in 2022 and is considered one of the fastest growing industries in America. The International Coaching Federation reported more than 26,000 coaches in North America in 2020. Yet those numbers are hard to qualify given that you don’t need certifications or training to become a life coach or, as we explore today, coaching of most any sort. Life coaches, business coaches, fertility coaches, “quantum” coaches: every industry has an increasing number of people who want to tell you how to do your job effectively, magically, or quantumally.
Who really benefits from this supposed gold rush of “MULTI 6 FIGURE BUSINESS COACH”, “Multi 8 fig biz mentor”, and “high ticket biz coach helping women scale to 20-30k months”? And has the dilution of the term "coach" damaged credentialed coaches with decades of experience?
Mallory DeMille returns to talk about the coaches who coach coaches industry: marketing tactics, parallels to multilevel marketing, and the glut in the coaching industry.
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So guys, are you ready to become certified soul-led quantum life coaches?
Where do I sign up?
You don't need to sign up.
You just need to be open.
Oh, that sounds totally legitimate.
Is it legitimate?
Legitimacy is irrelevant in the online world.
where coaches coach coaches.
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, authoritarian extremism
and today, life coaches.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Mallory DeMille.
We're actually going to go beyond Life Coaches.
We're going to cover a lot of coaching today.
But anyway, we are on Instagram at ConspiritualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just our Monday bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
As independent media creators, we appreciate your support.
If you're chronically online like me, or maybe even if you're not, you may have noticed a new onslaught of Instagram and TikTok bios with the word coach added to them.
These same bios will rhyme off income promises and brags like multi six figure business coach, multi eight fig biz mentor, high ticket biz coach helping women scale to 20 to 30k months.
Did this person, after much thought and consideration, go back to school to pursue a second career?
Maybe.
They might have also just woken up that morning and decided they have a secret to sell you.
Listeners, today we're talking about the coaches who coach coaches industry, their marketing, and there are more than just a few parallels to multi-level marketing.
And I'll give you a warning up front, we're going to be saying the word coach a lot today.
A lot.
And as I flagged a moment ago, life coaching is big business, but we're going to cover a range of coaches.
According to market research, the life coaching industry was worth $1.5 billion in 2022 in
America and it's considered one of the fastest growing industries here.
And I know I'm talking to two Canadians today, but I am pulling American statistics.
The International Coaching Federation has reported more than 26,000 coaches in all of
North America in 2020.
But really, those numbers are hard to qualify given that you don't need certifications to become a life coach or really any type of coach.
Life coaches, business coaches, fertility coaches, Quantum coaches, that's a thing.
Every industry seems to have an increasing number of people who want to tell you how to do your job effectively, magically, or even quantumly.
And let me flag off the top.
I don't have an issue with coaches.
I've worked for a few startups in my time where founders have hired executive coaches.
They were pleased.
I worked with them directly.
They were wonderful.
There was an outside coach that I worked with at a fintech company and he provided real-world insights into our marketing strategies.
So this episode is not a coaching takedown.
But I've noticed, and I know Mallory's noticed as well, that there's this uptick of coaches selling coaching courses.
We have a wave of people who spun up coaching businesses with either no training or minimal and questionable certifications.
Their entire business model seems to be training other coaches, and we don't know if they have any real-world experience actually coaching people, especially in the industries that they're in.
It kind of reminds me of the yoga teaching glut that happened in the late aughts.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, there were more and more yoga teachers, and so more yoga teachers started holding teacher trainings to train more teachers and supply quickly outpaced demand.
I mean, we're all yoga instructors here, right Mallory?
That's right.
Yeah, because making a living teaching group classes is very difficult.
And I taught up to 20 a week at one point in my career just to make ends meet.
So teachers realized they could make a lot more money leading teacher trainings.
And with that phenomenon came a lot of disappointed, newly minted yoga instructors who believe their passion was going to change the world and their bank account.
And it did, just not in the direction that they thought it would manifest.
And so there's also another question I want to ask as we proceed.
What happens to trained professionals who are highly educated and heavily regulated in a world full of coaches who just say they're coaches and then can start up a business?
So I have a close friend who worked as a psychotherapist and she was a social worker.
She was clinically trained to deal with people with mental health conditions and I know what she was earning and it was modest.
And she was really frustrated when people just spun up marketing sites claiming to coach people that can help them with their mental health issues.
This doesn't sound legal, and it's probably not, but it definitely exists.
And these same coaches were bragging about their multiple six-figure salaries.
Now, again, I'm not criticizing people who find help from unregulated, uncertified coaches.
There's a whole world out there, people of expertise beyond sometimes what their bio will show.
But what happens when those people run into real problems with their clients, or they turn their clients away from getting actual help when they really need it?
I have all of the same questions, Derek.
I also just want to add, as someone married into a family of psychotherapists, that as far as I understand it, the regulations that they work so hard to, you know, achieve and maintain, focus mainly on the ethics of therapeutic relationship, which are at the core of psychotherapy.
So, when we're talking about coaching, I think most of the time we're talking about advice and counseling, where the premise is that the client needs some kind of expert information about their lives or the task they want to perform.
Maybe they need cheerleading.
And the basic orientation is...
I'm successful, I know how to be successful, and I can teach you how to be successful too.
And that's a kind of hierarchy that runs counter to the basics of therapeutic relationship, which takes years of training and one's own therapy to understand.
And I think in this episode, we're going to be seeing the downstream effects of that gap.
Yeah, totally.
So let's peel back the quantum curtain of coaching and see what isn't inside.
You are obsessed with personal development, have been through a profound transformation
of your own and you have that calling inside that says, I want to help other people.
I want to be the catalyst for change.
I want to be a coach.
Scaling your coaching business from 5 to 30K a month can feel impossible these days because the market is so saturated online.
Let's talk about marketing in 2024 for a six-figure year.
If you're an ambitious coach that knows you're capable of making over $30k per month and know you're also a great coach, but you just can't figure out how to scale and have the impact that you really want, I need you to follow me here so I can help you.
This week I spontaneously created and sold a bundle for $200 and generated over $15,000 in 24 hours.
over $15,000 in 24 hours.
Just close out 34K with my brand new offer And it's no big deal.
$10,000 in 10 days.
