Does Life Coaching Actually Work?

Short of time? Read the key takeaways!

❓ Coaching is a very, very broad term. Because it is largely unregulated, almost anyone can call themselves a coach. This means the quality and focus of coaching varies widely, from thoughtful guidance and accountability to ineffective or even exploitative approaches.

🧭 Research suggests coaching can help many people. Although the evidence is still developing, studies indicate that structured coaching can support progress in areas like leadership, personality change, academic performance, and career development. It is not a universal solution, but it can be genuinely useful for people facing transitions or seeking clarity.

🔍 Paying attention to green and red flags can help you choose a good coach. Signals like occasionally ending client relationships based on progress, assigning homework, and avoiding pressure to buy expensive add-ons can indicate higher-quality coaching. Feeling understood and not judged also matters when deciding on a match.

🧠 A helpful coaching relationship often involves shared goals, good communication, and structured support. Productive sessions usually include careful listening, clear agendas, and a focus on actionable steps between meetings. When coaching works well, it can strengthen motivation, improve thinking, and create sustained progress on meaningful goals.

🤝 If you think coaching might benefit you, Clearer Thinking is partnering with the nonprofit Overcome to offer access to vetted coaches. You can explore a free introductory session to see if it fits your needs, and any commissions we receive support future tools and research for our community.

What do Yoda and your high school gym teacher have in common with a cult leader who was recently sentenced to 120 years in prison? Obviously not their interests, activities, or even their species. No, the answer we have in mind is: They were all coaches of one kind or another.

That fact illustrates something peculiar about coaching: It’s an extremely diverse set of activities that includes:

• Wise mentoring (à la Yoda),

• Preparation for competition (à la gym teachers),

• And even exploitative grifting (à la the cult leader)

As well as a host of other things like accountability, goal tracking, career navigation, deep introspection, and more. Why is this?

Well, there are some things that you don’t have a legal right to call yourself without certification. In the US and most other places, you can’t just go ahead and call yourself a medical doctor or a psychologist, for example.

The musician known as ‘Dr. Dre’ gets away with calling himself a doctor on the grounds that nobody would find his stage name misleading in a commercial or professional context (it’s clear that the only ‘sick’ things he presides over are beats), but imagine he launched a brand of vitamin supplements that were marketed as “Approved by Dr. Dre” - that might land him in trouble with the law.

However, most occupational titles are not as protected as ‘medical doctor’ or ‘psychologist’; in most (but not all) states and most countries, anybody can call themselves a vast number of other titles - including things like nutritionist or coach. This means that terms like those don’t actually guarantee any particular skills or practices or insights. This absence of regulation means that there is very little standardization of coaching practices, which could be part of the explanation of the sheer volume of things it can entail.

Some coaches will be deeply insightful people who can help you to reach your goals, whereas some will be grifters looking to take you for a ride. So, is getting a life coach worth it? And how do you navigate the largely unregulated world of coaching? In this article, we’ll help you to think more clearly about coaching - we’ll break down:

• What coaching is

• Can you benefit from it?

• How to separate the good coaches from the bad

Ultimately, we think high-quality coaching can help many people, as long as they know how to find a coach that works for them. If you want help with things like career planning, academia, deep introspection, self-discipline, stress management, navigating life transitions, setting goals, empathy, or personality change, then you might find a coach helpful.

We don't recommend coaching lightly: Clearer Thinking's founder, Spencer Greenberg, has personally worked with a variety of coaches and found some of them very beneficial.

Additionally, Spencer has participated in coaching sessions with a number of Overcome coaches, to vet the quality of their service, and has judged that they provide a service worth promoting. That's why we're partnering with the nonprofit Overcome, to offer coaching opportunities. You can click here to learn more and book a free 'get-to-know' session. If you work with Overcome, we will earn fees that will go towards our future projects and research. But, regardless of whether that service interests you, we hope you'll find value in this article's exploration of coaching.

What is coaching?

