Four Reasons Why I Fired My First Life Coach, and Then Became One

Posted on April 19, 2022 by Christine Dunning, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.

In March of 2021, I made a difficult decision.

I decided to quit teaching, and look for a new career that would give me more flexibility, more freedom, and the chance to travel.

My decision to quit teaching wasn’t out of the blue.

There were parts of my job that I loved, like working with the students. But the stressful parts overwhelmed everything, compounded by the challenges of teaching during the pandemic. Covid put a period at the end of that sentence.

But the big question was – WHAT was I going to do next?

I’ve done a lot of side hustles and gig economy in my life. Being a musician and music teacher, this is natural for me. I knew I wanted to return to that lifestyle.

I started playing with some scenarios, when I got a little boost. I found out that a long-time friend of mine had recently become a life coach.

Eureka!

I knew that could be great, and something I had missed in my past. Someone to guide me through this process, and help me figure out my new path was exactly what I needed.

My friend is a businessman who also helped run an award winning family business for more than 25 years. He is thoughtful, smart, and full of great ideas – just what I was looking for in a coach.

Whenever you hire someone, you want to know, like and trust them. Since this man was my friend, I already had that in spades.

But at the end of our three month agreement, I ended up firing him.

Why didn’t this work?

1. Coaches must not prejudge.

Hiring a coach is like hiring a therapist or counselor.

A coach needs to provide a safe space, and be someone that you can discuss difficult topics without judgment.

I thought that by hiring a friend, he would already be invested in me and my outcome (and he was).

But in part due to our long friendship, we ended up taking shortcuts that didn’t create a forward process. I had one idea of what I wanted to get out of our time together, and he had another.

We came in with preconceived notions about what we would accomplish together.

This was the first issue.

Your coach needs to be a neutral party, someone with no skin in the game. They need to listen to you without bias.

This coach THOUGHT he knew what I wanted and needed, because he knew me socially.

But a coaching relationship is different from a friendship.

By the way, this can be an issue with people other than coaches. Becoming clear on what you want, and communicating that will help you find the work you really want to do.

2. A life coach helps you find outcomes – but the decisions are yours alone.

Hindsight is 20/20. Now that I’ve taken life coaching courses myself, I have a much better idea of what a life coach should and shouldn’t do.

But even without that knowledge I saw some problems right at the beginning. I felt like our sessions were all over the map, and that I wasn’t getting outcomes that were satisfying for me.

My coach continued to talk about dreams and ideas when was ready for action.

I’m what’s known as a Quick Start, a term from the Kolbe assessment, a test I recommend. (check it out at www.kolbe.com). It means that I’m an ideas person.

What I need is help with structure and follow through.

It was fun to brainstorm with my friend, but the structure I needed didn’t happen, or at least, not quickly enough for me.

By the way – I’m now great at creating structure for my clients! It’s one of the things I learned in my coaching classes.

3. Your life coach is not a therapist or a mentor.

These are three different kinds of relationships, but the language can get muddy.

A therapist is a licensed position, and is trained to help you work through trauma.

A mentor is someone who has an established record in business, and guides you through business situations.

A life coach is a sounding board, and helps you deal with problems in your present.

Although a life coach provides guidance, they don’t provide answers. They know that the answers are inside of you, and they help you see them.

As you’ve probably already guessed – my first coach and I mixed up the mentor/life coach role. We also talked about doing some joint business, which brought up an awkward situation.

If we were working together, why was I paying him to coach me?

4. Life coaches don’t give guarantees or promises.

My coach made a few errors right from the beginning – things that are easy to do wrong when you want to do right by a client.

He made promises about where I would be at the end of the sessions, and where I would be in my life and new career.

That’s a big life coaching no-no. You can’t make promises about the client’s life – because it’s the client who needs to do the work. All you can say is that, your mission, if you choose to accept it, will allow you to make the changes you want.

In the end – I found that I was not compatible with this coach-friend. And while it’s hard to fire your friend, I did it.

He’s still my friend, and that friendship is important to me. We both learned a lot about how to be better coaches from our shared experience.

Conclusion

Even though we didn’t continue our coaching relationship, I did get some good insights from our time together:
He was the first person to suggest that I should look at life coaching as a career. He was right about this. Five months later I took my first life coaching class, and now I’ve got a beginning practice. It’s a great fit for me, and I’m excited about the future, and the change I can facilitate in others.
I solidified my concept about what I wanted and didn’t want from a coach – and what kind of coach I wanted to be. My coach wasn’t a bad person or a charlatan – we just weren’t a good fit, because our friendship created conflicts of interest.
Life coaching CAN be transformative. I recognized the power of this approach immediately. Even if my first coaching experience didn’t end up giving me the answers I wanted – it showed me a way to find the answers.
Now it’s my job to help guide others to find the answer they seek.

Takeaways

Choose a coach who you can trust, and who will remain neutral.
Make sure your coach focuses on YOUR outcomes, not their own.
Do you need a therapist, coach or mentor instead? A good coach will point you in the correct direction.
Life coaches won’t make any guarantees or expectations – that’s for you to do within your work.
Life coaching is great! If your life coach isn’t a fit, the problem isn’t life coaching. You just haven’t found the right coach – yet.