Deal my exact formula for doing $120,000 sales month with no team.
If you are a practitioner, healer, or coach and you're struggling with getting people to return for their sessions, it's actually a good time.
It's a book.
It's script.
If you're a hypnotherapist and you want to reach a consistent 10k every month in your hypnosis business, then I want you to follow me here on Instagram.
Hello listeners, it's 2024.
Everyone has become a coach.
We're all just coaching other coaches.
The only classes are masterclasses.
We're all a number figure business owners.
It is illegal for prices not to be angel numbers and we exist simply to level up.
Everything is either divine feminine or divine masculine.
There's containers everywhere.
All clients are aligned, dream, ready, and fuck yes clients.
We love adjective clients.
There's conflict over whose quantum is the real quantum, and your business is either soul-led, heart-led, spirit-led, or all of the above.
This is the reality the coaches who coach coaches sound like they live in.
You know, the first person in that montage clip, I just want to point out this appeal to, well, you really want to help others.
There's something so incredibly sad about that because it is speaking to something real in the culture, of course, which is just sort of mass neglect.
And I love the jargon that we're going to learn, but what is the containers part all about, Mallory?
Containers is so, there's containers everywhere.
There's so many containers.
Container just seems to be another way to say offer.
I think it is partially a way of making it sound less salesy, going from buy my thing to join my container.
And I think it suddenly makes it seem more exclusive.
You're not just signing up for a course, you're being invited into something that maybe requires an application process, which some of them do.
It does make me laugh every time I hear it, though, because all I can think of is my Tupperware drawer.
Yeah, you know, and to me, it also sounds like a pseudotherapy weasel word because it allows the coach to avoid saying what they will do, right?
Because there's this fallback to describing, you know, the fact that I'm going to be providing space in which something undefined can happen.
So, I don't know, maybe it's a way of setting up the client from the outset to be responsible for whatever happens during the process because all the coach did was to provide a container.
Definitely.
And maybe a little bit of foreshadowing.
This intentional word choice likely also plays a role in the no refunds aspect a lot of these offerings have.
The container I spend the most time in is my second Instagram, where I follow folks who I don't want infecting my own personal algorithm.
I'm pretty upfront about that, and one of my favorite things about this is seeing what ads meta will serve me.
It's not entirely difficult to puppeteer, but it did catch me off guard last year when I started getting ads for coaching programs.
At the time, I was predominantly following pseudoscience and conspiratorial grifters,
but for some reason, Meta assumed I was also a coach in need of coaching.
Of course.
And because I have a disgusting amount of curiosity, I spent time on those ads,
which told Meta to feed me more and more of them. I'm not a coach in need of coaching,
but I do have a background and deep interest in marketing, something coaches who coach coaches
seemingly spend a lot of time and money on. And because marketing on social media seems to be
where this industry dominates, that's where I want to start.
You are a female coach who knows you want to grow your business, but you're starting
to feel the burnout of being plateaued somewhere between 10 to 30K a month.
You don't know exactly where your next ideal clients are going to come from.
Then follow me and go back through all of our past free content, because I have given you a simple feminine marketing funnel that has helped me hire a world-class team for my multi-six-figure business.
While working less than four days a week, this is the same exact funnel that our client Leslie used to hit her first $50K a month this year, and Allison, who just hit a $73K cash month.
The feminine funnel.
OK, so what's the actual coaching content here?
And does it involve enemas or something?
And also the expectations are wild.
$73,000 a month.
Yeah.
Matthew, we don't have time to get into the enema containers today, so please don't tempt me.
After months of consuming Coaches Coaching Coaches marketing, it's almost comical how they're all seemingly pulling from the same playbook while claiming to have their own unique secrets.
So if you want to become a Coach Who Coaches Coaches, here are some things you need to do.
Step one is confidence.
Being a confidence artist, sorry, I mean, being confident is a non-negotiable.
The industry is unregulated, so don't be afraid to make promises and guarantees of success.
And because you're so confident, you should also start a podcast that will essentially only exist to promote your offers.
I mean, I think This is a great place to start, Mallory, because isn't confidence like the only real product here?
Yes, it absolutely is, I think.
If you're claiming without a shadow of a doubt that your program can get a coach to six figures with little room for nuance, that takes a lot of confidence.
Most of what I've seen has been confidence and vanilla motivational speak.
It's a lot of, you can do this, and not a lot of, okay, here's some actual tangible advice.
Without diagnosing here, I also think there's an element of narcissism at play.
To believe that someone can also improve their life or their business or their spiritual practice by paying to be graced by your wealth of knowledge, I think that's a little bit more than confidence.
I know we're only on step one, but I want to take a slight detour.
Meet Tiffany.
She's a business coach for soul-led, witchy, women of color coaches scaling to six fig.
She has 74,000 Instagram followers.
My understanding is that she went from social media coach to coach who coaches coaches.
I knew I was going to mess that up at some point.
Here's a clip from her podcast that she posted to Instagram.
It's titled, Here's How Your Coaching is Already in Demand.
Every service that we create is here for a reason.
And I also believe because of that, that means there are already predestined people out there that you have already met and a lot that you haven't even met yet that want to work with you and desire the service that you offer.
And I know you might be thinking, but I'm so in the beginning stages, I still don't even know what I want to offer.
I don't even know where to find clients.
I'm not even sure who I should be speaking to.
I don't even know how to create content on social media, and I don't even have a big following.
So where do I even start?
And I want to tell you the best place to start is inside of my signature fundamental program, Business Activation Academy.
BAA has helped so many students be able to start their coaching business and be able to even quit their 9 to 5 to go full time in their business and has helped them sign so many paid clients, specifically your first paid clients,
to get your business off the ground so that you can grow and scale into six figures
and multi-six figures, which is what we do in my business mastermind, Magic Mind.
Magic Mind is for the coaches that have been selling their signature one-on-one offer,
and they're ready to maybe add a group program or they're ready to grow into their six-figure self.
Okay, that was a lot.
I went to business school, but I don't think that's a prerequisite to know
that you should not assume there's abundant demand for something ever.
That's a very vital part of the discovery process before starting a business, but when what you're really selling is confidence and the dream, I guess that step matters less.
