Entre-Talk: Are There Too Many Coaches?

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, Entre-Talk: Are There Too Many Coaches?

Did you know that you can live a life that’s even better than happy? My name is Jody Moore. I’m a master certified life coach and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And if you’re willing to go with me I can show you how. Let’s go.

Hey, everybody, welcome to the first of a new series I’m doing here in Better Than Happy, when I say series I mean I intend to do this maybe forever. I don’t know, let’s just see. I probably shouldn’t commit to forever until I at least give it a try and make sure I can maintain the momentum and make sure that it’s helping all of you with your businesses. But my intention is to publish an Entre-Talk episode every Monday.

We will continue to do life coaching, talk about all the things I’ve been doing here on Better Than Happy for many years now, on Fridays those episodes will come out. But on Mondays I want to talk to my entrepreneur friends. That’s why I’m calling it Entre-Talk. So my hope by labeling it Entre-Talk is that those of you who aren’t interested in hearing this part can tune those episodes out and you will still get all the goodness you’re used to from this podcast.

But we have many, many entrepreneurs, especially a lot of coaches who want to grow their businesses and I kind of experimented with Instagram Live and some other mediums and I haven’t found a platform that I like better than podcasting for getting some good free help out there to all of you. And so we’re going to just add it to the podcast.

So today I want to start by addressing this question, are there too many coaches? And my intention right now is that each episode will have a question, that will be the title, will be a question. And so I’m trying to choose questions that I get commonly and that I know are going to be useful to many of you. And if you’re not a coach but you’re interested in learning about business I think this will be relevant in a lot of different fields.

But this especially comes up a lot for my entrepreneur coaches, whether you’re a life coach, health coach, weight coach, energy coach, breath work coach, or teacher of some sort. But especially in the field of life coaching it starts to feel like at some point everybody is a coach. So can you relate to this, tell me? Does it feel like every time you turn around somebody else is telling you that they’re getting certified, that they’re going to The Life Coach School or whatever coaching program to get trained, or certified, or become a coach? And if so, what do you make that mean?

Because usually when people say to me, “Gosh, it seems like everyone’s a coach, it seems like we have so many life coaches, isn’t this becoming a saturated industry? I feel like people are saying that not in a good way, especially if they’re a coach. They’re saying it out of scarcity.

They’re saying, “Doesn’t it seem like there’s not enough business for all of us? Are we really all going to be able to be successful if there’s so many of us? And do people really need coaching? And am I really going to be able to serve, and help, and find the success I want if everybody is trying to do it?” And so there’s a couple of things I want to dive into here. I want to start by telling you a story. Maybe you’ve heard this story before but it’s the story of how I first got into coaching.

I first found coaching through my corporate job, my now good friend and at the time a director in our company, Kris Plachy introduced me to the model through our company. She was a coach there, a leadership coach and I got to do a little bit of leadership coaching as well. So I learned the model from her. I learned about Brooke Castillo and her work from Kris Plachy. And I started following Brooke Castillo’s blog, that’s how long ago this was. She did not have a podcast. Podcasting wasn’t very popular at the time. I started following her blog and I read her book, Self-coaching 101.

And I ate it all up, all of the content that Brooke was teaching I loved. And that of course led me down a rabbit hole of studying other people who teach self-help and thought work in what we might call coaching. And all of it felt really powerful to me, so much so that when I was like, go from that corporate job, and feeling kind of lost I had no idea, am I going to go get another job. That didn’t kind of feel like the right move, but also being a stay at home mom, felt scary and not ideal for me.

And so the only thing that I knew was that I was drawn to the things I had learned from Brooke Castillo. And that she had a coach training program and it happened to be right down the street from my house basically and I was going to go to that. So I made that decision and I went through coach training in 2014. Now, I do want to say that at this time I was not aware of any other, and I am pretty sure that at this point there were no other LDS life coaches that had been certified at The Life Coach School. Life Coach School was much smaller at the time, just a handful of coaches.

And this part of me, I should say before I even signed up for coach training and was drawn to Brooke’s work and considered going through it. Part of me thought, maybe that doesn’t jive with my faith. Maybe that’s not something that we do as members of the church. Maybe that’s, I don’t know, in some way, contradictory. Even though I’d never heard anything that felt that way. None of the teachings or things that I’d learned felt contradictory to me. I couldn’t figure out why wasn’t this a more common thing amongst members of my faith?

