575. 7 Things to Look for in a Coach

People reach out to me all the time and they say, “Hey, do you know any coaches who help people with this particular challenge or who work with this kind of person or this age person?” And this is because they’re looking to hire a coach for themselves or somebody they care about, and they want to do their due diligence and find the best possible coach. Kudos to you if this is you. But what I want to tell you is that the best coaches could help any person with any problem. And not that it’s wrong to find somebody who specializes in the area you want help with, but there are seven other things that are much more important to be asking about to make sure you get the right coach for you or your loved one.

This is also going to be really useful if you’re thinking of becoming a coach and you want to make sure that you become the kind of coach who can provide the most extraordinary transformations for your clients. So, welcome to the podcast. I’m Jody Moore. This is Better Than Happy. Thanks for being here today. Let’s go.

Welcome to Better Than Happy, the podcast where we apply all the tools of psychology, human behavior, and mindfulness to live our best lives, navigate challenges, and achieve our goals. I’m Jody Moore and I’ll be your coach today. Let’s do it.

Hey everybody, how are we doing today? Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining me. How is life? How’s life treating you? I’m recording this on just a couple of days after the 4th of July weekend. So, we had a really fun weekend hanging out with friends, seeing some fireworks. We’ve been watching lots of FIFA World Cup soccer. That’s been fun. We celebrated, I celebrated Taylor Swift’s wedding. I don’t know about anybody else in my family, but anyway, it’s been a fun summer. I hope you’re having a great summer as well.

Today’s episode is something that I’ve been thinking about for a while, putting out there. And I want to tell you that I’ve put together seven things I think you should keep in mind when you go to choose a coach. And this is based on, obviously, my years of experience as a coach. And obviously my opinion is somewhat biased, I’ll be the first to admit, but this is not just based on my experience and the kind of coaching that I do. This is based off also working with lots of people who want to become coaches. Many of whom come to me after they’ve already been through some kind of coach training or certification or program.

And so I’m constantly asking, “Now, why are you looking at going through this program?” And I’m constantly asking, “What was your experience like?” And many of them have good experiences, but they tell me that there were things lacking, or there’s this like it factor. There’s this something that gets really deep into the root of the problem, which we’re going to talk about in just a minute, that they don’t quite have. And so that’s where I put these seven things together is again, based on my experience and my clients, but also what I hear from other people in coach trainings they go to or coaches that they’ve worked with, both the good, the bad, and everything in between. Okay?

So, let’s dive right in. First thing I want you to understand is that there is no true certification in the coaching industry. There’s no true regulation. Okay? So this is very important to understand before we even get to the seven points because there are business models that exist that will say things like, “Come to my school and you will be certified in this way.” I have such a program. I offer a coach training, and after people go through it, I give them logos and permission to use my name and say that they are Jody Moore certified. They went through my Better Than Happy coach training and they’re authorized to do so. They can put my name and logos on things. And for anybody who knows me or has heard of me, maybe that adds some credibility for them, saying, “Oh, I like Jody’s style, maybe I’m going to like this coach.” But that is not true regulation. The word certification doesn’t mean anything other than it’s the word I decided to use.

So if you think about traditional regulation or accreditation or certification, that is something that is done by a neutral third party. So traditional state schools come to mind for me. Those traditional state schools are accredited schools, right? All of your Cal State schools, your UC Berkeley, UC, whatever, fill in the blank. That’s for me in California. Whatever state you live in will have your own version of state schools. Those are accredited schools, meaning a neutral third party comes along and says, “In order for you to be able to issue degrees to students, your school needs to meet certain requirements. Your faculty has to meet certain requirements. The content of your curriculum has to meet certain requirements and students have to go through certain requirements.” And everybody agrees on what those are, and then if the if the school meets the requirements, they can give degrees, and students’ degrees then have some kind of weight, that’s arguable, but anyway, in the real world, right?

