Why Famous People Work with Life Coaches to Reboot their Careers

Posted on February 04, 2025 by Smita Das Jain, One of Thousands of Executive Coaches on Noomii.

The grass always looks greener on the other side. You might think that you are the only one facing insurmountable challenges, but even successful people go through the same upheavals and emotions you and I go through. Even the so-called celebrities.

It is simply a celebrity’s profession that separates them from ‘regular’ people like us; in all other respects, they also fight their internal battles. They too get overwhelmed with their fears and can have issues with finances, health and relationships.

Many such celebrities have taken the help of a life coach to overcome roadblocks and elevate their lives.

So, what is Coaching? And who is a Life Coach?
The International Coaching Federation defines Coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential. In other words, Coaching is a co-creative approach to working and interacting with people so that they develop their unique capabilities, interpersonal skills and ability to understand and emphatise with others.

A Life Coach is one who addresses specific personal objectives, work goals, general conditions and transition in a client’s personal life, relationships or profession by examining what is going on right now, discovering what the obstacles or challenges might be, and choosing a course of action to overcome these barriers and achieve the objectives. In that sense, Life Coaching is different from Consulting, Mentoring, Therapy and Counselling. The first two focus on providing solutions while the latter two delve into the past to find the answers for the present. A Life Coach focuses on the client’s now and asks profound questions to help clients uncover their layers and arrive at their own solution instead of giving advice.

Three Categories of Life Coaching Niches: Domain-Oriented, Outcome-Oriented and Title-Oriented
All life coaches work for specific goals- be it short-term targets like helping a speaker get through a presentation without losing their nerve to something more encompassing as seeing a company’s senior management through a tricky merger.

There is a lot of emphasis on specialities and niches within the life coaching industry. Coaches go by all sorts of designations. The variety of titles confuses potential clients in a nascent sector who remain in a dilemma regarding the title of the coach they should go for. In this article, I have highlighted the three different categories of specialists falling within the ambit of Life Coaching, which will help you make an informed decision in this regard.

The first category is the domain-oriented life coach, specialising in helping clients overcome challenges about one aspect of their lives. Career coaches, Relationship coaches, Business coaches, Parenting coaches etc., fall within this category.

The second category is the outcome-oriented life coach who entails clients to achieve and sustain a specific outcome in life. As mentioned earlier, all coaches work with clients for particular goals, but outcome-oriented coaches design their sessions such that their clients attain a particular state in their overall life at the end of the program. Fulfilment coaches, Personal Empowerment coaches, Transformation coaches, Performance coaches etc., are some of the life coaching niches in this category.

The third type of title-oriented life coaches work with people holding particular designations, titles or professions, irrespective of their clients’ problems. An Executive Coach, Leadership Coach, CEO’s Coach, Writer’s Coach etc., is someone who will fall in this category.

Who needs a Life Coach? Well, everyone, if one goes by Bill Gates
In what may come as a surprise to people like you, it is not only ‘normal’ people like you and me who work with Life Coaches, but famous and successful people who otherwise seem to be having the world at their feet. Consider the famous and successful people below who have worked with life coaches, and you will appreciate what I mean.

1. Hollywood Celebrities

Oprah Winfrey has attributed some of her success to her life coach. As a result, she has advocated life coaching to her fans and viewers through her Oprah Winfrey Show.

Leonardo Di Caprio worked with a life coach to persist and persevere on mastering the acting craft after missing out on numerous Oscars. It is only after working with his coach that he won the Best Actor Oscar for “The Revenant.”

Jennifer Aniston hired a life coach to help her find time to manage a baby amidst her demanding career.

The famous band Metallica overcame heated feuds and creative duels after working with a life coach and released their album “Death Magnetic”, which helped them return to form

Chairman of Alphabet (formerly CEO of Google), Eric Schmidt, said the best advice he ever got was to hire an executive coach. He resisted at first before changing his mind, and later in an interview with Fortune Magazine, went on to say that “everyone needs a coach.”

Bill Gates worked with a life coach for most of his illustrious corporate career. In his viral 2013 TED talk, he said, and I quote, “Everyone needs a coach. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player. We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.”

Bill Clinton worked with a Life Coach during his time in office to help him make decisions that would dictate the USA’s and its citizens’ future

Andre Agassi worked with a life coach to help him get out of a career slump and bounce back from injuries.

Cricketer Virendra Sehwag hired the services of a life coach to help the IPL Kings XI Punjab team stay motivated

4. Corporate Executives (It’s not only the elite who use the services of a coach. Let’s talk about you and me now)

Rajeev Dubey, President HR and Executive Director of Mahindra & Mahindra, worked with an executive coach for six months for learning to say No.

Harish Natarajan, Bausch + Lomb’s former managing director for India and Thailand, learnt to be more aggressive and acquired new-found confidence after working with a life coach.