And then one day I was at church and I overheard a woman talking to someone, she happened to be in the Stake Relief Society Presidency at the time and they were talking about speakers. And one of them said, “Yeah, I’ve reached out to”, I don’t even know what the woman’s name was. I didn’t know her but she named some woman. And she said, “I’m going to see if she’ll come and speak. She’s a life coach.” And my ears perked up like, wait, what, there’s somebody in our stake who’s a life coach and that’s okay?

I know this sounds kind of ridiculous but this is, I’m just being honest about where my head was at. And I thought, maybe it is okay. Maybe coaching doesn’t go against our religion. It sounds so funny now when I say it out loud. And anyway, I went home and I got on the internet, where you go to get good information. And I Googled LDS life coaches. So I thought maybe there are some people out there who are coaches who are members of my faith. Maybe those two things can go together.

And when I Googled LDS life coach I found Kim Giles. Anybody know Kim Giles? I love Kim Giles, to this day. I don’t really know her very well. She came on the podcast once many years ago but otherwise I have not really worked closely with Kim Giles. But I still am so appreciative to Kim Giles and love her for leading the way because when I discovered that she was a life coach and she is a member of the LDS church, and she seemed to be doing really good work in the world.

It sort of flipped that switch in my brain that, yes this is a thing that is possible, and can be good, and can work even within my faith. I don’t have to abandon my religion in order to follow this thing. So Kim Giles, she has a great book, Choosing Clarity that I highly recommend. And as far as I can tell, I think she’s still running her coaching practice, Clarity Point Coaching. So a huge shout out to Kim Giles. I ended up going through training later that year, then at the Life Coach School.

Shortly after I went through training, to this day good friends, Molly Claire and Aimee Gianni came through The Life Coach school and they are both members of the LDS church. And so then there were three of us and that was kind of fun. And here’s the interesting thing. We were kind of the only ones in this sea of people who were teaching and learning awesome concepts but had a very irreverent way, let’s just say. And so we kind of stood out like we all do in the world.

But over the years we’ve all watched as hundreds, if not thousands of members of our church have gone through at The Life Coach School. And I know there are many other types of coaching and coaching training programs and schools out there. And so I’m sure there are many all over, but in my little world of The Life Coach School I’ve watched it grow tremendously, not only the number of coaches but the number that are sort of like me, members of my faith and living a similar life.

And so when you go through that, whether you’ve been a part of that story, maybe somewhere along the way you were one of those women or people, not just women, men also who have gone through the Life Coach School or you have a similar story from another type of coaching, or training, or a method of serving and helping people. And you’ve watched it snowball, you’ve watched it grow and then it starts to feel like everyone is a coach, everyone is doing this. And here’s what I want you to know.

I believe that that story is a scarcity story, of course, that is a lie but it’s also natural as a part of our psychology and a part of our identity to take that on and wonder and worry about it. Here’s why I think it’s a lie. The lie is that there are too many coaches and that it’s a saturated market. And again that’s true whether you’re a yoga teacher, an energy healer, a fitness coach or a life coach. I do not think we have too many of any of those things, any of the types of coaches in our world, here’s why. How many people do you know who have a life coach, how many off the top of your head?

How many people do you know? And we can define coaching any way you want to. I have a membership program where people come in and they get workshops and classes and they can come to coaching calls and they can get right in, help coaching and they can get coached, or they can learn from coaching. And that is a group coaching program. So there are other coaches who offer one-on-one coaching. And there’s a higher end type of coaching where you’re working more intensely and more intimately with a coach for probably a concentrated period of time.

So even if we define life coaching as being in a membership program like the one that I offer, some people in there have never been coached live but they are listening to coaching and they’re getting secondhand coaching if you will. How many people do you know who even have something like that, have a program or a place where they go regularly to maintain or strengthen their mental and emotional health?

Because in my world of coach friends, in my friends from The Life Coach School and obviously my clients. but in my little world it feels like a lot of people have a coach or in some kind of a program, or that there are a lot of coaches. But when I step out and look at my real life, when I look at the people I go to church with, the people I associate with through my kids, their friends, and their friends’ parents, and the people at my kids’ school, and the people in our neighborhood. Those people in my everyday world, how many of them have life coaches? Very few.