That does not exist in coaching. It does exist in other service-based industries in our world, like therapy. You have to meet certain requirements to be a therapist, and the schools that train you have to meet certain requirements, to be a dentist, to be in the in the medical field, even to do people’s nails. To be authorized and licensed to do nails, you have to go through certain training requirements. All of that is regulated by a neutral third party who doesn’t stand to gain financially or in any other way by approving or disapproving certain programs out there. That does not exist in the world of coaching. That’s important to know because when you hear terms like accreditation, certification, etcetera, you need to dive deeper to learn what’s really going on here. It might mean that somebody paid the appropriate fees to fall under their label. It might mean more than that, but we don’t know what it means exactly because there’s no true regulation in this industry. You with me?

Okay, so now with that, let’s dive into the seven things I want you to keep in mind when you go to choose a coach or become a coach. Number one, causal coaching. I recommend that you find a coach who does some kind of causal coaching. Now, I’m going to tell you how to identify this because they may not all label it causal coaching, but you can tell the difference in the way that they coach. So, the most extraordinary coaches that most of us know really well, that are really fun and powerful to listen to, are doing causal coaching. It’s very different from just having a conversation with a friend who might be encouraging you or supporting you or giving you good advice, which unfortunately is the kind of coaching that most coaches do. It’s more accountability coaching. It’s, “Hey, have you tried this?” That’s not wrong to do. It can be helpful. There are times when we want someone to hold us accountable or just give us advice or show us the way to something.

But causal coaching is next level. Think Tony Robbins. If you’ve ever watched Tony Robbins coach somebody, you find yourself thinking, “Whoa, how did he know that was what was really going on?” I didn’t expect that we were going to be talking about this thing when this person brought up, you know, their business or their relationship or whatever it was. And now we’re down a whole rabbit hole of stuff going on. People will say, “How did you know how to really get deep about what’s going on?” People ask me this when they watch my coaching. This is true of coaches like Byron Katie. She does her own version of causal coaching. You’ll hear this with Brendan Burchard, with Joe Hudson. Really transformative coaches are doing causal coaching.

Now, it’s not magic, although it looks like magic, right? It feels like magic to watch. This is why it’s so entertaining and so powerful to watch causal coaching, and I personally could watch it all day. But all of these coaches have their own methods and tools that they use, but the key is they’re getting to the root cause. They’re not just treating symptoms. They’re not just giving good advice, saying, “Oh, you’re struggling in your marriage. Have you tried saying this thing? Have you had this conversation? Have you set boundaries in this way?” Now, again, these kinds of tools, nothing wrong with them. There’s a time and a place for them. But true coaching gets to the root cause of the problem. And when you solve for the root cause of the problem, guess what happens? You don’t just know what to do with your immediate problem. You suddenly make so many other things in your life easier, and you become more powerful in your own life in ways you didn’t even know you wanted to, because that one root problem has been showing up in so many different areas of your life. Nothing wrong with short-term accountability. It’s just not nearly as transformative as causal coaching.

So how do you know if your coach does causal coaching? Well, you should be able to find examples of their work online, or maybe they do some kind of a consultation where you get a sample of coaching, and you will know because it will feel very different. If you feel like you’re getting the kinds of tips and advice and support that you could get from a close friend or a sibling or somebody who had a little experience in this area, they probably aren’t doing causal coaching. No offense, but you’re going to probably want something a little deeper, a little more powerful to spend your money on. Causal coaching is the way I was trained by Brooke Castillo, who’s a causal coach. It’s the type of coaching that we train our coaches to do. It’s why when they first come into coach training, it feels so foreign and different, but by the end, it feels like a spiritual experience. That’s what I love about causal coaching.

The next thing I want you to watch out for when you’re looking to become a coach or hire a coach is real coaches, the most powerful coaches I should say, understand that we don’t know what our clients should do as much as our clients know what they should do. This one matters, my friends, because if you think there’s some kind of a guru out there or somebody who knows what you should do in your marriage, in your relationships, in your business even, even with your health and your own body, better than you do, you are setting yourself up for some potential problems. If you’ve ever watched a documentary on TV about people who end up in cult situations or who end up being really led off into the deep end by a person and you’ve thought, “How could they fall for that? How could they think that was acceptable behavior or advice?” It’s because every single one of us is actually very subject to this kind of psychological manipulation. It’s easier to fall for than what any of us like to believe. And I don’t want that happening to you. And I certainly don’t want my clients to be led astray by my advice. I don’t know what they should do. I don’t know.