I think this overwhelming confidence can result in someone maybe overlooking how much a program costs and what you maybe will or won't learn.
Well, she's also saying that you can actually start in her coach downline without having anything to coach anybody about.
Like, you know, you might be saying to yourself, how can I score a tenure track position at an Ivy League college?
I haven't even completed a B.A.
and I don't even have any special interests.
Well, the best option for you is my container.
Well, you're not dreaming hard enough, Matthew.
I think that's the issue here.
But Mallory, would you would you say these podcasts that you know you shared with us and some of these coaches produce that they're pitching them as sharing free knowledge but the hopes is really to monetize people later.
Like I covered this guy Luke Story in Austin and his fans would reply when I was covering Critically that he gives away so much for free with his podcast.
Yet, his podcast always promotes products on his downline and his website has over 250 affiliate products, mostly around optimization and biohacking.
You have to ask, how free is it really?
Did you notice these coaches leaving some breadcrumbs for listeners who would really only benefit when they signed up for a session?
Yeah, they're not breadcrumbs.
They're like loaves of bread.
Podcasts are basically a sales funnel.
We live in a time where a lot of information is available online.
One critique of the coaching and the coaches who coach coaches industry is that when you boil it down to the actual business or life advice they're giving, again, it's pretty vanilla and someone is something that you could probably find elsewhere online for free while dodging a sales pitch at the beginning, middle and end.
I listened to a lot of podcasts and webinars for this episode and the use a podcast to sell my course sales funnel tactic became very clear, very fast.
In some cases, the coaches wouldn't even share advice.
The entire episode or presentation would just be walking you through the program and how your life would be so much better if you invested in it.
A lot of it is really just a smoke and mirror marketing show.
I can change your business and your life, now just don't ask me any real business questions about accounting.
But speaking of accounting, step two is what I alluded to at the top.
You have to put how much money you have made in your bio.
Don't forget, it's something, something, something, fig your business.
Or fig biz if you're low on character count.
This isn't weird at all.
It's perfectly normal to share how much money you've made convincing coaches you can help them to succeed and use that as a value point in convincing coaches you can help them to succeed.
Step 3.
You have to share screenshots of messages from your clients indicating how much they're making thanks to your help.
Why share details of what you have to offer when you can share possibly falsified or misleading proof that what you're selling works?
But remember, we don't talk about the folks who this system may not be working for.
It's probably their fault anyway.
This one always gets me.
I mean, on one level, social proof is huge, right?
It's important.
Again, going back to when I worked for startups, asking users, people who really use the product, to share their thoughts on social media and then screenshotting it and adding it to marketing collateral is really important to get your business off the ground.
The thing is, part of my job was requesting permission from those users.
And I guess if a coach gets that permission, that's part of social proof, but sometimes it feels a little bit more disingenuous in this industry.
Yeah, I don't think the social proof piece is entirely wrong, but I do feel the same disingenuous ick as you do here.
I wonder if it's because a lot of this career choice is marketed as a way to give your life meaning and purpose, and of course the paycheck is also a part of that, but then the social proof is really only how much money someone is making, and they never really elaborate on how their clients even got to that point.
Well, and then there's also the basic problem of not being able to know how performative forms of social proof are.
Like, it can feel really gratifying to say that you're doing better than you are, in There might be a way in which you could save face by saying, Oh yeah, I did really well with this thing that I spent so much money on.
Yeah.
And well, it's certainly in the coaches who coach coaches best interest to say that, like, look at these 10 clients who are succeeding instead of look at these 10 clients out of a thousand clients who are succeeding.
Yeah, for sure.
There's also this assumption here that finding your life's purpose will bring you a pile of cash.
I've seen these coaches sell a career in coaching as, basically, your coaching business is your soul.
But what happens if you believe that, and your business fails?
What if you believe coaching is your life's purpose, but your business fails?
Do you come to the realization that maybe it's not actually your soul or life's purpose?
Or, have you been convinced of this so much that you'll continue to buy out every container that that coach who has sold you on this has to offer?
I think the social proof in addition to obtaining new clients can also be used to keep existing clients trying and spending.
Step 4.
You have to share your regs-to-riches story.
Make sure to really stretch it out.
Share about the trials and tribulations you have had to go through to get to where you are.
Explain in depth how you went through all of this so that you can now share your there-must-be-a-better-way method.
Bonus points if you compare all the money you spent getting to where you are now to how much your own offer costs.
Speaking of regs to riches, step five, you can't forget to prey on your followers' pain points.
Make sure to suggest that coaching is the cure to time freedom, hating your job, making more money, and finding purpose in life, but with your courses specifically.
So not that different from cults, at least in this sense, right?
Exploit a weakness, then position yourself as the one who can strengthen you.
Totally.
And that even makes me wonder if these coaches, like, do they turn folks away?
There's so much talk of making sure you find aligned clients, but they don't talk about not taking someone's money if they're not aligned enough.
Well, I think the translation for aligned might actually be finding people who really vibe on your particular charisma.
Like if they are clicking, then they're aligned.
Yeah.
It's all vibes and clicks.
I think that aligned can often mean doesn't ask a lot of questions or is fully invested no matter what or is already on the path to being successful and now I can take credit for it.
But back to the pain point praying.
One coach and wellness mentor I follow who definitely leans more into the awake community recently launched a new six-month mentorship.
It's over $11,000 and I'm guessing the launch didn't quite land like she thought it would because of follow-up posts like this one.
All right.
I don't think you realize how much opportunity there is waiting for you inside this mentorship.
It is wild how, as a projector for example, my projector brain is just like, I see opportunity everywhere.
I see it in front of you all the time.
And I understand The ways that we get in our own way, I can see what's invisible.
I can see what's invisible standing around you, where you think you've done it all right, and you still feel empty, and you still feel stuck, and you think that shifting is going to blow up your entire world, and ruin relationships, and make people hate you, and make them be angry at you, so you just keep looping.
And the opportunity for you to break that loop Is huge.
Making 2024 the year you do it.
Wow.
Come for the promise of cash.
Stay for the emotionally abusive grandiosity.
Yeah, you want to talk about pain points and I'll give you pain points.
She recently promoted this offer again with the motto, your one precious life is happening right now.
