Coaching Is the New ‘Asking Your Friends for Help’

Serena Kocourek dreaded the lullaby. She worked in a hospital, and every time a baby was born, staffers would play the same song over the loudspeaker. She was going through IVF, trying without success to conceive a baby. When the lullaby played, she told me, “I felt like I was two feet further away from finally being a mom.”

One thing helped: messaging her IVF coach, Kristin Dillensnyder. She’d say, “They just played the lullaby thing and I didn’t cry.” “Win,” Dillensnyder would respond. Or she’d remind Kocourek, “Just because somebody else is having a baby doesn’t mean that you can’t have a baby.” Dillensnyder also offered advice for staying hopeful during the grueling process of IVF: She suggested that Kocourek create a playlist of songs to listen to as she gave herself hormone injections. Kocourek liked that Dillensnyder had gone through IVF herself and would help her come up with responses to insensitive questions from family and friends about when she planned to get pregnant. Occasionally, in the middle of her day, she’d think, “I just need to step away. I just need to talk to Kristin real quick.”

IVF coaching may sound niche, but it’s far from the most specialized type of coaching on offer. These days, if a problem exists, there seems to be a coach for it. Having trouble focusing? An “executive function” coach might be right for you. Undecided about having kids? There’s a coach for that too. Too burned out to plan a “transformative” vacation? A travel coach can help you for $597 (a price that does not include the actual booking of the trip).

[Read: The teen-disengagement crisis]

Discovering all these types of coaches made me wonder: Whatever happened to asking people you know for advice? So I set out to try to understand why people hire coaches and what they get from the experience. Most of the coaching clients I spoke with asked to use only their first name because of the personal nature of the issues they sought help for. One woman, Sarah, sees a meditation coach for $350 a session, justifying it because she does not own “expensive purses or clothes.” Another woman, Liz, has, at various points, had a career coach, an executive coach, a doula (or birthing coach), a co-parenting coach, and two different accountability coaches who focus on diet and exercise. She recently added a Disney “concierge”—a coach for navigating the Magic Kingdom. Each one of her coaches costs at least a couple of hundred dollars a session. She told me that if she hasn’t done something important before and wants to do it right, she tends to hire a coach to help her. “Winging it is so not my style,” she said. “Why not go into it informed if you can?”

People have long sought advice for some of life’s biggest questions—marry that guy or don’t; take or don’t take that job. But over the past few decades, the options for living one’s best adult life have expanded so much that knowing the right or wrong way to do anything can be difficult. Today, many Americans can join a polyamorous triad, remain child-free by choice, launch a new career in their 30s, or dedicate themselves to running ultramarathons, all without ruffling any feathers within their community. “Identities are no longer given,” Michal Pagis, a lecturer of sociology and anthropology at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, who has studied coaching, told me. “They are now achieved … It’s a project.” A number of people seem to crave sounding boards for all of this identity making, especially if they want to do it “correctly”—i.e., in a way that is still impressive, if unconventional. Erik Baker, a Harvard historian and the author of Make Your Own Job, told me that coaching is the latest example of “the therapeutic culture that emerged in the United States in the 20th century: a sense of needing to have some kind of expert to help optimize your performance.” Being “normal” is no longer enough, so people hire coaches to help them transcend normal.

In some ways, coaching stands in for the free, civic sources of support that over the past decade have been slowly fading away. People are less likely now to be members of the kinds of community groups or religious congregations where they might have previously sought help. In some circles, an idea has taken hold that asking strangers for advice without paying is gauche. Emailing someone to “pick their brain” has become a corporate misdemeanor. (“Set the precedent that you are not comfortable talking without a pre-booked and pre-paid official meeting,” goes some typical advice on how to respond to such an affront.)

People today also have fewer close friends than they used to, and they may be reluctant to rely on those friends for help. Overwhelmingly, the coaching clients I spoke with told me that they would not expect their (few, flawed, busy) friends to provide the same level of guidance that their coaches do. Friends and family members are biased. (“You never know if someone has your best interest in mind,” Liz told me.) A stranger who doesn’t know you seems more likely to be neutral. Friends may say clumsy or unsupportive things as they respond to your texts between meetings; a coach’s job is always to have the right mantra at hand.

[Read: Want to change your personality? Have a baby.]