So you can ask yourself this question. How many people in your ward, pick a specific place, don’t keep your brain limited to the people you associate with regularly, Because those people I associate with regularly, a lot of them either are coaches or have coaches because I have reason to interact with people who are like me or doing similar work to me. But if I step back and take a more accurate assessment of my life and the world around me, how many of them have coaches? Not many, even in my own family, not many.

So here’s what I think. We have so much work to do. People need coaching and a lot of people don’t even understand that they need coaching. But when you approach your business in the right way, which isn’t who wants coaching but it’s would you like help with this particular problem? Would you like help achieving this particular result in your life? Then yes everybody has reason to have a coach. So we’ve got a lot of work to do. We could use a lot more coaches.

Now, here’s the other thing to keep in mind. While I see a lot of people getting certified as coaches, I don’t see very many people do much with it in terms of starting and growing a business. And many times that’s because they choose not to. Either they didn’t intend to in the first place or they start down that path and then decide it’s not a path they want to continue on and so they change course. I think that we highly underestimate how many people just change their minds. And I don’t think there’s any shame in that.

I think it’s perfectly fine to go through a certification or program thinking you’re going to want to build a business and then to decide you don’t want to build a business. I still don’t think that’s a waste of time. I think that you should go into it deciding whether or not that would be a waste of time because if you think it would be waste of time that’s kind of something I would question about whether you’re really going to go through that program. But if you tell yourself, I know there’s going to be a lot of learning, and a lot of personal growth and development.

That’s actually the main reason that I signed up for coach training, it was for my own development but at any rate you can decide going in that you want a business and you’re going to grow, and develop, and meet people, and learn things that will serve you the rest of your life in that program. And if at any point you decide you don’t want that business you’re not going to label it a waste of time or money. So that’s step number one, a lot of people choose to walk away for good reason.

And then there are some who are not able to succeed or this is what I think, they haven’t succeeded yet. So some people get frustrated, this is the difference between walking away because you decide I don’t want to do this, and getting frustrated, and discouraged and giving up. But then there’s the third category of people who just haven’t achieved success yet. So my point is that the people in those buckets, who either willingly walk away or haven’t achieved success yet, that’s the majority of the people.

The people who have really fast overnight success is few and far between or even the people who have what we might say is a very, whatever your mind expects is the reasonable amount of time to succeed. I want to increase that number, that is why I do business coaching. I want to help more entrepreneurs but especially coaches, I have a program where I’m coaching all kinds of entrepreneurs and it’s been amazing. And we’ve seen amazing changes happen in people’s businesses.

But I’m going to next year offer some things that are more specific to coaches because I feel called to help serve the world through coaching. And one way I do that is as a coach but another way I want to do that is by helping more coaches succeed in their businesses so they can go help more people. So my point is, it doesn’t matter if we have a whole bunch of people getting certified at whatever program or school you pay attention to. How many of them are putting in the work to build a business to actually take what they’ve learned and impact the world in a positive way?

That’s a pretty low percentage. So we need more. We need more people to succeed and we need more people to go through and learn the tools of coaching. Here is the other thing I want to point out whenever people say, “It just seems like there are so many coaches, everybody’s a coach these days.” And I say, “Why do we think this way about coaching and we never think this way about other industries like being a doctor, or being a dentist?”

If somebody decides to go to medical school and become a doctor we might say that that’s a saturated industry, medicine. Because when I say, “How many people do you know that have life coaches? Not very much. How many people do you know that have a doctor? Most everyone I know has a doctor or has been to the doctor at some point or sees the value and has maybe a primary care physician or what have you, most everyone. And yet we never say, “You’re going to be a doctor. I don’t know, I feel like everyone’s a doctor. I feel like we have enough doctors.” We don’t say that.

We’re like, “That’s a very wise career choice, you should be a doctor.” Interesting. So just be careful about, one, not assessing the world accurately because we only assess it based on our little bubble of what we know. But two, believing the scarcity lie that your brain wants to offer you, I don’t think we’re anywhere near saturated in coaching. And if you are a coach, if you are certified in some kind of helpful, useful method of serving people and you want to help people I want to help you to do that. So I hope you will keep tuning into these episodes.