Is this really how you want to live it?
And in one of her podcasts, she pitches it with, there's only 10 spots left, which I'm pretty sure was all of, or at least most of the spots she started with.
That's marketing, baby.
Step six, you have to sell the lifestyle.
Again, why share information about what folks can expect to learn from you when you can brag that you made $6,000 while you were out skating with your daughter, or that you made $5,000 while you were at the beach because you somatically programmed it into your body?
Well, and that's the end result of peak confidence, right?
As the product, there's also this vision of a magical existence in which you make money just because you are you doing whatever you're doing.
It's some kind of like mirror house capitalism hack.
Yep, and funny you mention magical existence.
Beyond being able to make money by just showing up as yourself, there's some coaches confidently claiming that the spirit of your business chose you.
Here's Tiffany again in a video that she recently posted to her Instagram.
She's talking to who I can assume is a client of hers.
Every single one of us has been chosen.
To do this work, or else we wouldn't be here, we wouldn't care deeply, we wouldn't give a shit, we would just be fine doing something else.
But there's a reason we're not fine doing something else.
We're not fine going to a cubicle, driving in our car, commuting for one hour to be told, you know, whatever from a condescending boss.
We are here doing these things for a reason.
Right?
There's a reason that this spirit of our business chose us.
There's a reason you are meant to help moms that have children who are autistic.
And all of the, everything that comes with that.
You are the best person to do that for your people.
So when you own that, and when you step into that, and when you let that wash all over you, that if you do not serve them, they might not even know something like life coaching exists.
Imagine all of the people that wouldn't have been served if the first life coach didn't just start.
Or if we all waited until we had certifications on top of certifications coming out the ass, right?
Like, we have to just show up and trust our power.
So here's where we learn that it's not just coaches coaching coaches.
It's coaches coaching coaches who work with moms of autistic children.
It's coaches coaching health coaches.
It's coaches coaching energy coaches.
It's coaches coaching literally you name it because the niches are endless.
What it seems to often boil down to is one unregulated industry coaching another unregulated industry.
With like a religious origin myth.
She's even referring to some sort of primal life coach who started it all.
This one is so interesting.
I'm going to unpack it here.
This post was also used to promote her upcoming offer, Magic Mind.
It is a spirit led container where the magicians...
Container!
You called it!
It's a container.
It's where the magicians, witches, and intuitive souls of the coaching industry come together in our coven, I mean mastermind, to cast spells on our business.
It's for the coach, mentor, consultant, course creator, or service provider who has made over $20,000 in the last 12 months and desires to grow to six or multi-six figures.
It is a $10,000 energetic investment, and the only prerequisite is that you must believe in magic.
In an email that she sent out to promote the course, she included a photo of two spiral round books, one being a workbook, and she claimed that these workbooks alone were worth the $10,000 investment.
So, but the $10,000 is an energetic investment.
It's a form of Bitcoin, right?
It's a form of, it's like a, it's crypto.
It's like actual money, right?
But like energetic investment.
It's all marketing, right?
It's all just like, make it, make me, I'm going to make it sound better than it actually is or make it sound more, you know, on brand with this spirit, witchy kind of whatever she's offering.
And to even tie it back to what I mentioned in step one, Tiffany does have a podcast.
I listened to several episodes.
There's some knowledge sharing in them, but it seems they mostly exist, again, like most of them, to promote her offers and to affirm that you don't have to have certifications coming out your ass or even need to know what you're going to coach on before deciding to become a coach.
That's for the coffee to come out your ass anyway.
I need to stop posting about enemas, I think, because people keep sending me content.
Well, that last one with Kate Stillman, who's been doing Ayurveda stuff for years, where she's standing in her Tony kitchen and just looking over the counter and staring right into the camera and taking down her pants with a big syringe, and just going, what?
That was incredible.
That was a whole new level of kind of I don't know, a parent on the go, coaching of like weird hygiene stuff.
That was amazing.
Yeah, and I'm coaching incoming, coming soon.
So that's the typical playbook.
But there's two more strategies that I want to unpack here.
A true honorable mention goes to the coaches who use sponsored social media posts to promote their courses that teach you how to find clients and build your business without social media.
Let me say that again.
I have a stack of examples of coaches promoting their Build Your Business Without Social Media course using social media ads, which obviously begs the question, if you have the secret to getting clients without social media, why are you paying for a social media ad to get new clients?
And a part of me knows that this is a tactic to get folks who are on social media who maybe don't want to be, but I am dying to know if these coaches are also using their supposed secrets.
Yeah, that's amazing.
It reminds me of marketing gurus who have like a hundred followers on their accounts, even their business accounts, yet they promise you tens of thousands of followers with their techniques.
Yeah, but Derek, those are the core power 100 followers.
They contain multitudes.
The referrals are insane.
They're really productive followers.
I'm so bad at math.
Yeah.
I actually follow a few of these accounts as well, and I find most of them through their sponsored Instagram posts that were served to me.
Paid content definitely has a place in a marketing strategy, but if you're making guru claims about your marketing skills and you're heavily relying on paid ads, I have questions.
And speaking of where coaches are spending their money, I've seen coaches who coach coaches using their own investment in coaching as a reason why you should invest in them.
It's often portrayed as, I was successful because I invested in myself and my business by hiring my own coach.
One coach I saw thought it would be worth including on her about page that she's personally invested over $100,000 on her personal evolution and business journey.
Another coach I follow on her Instagram stories, in the middle of promoting her $11,000 mentorship, started talking about all the coaching she's personally investing in.
So, to me, this reads, well, I spent this much on me, now it's your turn to invest in yourself with my programs.
And I think it also acts as a strategy for normalizing hiring a coach and at what some would consider astronomical price points.
But what it doesn't do, again, is provide insight into what someone actually has to offer.
I've seen a lot of this in the yoga world as well.
I mean, look, listing your credentials is important.
And if you've done multiple advanced trainings, definitely list them in your bio.
That's important context for potential clients.
But that money thing, it just hits different.
It's almost like instead of listing the places and people you've trained with and at, which provides everyone Yeah, it's very empty as a proposition.
It reminds me of being very young and just having this question about what bankers do because it seems strange to make your money by managing money.