In her book The Outsourced Self, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild writes that when it comes to advice, “anything you pay for is better.” A coach is like a super-friend—someone very smart and attentive who can help you make the best possible decision. Kiya Thompson, a travel coach, refers to her service “like a best friend pre-trip, during the trip, and … after the trip.” Dillensnyder, the IVF coach, told me that she sees herself as kind of like “a big sister”—one whose counsel is, presumably, better than your real sister’s. “Friends and family are really good,” Dillensnyder said. “However, they often give advice that is not helpful.” Another refrain I heard was that coaches allow you to be messy and depressed around them so that you can be bubbly and interesting around your friends. As another woman, Emily, put it to me about her weight-loss coach, “Your friends don’t want to listen to you talk about that all the time.”

But using coaching in this way undermines one important aspect of friendship: reciprocity. During a common type of friend hang, one person shares their problems for a while and the other person offers their best stab at some solutions. Then they switch. Pagis told me that debts—for example, owing someone a few minutes of uninhibited venting—“are important for social relations.” With coaching, however, “you are avoiding creating these debts.” If part of friendship is being there for each other, what becomes of the institution when you don’t have to be? When the well-heeled can afford to take their problems to a coach, friends risk becoming merely the people with whom we have pleasant catch-up brunches before we rush home to pay by the hour to give the real dirt to a stranger.

Yet the advice a coach dispenses may not be as reliable as clients hope. Coaches, who in many cases bear no qualifications other than personal experience, do not need to adhere to official standards. Some coaches might be only dabbling in the practice: A 2023 report by the International Coaching Federation, a credentialing body for some types of coaches, noted that the average coach spent just 12 hours a week coaching.

The casualness of these arrangements, and the lack of standards, can lead to disappointment—and little recourse—when people pay hundreds for coaching that turns out to be lackluster. One woman I spoke with, Maria, told me she was scrolling through TikTok when she came across a bariatric-surgery coach who promised to help her adjust to the dramatically different eating habits the procedure requires. “I booked a call with her,” Maria said, “and she sold me within, like, 20 minutes.” For about $500 a month, the coach would check Maria’s MyFitnessPal food log and text her an emoji assessing her performance—a fire emoji if she was doing well, for example. But during their one-on-one sessions, Maria felt like she was talking with the coach’s TikTok character rather than with a devoted adviser. “She has, like, five things that she repeats over and over again,” Maria said. She quit after two months.

Coaching can also be a problem if it replaces therapy, which, unlike coaching, is regulated and typically covered by insurance. Most coaches take pains to point out that they are not therapists, and most of the coaching clients I interviewed either have or have had therapists. Still, about 25 to 50 percent of coaching clients have a diagnosable mental-health condition, and they aren’t getting any formal mental-health treatment from their coaches, Elias Aboujaoude, a psychiatry professor at Stanford, told me. “In my clinical work, it’s a common thing that comes up,” he said. “We recommend a therapist to someone, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, but I’m seeing a life coach.’”

[Read: The isolation of intensive parenting]

I do have a therapist. Even so, the more I dug into coaching, the more I wanted to understand what people saw in it. I soon had the opportunity to find out. In the course of my reporting, I spoke with Nell Wulfhart, a “decision coach” who, for $247 per hour-long session, helps her clients make one big life decision—as varied as whether to have kids or what color to paint their kitchen.

Wulfhart told me that she’s always had a “fixer brain,” and that often, she’s simply listening for what the person really wants to do anyway. “It just helps to have a totally neutral third party to check your work,” she said, “and make sure, ‘Yes, this is not a ludicrous risk you’re taking.’” What qualifications does she have? “Nothing,” she said. “People have said to me, ‘You’re so wise.’ And I was like, I think they mean you’re in your mid-40s.”

I’m allergic to people who embellish their credentials, so I liked that she admitted her lack thereof. I also liked that she has worked as a journalist, a profession I associate with straight shooters. And as it happened, I did have a decision I was struggling with. So I decided to book a session with her.

I told Wulfhart that I couldn’t decide whether to move to Florida or to Texas. She began asking me questions about what was important to me, what else I’d considered, and what each place had to offer me. Unlike my therapist, she didn’t ask about my childhood—in fact, she didn’t seem much interested in my backstory, my neuroses, or any of my usual patterns of behavior. “Why you feel this way is not that relevant,” she said. “The only thing that matters is that you do feel this way.”

It did feel like talking with a super-friend—someone who was smart and likable, but also disinterested and ruthlessly rational. After about 30 minutes, she told me what I should do. It was what I’d wanted to do anyway.

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