If the service is “advice,” then no, they’re technically not fraud. However, claims about the efficacy of the service or product can certainly be fraudulent. If a 19th century salesman offers you Magix Elixir and claims it’ll cure your gout, and you pay him $10 for what turns out to be cat piss and your gout gets worse, you can’t say there was no fraud just because you got the bottle you paid for.
The “Life Coach” service would seem to imply a claim that the person’s life will be improved. Certainly in the one case I know of where someone’s employed a Life Coach, the Life Coach’s primary purpose appeared to simply create a dependency that enabled them to continue making money.
There’s a place for advice, but honestly, even a cursory study of the entire Life Coaching industry has SCAM written all over it in block letters.
It’s rather doubtful that any of these services actually make “Turn you into Paris Hilton in 30 days or your money back” type of promises. The fellow who use to do my job quit to become a life coach, and I know that his particular firm does not promise any such thing. I suppose if you actually found someone who makes such a promise, you could call it a fraud.
The most important thing I can say is that a Life Coach should never replace an experienced professional who uses empirically supported methods of treatment for psychological disorders. There is no educational or universally recognized certification standard for a life coach, no required degree, nothing of that nature. I’ve never met a psychologist who doesn’t spit on the very idea. According to the Wiki life coaching is derived from management consulting and leadership training – I’m pretty sure lots of business majors become life coaches. Maybe they’re very adept at helping people pick out nice clothes or find a partner, who knows? The bottom line is: not a doctor or psychologist, can’t replace genuine psychological care.
The coach I went to for a while was also a licensed marriage and family therapist. The difference was that his coaching sessions were cheaper and more informal.
I found him very helpful. I don’t want to get into the details, but I credit him with enabling me to persevere through the dating world until I found the woman who would become my wife.
The concept itself does not imply a scam necessarily. However, most therapists and psychiatrists would find a level of familiarity and specific advice given by life coaches to be outside of the scope of their relationship with the patient. It would be awesome if your psychiatrist who’s also your therapist could go clothes shopping with you or watch your date from afar and give you pointers (especially if you can afford that sort of thing), but most won’t. People who visit therapists often have to be able to convey their problems for the therapists to help them. It might be painfully obvious to any third party what’s wrong but they themselves could be oblivious and as such a therapist will have a hard time finding out the actual problem.
Sometimes people come with a general complaint of stress and strained relationships and it takes session after session to get down to the bottom of it and start building a solution from the bottom up. Even an uneducated “people-person” who spends a few hours in that persons house could come to the conclusion “Your mother in law is a bitch and you’re a pushover”. If you’re suffering from clinical depression that’s entirely useless and you need a licensed professional, if you just have a personality quirk that’s making your life unpleasant or difficult, a licensed professional might not be able to help from behind that desk.
I had a “cultural change coach” once. I was moving from Spain to the US for the second time (third time if you count that summer when I was in college). This woman went with me through “change management” (which I was already good at, but I know many people who aren’t), through “how to get a doctor in the US” (I wish I’d gotten that in Switzerland), through a list of “things us foreigners* always find strange about Americans” (this was worth however much she got paid… it’s not just me being weird! There’s thousands of millions of people who find it strange!)
While I wouldn’t want something like that on an ongoing basis, it did come in handy. She had BTDT and was good at explaining it.
The irony? Not a few professionals in the mental health community supplement their income by doing life coaching. Certainly not a majority, nor even a significant minority, but still a surprising number. I’m guessing they have to keep a firewall between their therapy and coaching services, lest the blurring of boundaries cause all manner of ethics violations. My impression also is that some life coaches, despite not being licensed therapists, probably not infrequently cross the murky line from coaching into therapy. IIRC, one needed be licensed in most states to do therapy, nor coaching. Eventually, the licensing bodies for mental health professionals are going to have to take a harder line on this issue.
We can expect many investigative news stories to follow.
True. Sometimes we don’t see ourselves, and our life choices, very clearly. Sometimes what is mysterious and frustrating to us is obvious to an outside observer. Sometimes that external point of view is helpful, or even necessary, in figuring things out and getting through difficult stuff.
On the other hand: that’s what friends are supposed to be for. But for some reason, a lot of people seem to have the idea that friends must be unconditionally supportive in all circumstances, and never disagree with us, or they’re not being true friends. Me, I think a friend who isn’t willing to call me on my bullshit from time to time is no friend at all.
But if you won’t accept that from a friend, then I can see where it would be necessary to pay somebody to fulfill that role for you. Unhealthy, perhaps, but still necessary.
Edited to add: That’s the general you, not you specifically, WhyNot.
Evidently this service is now obsolete, as you can get all the information you should ever need on this subject and more with a simple $14 subscription to the SDMB. I’m funny, too.
For some reasons, all this reminds me of the Six Sigma…It’s rubbish, isn’t it? thread. The parallels are uncanny. So basically. a Life Coach is like a Six Sigma black belt for your life?
I always thought a good metaphor is that they’re self-help books that you actually have to answer to. That will work for some people, not for others. Some people would be foolish to pay for the service; for others, it could work well.
I got to work with one on the cheap. She was a social worker by training, I believe, and had some bona fide counseling credentials & experience of some sort. She was trying to branch out into the business of helping grad students finish their degrees, and while gaining the experience wanted some grad students to work with at a very reduced fee. I volunteered myself, as I was bogged down between work, toddler, family life, and a dissertation chair I was feeling increasingly acrimonious towards. We worked by phone (weekly calls).
I didn’t find it much different from the support I might have gotten from a group of other grad students (except the time could selfishly be devoted to me, all me, every time) or any good counselor, or a friend (except our semi-professional relationship was a better dynamic for the work involved IMO). She helped me with goal setting, work-life balance, etc. I also used her to hash out some of the emotional issues and frustrations I was feeling, because I did not want to discuss those things with my dissertation chair. I found it useful. I could have worked through this stuff myself, and set goals for myself (indeed I’d survived most of grad school without her), but I think at that particular stage it was beneficial to me to work with an outsider.
I would not have paid full-price for this kind of service, but I can see why it could be useful for certain personality types.
Nah, the difference is that Six Sigma actually has some legitimate applications (high quality manufacturing processes, for example.) It’s only when idiot managers try to apply the math (which they don’t understand anyway) to unquantifiable things that Six Sigma becomes idiotic.
Life coaches, on the other hand, are idiotic to begin with.
Well, doesn’t this completely figure. A few months back, I spent a ton of work hours watching episodes of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit on Google Video. And what episode can I no longer find online? The Life Coaching episode, of course. Ah well…