Like, I thought, aren't we supposed to get money by doing things?
Like, by making things?
With this aspect of coaching coaches by focusing on money, there's like something similarly eerie and empty going on.
Yeah, Matthew, you're never going to get your fourth house when you're thinking like this.
I know, it's so self-limiting.
I know, I know.
I talked about this topic recently when discussing Emily Morrow and you covered her brilliantly, Mallory.
She was the influencer who was trashing coffee And saying everything is bad because microplastics.
And then she's selling mushroom coffee that's actually packaged in individual sachets made up of four types of plastic.
And I'm really glad you contacted the company directly to find that out, Mallory.
But I read her bio and there's no information about her training.
It all focuses on her journey and specifically her healing journey with Jesus.
And if that's your thing, cool.
But if you're claiming to read blood labs and then sell people on nutrition and diets and supplements, and you're pitching faith healing in the same paragraph, that's a huge red flag.
Yeah, honestly, the credentials part of the coaching and coaches who coach coaches industry, it could be a whole podcast on its own.
The industry is wildly unregulated, which means after this episode, I could add coach to my Instagram bio and immediately start selling courses on whatever I want.
I don't actually need to take any courses to do that, but then there's the coaches who are selling coach certification courses.
Some that are approved by, you know, the Coaching Federation, but some that are not.
And they're all just pumping new coaches out.
Wait, is Coaching Federation like the Galactic Federation?
Give it a couple weeks, then maybe.
Yeah.
So meet Ashley, the Quantum Coach.
I have a question for you.
How ready are you to learn the three secrets that are going to actually shift you from dreaming and daydreaming about becoming a coach and helping people change their lives to actually living the dream as a sought-after, powerful, paid, world-class coach?
That's why I'm inviting you to my masterclass called Become the Dream Coach, where I'm going to be teaching you the actual secret to building a six and seven figure coaching empire.
Secret number two, the five biggest mistakes that new coaches and not so new coaches make in their coaching sessions.
And how to avoid them.
Secret number three is that you can coach anyone on anything by focusing on this one thing.
I am so excited for this masterclass.
I know you have this calling inside of you, and I know you're ready to get to that next level in your life.
And you know that coaching is your thing, but you've been holding yourself back.
This masterclass is going to propel you forward.
And I can't wait to take your hand and say, let's do this.
So many secrets.
Should anyone be able to coach on anything?
I think that's debatable.
She says the secret to this is energy.
Coaching clients at their energetic and subconscious levels.
That's it.
That's the secret.
Also becoming the dream coach.
It's a little bit on the nose.
Yeah, I just keep thinking, you know, not everyone and anyone can be the best chef and not everyone and anyone can be the best hairstylist.
But you could dream about being the best chef and you could dream about being the best hairstylist.
I mean, I guess what I'm saying is that the product is, I'm going to sell you a way of imagining yourself into a position that doesn't really exist.
Yeah, and so like in those professions, it's not typically sold that way, but for some reason in the coaching industry, the assumption is that anyone and everyone can do it and anyone and everyone can get to a six figure, you know, success story.
Anyway, I digress.
I watched the whole Quantum webinar and it was basically a sales pitch for her Quantum Coaching Academy, apparently valued at over $85,000, but has she got a deal for you?
I'm curious, what's starting your coaching business worth to you?
Being able to sign three clients and bring in an extra $4,500 a month?
How would that change your life?
Being able to sell out a small group program and have your first $10,000 a month?
Or if you knew that mastering your craft of coaching was going to make you an extra $4,500 to $10,000 a month?
Or, if you are already making six figures and you knew that this skill set could help you make half a million or five times that by refining your craft, how much would you pay for eight certifications in one?
And the whole shebang that we offer.
Because the total value of QCA is over $85,000, so you could see how it's an absolute no-brainer at $20,000, right?
But that's not the investment.
For the general public, the investment is $9.997.
Okay?
But, because we're hosting this insanely amazing masterclass, I want to do something really special for you.
Remember when I told you to stay till the end?
Here we go.
Applying through the Master Class in the next 24 hours, we are giving $1,000 off of general public tuition.
Okay?
$1,000 off.
Now remember, if you were to piecemeal these certifications together, it would cost you a lot more.
It would cost you over $30,000.
And my first certification program, I put that $12,000 on a card.
I got certified as a life coach.
That was my certification.
QCA is certifying you in eight modalities.
Giving you ICF mentorship, one-on-one coaching, quantum business accelerator, live monthly coaching business calls, big closer energy sales course, receive like a quantum coach, 12-month access for $8997.
The follow-up slide says that your first option after watching this webinar is to do nothing and not take this leap of faith and you'll leave here today and nothing will change.
Or the second option is to take the leap of Apply, lock in your savings, and finally trust that the universe and your intuition are guiding you right now to fully embody your calling and purpose.
It's only $9,000.
Derek, Matthew, who's in?
It's also eight certifications, you know?
And I mean, we might think that one useless certification from a made-up content-free school isn't enough to get us started on our made-up jobs, but, you know, That's why we might want eight.
Yeah, but it's quantum.
It's not 9,000, Mallory.
It's 8997, which is a sacred number.
But also, what I found interesting, you know, she listed a few of those one-on-one quantum whatever bullshit, like obviously all made up, and she's just winging it.
I mean, in the video itself, she's just sitting there drinking a mason jar of some liquid and just...
Riffing the whole time.
But one of those eight is Reiki healing, like a level one Reiki.
And I know, I also know Reiki is bullshit, but like, so now there's online Reiki.
Like, I thought at least you had to be in the room with the person to understand the techniques.
I didn't realize that.
I know you've covered Reiki TikTok, where the, you know, the people are just waving their hands at the screen and whatever.
But like, you can actually be certified In waving your hands online as part of this program.
Well, maybe part of the program is becoming a Reiki influencer on TikTok and why that's why there's so many of them.
Got it.
Got it.
I just have to take the course to understand, I guess.
Only $9,000 or sorry, $8,000, $8,000, $9,000, $7,000.
Pumping more coaches out.
Now I break the bad news.
If you thought this all stopped at coaches coaching coaches, you would be wrong.
Because now we know that these coaches who coach coaches have their own coaches and mentors, which would be the coaches who coach coaches who coach coaches layer.