Ajay Srinivasan, then chief executive at Prudential Corporation Asia in Hong Kong, had a thriving career, great friends and a good family. Yet he wasn’t happy beneath the surface. Then he worked with a life coach who made him realise that India is where he and his family would be truly happy. This led him to move to Mumbai in a new role as the chief executive at the Aditya Birla Group.

The names of people and the list of categories are by no means exhaustive. Homemakers looking for a career, women looking for a career refresh after a break, teenagers looking to learn leadership skills, young people undecided about what job will make them happy- I can go on and on with the examples. More and more corporations are bringing in life coaches to groom their executives in recent years. Sufficient to say that Life Coaching is no longer an anathema or an elite phenomenon but has entered the everyday conversations of working professionals.

The Role of a Life Coach
You might be curious why the top performers and leaders require a life coach when they have many resources at their disposal. The fact is that even successful people at the top of their game have room for improvement, and a coach facilitates this process. For instance, as an entrepreneur, you might be an expert in your field, but are you an expert in organisation and productivity? Probably not.

This is where a life coach comes in and can help to:

1. Uncover Your Blind Spots and force you to confront areas in your work or personal life that you have been either neglecting or too attached to- consciously or subconsciously.

2. Understanding the Why behind Your Goals to reinforce or strengthen your vision and forge a connection between your day-to-day tasks and your term objectives.

3. Promote Accountability by tracking progress against your priorities and implementing better systems and workflow tactics

4. Appreciate Your Accomplishments to look at the positive aspects of your life and keep your spirits up in the face of challenges

5. Prioritise and Manage Your Time by helping you see which tasks or commitments you should remove yourself from or delegate to others and re-training your brain not to accept wasted time

6. Overcome limiting beliefs by making you see that you are good enough to achieve whatever you set your eyes to

7. Break bad habits and negative patterns and replace them with positive practices and beliefs that shape your outlook and happenings

Increasing Demand for Life Coaching
Between 25 per cent and 40 per cent of the Fortune 500 companies use the services of a life coach for their executives. In 2001, the International Coach Federation (ICF), the international accrediting body for coaches, had 4,691 members. As of August 2020, that number stands at 42,786 members across 147 countries.

The tremendous growth of life coaching can be attributed to increasing levels of “job insecurity” and “workplace pressures” to people today being more “open to the idea of being in charge of their own lives.” The prolonged pandemic has added to the stress and anxiety levels of individuals, fuelling the need for expert guidance pertaining to careers, wellness, finance, relationships, communication and confidence building matters.

Organisations have also realised that people are their greatest assets and biggest differentiators. Therefore, they want to help their executives grow by investing in their skill development. Executive Coaching is one such tool available for organisations to support their managers improve their skills. As the adage goes, people join organisations and leave their managers. In a VUCA world, when the corporate sector in India is highly competitive on the one hand and witnessing a Great Resignation on the other, a life coach helps an individual stay focused and increases his awareness levels.

Caveat Emptor
The rise in demand and resulting significance for life coaches also means that everybody wants or claims to be a life coach. For a still largely unregulated industry, credibility rests with the coach. An uncertified coach may have the best of intentions, but in most cases, the lack of proper training on the part of the life coach pushes an individual into deeper problems.

Beware of the coaches who promise quick fixes. One webinar or session is not going to change your life. A life coach can only provide you the direction; it is you who needs to work on his guidance to translate your potential into results.

Go with a certified life coach after looking at her credentials, qualifications and experience. ICF, EMCC and CCA are the three major international coaching certification bodies. In India, we have the Coaching Federation India. Ask your life coach if she is accredited to any of these bodies before hiring them.

The Last Word
If your arm is broken, you go to the hospital to get expert help to fix it. So why not apply the same yardstick to all other areas of your life? We all want to improve on some aspect of our life. Translating that intention to action is the hard part where expert help can make the difference between success and failure, good and great.
A life coach could be the catalyst you need to elevate your life and become a better version of yourself in the process. A good life coach will take a unique perspective of your surroundings, help you define a clear and compelling vision, be candid about the changes you need to make to achieve your objective and help you create action steps aligned to your vision. She will hold you accountable for your life’s priorities, time management, habit formation and character development.

If you find yourself stuck, at a crossroad, stressed, anxious, confused, indecisive, underconfident or all of these, work with a life coach. A life coach will be a powerful asset in your arsenal, and you will realise your goals faster than if you were to work on them alone.

Your idols are working with a life coach. What is holding you back from emulating them?

Note: This article was first published on LinkedIn.

Smita Das Jain is a Personal Empowerment Life Coach, Executive Coach and NLP Practitioner. Smita’s ‘Empower Yourself’ Coaching Program enables busy corporate professionals to create a career they love, find time to do all they like, and live the life they choose.