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The idea that there’s someone out there who can “help you fulfill your dreams” and “reach your highest potential” is an enticing promise—but do they really know how the “secret” to living your best life? Are life coaches a legitimate investment or a quasi-pyramid scheme?

Well, I hired one to find out—and she’ll be joining me today along with Jane Marie of the popular podcast, The Dream.

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Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is our Chief Content Officer and additional fact checking comes from Kate Brandt.

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Mentioned in the Episode

• Selling the Dream: The Billion-Dollar Industry Bankrupting Americans by Jane Marie

• CorporateNatalie (aka Natalie Marshall): “Day in My Silly Little Life” TikTok

• Elizabeth Wallace coaching

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Katie:

Jane Marie is a bit of an audio legend. She is a Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist who produced the massively popular show, This American Life, for a decade. But more recently, she produced and hosted season three of her show, The Dream. If you are a longtime listener of The Money with Katie Show, that might ring a bell. The Dream is a chart topping investigative podcast that pulls back the curtain on the seedy underbellies of pyramid schemes and the quote world of wellness. Jane has become the go-to gal for content about MLMs or multi-level marketing schemes. In fact, she just released a book about the subject called Selling the Dream, the Billion Dollar Industry Bankrupting Americans. You probably get the picture. This is a smart, celebrated journalist who's known primarily for levying a healthy skepticism on the two, good to be true world of self-help that's often crawling with scams and grifters. She's turned her doubt about this field into a career. This is the last person you'd ever expect to do something as seemingly new age as getting a life coach, right? Well…

Welcome back to The Money with Katie Show, Rich People. I'm your host, Katie Gatti Tassin, and today we are talking about life coaching: pyramid scheme or legitimate investment?

I am joined by Jane Marie herself who in the most recent season of The Dream investigated the gurus and life coaches who claim they know the secret to living our best lives. I remember rubbing my hands together when it first popped into my feed and I was like, oh yeah, baby, let's go. It's time to call out some bullshit. So you can imagine my surprise upon making it to episode two and hearing a teary Jane admitting that actually she's been in a funk lately.

Jane Marie in “The Dream”:

I think the pandemic is a big thing. I think also I feel a constant chipping away at my resolve and my patience, tolerance, joyfulness, optimism, happiness. It feels so daunting to deal with Again, I don't know if we should include something like that, but it's true. That's what I was thinking. I was like, how honest do I want to be about this on this show? I don't want to lie. Yes, I still go to therapy and I've adjusted my meds, but there's just a dark cloud over everything.

Katie:

As a podcaster, I must admit my creative envy was off the freaking charts when I heard this. I was like, oh my gosh, what a bold, creative choice to do an entire season about the world of life coaching. While you yourself are coming to terms with the fact that you think you might need a life coach inspired, it blew me away. It sucked me in.

Clip from "The Dream":

I won't be bad, I won't be a bad person, but I feel like

You know what I mean? I don't want to become

Like you would become an entity. Yeah. Okay.

Katie:

So throughout the season, the two storylines, the one that Jane is investigating and her own journey to figure out why she feels so unlike herself or the version of herself she wants to be, are woven together and it creates a really cool dynamic in which she's earnestly engaging with something that she's also investigating. Like Jane, I tend to run cynical about people who claim to have all the answers. I tend to group life coaches in with the likes of Tony Robbins, Rachel Hollis, people who may have meant well at one point and might still serve some genuine inspirational purpose to some, but strike me as inescapably God complexity now almost gaudy in self-promotion and self regard. Above all, I find it dubious that someone who supposedly figured out all a life's most valuable secrets chooses to spend that life dispensing them to others for a fee.

It's a little like the traders who claim they can teach you how to consistently outperform the stock market. If they really knew how to do that, they would be making levered bets with their own money and raising a fund to invest your money to and keeping the secrets to themselves, not selling their edge to any Joe Schmo on the internet for $99 plus tax.

Not to mention the fact that many of these coaches train other coaches about how to be coaches for coaches. In other words, much like the focus of Jane's other work, the entire field struck me as incredibly pyramid scheme. But don't get me wrong, the idea that there's someone out there who can help air traffic control you towards your fullest potential for a price is an enticing promise, particularly if you're feeling lost or stuck. I'm not immune to the aspirational glow of motivational entities who seem to have life figured out, who seem to be doing it better than I am.