That is some serious recursion.
That's amazing.
And if you're starting to think, hmm, this sounds like an MLM, I had the same thought.
There's actually a number of things in this coaching industry that seem MLM coded.
But first, I want to highlight someone who is doing a really fantastic job debunking the coaches industry at large.
Danielle Ryan is a content creator.
She is great.
Go check out her YouTube.
And in this TikTok, she uses her own experience to speculate on the pyramid schemeness
of the coaching industry.
I spent $4,500 on a business coach who once told me that the way I was gonna be successful in my business
was that I was just gonna write in my journal as if I already had a successful business
and that success would then come to me.
Keep in mind, this was back in 2018 when I first started my yoga business
and I had no experience as an entrepreneur.
Nor did I really have like any idea what I was doing.
A year later, I hired a second business coach who think I would have learned my lesson, but I didn't.
And I paid her $200 US a month.
And that business coach actually told me I should stop teaching yoga altogether and I should start a business where I would coach other people how to quit their jobs and open a yoga business just like I had done.
Meanwhile, keep in mind, I was making like less than $20,000 a year purely as a yoga teacher.
You see, so many of these business coaches have A, never owned an actual business outside of business coaching, and B, have only been able to build a successful business through selling other people on the dream of being able to teach them how to build a business.
But, because they have never owned an actual business themselves, the only business they know how to coach people on is how to teach people how to build a coaching business.
And so essentially what we end up with is this pyramid of coaches who coach other coaches to teach other coaches how to coach other coaches on starting a business.
So everyone just has a business selling you on the idea of having a business, but nobody actually has a real business.
Danielle Ryan.
That's amazing.
Great description.
And I mean, really, she's describing this spinning out into just complete labor abstraction and alienation.
Which is kind of the logical endpoint of globalization and the collapse of labor unions and automated production.
I mean, we're really talking about a world in which no one seems to be making anything.
But of course, the tech that all of this is being done on is like made in Chinese factories with suicide nets on the roofs.
And I was thinking that like there can't be any or many Bangladeshi life coaches selling coaching classes.
So, I don't know.
I'm not surprised that this is one response to modernity, to really lean into the vacuousness of it all.
But I'm also not surprised that so many of the conspiritualist influencers we cover go running screaming in the opposite direction.
They want to go off-grid.
They want to find wild mushrooms.
They want to plant food forests.
They want to have zero screen time for their kids.
I mean, I can see in the shadow of this the drive towards, like, reconstituting some kind of real world.
Much like MLMs, a career in coaching is sold as a badass girlboss solution that ultimately preys on very real pain points.
Don't like your job?
You're meant to be a coach.
Looking for more meaning in life?
Help others by being a coach.
Made to make more money?
Coaching is the key.
Just look at me.
I have seen all of these prompts used to pitch MLMs, too.
I made a TikTok last year where I compared the current evolution of the coaching industry to a decentralized MLM.
It's coaches, coaching coaches, coaching coaches, into infinity.
If you're a coach who coaches coaches, you benefit when there are more coaches in the world.
So a part of your marketing is recruiting and, as I mentioned above, this can often result in courses that pump out more coaches.
Much like MLMs, there needs to be players in the game who lose so that others can win.
And we know that some folks are losing.
Here's a user on TikTok who has manifestation in her name.
I have $68,000 in credit card debt, all from investing in coaching courses and mentorship to grow my business.
Earlier this year, I could no longer keep up with the minimum payments, and so I entered into a debt settlement program.
This also meant that I had to break a contract with the coach, which we're all told is out of integrity.
I currently have no access to credit or loans of any kind.
I am entirely cash only until I pay off the settlement in full.
All of this resulted in an extremely low point for me mentally, emotionally, spiritually.
The lowest I've ever been.
Also resulting in two consecutive months where I made less than $500 in my business and had to borrow money from my family.
For context, I had always been very traditionally smart with money and credit for my entire life up until entrepreneurship.
You're your own best investment.
10x your return.
I invested when it made no sense.
For the longest time, I blamed that messaging and my coaches for my lack of financial results.
And all that did was keep me in a loop of guilt and resentment.
Because the truth is that I was the common denominator in all of those investments.
The truth is that I didn't get a return because of me, and now I know exactly why.
So I don't know this person or their situation, but defaulting to taking the blame for multiple failed systems is unfortunately not surprising.
And if you're buying courses without doing the work, I mean, that's one thing, but I don't think we should overlook this obsession with, I can't be successful without a coach or without buying something.
Or if I'm unsuccessful, it's entirely on me.
And I just need to keep investing in this industry because after consuming this content for months, I think there are more than just a handful of folks losing in this pyramid.
It's hard to imagine how much farther she could go with that and maintain the kind of responsibilist attitude of, well, it really was all on me.
Like, what else would have to happen?
How much more debt would she have to be into?
Uh, for her to turn around and say, oh wow, maybe I've been constantly lied to by an entire social movement.
Yeah, I think the, I see a lot of parallels, which I don't touch on today in like the wellness industry as well, you know, the folks who scream big pharma, but then they show off their cabinets of natural supplements.
And this comparison between Big Pharma's just trying to keep you sick to make money,
but then showing off the thousands of dollars that they've spent on natural supplements.
I see a lot of parallels between this industry and kind of like that that I track.
But the sheer amount of content dedicated to promoting a proven system that will land you clients in 30K months
me wondering if the coaching industry is actually tattling on itself.
One post reads, four things that keep new coaches stuck and unpaid.
Another reads, you're not stuck in your business, you're manifesting without taking action.
It's getting so close to self-awareness, right?
To like a true statement.
Oh, I'll keep going.
One post reads, why you keep getting objections in your DMs and it's not your price.
Another reads, the art of predictable client attraction.
One post says, this is an ad specifically for coaches and consultants that want to generate more leads and sales.
Another says, how to create your irresistible signature offer, get more clients and build a thriving virtual business.
Do we need more?
Because I could honestly Keep going.
It sure sounds like a recurring issue for coaches is finding clients to coach and coaches coaching coaches are sprinting to claim that they can solve that for you.
You were called to be a relationship coach.
There's a reason for that.