This is actually such a relief to me as a coach that I don’t need to know what you should do. I’m going to help you access the wisdom that lives within you. Maybe you think of it as inspiration. Maybe you think of it as the spirit guiding you or God directing your life. However you want to think about it, I know for sure it’s not me as a coach that knows what you should do. Now, might I have some experience in an area like business or something that I’m offering some tips and strategies on that we’re discussing? Sure. Nothing wrong with that, right? But in the end, it’s not my decision about what you should do. And it shouldn’t be the decision of your coach or anybody else that you’re working with. It is your decision. What coaching does that’s so powerful is help you find that wisdom.

One of my coaches in coach training recently said it this way, I was so proud of her. She said, “I felt such a relief when I realized I don’t need to know what this client should do. We’re going to go on a journey together and discover what they already know they should do. They just aren’t accessing it right now because of fear, because of confusion, because of the noise and drama that comes at us from the world around us.” As coaches, we get to help people clean that up and find their own wisdom. Now, good coach training will give you tools and strategies that help you to do this. It’s not just a mystical magical thing you need to do. There are specific processes that we can go through, but thank goodness, I don’t know what my client should do, nor should any other coach know for you what you should do.

Okay, moving right along. The third thing that you need to know if you’re going to become a coach or hire a coach is that it is not your coach’s job to be liked by you, to be respected by you, to be admired by you. Now, I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be upstanding citizens and people who are practicing what they preach and all that. I’m just saying a good coach loves you enough to tell you the truth. And sometimes the truth is hard for us to hear. Now, I want you to think about this with your true friends, right? You probably have friends if you’re like most of us who are just nice, polite friends, but then you’ve got that one friend, right? Who will tell you the truth, who will tell you’ve got lettuce in your teeth or you’re being kind of a jerk or whatever else, and they’re not doing it to try to piss you off. They’re doing it because they love you. They’re doing it because they care about you too much not to tell you the truth.

Well, think of a good coach as being like that on a 10x level. They are able to see insights in you that you can’t even see yourself, and they are going to point those things out to you not out of judgment. Okay, so a good coach shouldn’t be coming at you in your face, trying to like yell at you and motivate you through fear. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about telling you the honest truth because they care more about you having access to that information so that you can do whatever you want with it, than they care about being liked, being approved of.

So if you’re thinking of becoming a coach and that sounds scary to you, it is scary at first. It’s foreign to us. We’re not used to interacting in that way. But you will learn if you go through a good program, the way we teach our coaches is that you have your coach hat that you put on where you set aside your own ego and your own insecurities. You’ll still have them, by the way. I still have them. We’re still human beings. I can just set them aside when I’m in coach mode, and I understand clearly that my job is to love my client so much, I’m going to tell them the hard truth.

Now, we do have again, tools and strategies and processes that help the client to receive it well and to not feel shamed. That’s the last thing we want is for them to feel shamed or called out. So we use specific tools to do that, but I’m not doing anyone any favors by simply validating them, right? There’s a time where you want validation in your life. There’s times when I want to just call my sister, complain to her and have her go, “Oh my gosh, poor baby, that sounds so hard,” and take my side. There’s a time for that.

I want you to imagine that you hire an interior designer to come into your house and make it more beautiful and more functional for you and your family. And the interior designer comes in and she takes a look around and she’s like, “Wow, I love what you’ve done with the place. It’s so beautiful.” Now, maybe she starts with that, but then if she doesn’t have any advice to give you about what could be better and what’s kind of a mess and what really needs a lot of work, then you’re going to ask for your money back, right? That’s how you need to think about a good coach, is their job is to point out to you opportunities to make your life better. So that means you have to hear some hard truth. Okay? Hopefully you’re up for that and hopefully your coach has methods and tools to do it that don’t send you into a shame spiral because that’s not the goal either.