And for as much time as I spend donning my tinfoil skeptic hat and remembering that social media isn't real, I would be lying if I said there isn't a small collection of women I follow who do seem to have it all figured out. They're up before the sun, exercising. They're always put together hair, makeup, outfit, nails, you name it. And even the disheveled versions of themselves are remarkably sheveled. They're glowing. They always seem happy, they're always optimistic. They share pictures of their nutritious, well-balanced meals on West Elm plates that they quote “threw together on a lunch break.” I don't know who chops cherry tomatoes for a lunch break, but here we are. Normally I can derive about three ounces of inspiration from these people who are succeeding so gloriously and effortlessly at this late stage capitalist experiment. But sometimes when I'm feeling down, these people make me feel like a failure, and I know what you're thinking, Katie, just unfollow them.

Sure I could. I probably should. But there's something magnetic about their order, their discipline, their routine. They are so in control. As much as I don't want it to appeal to me, I must admit that it does. And most of the time my reaction is positive or neutral, but sometimes it crosses my screen on a day when I haven't showered and I'm behind on work and I've got my face in a bag of Cheetos and I'm door dashing fast food to the front porch for dinner and yeah…it’s no good. Take Natalie Marshall for instance, she goes by Corporate Natalie online. To be fair, she isn't one of my aforementioned Stepford Women masochism follows, but she is another woman who occupies a similar online space that I do and she makes entertainment content about work from home, and she's a little bit of a crossover talent between comedy and earnest advice giving. Let me tell you dear listener, this woman is a force. Sometimes she posts these “day in my silly little life” videos that feature her going to 5:00 AM Barry's bootcamp before getting ready for the day with a full hair and makeup beat, then filming hours of content hopping on a flight to go to LA to be the keynote speaker at an event, jetting home to film a podcast episode…

Corporate Natalie:

Did a little workout, grabbed breakfast, saw dressed for the day, ate my hair and makeup, filmed five different videos at my desk, ordered lunch, took a meeting, filmed three more videos upstairs and outside…

Katie:

And she looks like she's having a ball. I can practically feel the bags under my eyes burning permanently into my face just watching her, and I really admire her. Sometimes I watch her and I feel like that girl leaving the Eras Tour…

Taylor Swift TikTok:

Taylor Swift, we need the workout routine. We need what I eat in a day, drop the therapist, drop it all physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. How are we doing this? How are we doing this? How are we doing? I don't know how you do this, girl. I'm disheveled. I just need answers. I need to know the routine, what we doing, what we eat, and how are we coping?

Katie:

How are we doing this? Natalie, I am disheveled.

I'm so impressed with her level of energy and output, but when I am not feeling great about myself, that doubling down is not what I need. So why am I telling you this? I might be sitting there like I thought I clicked on The Money with Katie Show, what's happening right now. But I'm telling you this because it seems to me that we go through phases in life where we don't always feel like our best selves. And it's in those moments, those moments of vulnerability when if you can afford it, paying for professional help feels like and might be a good solution. It's not just life coaching. You could hire a nutrition coach, a fitness coach, a career coach, an executive coach, a financial coach even.

But just how legitimate is this means of getting help? Is this the commercialization of, I don't know, just having a journal and close friends? It feels like the type of problem about which my dad would tell me to eat a scoop of peanut butter and go for a walk, not hire someone. Is there value in paying for an objective third party opinion that might be able to make sense of your next best move or help you figure out where you might be getting in your own way? And how does all of this jive with my identity as a skeptic more broadly?

We will get right back to it after a quick break.

So I've alluded a few times now to the fact that I have recently hired someone to help me. The story of how we got connected is a little random. I had shared at the end of last year that I was thinking of investing more explicitly, and that is to say with my time and money in personal development, whatever that means, I felt like I could be living a better life despite the fact that there weren't any obvious sources of dissatisfaction. I didn't really know how to proceed, but I knew the life I was living on paper didn't really match the internal experience of my day-to-day emotions. So when an old friend connected me with her coach, I met her for a free session. Now ahead of time, I sent this woman a four-page Google doc carefully outlining what I saw as my blocks as the various path so I could see my life taking.

And at some point she was like, “Listen, the longer the Google Doc that you send me, the more time we're going to spend getting out of your head and into your body.” I'm like, huh, my body, what does my body have to do with this? But what about my Google Doc? I'm interviewing coaches. We need a roadmap, lady.

