Will the real coach please stand up?

Every second person on LinkedIn now seems to be a Coach. I asked myself “What accounts for this sudden spurt in interest in life and leadership coaching?” A number of things come to mind.

For starters, the gig economy gathers speed fuelled by a wave of global layoffs. Those in gainful employment are wondering when their chair will get pulled from beneath them and that anxiety needs a safe space to voice itself. Alternatively, to stay relevant and succeed at any cost the overworked and overstretched pay the price of a quick visit to 'burnoutville'. Either way, having a coach in your corner at a time like this, to help find the next chair or hold onto the one you have, is helpful.

A glass-half-full view of the situation is that the ‘A team’ players want to remain at the top of their game and to do that they get themselves a really good coach. In other cases, the enterprising person who went in search of a solution to a coach figures that they can become one. It could well be a pretty cool side hustle as an insurance policy should something go wrong with their main gig. Some or all of these reasons could be contributing to the sudden growth and interest in coaching as an industry and a profession.

Will the real coach please stand up?

While the coaching industry is an unregulated one and there is a fair share of fly-by-night operators offering “certificates” that are not worth the paper they are printed on, there is also another side to the industry. Bodies like ICF and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC) hold practitioners to a high standard. So, it would be unfair to paint all coaches with the same tar brush and call them out as suspect.

As per ICF data published in March 2023, there are only 1,762 Credential holding Coaches based in India. A further break down reveals that 898 of the are 'Associate Certified Coaches' (ACC), 779 are 'Professional Certified Coaches (PCC)' and 74 are 'Master Certified Coaches' (MCC) level coaches.

On one hand every second person on LinkedIn seems to have the word ‘Coach’ linked to their bio in some way, while on the other this statistic presents a very different view of the demand – supply equation, when it comes to the availability of certified coaches in India. The headroom from growth appears considerable.

It would be good to make the distinctions about professional coaching vs the fly by night variety easy for people to understand. What should one look out for if you are looking to hire a professional coach or become a professional coach? To my mind a good place to start would be to focus on three things:

1) Find a practitioner who is certified and or accredited by either of these two global bodies

2) Ask for references

3) Get a first-hand experience of how well you feel supported and partnered.

Don’t get a coach because it’s cool or fashionable. Don’t become one for that reason either. On the other hand - If you feel you are ready for a change and want to move forward from the place that you are at, coaching could be just the path to the answer you are seeking. It will offer you a safe space to examine who you are and what is important to you. At a time when the world is going through so much disruptive change, maybe this skill of helping build one’s self-awareness and creating accountability towards authentic living is a reason for the coaching industry to see the growth it is experiencing.