Alright, moving on. The fourth thing I want you to know, and again, this is whether you’re becoming a coach or hiring a coach, but a good coach should not have the primary objective of making you feel good, even making you feel better. Yes, a lot of times through coaching, you’re going to feel better, but the true goal of a powerful coach is to help you become empowered. So empowered does tend to feel better if you’re coming from disempowered, if you’re being a victim, if you’re feeling sorry for yourself, etcetera. At some point, sometimes empowerment’s going to feel really good. Empowerment is, oh, I see what I’ve done here. Oh, I see how I’ve created this. And that can be a huge relief if you’ve been feeling hopeless or stuck or unsure what to do next.

But sometimes empowered doesn’t feel great because we don’t always want to take accountability for what we’ve created. We want to blame others. We want to be mad at people. Sometimes we even want to feel sorry for ourselves, and that’s okay. It’s just not going to help you move forward, right? So a good coach should be empowering you to move forward. Now, part of empowerment is also learning to process and allow emotions. We’re not trying to turn people into robots, at least not the kind of coaching that I do and that I train people to do. I’m not saying you should feel good all the time.

I was actually just coaching a woman today who is trying to work on not being so worried and anxious about her adult children. She’s trying not to be overly manipulative in their lives, and she’s gotten pretty good at that. She’s managed to alter her behaviors a little bit. She’s able to show up a little bit better, but she said, “I still just have this pit in my stomach when one of my kids is struggling or suffering in some way.” And I said to her, “How do you want to feel?” She gave the example of like a daughter calling home crying about something, right? And I said, “How do you want to feel when your daughter calls you and she’s in tears and she’s upset and she’s struggling?” And she said, “I want to feel strong and confident.” And I was like, “Do you? Because I don’t think so. I think that you actually want to feel sad when your daughter’s struggling. I want to feel sad when my kids are struggling. It makes sense. It’s perfectly understandable and human for you to be sad about your daughter struggling.”

Okay? So I’m not just here to help you feel good. Yes, sometimes you’re going to want to feel better and that might be the appropriate way to coach you, but many times it’s to teach you how to allow sadness. How to make sadness be a really expansive, almost even spiritual experience that then does refine you and make you better instead of bitter. And you can still show up as somebody who is there for your daughter with some strength and confidence and allow sadness. So the best coaches understand this. We’re not just trying to make you feel better. That’s not an ideal way to live. If you really just want to feel better, just I don’t know, sit on your couch, take drugs. You would feel good until the day you died, right? If that was your life, you’d create other problems, but I’m just saying feeling good is a very, very low-bar goal. And a good coach should understand that and should have tools that help to actually empower you. That’s what we want to go for.

Okay, number five. Now, this one seems obvious to me, but it is not to many people. The best coaches have coaches, have at least a coach. I am a huge believer that anyone with a human brain can benefit from coaching because the human brain is an amazing, extraordinary, I love it so much. I’m obsessed with how powerful our brains are and our minds are, but also needs some guidance, needs some regulation, and needs somebody from an outside perspective to help us see what we don’t see ourselves. So if your coach doesn’t have a coach, I’m just curious about their belief in coaching, right? Like, I want you to imagine going to a dentist who doesn’t have a dentist. They’d be like, “Hey, hey doc, if dental practice is so important for the health of our teeth and our gums and the longevity of our overall health, then why do you not go get your teeth cleaned? Why do you not get x-rays in your mouth like I’m doing? Shouldn’t you be doing this?” And the answer is, yeah. Your coach should have a coach. Now, maybe it’s just an overall mindset coach. Maybe, and for me anyway, I hire all different kinds of coaches based on what’s going on in my life. Sometimes I’ve had health coaches, sometimes I have business coaches, sometimes I just have general mindset coaches, but it depends on where I’m at, but I will always have a coach. I would feel like a hypocrite otherwise.