But since the session was free, I was like, whatever. So I trusted her, and I can't believe I'm saying this, but she did a hypnotic meditation with me, and by the end of the call, I was literally begging her to take my money and work with me. And well, that's not quite the entire story as you'll hear later because I asked her too to join us today to talk about this world. But now we meet for an hour every week. She's available to me on demand, via phone or text when I need her in between sessions.

The service was sold in packages, so you pay a flat fee either upfront or monthly, and it worked out to about $200 per hour for the year. Now, there's a part of me that feels embarrassed to admit that I wanted or needed this type of help or that I'm willing to pay $200 an hour for it. And I'm not sure why; working with a therapist isn't really taboo anymore. But for the aforementioned reasons, coaching still feels like it straddles the line between legitimate form of professional help and total quackery.

And at first, I felt like I was on a high, I remember my naivete about a month or two in when I thought I had made so much progress that I wasn't even sure what we were going to use the rest of the sessions for. But as with most highs, those feelings faded. They normalized, and as I found myself struggling with new things, I felt ashamed. Here I was spending almost a thousand dollars a month on professional help, and I still had problems. The freaking audacity.

In retrospect, my approach was really corporate. Here's a Google Doc. These are my self-identified issues. These are the life paths that I am weighing. Let's map it onto a Gantt chart and make progress accordingly. Her approach, as you can probably guess, was far more fluid. There was one time that I shared I was upset about something that I thought I had resolved, and she almost like she was reading my mind immediately reassured me, Hey, this does not mean that you have failed at finding resolution.

So has it made my life perfect? No, but has it been valuable? Absolutely. And you'll hear more about how and why it's been valuable in our conversation. She isn't someone who claims to have all the answers or have life figured out, or at least she's never said that to me. But it's a little bit like employing the best manager you have ever worked with to help you navigate the ups and downs of your life and your work. But before I tell you anything else about that, I wanted to talk first to our guest, Jane Marie, about her confusing feelings when she ventured into the life coaching world. Jane, can you tell me about what you found when you were scouring the life coach landscape?

Jane Marie:

A lot of hooey. I found so many life coaches when I was looking into doing this season. I'm in LA so literally everyone is a life coach, and as I was doing the show, I would just be mentioning it to people and they're like, well, I'm a life coach. Why don't you have me on the show? All of the dog walkers in my neighborhood are life coaches and all of the teachers at my kids' school. But basically what I found is it's so hard to define a life coach can be literally anything. I found just a lot of different stuff.

Katie:

And it sounded like coaches for everything.

Jane Marie:

Coaches who coach coaches.

Katie:

Yeah. Well, and we'll get into that. Well, it's funny because I originally discovered you and your work when I was trying to learn more about MLMs, but it didn't really feel like a big jump to me when I learned that you were doing a season on life coaches as part of your show that focuses on MLMs. What was the connection that led you there? What was the MLM to coaching pipeline?

Jane Marie:

In the first season of the show when we were looking at MLMs, we found that both the coaching world came up around the same time in the sixties, seventies, as these new thought movements and EST and all of these kind of group dynamic group therapy things. And a lot of people who were starting MLMs at the time were in those kinds of programs. And then a lot of MLMs have coaching programs to try to keep people in them after they're failing. So they often recommend doing a coaching program with either a multilevel marketing coach or someone within the organization to try to improve your skillset or your mindset and become a better seller of these garbage products that MLM cell. So there's a very, very big overlap.

Katie:

Gotcha. So it's kind of like the Venn diagram where the two meet?

Jane Marie:

Yeah. When you're failing it at MLM, which is what they're designed to do, they're not designed to succeed, but when you're in one and you're failing, you're told that it's really just a you problem. Never. Is it the problem with the product or with the marketing strategy or materials or the people who own the company? No, it's that you don't have the right attitude. And so I think that was at the core of our questioning of coaches in general was just like, is that true? Is it really all just mindset? I feel like that's what you hear from a lot of big podcasts these days too. It's just like have a better attitude, get up a little earlier and seize the day or whatever.

