Coaching is the new "asking Friends for help"

Shared Atlantic article

Excerpt: ..."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).

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?”'