Number six. Now, this is just my personal preference, so you can take or leave this one, but I have, again, talked to so many people who have had different experiences with coaches. I am a big believer that the coach should be the one doing the work and guiding you through a process, which is not the same as having an agenda for you, by the way, but having a process that will help you to bring up your limiting beliefs, to have the opportunity to have breakthroughs, to again, clear away the fear and the noise, etcetera, that might be happening for you. Your coach should have a process they take you through. Maybe this is a program, maybe this is ongoing tools they’re teaching you. If the only thing they do is show up to a call and ask you, “What do you want coaching on today?” then in my opinion, that coach is not doing their job. Their job is to be able to guide you.

Now, you may show up with an agenda and say, “Hey, whatever you had planned today, let’s set it aside because I’m having this problem or I had this thing happen this week.” Cool. But when I did private one-on-one coaching, I did not expect my clients to prepare for the session. I needed to be prepared for the session. And I had a process that I went through. Now, I could tailor that process based on what my client wanted and needed. Sometimes much of that process got set aside or maybe I needed to create a whole new process for this client, but I should be the one prepared.

I should be able to ask you questions that you haven’t even considered asking yourself. I should be able to help you uncover insights you didn’t even know you were missing if I’m a good coach. Now, there are exceptions to this. In group coaching programs, there are lots of times when we need space for people to be able to come and bring anything. So in my program, The Lab, for example, I do lots of teaching. I teach courses and workshops, I give exercises, and I have a whole library of content people can go to get guidance and go through processes. But then we have lots of calls too where people come and I say, “What do you want coaching on today?” because we’re doing kind of a catch all. But if people don’t dive in and take advantage of the courses and the workshops and things that I’m teaching, then they can just use it as one-off coaching, but it’s not going to be nearly as powerful as if they go through the processes that I’ve outlined for them.

So, as a coach, you’re going to want to create processes, programs, challenges, things that people can go through with you that will call up opportunities for personal development they maybe didn’t even know they had. Of course, all of that gets set aside if they have a more acute problem they want help with, but we should be guiding our clients in my opinion. As a client, that is my favorite thing to sign up for is a program that focuses on a particular area that’s going to take me on a journey I didn’t even imagine was possible for myself.

And then last but not least, the seventh thing I want you to look for in a coach, and this will just help you with the other six, okay, is that your coach should have opportunities for you to sort of test drive or try them out before you pay them any money. This might be content. This is actually the main reason I do this podcast. I want people to understand my style of coaching, my philosophies of coaching, and how I approach different situations because I don’t want anyone coming in and paying me money as a client that doesn’t love my approach. That’s not a win for them or for me.

Okay, so they should have either some kind of long form content like a podcast, a YouTube channel, a Substack, or maybe it’s a whole bunch of short form content on social media or somewhere, but you should be able to get a good feel for this person. Maybe it’s even a consultation or a free class or challenge or very low priced, if not free, that you can go to learn more. You should be able to ask them all these questions that I’ve given you today to learn more about their style of coaching, their training, their philosophy, etcetera and you should be able to get a good feel before you pay them any money. That is the world we live in today, my friends, is there’s so much opportunity to do your due diligence before you hire someone. So do it. And if they don’t have a way for you to do it, ask them if they have anything that you just haven’t found, but most coaches nowadays understand that’s an important part of the work we do, and you should be able to get a lot of great help through their free content or offers.

All right, so that’s what I got for you today, my friends. I hope this helps you. If you are thinking of becoming a coach, I am getting ready to open up the doors to my coach training. I’m going to be taking applications. We have an application process and then we do interviews and we select the people who will be going through the next coach training, which will start in January of 2027, but we’ll be doing interviews and applications in the fall. The waitlist is currently open, so you can go to JodyMoore.com/training. If you want to learn all about the type of training I do and what it’s like to work with me.

Again, JodyMoore.com/training. You must be on the waitlist to learn how this program works, to get the link to the application, and to be able to be selected to be interviewed for 2027 coach training. We are about to graduate this fall, the 2026 class, which has been so amazing working with these coaches. And again, I’m excited to meet the 2027 class when that time comes. So again, JodyMoore.com/training. if you want to learn more about learning to be a coach in the way that I do it.

Thanks for joining me today, my friends. I hope this episode serves you. If so, I’d love if you would share it with others. Have a beautiful rest of your week and I’ll see you next time. Bye-bye.

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