Katie:

My default position typically when dealing with things like this is skepticism, and I don't know if I am just a cynic, but I have had friends over the years, for example, who were, I would assume financially in no position to be spending thousands of dollars on coaching to access help from someone who claimed that they could help transform their life, and you name it, right? Spiritually, sexually, financially, their business. It doesn't really matter. It always kind of struck me as predatory, but I did notice that you and Dan make a point of saying pretty early in the season that your original operating position when you set out to do this was not that the entire field is a scam. And I think the audio clip of you investigating different coaches and trying to find one and the audio of the guy going, what's up, legend? And you guys just bursting into laughter. I mean, I share that feeling of, there's some of it that feels so cringe that I want to just write it off, but I'm curious, as you investigated further and produced more, did that position shift at all?

Jane Marie:

I mean, so many of them that we looked into in the beginning just have so much fodder to make fun of, but I don't ever want to lump everybody together. Even when we're looking at multilevel marketing or when we were looking at wellness, I try to see, it's not possible that every single person involved in this is like that. That just can't be the case. And as we kept looking, I ended up talking to some people that had really good reasons for being a life coach instead of a therapist, for example. Some people don't want to have to be mandatory reporters and want to be able to offer people help without involving the police. And so I spoke to a few life coaches that do have an education in psychology and have all of the chops but aren't licensed because they don't want to have to follow that law. So that's just one example of why somebody would be a life coach and not a therapist or some other regulated profession. But I liked my coach. I got a coach and I'm still friends with her and it's great.

Katie:

So it's funny, I was in a really good place emotionally when I first heard season three of The Dream, so I was really able to enjoy it on what I would call an artistic level. But I re-listened to it recently, and I have to tell you, I'm having a bit of a hard time right now. I know. So when I listened to you describing what you were struggling with this time around and you said, I'm not feeling anywhere near my best, it feels like a difficult daily fight I'm having with myself and am beating myself up over for not being more motivated, not having more energy, not being more dedicated, not being more productive, not being more loving or tolerant. I was sitting there like, oh wow, I feel like she's kind of describing how I'm feeling right now. And I know in this show, these were the feelings that led you to want to find a life coach of your own who would help you. And so you just mentioned that you're still friends with yours, but what was that experience like?

Jane Marie:

It was great. I have a therapist that I go to every week. I probably spend a thousand dollars a month on therapy, so I am one of the people that spends a lot of money on something like this, but therapy and medications just weren't doing the thing that I wanted a life coach to do, which is get me up in the morning, give me inspiration. And I don't know, coming out of the pandemic, I just never felt like I was myself again. And it was some depression, of course, also menopause, also a thousand other things, being a single mom and all of this stuff. And so I wanted to find somebody that would hold my hand a little bit more than my therapist can, someone who would come to my house and talk and go for a walk and make me move my body and help me make better choices about my food and that sort of thing.

So I found Jesse, she's a wellness coach, which was hilarious because the second season of my show is taking down the wellness industry, but I was very upfront with her and even says on the show, I said, you freak me out in the beginning. I don't believe in this hocus pocus. And she's like, I know, and I am like that. I know I can seem kind of creepy and culty, but I'm not. And she understood that I was coming in with skepticism and didn't care. She was like, whatever. I drink water that sits in the fridge with a crystal in it for 30 days after every full moon or whatever. She's like, you can do that if you want to. It helps me, but you don't have to do it. And I was like, I think, I guess I tried it for a week. It didn't do anything because it's a rock inside of glass with water on it. But I really adore her and she did really help me a lot. She got me my health. I mean, I was having a lot of stuff going on with a fibroid that I had in my uterus and some hormones dipping from perimenopause and all of that got sorted out because of Jessie.

Katie:

Yeah, it sounds like she did help you. How long did—how long did you work with her for?

Jane Marie:

Six months.

Katie:

Six months.

Jane Marie:

The whole period of production of the show.

Katie:

Yeah. Was it every week?

Jane Marie:

Yes. It was twice a week.

Katie:

Twice a week. Wow, nice.

Jane Marie:

She's $85 an hour, so it's not something, I mean, it's probably the same amount I spend on therapy, but I don't have another thousand dollars a month for a life coach. If it was one or the other, I could maybe cover it, sort of. I couldn't keep it up the money, but she also didn't want me to stay in a place where I had to see her twice a week to be motivated to put into action all the things she was teaching me. But yeah, it's expensive. It's really expensive.

Katie:

So about a thousand dollars a month we'll say, and you did it for six months. Do you think that if money weren't a factor that you would have wanted to continue working with her? Is it something that you could have seen?