And if you're at a plateau right now doing around 3 to 9k a month in your relationship coaching business, then this is for you.
You're probably really good at what you coach on.
You want to make an impact and help more people.
You just need more dream coaching clients.
So if that sounds like you and you actually want to scale with dependability and consistency and have qualified leads that have money coming inbound to you, then give me a follow here.
So she's talking about scaling how to coach coaches of people Who want to have better relationships?
Like this is relationship coaching.
Yeah, a coach for relationship coaches.
So if you're a relationship coach and your business is plateauing at $3,000 to $9,000 a month, then you'd seek her help because obviously you're meant to be making more money than that.
Wow.
But how does this get more clients content square with all the Instagram bios claiming 6, 7, 8 fig bizzes?
Well, those are the winners.
These are the poster children for the industry.
Of course, there's also the other parallel to MLMs, faking success in order to sell the lifestyle.
So while some are certainly making bank, there are very likely others who are faking their success.
Anecdotally, there's a coach I follow and in one of her podcasts, she talks about having to have a breakup with a friend Who is another coach she met online because she found out that this other coach was fully lying to her followers about how much money she was making or rather not making.
Unpacking this kind of content and you start to see another MLM parallel emerge.
You're not failing because the system is broken, you're failing because of you.
So we've mentioned this, it's come up, you know, already.
There's this assumption that you too can be wildly successful.
All you have to do is be authentic, believe you can succeed, believe that your dream clients are out there and follow these steps.
And if when that doesn't get you to that promised 10k month, it's not the fault.
It's never the fault of the system that was sold to you.
There it is again, right?
Thank me for your success, but any sign of failure is all on you.
It's one of the most common themes in conspirituality wellness that we've been tracking for all these years.
Exactly.
So here's Tiffany again.
Initially, what marketing is, is you're selling your frequency before they get a taste of your coaching.
So in order to attract aligned clients and be able to receive bigger payments, bigger sales, bigger amounts of money, bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger all the time, right?
Which means your business is growing, sales are increasing, revenues going up.
Like that's what we want in your business in order to see that, in order to not just see that, but maintain that.
It has to be connected to something super sustainable, which is your frequency.
So if I'm not getting clients for my program, maybe it's my frequency and I just need a course on how to fix that.
Because the frequency comes first.
That's the first thing.
That's the only thing, actually.
Absolutely.
Don't you remember from the Healy episode?
Everything is frequency.
A lot of the coaching marketing material I've seen assumes the same thing that MLMs do.
An infinite and identical market.
The assumption that with every new coach there is a blank canvas of demand is the same as the assumption that with everyone involved in an MLM has the ability to make it to the top.
The reality is that there are only so many folks who actually need coaching and there are only so many folks who are in the position to want to join an MLM.
And with every new person who gets involved in the industry, the landscape changes.
The coach who is selling their how-to courses based on the fact they are an 8-fig biz owner is like someone in the top 1% of an MLM sharing how they got to where they are as an undeniable how-to without acknowledging the complications of reality that would make an exact replication even possible.
Infinite market assumption marketing makes this industry look a lot more appealing than it actually is.
This whole tactic is often paired with the regs to riches story, you know, life was bad, enter MLM or coaching, life is better.
Like I mentioned above, if a coach's ad is promising you X amount of money in X amount of time just because that's how they made it, it's the reddest of red flags.
But that said, sometimes I'm fed ads like this.
Don't freak out.
Let's talk about how you can stand out as a coach online.
The problem with being a coach is that literally everyone is a coach these days.
I needed to offer something unique, something no other coaches offer.
Something that gets me clients on autopilot so I can start earning more than ever.
And it wasn't what I thought.
It wasn't a flashy new website, endless free content, or some overwhelming AI tool.
It's my very own branded coaching app.
I thought that you had to be a celebrity to get your own app, but it's not true.
We don't have to be celebrities to get that credibility.
My own branded app is why all of my new clients are signing up.
They trust me.
Hurry and join the Black Friday waitlist before it's full.
And so it appears that the industry is maybe starting to become self-aware, and so their marketing has to pivot.
Like, we know the market is saturated, we know this, so you have to stand out.
And I can help you with that by my thing.
Yeah, well, we've sort of mentioned this before, but I want to sort of happily remember that the yoga world did something a little bit different at the market saturation point because, you know, we were saying that YTT directors realized that there were diminishing job prospects And then they rebranded their training, or a lot of them did, as personal enrichment programs.
So you'd get a teaching certification at the end of your 200 hours or 500 hours or whatever.
But the point was to go deeper into your practice.
But it doesn't seem like you can do that with coaching.
And I think that might indicate that yoga teacher trainings are actually offering some kind of substantial product and not just a ticket to it like a free gig work lunch.
Yeah, I mean, I did my 200 hour yoga teacher training in 2016 after maybe only six months of actually practicing yoga.
And I had been teaching a few other modalities for years.
And really, I just wanted to, you know, add to my certifications, but it was definitely sold as a way to deepen my practice.
Yeah, they hooked you.
They hooked me for sure.
Like MLMs, coaches also help you suddenly become really bad at math.
In MLMs, you'll see things like, look at you!
You made $1,000 in this biz.
Now, completely forget about the $2,000 you had to pay to get here.
I've seen this in the coaching industry too, and I'm actually looking at a post right now where a coach who coaches coaches promises her program can get you to your first 5k.
But when you look into it, the program costs $5,555, which means you're out $555.
It's coaching math.
Yeah.
Like I said, I'm not too good with math, but I love wellness vocabulary because it has its own language.
If there's anyone who can make language seem ridiculous, it's aspirational influencers.
And maybe that's the next conspirituality book, right?
The Ascending Angels Dictionary.
We can pay homage to Ambrose Bierce's brilliant 1906 satirical work, which is called The Devil's Dictionary.
If you don't know what that book is, it's basically the satirical work where he turns a mirror back onto language.
And so, he defines things like this.
Oh wow.
A nutritious substance supplied by a bountiful providence for the fattening of the poor.
And then there's faith.
Oh wow.
Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge of things
without peril.
All right.
I look forward to that book.
There's two other MLM-adjacent topics that we do not even have time to get into today, and those are the MLM Hunt to Life Coach Pipeline and the Business of Network Marketing Coaches, as in coaches who coach folks in MLMs.
