The cost of working with a coach: it’s not the time and money

People think the cost of hiring a coach is the time or money. But I argue you can arrange those things if needed. We buy cars, go on vacations, and scroll social media all the time. Time, money, space, logistics, and situations can be figured out.

The real cost of working with a coach is letting go of your mental models. And we humans cannot let go of those mental models, no matter how genuinely we wish to.

When I hired a coach for the first time, I just wanted help building my business. I wanted help implementing the how-tos despite taking intensive courses about marketing or coaching. Soon after getting into the coaching relationship, I realized: given enough how-tos, I could usually throw some spaghetti at the wall and figure things out. Lack of ideas was never the problem. Execution was never the problem. Taking professional feedback was never the problem.

It was something else—the mental model of who I am and what I can and cannot do.

The cost of coaching is that you have to give up what "working" even means. You give up how you usually hold relationships (co-dependent by default). You have to give up what working with another human means.

After 4 years of working with a coach, I'm sitting with a big question: What does getting help mean?

I thought getting help meant that someone gives solutions to pesky problems. That someone understands the root cause and offers feedback or frameworks. That someone guides us through sticking with healthy habits and doing scary things (like asking people to pay money for my services 😵💫). Those are important, yes.

Yet, coaching is none of those things.

It's about sitting with someone and seeing how wherever you go, there's your limited mental model about work, time, relationships, money, and commitments. It's all the same contraption, built intricately to keep you from the uncertainty and unknown.

Coaching is about sitting with someone and defining what 'partnership' means.

"I don't know how to partner with you," I said to my coach.

It's the same thing I felt with my best friend two days earlier. The same thing I felt with a family member yesterday. The same thing I felt with a peer coach. So it's not the coach. When we reach this point in relationships, we usually shrug our shoulders, swallow our pride, and get along with it. Sometimes we stop responding. We move on to find better people, better bosses, better teams.

One of my mentor-coaches says, "I don't know" is the start of a breakthrough.

Do I really not know? That's not true. I have done relationships. I have done work. But "I don't know" is the sound of exiting the mental model that ran my life till now. The roles I took on moving through the world.

It's where a skilled coach makes a difference. They receive your "I don't know," empower you to carry on your shrugs and swallows, and then also say, "What if life worked differently?" "What if there were other options?"

From there, everything slowly starts shifting—habits, health, dating, marriage, parenting, purpose, creativity, hobbies, community, recovery, recreation, money, career... the experience of life itself.

The cost of working with a coach is confronting how you work—and reinventing yourself to live in new options. It's edgy. It requires taking a good look at yourself. If you've read that and slightly leaned away, perhaps with a thought like "that's dumb," "I want feedback like that," "I don't understand that," or "whatever," that's the voice of your current mental model.

The truth is, it's actually not that scary. It feels scary. Like we all know, getting on stage in front of an audience is safe. You're not going to get killed. Yet we perpetually avoid it for years. Working with a coach is like that. You'll avoid it even if you know you'll grow from it.

This work requires willingness to step into deep connection with someone. Letting them be your partner. Discovering what you want in the face of them not telling you. Then asking for what you want. And discovering that your ask is coming from the same old contraption. Then developing the capacity to trust yourself as a human—that your shortcomings were interpretations all along. That holding yourself with love is deeply uncomfortable. That the certainty you built with your mental models can be set aside safely. That you have the ability and can develop the capacity to live into new options.

Despite all my fair warnings, if you're considering working with a coach, here are some guidelines:

Hire a coach trained in ICF guidelines. There are many models and lineages, but the foundation for the kind of coaching I'm talking about—the one that develops your own wisdom rather than gives solutions—starts with following the ethics and competencies set by the International Coaching Federation. A consultant gives solutions. A coach facilitates you to grow out of needing solutions to operate. A coach with a basic ICF training will know the difference and practice facilitation rather than giving solutions.

Hire a coach who works with their own coach. If they're not continuously in this conversation, they cannot skillfully separate their stuff from your stuff. They can talk the fancy concepts (and oh, don't we all love a good fancy concept—connect it to Zen or leadership and we've got a winner). I've met many coaches who look amazing on paper and on LinkedIn. But when you want coaching from them, they won't stop talking about the concepts. It's all in innocence, of course, because they haven't sat to untangle their own contraption, or at least own up to it when it eventually shows up. Coaching is a discipline where the coach needs to develop the skill and capacity to meet the naked reality...many times over.

Hire a coach you feel connection and resistance to at the same time. Not someone abusive or dismissive—but someone you feel connected to in paradoxical ways. Meeting a new person is awkward at first, like any relationship. But with this person, you know you can hold a friendly conversation, and you also feel just enough discomfort that they see your gifts and patterns. That slight edge of "I'm not sure I can BS this person" is probably what you'd be getting into.

The mental models you've built have served you. They've kept you safe, helped you navigate, given you identity. But they've also kept you limited, kept you stuck in cycles of boredom and chasing, and kept you from the partnership and possibility you actually want.

The question isn't whether you can afford to work with a coach, given how busy you are or how complex your situation is.

The question is, can you afford to face and live into the new possibilities of your life?