On the proliferation of online coaching advice

I have become increasingly uneasy with the way coaching advice circulates online, especially in formats that promise rapid transformation through short lists or fixed formulas. Phrases such as “three hacks that will change your life” or “ten mistakes you are making” or "never, I mean never do ABC", present themselves as practical guidance, yet they reduce complex psychological, relational, and organisational processes to simplified instructions that can be consumed quickly and repeated easily. Τhe confidence with which such generalized advice is offered is astonishing, as though the relevance of a recommendation were independent of the situation in which a person actually lives. And such people call themselves coaches.

This raises a question of epistemology rather than of style. Coaching, as I understand it, depends on situated inquiry, on attention to context, and on a careful consideration of how meaning, constraint, history, and relationships interact in a given case. To begin with, advice is not what coaching is supposed to offer. Even less so when it is given without reference to any of the contextual conditions above and detaches itself from the circumstances that would determine whether that piece of advise is useful, premature, beside the point or even harmful. Besides, this type of "coaching" usually carries a tone of certainty without the discipline that should justify it, and it speaks as if the same intervention could apply across very different lives and institutional settings. I find that claim difficult to sustain.

This matters to me because it changes how the field is perceived. When coaching is represented through generic prescriptions, it can begin to resemble self-promotion - often using pseudo-science to sell whatever it is selling - rather than reflective practice, and the work itself is pulled toward the logic of visibility and repetition. In that setting, the value of a statement is often measured by how quickly it can be understood or shared, rather than by whether it can hold the complexity of a person’s situation with sufficient precision. The result is a flattening of the field, where nuance appears cumbersome and where an open question can seem less useful than a neat answer, even when the neat answer rests on very little.

I do not think this development is merely a matter of communication, because it shapes expectations on both sides of the coaching relationship. Coachees arrive having seen a great deal of content that implies that change should be immediate and easily transferable from one person to another. They may come to a session expecting a method, a formula, or a sequence of steps that can be applied regardless of context. That expectation makes it harder to engage with the slower work of understanding a situation, identifying its pressures, and thinking about what kind of change is actually available. It also obscures the fact that coaching is often most useful when it helps a person clarify what is specific to their case, rather than when it offers a public theory of how people in general should live.

What concerns me most is the commodification of coaching advice as a form of knowledge that is packaged for circulation and detached from the conditions that give it meaning. In that form, advice gains a market value by becoming portable, repeatable, and easy to recognise, while losing the precision that would make it useful in practice. Coaching then risks being understood as a genre of reassurance or instruction, and the more demanding work of interpretation, contextualisation, and inquiry becomes harder to defend. That is a conceptual loss as much as a professional one, because it narrows the understanding of what coaching can be.

I think the field has a responsibility to resist this pressure, even when doing so makes communication less immediate and less marketable. That responsibility includes acknowledging the limits of one’s knowledge, centering our practice on our clients, remaining careful about claims of generality, and staying close to the concrete realities from which a coaching conversation begins. Meaningful change rarely follows the logic of a list, and it rarely respects the pace that online content prefers. That fact seems to me central to the integrity of coaching itself, and central to the intellectual seriousness of any practice that claims to work with human change.