Jane Marie:

I try to trick her into doing free coaching for me all the time. When I see her, I'm like, you don't want to come over and just go to the park or something.

Katie:

We can work out, go get lunch or whatever.

Jane Marie:

No, I would love to keep doing that and I probably will eventually need a refresher. I can feel myself getting tired again and it's, I'm not like a healthy person. I don't know how to put that. I don't think about it and I don't prioritize it. I eat whatever I want and I drink and smoke, and I do I whatever. And then when I take care of myself, I'm like, damn, it does help.

Katie:

Yeah.

Jane Marie:

It's so frustrating that getting exercise and eating well makes you feel better, like blah. I hate it.

Katie:

Well, it's funny because a couple things are percolating for me right now are kind of coming to the surface, and I think one is just the fact that when I think about you and your, I'll say natural tendency as a investigative journalist to question and to be skeptical and to be the kind of person that produces a podcast that takes down the wellness industry, but then to kind of contain that multi-dimensionality where you're still a human being who is going to hit rough patches, and then in those moments might be like, okay, well what's really going to help me if I need help? And that I think is kind of the slippery, I don't know. I find that it's a truth that kind of resists neat categorization here because I think it's one of those situations where two things are true that there is a lot of quackery and scamming and grift in that world, and at the same time, there is some legitimate stuff that will help you and people that can help you and you can pay to help you live a better life.

Jane Marie:

Dealing with cognitive dissonance and dealing with two things being two opposing ideas being true at the same time is most of what I talk about in my regular therapy is how to get comfortable with that. And broadly speaking, parents for example, you love them, they were horrible to you. How do you live with the duality of a parent, right? They're human and their parent or that's just one example of a relationship or a situation where two opposing ideas are held by one symbolic thing, and I think it's a good practice to try to get comfortable with that no matter what part of your life you're talking about, because it just is true and it's impossible to interact with the world without recognizing that, and I don't try to fight it anymore. I just “yes, and…” like an improv class.

Katie:

We will get right back to this conversation with Jane after a quick break.

The mindset thing, I think is an interesting example of this as well, because we're a personal finance show that often talks about systemic barriers to building wealth and all the different kind of like, oh, you can't positive your attitudes, you're way out of wage stagnation. Nope. You still are going to have to spend 20% of your income on childcare, whether you're getting up at 5:00 AM or not. That kind of, I will say critical lens or maybe even skews pessimistic at times, but it's another yes. And both situation where to write off mindset is totally irrelevant or incapable of affecting change is also not a fair characterization.

Jane Marie:

What are you going to do? Not go to work ever?

Katie:

Right?

Jane Marie:

I mean, I can't have the luxury of making that choice, so how do I make it a little bit more tolerable for me is to say, well, the other option isn't better by any means of me just giving up and giving into the idea that maybe in my daughter's lifetime we will still have a pay gap or wage stagnation or all of the more institutional issues that we're fighting with. I could be really, really depressed about that every day and not do anything. I think people do do that, but I'd rather just try to keep moving inside this weird space we live in where you can't think your way out of things. You can't mindset your way out. And what I find is also people who think that they can, I don't think they're living in the same reality as me or most of us. I think the Tony Robbins of the world, they're not acknowledging that, acknowledging that there are forces greater than their mindset that you can't think your way out of. I feel like that's just not fair to be taking people's money and not acknowledge the complexities of lives.

Katie:

Agreed. That I think is a language that culturally we're becoming more fluent in. For example, when the Kim K “get your ass up and work, nobody wants to work anymore” dialogue happened, and I think maybe in a previous more hustle culture forward era, it would've been like, yeah, just got to get up early. We got to grind harder, and I think now…

Jane Marie:

Rachel Hollis did the same thing.

Katie:

Oh, yeah.

Jane Marie:

Remember when she said, I get up at four in the morning and I was like to make TikTok videos or whatever.

Katie:

It's like, well, actually there is an entire class of people that wakes up at 4:00 AM not because they are a cold plunging, but because that's what time they have to leave to get to work.

Jane Marie:

That whole thing. Kim and Rachel, I know again, this duality thing. I know Kim works for some legal campaigns that I agree with, so there's some good in there, but on the whole, I don't think her busting her ass and working hard and as she likes to say on a TV show with her sisters is important work. That was my reaction to her saying something like that.