By this point, you've probably heard the word coach so much that it's lost all its meaning, but we should remember that this title can and should actually mean something.
A friend of mine sent me this message after I posted it about working on this episode.
She said, as someone who takes a lot of pride in the coach part of my title,
aka strength and conditioning coach, and coming from a long line of actual sport coaches in my
family, it honestly breaks my heart that so many people just slap the term on their title.
That's a title that you earn. That's a title that's given to you. You don't just get to
add it to any previous title. And I think that that can be a really good starting point.
Did someone give this person the title of coach, or did they give it to themselves?
That's really important.
It gets back to what I said at the very beginning of the episode, which is the fact that not all coaching is bad, and specifically when you have earned that coaching.
And something happened to me recently that really drove this point home.
We've been working on this episode for really a couple months, we've been talking about it.
I went into a cycling class.
It was the first studio cycling class that I've taken since moving to Portland, and it was a fucking nightmare.
Now, let me frame it.
I started Spin with someone who became a friend of mine.
His name is Will Ashley.
It was at Equinox in New York City.
It was 20 years ago, 20-some years ago.
And he taught a studio cycling class right before I taught my yoga class at the 19th Street location.
Now, Will is an actual cyclist and he would always say, I'm going to coach you today or I'm your coach today.
And he taught the class like a coach training you for outdoor riding.
Now, a year later, years later, when I began teaching studio cycling at Equinox, I took the same approach because I think that word is important.
And let me say, now we're getting back to Portland, if movement makes you happy, that's awesome.
I'm not a movement purist.
I think any sort of exercise is wonderful.
Now that said, SoulCycle kicked off a whole wave of studio cycling that includes a lot of movements that you would never actually do on a bike.
Well, what are they?
What are the movements, Derek?
Like mudras or sun salutations while you're cycling or something?
I actually wouldn't mind mudras.
That would be a step up here.
Okay.
I'll get into what it was, but I'm not against people who enjoy the type of class that I took, but I would personally never return.
But here's the but.
I've said it a bunch.
The instructor just kept saying things that were anatomically and physiologically false.
So on the first layer, he would signal things like doing push-ups on a bike.
So there's one for you, Matthew.
Like leaning on the handlebars and pushing up while you're spinning.
Okay.
But there were new people in the room and he gave no cues on how to perform those push-ups properly.
And there was also no warm-up.
You just literally start on the first song doing push-ups.
So the dude across from me had never taken a spin class before.
I knew that because I actually helped him set up his bike before class started.
And he was just doing the movement wrong because he had no actual coaching And therefore he could have gotten injured.
Now, the second layer was even more problematic.
The instructor kept saying, this is working your obliques or ab work, he would yell.
But the exercises we were doing were not working abs at all.
He would have the entire class bounce on the bike, which is something you never do on a bike, and then he would yell, isolate.
But the class would slow down their legs, but he never told you what to isolate or what that even means or for how long.
He constantly told people to find the beat.
But he was never on the beat one time, and I know because I was a Schwinn-trained instructor with the highest level instructors in the country, and they drilled that beat into me.
So the whole point of staying on the bike as a cycling instructor is so that the class can mimic your leg speed and movements, which meant everyone was 20 to 30 rotations per minute above the beat for most of the class.
And he said we were climbing hills the entire class, but not even Tour de France cyclists are climbing at 110 rpm.
It's impossible.
So there was actually nothing coached in the entire class.
But there was a lot of extra stuff.
And I mean, this is not my world at all, but it just seems like this might be a logical outcome of market saturation, because I mean, wouldn't competition incentivize the spinning coach or the brand to like add value or stand out or innovate, you know, or think outside of the box in whatever way?
So, I mean, what you're talking about seems like a good example of a brand that says spinning isn't really enough unless you're also supercharging your spiritual life or unless you're also doing a bunch of other sort of physical actions.
But yeah, I mean, for me, it brings up this question about like how easily capitalism can just push people to be stupid.
And I mean, it might apply to the excesses of bad coaching, but there's also...
This huge confounding factor in all of the stuff we cover, on up to QAnon, in which rhetoric and behavior just always becomes more extreme, not just in relation to people's beliefs, but according to the marketability of extreme performance.
Everybody has to stand out.
Yeah, you nailed it with that needing to be something else, which is honestly what SoulCycle did.
They had some two-pound weights that they would add tricep exercises and some things.
And again, it's fine.
It is a different type of workout than I do.
I keep my weight training and my cycling separate.
If you want to do those movements, I'm not against them.
My larger point is that he just was coaching the wrong things and he was saying things that were incorrect.
And that's where I really have a problem with it.
I mean, it's where the entire problem lies.
There are amazing coaches like my friend Will.
They devote their entire lives to a craft and they work hard at understanding it and presenting it in a way that will keep people safe and motivated, inspire them and get them the best workout.
And I'm not saying these coaches we've discussed today aren't working, but what are they really working at?
And if you haven't been trained by reliable professionals, what kind of hubris do you have to have to think you're worthy of coaching others?
I know we're in the listen-to-your-own-inner-teacher space here today in this discussion.
The container!
The container, sorry!
We're in the listen-to-your-own-inner-teacher container here today.
But being apprenticed by masters is what can help make you masterful at what you do.
And that takes a long time and a lot of dedication and a lot of education, to be honest.
And I'm just not seeing evidence of that with the meta ads that you shared with us over the last few months, Mallory.
Honestly, this topic was so daunting because it's a fucking circus.
There's so many players.
It's super nuanced.
There's a lot we were not even able to poke at today.
I feel like this could have been a five part series, but I'll take a second to say how much I love the Dream Podcast.
And the whole third season, which just dropped this fall, is dedicated to talking about the coaching industry.
So if we've piqued your interest here today, I personally recommend that if you haven't listened to it already.
And finally, if you're a coach who coaches coaches and you're looking for a course on how to coach coaches on writing a podcast about coaches who coach coaches, you can find me at this.is.mallory on Instagram and I look forward to you joining my container.
Thank you everyone for listening to another episode of Conspirituality.
Join us here next Thursday as we discuss Project 2025 on the main feed or we'll see you over on Patreon.