Most fundamentally, when it’s done well, coaching can be thought of as a structured, non-clinical relationship that helps you think, feel, and act more effectively in pursuit of your goals. Of course, that’s an extremely broad definition to cover an extremely broad set of practices. Other things that can be said about it include: It’s not therapy, and many (but not all) people distinguish it from mentoring, but many coaches borrow some therapeutic tools and give guidance. They also might blend ideas from philosophy, psychology, self-help, business, and beyond.

Tee Barnett is a coach interviewed by Spencer Greenberg on the Clearer Thinking podcast, and he puts it like this:

Sometimes [coaching is] straight advice or knowledge transfer, which I think a lot of people think about as coaching, like, “Oh, I'm a CEO, I'm a former founder, and I exited, and now I'm going to tell you my secrets,” and so on. But there are a lot of different relations and orientations that coaches can have to people. Sometimes it's like having a thought partner. Sometimes it's like going on a safari and having a skilled guide walking alongside you and pointing things out in your mind and your emotions that can be important.

Here’s a five-stage model that we think is helpful for understanding common steps you might go through in coaching, though not all coaches will approach it this way:

1. Groundwork: The coach and coachee build a trusting, collaborative relationship through active listening, open-ended questioning, and empathy.

2. Assessment: The coach helps the coachee identify gaps between current and desired behaviors, feelings, or performance and blind spots.

3. Goal-Setting: The coach assists in turning insights into clear goals that are meaningful and achievable or worth striving toward.

4. Action Planning: The coach and coachee develop a detailed plan outlining concrete steps and accountability structures. This phase turns intentions into an executable strategy.

5. Ongoing Assessment and Support: The coach monitors progress, helps address obstacles, and sustains the coachee’s motivation over time. The focus is on maintaining improvement and embedding changes into long-term practice.

Who can benefit from coaching?

Coaching existed for a long time before being studied. The earliest uses of the term appear to be as slang used by Oxford University students in the 1830s, to refer to the extra help some students got when preparing for their exams, but if you read studies from recent years looking into the effectiveness of coaching, you’ll see lots of statements about how “little research has examined these coaching strategies and their impacts.” (For example, here, here, and here.) Some have called this “one of the most frequently cited problems in the field.”

This is slowly changing, as a growing body of research provides more and more evidence that coaching can improve outcomes in things like education, career development, leadership, personality change, and beyond. If you want help figuring out your goals or moving towards them in any of those domains, then there is empirical research suggesting that coaching could be for you. It's a tough thing to study because coaches can vary so much in their approach, and it’s not the strongest evidence out there, but it’s real and it’s building.

Here’s Tee Barnett again, explaining what he thinks:

If in your past you've ever had somebody that you've worked with or worked alongside, and you found that the kind of dialectical process, or a process of bouncing things back and forth and building concepts — rubber ducking is another word for this — has led to more formulated thoughts or crisper thoughts, or has opened you up to new ideas. [If] you've seen pieces of other people's maps, and you wanted to bring that into your map, then you'd likely be a good candidate for coaching.

And:

The most ideal time [for coaching], in many cases, is when people are undergoing some kind of transition. That can be incoming, reactive times of crisis, like a slow-burning type of burnout situation, or positive things, where you receive a promotion, you get new responsibilities, a new stage of life is unfolding, you're about to have children, you're about to enter a new milestone, whatever. 

Sometimes it's not just purely in reaction to what's going on in your life. It can be that people are stuck or in a rut, or they're thinking they're on top of things, and they're thinking, "How can I be a better leader? How can I be a better father? How can I be a better partner? How can I improve my experience in some way?" Coaching can certainly help you with that.

How can you separate good coaches from bad?

When you have your first introductory coaching sessions, you’re interviewing your prospective coach as much as they are interviewing you. You’re trying to figure out whether this person will be a good fit for you; can they understand your goals and help you move towards them? Here are some tips to keep in mind when you’re making that kind of decision.