Katie:

Yeah, hard work means something different to you, and I think there's just a different set of incentives. I mean, if you're already incredibly wealthy and working on things that are going to make you far wealthier, working hard is a different calculus than if it's working manual labor to make ends meet.

Jane Marie:

And she doesn't even raise her own kids. Yeah.

Katie:

I think that that's the part of the mindset guru, that world of just the thought leader as a profession where basically you are making expensive speeches and you're a motivational speaker and again, the both, and it's not that there isn't any value in those things in motivational speaking, and maybe you do find inspiration from somebody. I remember the other day I saw, I was trying to look a little bit further into the Hollis drama, the Racial Hollis drama, and I saw a post on one of the subreddits devoted to it that was basically this woman being like, is it bad that I kind of miss the old Rachel? I miss feeling inspired. I missed the time before we knew that she wasn't who she said she was, because I really liked how she made me feel before because she made me feel like I could do anything.

And I was like, yeah, there's got to be some value in that. I think where it shifts into danger zone or where it becomes just outright damaging and destructive is when we're talking about people who have access to such a different echelon of resources and time and their performance of ease and effortlessness is supposedly upheld as this is what living a good life looks like. And then you have all these people that don't have those resources in time comparing and not feeling inspired and better, but feeling like, oh, I must be doing something wrong. I am failing at this because I don't have those things and I'm not able to live up to that standard.

Jane Marie:

Well, not only that, but they're giving their money to that person. So that's the part that I found the most bothersome when I was looking into life coaching is it's not just that what you're selling is unachievable for your average human being, it's that what you're gaining is at that person's expense.

Katie:

Oh, that's an excellent point. So yeah, it's like Tony Robbins' wealth does not exist in a vacuum. It's not a separate thing.

Jane Marie:

It doesn't exist without those people at his conference who he's yelling at for having a bad attitude and he's screaming at them and they're paying thousands of dollars for that experience or with Rachel Hollis, Girl Wash Your Face. People are buying that book to be yelled at through that book by Rachel Hollis and Rachel Hollis, that's where all of her money comes from. That's where all of her success comes from, is from that dynamic of, I'm better than you. Give me your money and I'll teach you how to be more like me. And that's icky to me.

Katie:

That in combination with the coaches coaching other coaches how to be coaches, that is what brings in the pyramid scheme vibe to me by my course where I'm going to tell you how to make a bunch of money online selling courses. I'm like, wait a second, this is a, hold on.

Jane Marie:

There is literally a pyramid scheme that's new that is doing exactly that.

Katie:

Oh, tell me more.

Jane Marie:

It's called Master Resell Rights, man, don't go down that rabbit hole. It is wild. It is…

Katie:

Master Resell Rights.

Jane Marie:

Yes, it is a class teaching people how to teach people to sell classes to people endlessly. It's like a nonsense organization, but you should check it out. But it's literally that it's coaches, coaching coaches how to be coaches to coach coaches.

Katie:

I said this, I think last year we did an episode about MLMs. I said, I think business coaches are the new MLM. Oh yeah. Business coaches for business coaches who coach other business coaches. I'm like, so where is the end product? What's the end outcome here? Or are we all just coaching each other?

Jane Marie:

We are. When I talked to my therapist about how I don't make any money, she's like, you should come up with a course. And I was like, that's a little too on the nose. I don't think I can do it. She was like, I have so many friends that make so much passive income. I was like, okay.

Katie:

Oh, I hear that all the time.

Jane Marie:

Jumping the shark a little bit.

Katie:

Oh my God, that's hysterical. Okay, anything else that I didn't ask you that I should have asked you?

Jane Marie:

No. I do want to say there are some licensing, licensing or educational organizations that really do a good job of training people how to be life coaches. So I know that there's rigorous study that can go into it if you have the right attitude and resources because it's all costs money. I think there are ways to legitimately learn what a good coach is and what a bad coach is, and I think there's lots of good ones out there. Unfortunately, there is no regulatory body, so there's no American Dental Association for coaches. There's no one stamping your professional license every year. So that's where you get all the hocus pocus stuff, the people that don't know what they're doing and just call themselves a coach one day. So being discerning is important, but there are good people in that world just like with MLMs and just like with wellness, my grandma who I always have on the show as an example of someone who makes no sense to me, but I love her to death, but she just lives on essential oils and the Lord. Grandma Ruth, but I adore her.

Katie:

Terra Living.

Jane Marie:

That’s the Christian. That's the more Christian one.

