The Coachification of America

“You can do hard things!”

Thank God my Peloton instructor told me that, or else I might think I am incapable of doing such things.

I am on a bike in my bedroom, a bike that goes nowhere. I did not get on this bike for a life lesson. I got on it because I had a 45-minute window of free time and figured I should sweat some of the bad things out of me.

“Perfection is the enemy of progress!”

People who offer life advice often scream it, presumably because volume makes it sound more believable. Or maybe they all spent their formative years on cheerleading teams.

I’ve heard these phrases from my yoga instructors too, usually in a room that smells like eucalyptus and is filled with people who smell like the opposite of eucalyptus. Sometimes the wisdom arrives immediately after a pose I know I mailed in. Come on. If I’m going to spend an hour sweating in a room heated to roughly the temperature of the sun, I’m not going to worry about whether my triangle pose reflects a lack of commitment to personal growth.

Nobody hired these people for wisdom.

My cycling instructor is there to come up with some combination of cadence, resistance, and timing for 45 minutes and make an accompanying playlist. My yoga instructor is there to move me through warriors, planks, crows, trees, airplanes, and wheels for an hour without letting me cheat too much.

Somewhere along the way, the job descriptions expanded without anyone renegotiating them.

The cycling instructor became a philosopher. The yoga instructor became a spiritual adviser. The CEO became a relationship expert. The podcaster became a nutritionist. The nutritionist became a neuroscientist. The neuroscientist became a parenting expert.

None of these people necessarily call themselves coaches. They don’t have to. Coaching has escaped the job title. It has become something closer to a posture: I know something about this, therefore perhaps I can tell you something about everything.

At some point, staying in your lane became optional.

***

The people who actually do call themselves coaches are everywhere too.

Marriage feels off? Coach.

Career stalled? Coach.

Can’t sleep? Sleep coach.

Kid won’t listen? Parenting coach.

Can’t find a date? Dating coach.

Found one and keep screwing it up? Relationship coach.

Don’t know what you want from life? Life coach.

Don’t know what you want from your life coach? I assume there is another coach for that.

None of which means coaching is bullshit. I know coaches, including some good friends, who are excellent at what they do. A public speaking coach who helps someone become a better public speaker is providing a valuable service. So is a career coach who helps someone navigate a career transition. They bring relevant experience, understand what the person wants to accomplish and, importantly, have been asked to help.

The problem isn’t coaching. It’s the assumption that expertise in one area automatically extends to another.

A few days after my Peloton ride, I was scrolling LinkedIn and Gary Vaynerchuk was telling me about self-awareness.

Drop the need for outside validation, he said. Choose practical optimism over cynicism.

Gary Vee, as people apparently call him, came out of a family wine business, built a marketing agency, does early-stage investing, and has his hands in a collection of other businesses. He would also like to own the New York Jets.

There would seem to be plenty there for him to talk about.

Instead, Gary has expanded into self-awareness, happiness, gratitude, parenting, regret, kindness, ambition, and seemingly every other corner of the human condition.

I should admit here that I find him extraordinarily obnoxious. That doesn’t mean he has nothing worthwhile to say.

It does make me wonder why what he says carries so much authority.

Why does building a successful marketing agency qualify someone to tell me how to think about regret? More importantly, when did we all agree that it did?

There are videos of Gary dispensing advice one-on-one, often to young people, who stare back at him as though Moses had just come down from the mountain with an eleventh commandment intended specifically for them. They nod. They listen intently. Sometimes they appear genuinely overwhelmed by whatever he has just told them, as though this particular combination of words could not possibly have come from a parent, a friend, a teacher, or anyone else who knows them considerably better.

Perhaps the camera just happens to be there.

There is a larger machinery behind all of this. Someone becomes successful at something. They get invited to speak about it. They develop an audience. They get invited to speak about other things. The audience grows. Eventually, being invited to speak becomes part of the reason they keep getting invited to speak, even as the subject of their expertise keeps expanding.

The audience applauds. The video gets clipped. The clip gets shared. Someone watches it and decides this is a person worth listening to. Eventually, the original reason anyone started listening becomes almost incidental.

The performance becomes part of the credential.

I’ve written before about our tendency to confuse attention with authority. This is slightly different. Gary has achieved real success. The question is why success in some things seems to confer wisdom about so many others.

Success has become transferable authority.

There was a time when being extraordinarily good at one thing did not automatically require having a public philosophy about everything else.

Charles Barkley made that point rather spectacularly in 1993.

At the height of his fame, Barkley appeared in a Nike commercial and told everyone he was not a role model. He was paid to wreak havoc on a basketball court. Just because he could dunk a basketball, he said, did not mean he should raise your kids.

