Your life coach is probably more messed up than you are

The call was supposed to last an hour. We made it forty minutes before she started crying.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she whispered into the phone. “I’m supposed to be helping you, but I don’t even know how to help myself.”

This was during my experiment with life coaches about a decade ago, when I was living in the US and searching for something I couldn’t quite name. I’d hired a few coaches over several years, each promising transformation. And each time, eventually, the facade would crack—one hospitalized for exhaustion, another who disappeared mid-program to “work on some personal things,” a third who drunk-texted me at 2 AM about her divorce.

But sitting there, listening to this woman sob while her website promised “total life transformation,” I finally understood: this wasn’t about individual coaches failing. This was about something much darker.

Three days later, she sent a professional email like nothing had happened. Back to business. Back to performing wellness. The crying call? Never mentioned again.

That’s when I started digging.

The first thing you notice when you research life coaches is how many of them used to be something else. Corporate executives. Lawyers. Consultants. And their origin stories follow a revealing pattern: they burned out spectacularly, had some kind of breakdown, then reinvented themselves as coaches to help others avoid their fate.

Maggie Supernova shares her story honestly: “I’m a perfectionist. An over-achiever. A type-A, jet-setter with a fantastic Instagram feed and a life to be envied. At least, that’s how it looked. In reality, I was permanently stressed, overwhelmed, exhausted, emotionally drained, anxiety ridden & depressed. My immune system was compromised, crippled by stress, I rarely slept, avoided my friends and cried at least 4 times a day.”

She transformed that experience into her coaching practice, helping others navigate similar challenges.

Jacqui Meyer worked corporate for 17 years before being “rushed to the hospital twice,” ending up in “High-care.” Now she coaches burnout recovery. Wendy McCallum‘s life was “perfect” on paper while she was “barely keeping my head above water.” Now she teaches balance.

These aren’t isolated cases. They represent a pattern across the industry: breakdown becomes breakthrough becomes business model.

But here’s what often goes unspoken: the pressure to maintain that breakthrough narrative, to constantly embody transformation, creates its own form of suffering.

I know because I’ve been on both sides. Through Ideapod and The Vessel, platforms I co-founded in the personal development space, I’ve met with hundreds of coaches. Behind closed doors, away from their clients, the stories are consistent: panic attacks between sessions, credit card debt from buying their own coaching certifications, relationships crumbling while they post about “conscious coupling.”

This experience actually inspired us to create Reset Your Life Compass at The Vessel—a tool that empowers people to coach themselves, to develop their own inner wisdom rather than outsourcing it to someone who might be struggling just as much.

The math alone should have tipped me off. There are 4.7 million LinkedIn profiles with “coach” in the title. The industry is worth $6.25 billion and growing at 6.7% annually. Sounds impressive until you realize more than half of coaches globally earn less than $30,000 per year.

Do the calculation: millions of coaches, fighting for scraps, in an unregulated industry where the main qualification is claiming you’re qualified. The pressure to stand out is crushing. And there’s only one way to stand out: be more transformed, more enlightened, more “living your best life” than the coach next door.

So they perform. And perform. And perform.

Until they can’t.

A coach writing for Quartz exposed the trap: “The horrible truth was she didn’t need me anymore.” When clients succeed, coaches lose income. The business model depends on perpetual transformation, endless breakthroughs, constant growth. There’s no room for arriving. No space for being human.

This would be tragic enough if it only hurt the coaches. But the damage spreads like a virus.

When you hire a coach who’s secretly drowning, you’re not getting guidance—you’re getting performance. They can’t admit uncertainty because uncertainty doesn’t sell. They can’t share their struggles because struggle contradicts their brand. So they give you what worked for them in theory, not what works in practice. They sell you their fantasy, not their reality.

And you buy it. Because you need to believe someone, somewhere, has figured it out.

I’ve been that buyer. Each time convinced that this coach, this methodology, this framework would be different. Each time participating in an elaborate mutual delusion: they pretend to have transcended human struggle, I pretend to believe them, we both pretend the arrangement is helping.

But something fascinating happened with the coach who cried. After her breakdown, after the awkward email pretending it hadn’t happened, our sessions changed. She stopped performing. Started admitting what she didn’t know. Began sharing her actual struggles alongside mine.

And for the first time in my coaching experiments, I actually grew.

That’s when I recognized the pattern—something I’d been exploring in my writing about identity and mental health. Whether it’s vegans who can’t admit health struggles or coaches who can’t admit life struggles, the problem is the same: rigid identity fusion.

When you believe you ARE something rather than someone who DOES something, any crack in the performance threatens your entire existence. The vegan who needs to eat fish for health reasons faces identity death. The coach who needs their own coach faces brand destruction. So they suffer in silence, perform through pain, and spread their dysfunction to everyone they touch.

What they lack—what we all lack when we’re trapped in these performances—is fluid integrity. The ability to hold our values and roles deeply enough that they guide us, yet lightly enough that they can evolve. To say “I teach wellness and I’m struggling” without feeling like a fraud. To acknowledge “I help others transform and I’m still transforming myself” without shame.

But the entire coaching industry is built to punish fluid integrity. 82% of employees are at risk of burnout this year, including the coaches teaching burnout prevention. The wellness industry is making everyone sick. The transformation business is keeping everyone stuck.

Dr. Megan S. Carney, who works with burned-out coaches, cuts through the bullshit: “Question the life coach or counselor who presents themselves as perfect; it is a good warning sign that someone isn’t authentic.”

But authenticity doesn’t pay the bills. Perfect does. So they choose perfect, even as it kills them.

I think about that coach who cried often. That moment when her performance cracked and her humanity leaked through. How terrified she was. How apologetic. How certain that showing struggle meant failure.

She had it exactly backward. Her struggle was her credential. Her breakdown was her breakthrough. Her humanity was her qualification.

Because here’s what my coaching experiments taught me: the ones who help are the ones who’ve stopped pretending they don’t need help. The ones who’ve abandoned the performance of transformation for the practice of it. The ones with fluid integrity—holding their role as coach while acknowledging their reality as human.

They’re rare. The industry doesn’t reward them. Instagram doesn’t celebrate them. But they’re the only ones who can actually guide you anywhere worth going.

The rest? They’re just better at hiding their breakdowns than you are.

So the next time you’re tempted to hire someone who seems to have it all figured out, remember: the coach with the perfect life is probably crying in their Tesla between sessions. The one with the flawless Instagram feed is likely taking anxiety medication to maintain it. The one promising total transformation is almost certainly desperate for their own.

And maybe—just maybe—that’s exactly why they understand your struggle. Not because they’ve transcended it, but because they’re living it. Right there with you. In real time.

The tragedy isn’t that life coaches are struggling. It’s that they feel they have to hide it. Because in hiding their struggle, they hide their humanity. And in hiding their humanity, they lose exactly what could actually help: the radical honesty that real transformation requires.

The coach who cried on our call? I hope she’s found her way to more authenticity in her practice. Her breakdown taught me something crucial: real growth happens not when we find someone who’s “arrived,” but when we find someone honest about the journey.

That’s why we built tools like Reset Your Life Compass—to help people develop their own inner guidance system. Because ultimately, the wisdom you seek isn’t in someone else’s perfect life. It’s in your own imperfect journey, held with fluid integrity.

The moment we stop performing wellness and start practicing it. The moment we remember that we’re all just making it up as we go.

Even—especially—the ones who claim they’re not.