Green and Red Flags

As we mentioned at the start of this article, the world of coaching is largely unregulated. This means there are no qualifications that coaches must have. A consequence of this is that there are many organizations offering different certificates to show that a coach has been through training of some kind. Some of these organizations are well-respected and can confer some confidence, while others are like degree mills - churning out qualifications for cash. And lots of coaches (both good and bad) will not have these certifications.

Since we at Clearer Thinking generally lean towards non-credentialism, we’d never say that a coach must have one of these qualifications in order to be excellent. Instead, we’d say that a credential from a high-quality training program is a positive signal (a green flag) that can form part of your overall impression - but plenty of people with excellent coaching skills and insights will lack these qualifications, and you needn’t dismiss someone only on the grounds that they don’t have one.

More green flags come from Spencer Greenberg’s conversation with Kristen Meinzer, on the Clearer Thinking podcast (Kristen, for her podcast, lived by the rules of about 100 self-help books). In that episode, Spencer gave two quick and easy criteria that he finds can be very helpful predictors of the quality of a coach or therapist. These aren’t intended to be decisive criteria, but they can be more data points to add to your impression:

1. Do they ever ‘fire’ their clients based on progress? At some point, it's a good sign if they are happy to say, "You know what? I think you've made the progress that we set out to. I don't think you need to come to me anymore." Whereas, if they never fire their clients, the risk of creating detrimental long-term dependency is higher. 

2. Do they at least sometimes give homework? That is to say, are they giving you things to do between your sessions? Because the vast majority of your week is time you don’t spend with your coach, if you're not doing something between sessions to put into action what you talked about, it’s less likely that you're going to make as much progress as you otherwise could.

To put these insights into action, you can simply ask your prospective coach to tell you about their attitudes towards ‘firing’ clients and giving homework.

And, in that same podcast episode, Spencer and Kristen discuss the proliferation of scams whereby people sign up for coaching and are told that they would make an excellent coach themselves, and an exciting future awaits them …if they just pay for an expensive course to teach them the skills.

So, another thing to keep in mind when choosing a coach is whether they’re ever trying to sell you on additional costs, over and above your coaching sessions (such as the opportunity to become a coach). If they are, that’s a potential red flag.

What does a good coaching conversation look like?

On a different note: Linda Gross Cheliotes and Marceta Reilly are two coaches and academics who have suggested four reasons why a coaching conversation might run into problems:

1. The coach and coachee have different personal agendas

2. At least one has insufficient information to understand the other’s viewpoint

3. There is miscommunication due to poor listening or inattention to body language

4. A coach does not choose words carefully enough or asks closed questions, leading the coachee to feel judged, criticized, or defensive

These suggest things you can do to maximize the value you get from coaching and tell whether someone is the right coach for you:

1. Try making your personal agenda explicit (what do you want to get out of being coached?) and ask questions to determine whether your agenda is consistent or well-matched to your coaches. For example, if you’re someone who wants coaching because you want to find meaning in your life, you might not have an agenda that fits well with someone who specializes exclusively in career advancement - unless you’re happy with finding most or all of your meaning in life in your career.

2. Similarly, you can pay attention to whether you feel understood by your coach, which might involve asking helpful questions and listening well. If you do feel understood and you feel you understand what they’re saying and where they’re coming from, then you might have a good fit.

For point 4, the application is more obvious and might go without saying (but we’ll say it anyway): If your prospective coach makes you feel judged, criticized, or defensive, then you can do better. There are plenty more coaches in the sea.

Putting all this into action

If the concept of coaching sounds interesting to you, and you think it makes sense for where you’re at in your life right now, you might want to check out our partnership with the nonprofit Overcome. We believe they can help you build strengths, uncover blind spots, and make faster progress towards your goals. 

If you're not sure whether it's for you, we recommend booking a free 'get-to-know' session. This is a paid partnership between Overcome and ClearerThinking.org, and all commissions we earn go towards our future projects and research.

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