One other thing I want to say about this. I mentioned that this is a scarcity story that’s a lie. And I mentioned briefly that it’s also part of our psychology and identity. So here’s what I mean by that. A part of our psychology is that we want to fit in with others. We want to behave, or act, or look etc., in such a way that we don’t stand out too much. We don’t like to be too much of a standout and at the same time another part of our psychology is to want to be unique and individual. So we don’t want to be too much like everyone else.

We don’t want to be just the same, we want to stand out a little bit. We want to be unique in some ways. So again when I first started not knowing any other LDS life coaches I didn’t want to be rejected from my community of people at church. I couldn’t figure out why there weren’t more people that I was aware of. And so I thought maybe there’s something wrong with it. And I don’t want to be rejected or be wrong in some way and so it made me hesitant. So until I found Kim Giles and discovered that no, this is fine and there are actually a handful of other people doing this then I decided it was safe to do.

I didn’t want to stand out too much, but as the community of coaches grows or as you become familiar with more or your world becomes more saturated with coaches then it’s easy to think, I don’t want to do that because everybody’s doing it. Everybody’s doing it, it’s why we like to name our kids names that seem uncommon except that we’re all choosing the same uncommon names. And so pretty soon your kid goes to school and there’s three other kids in their class with the same name.

And you’re like, “I remember when you were a baby and I named you that it sounded like such an uncommon name and now everybody chose that name.” It’s why we do that. We want to be somewhat unique and individual. So it’s okay that your brain is doing that is my point but you have to remember that you are unique first of all and that you can differentiate yourself. In fact that’s a really important part of having a successful business. Don’t try to create the exact same business that your friends have or that somebody else you know has.

Try to create a unique business, solve a unique problem and decide what makes you unique and different. That is part of effective marketing but it also will feel better to you from a psychology standpoint. We’ve got to make you the best version of you and serve the world in the best way that you can, not in the best way necessarily that even you found coaching. So that’s what I want to say about this topic, is everyone a coach? No, definitely not. Do we have too many coaches? No. Is the life coaching market saturated? Not even close.

I’ll leave you with this final thought because some of you have been listening to me and following me for a long time and you maybe came through my program and then went through coach training. And hopefully you’ve told all your friends and family about me and they all know me too. And I am always fascinated at how a lot of, again, people that I’m close to or coaches that I work closely with, or my clients will say, “Well, everybody already knows Jody Moore, so why would they want to come to my business?

Why wouldn’t they go through your program if that’s a possibility? And everybody already knows you so we’ve already soaked up all the possibility.” That’s what people are telling me. And I’m like, “I wish that were true. I wish everybody knew me and I which I was as big, and famous, and successful as you think I am.” That is not true even within the LDS church. If we say, “Well, okay, but everyone in our church has probably heard of you.” Even that I think is you’re probably highly overexaggerating how effective I’ve been at getting the message of coaching out to members of our church.

Because when I travel with my husband or my family we usually go to a sacrament meeting wherever we happen to be. And guess how many people when I go to church recognize me and come up and say, “Wait a second, are you Jody Moore?” Sometimes one person, most often nobody. If everybody’s heard of me pretty much in the church and I’ve already got the word out about coaching and mental health then when I travel and I’m not going to obscure places in the world either. I’m talking mostly in the United States in highly populated areas.

And when I go to a sacrament meeting, in other words mostly nobody knows me, occasionally one person. That’s it. You know what that means? I need help. Help me help the people, help me get the word out about mental and emotional health. We need more coaches. And if you aren’t a coach and you want to become one, do it. But I especially am talking to all of you coaches who aren’t building your businesses but secretly want to. Let’s go. Let’s go help the people.

Alright, thanks for joining me today. I’ll be back next Monday for another Entre-Talk episode. I’ll see you then.

Hey there, if you enjoy this podcast or even if you just find that it sort of piques your curiosity, or it makes you think, you’re going to love the book that I wrote. It’s called Better Than Happy: Connecting with Divinity Through Conscious Thinking. And it’s available now at Amazon in print or kindle version. Or if you want me to read it to you, head over to audible and grab the audio version. And why not grab a copy for your sister, your best friend, or your mom while you’re there too. Just saying.