The commercial was controversial then. The idea behind it feels almost incomprehensible now.

Imagine an enormously famous person being handed authority he hadn’t earned and voluntarily giving it back.

Why would anyone?

A domain has a ceiling. A persona doesn’t.

There are only so many things Gary Vaynerchuk can tell you about marketing. There are only so many things a Peloton instructor can tell you about riding a stationary bicycle. Eventually you run out.

Life never runs out. There is always something to say about happiness, relationships, money, parenting, purpose, confidence, productivity, grief, masculinity, longevity.

Expertise is narrow. Advice is infinite.

And there is always an audience for it.

That last part matters, because it’s easy to make fun of the people giving all this advice. It’s harder to explain why the rest of us keep asking for it.

***

We appear to have developed a profound discomfort with figuring things out ourselves.

We want three rules.

Five habits.

A framework.

A protocol.

A morning routine.

A fucking acronym.

We want someone who wakes up at 4:47 every morning to explain that 4:47 is the reason he is successful, even though billions of unsuccessful people throughout human history have also gotten up early.

We want the foods to eat, the foods never to eat, the supplements to take, the conversations to have with our children, the questions to ask our spouses, the amount of deep sleep we should get, and the precise temperature at which we should get it.

And apparently we need someone talking into a microphone for three hours to explain all of it.

There is probably a podcast explaining how many podcasts I should listen to.

The appeal is obvious. A framework converts uncertainty into instructions. “I don’t know; you’re going to have to figure out what works for you” may be excellent advice.

It makes for terrible content.

I know this because I consume plenty of the other kind.

I consider myself pretty good at spotting bullshit, which is exactly the kind of thing someone susceptible to bullshit says.

I’ve listened to successful people explain how successful people think. I’ve changed workouts because someone on a podcast sounded convincing. I’ve read about sleep, diet, productivity, longevity, leadership, relationships, and probably a half-dozen other subjects I’m forgetting.

Sometimes I learn something. Sometimes I even change something.

So I am not standing outside the church throwing rocks at the windows.

I’m in a pew.

There is another uncomfortable problem with everything I’ve written so far: I do some coaching myself. I just don’t call it that.

Founders ask me about go-to-market plans. Younger people ask me about careers. Friends ask what I think they should do. My daughters ask me questions all the time, although being a father teaches you fairly quickly that the frequency with which your children ask questions has very little relationship to their interest in your answers.

And I like being asked.

Most of us probably do. There is a small but undeniable pleasure in someone saying, in effect: You have lived enough life that I think you may know something I don’t.

I like to think I stay in my lane.

I also suspect everyone giving unwanted advice thinks he’s in his lane.

That complicates things, because I don’t believe the answer is that nobody should give advice unless he has a license hanging on the wall.

I have learned things by fifty-one that I didn’t know at thirty. I have built a couple of companies, sold one, screwed things up, hired people I shouldn’t have hired, trusted people I shouldn’t have trusted, made some good decisions, and survived enough bad ones to recognize a few of them when I see them coming.

Some of that might be useful to somebody. But experience is not the same thing as universal wisdom. Knowing how I got through something does not mean I know how you should.

Maybe the problem isn’t that we leave our lanes. Maybe it’s that we forget the lanes exist.

***

One of my closest friends has a particularly useful form of expertise.

She knows when I am full of shit.

This is not a credential she advertises, and she has no certification in it. But she has known me long enough to recognize the difference between a difficult situation and a story I am telling myself about a difficult situation.

That distinction matters.

A stranger on a podcast can tell me I can do hard things. She can tell me which hard thing I’m avoiding.

Gary Vaynerchuk can tell millions of people to stop seeking outside validation. She can tell me, specifically, that I am pretending not to care what somebody thinks when both of us know perfectly well that I do.

The internet knows my demographic. An influencer knows his audience. A coach may know my goals.

My friend knows my bullshit.

There are different kinds of authority. Some people earn it because they know the subject. Some earn it because they know you. The trouble starts when we confuse either of those things with knowing everything.

Tomorrow morning I’ll probably get back on the bike. At some point the instructor may tell me that discomfort is where growth happens, or that I am stronger than I think I am, or that I didn’t come this far to only come this far.

Fine. I’ll turn up the resistance.

But if I need someone to tell me whether I’m avoiding the hard thing in my actual life, I know who I’ll call.

She’ll probably tell me I’m full of shit.

She usually knows.

***

Mike Sweeney is a writer, essayist, and narrative consultant based in the Washington, D.C. area. He spent 25 years helping companies find the language that makes their work matter — most recently as founder of Right Source Marketing, which he sold in 2024. He is currently working on his first novel. Read more about Mike or get in touch.