Katie:

Young Living. My apologies. Oh, I forgot. I forgot the religious angle of it.

Jane Marie:

She has a giant box of Young Living and she also loves Herbalife, and whatever, and I love her.

Katie:

Thank you so much for being here.

Jane Marie:

Oh, my pleasure.

Katie:

Something I thought about a lot again after I talked to Jane was this focus on mindset. Sure, the socially conscious part of me wants to write it off. Wholesale is nonsense, but then there's the fragile human part of that's unwilling to believe there's nothing I could do that would help me, nothing that would make the experience of day-to-day life better. It feels incredibly bleak to accept that the only solutions to the systemic issues that plague us are like anarchy and policy change. All the offhand references to early workouts and productive workdays and macro nutritiously, optimal meals also had me wondering what are we optimizing for? Here are the things we feel like we need help succeeding with actually indicative of the right way to live. You heard Jane referenced this, something to the effect of I like to drink, I like to smoke, I like to eat Doritos, but damn it, if I don't feel better when I exercise and consume vegetables, there's this tension between our imperfect base instincts to guzzle coke while we couch rot and our well-adjusted doppelgangers, our twins who floss and sleep eight hours a night and don't waste entire afternoons on TikTok.

And this is probably too obvious an observation to be worth stating aloud, but hey, it's my show so I'm going to state it anyway. Much of it feels like the stuff designed to make us better cogs in a machine, better at making money, producing value, maintaining a grasp on our hyperspeed lives. And on one hand that's showbiz baby. But on the other hand, we should probably be aware of our motivations in seeking help.

So like I told you before my conversation with Jane, I'll tell you a little bit more about my experience and who better to help me talk about it than my coach. Elizabeth, welcome to The Money with Katie Show.

Elizabeth:

Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.

Katie:

This is not the normal context that we talk within, so it's a little trippy.

Elizabeth:

Yep. The tables have turned.

Katie:

You're in my domain now. Okay, so Elizabeth, you, are you a life coach? Is that how you would classify yourself?

Elizabeth:

So I'm going to say yes. Short answer, long answer is yes, but I wish it could be life coach, which really means I'm your teacher advisor guide, best friend cheerleader, no bullshit partner who helps you function well in this world, but that wouldn't fit on tax forms.

Katie:

Okay, cool. So life coach plus some other things, like you're clearly conceptualizing of your role as pretty wide ranging. So what do you think about the world of life coaches? Were you offended when I told you after we met that I actually had a lot of suspicions about the world of coaching?

Elizabeth:

No, I was a not surprised. I think that there is such a stigma out there about the world of life coaches and for you to say, actually, hey, I have some reservations and some skepticism around, well, are you actually just going to steal my money and is this going to be bullshit in not such direct words? But it actually is so nice to hear people say that and be like, Hey, this is my concern. Then we can talk about it. Right? The worst thing you can do is be like, I'm just going to write that off and never actually find out what this could be all about.

Katie:

So tell me a little bit about the clients that you typically work with. Would you say that you have a type?

Elizabeth:

I think about the—

Katie:

Don’t out me.

Elizabeth:

I'm like people who send me long word documents that I'm then we are not looking at this shit. So do I have a type? I think my general answer is yes, but it's not like women who want to become entrepreneurs. It's more of a lived experience. People who share the lived experience. I work with mostly women, some men but mostly women who are sort of in that 25 to 45-ish range who up until the moment when they're like, I think I need a coach. They've been doing everything. So really, really driven women who have done all the things, they've gotten the grades, they've gotten the job, the promotion, they have this good salary and a good title, and they bought the house, all of those check boxes and they're like, I'm doing it, but my insides are screaming. It looks like I'm doing it. I should be checking the boxes, so why do I feel like shit? And so it's that disconnect. It's people who are experiencing that disconnect that I love working with.

Katie:

Okay, that's so funny. I'm sitting here. Same. But no, the first time that we met was so interesting because I felt like I was in the midst of such a big decision. You've already alluded to my doc. I did send you this infamous Google doc, it was like several pages long and I'm thinking, oh, this is amazing. I'm laying out all the pros and cons, right? I'm telling her exactly what the cost benefit analysis is. We're going to sit down and we're going to really think it through. We're going to analyze and figure out what the right next move is.

And we basically did an exercise together that in a matter of 50 minutes, took me from what had been months and months and months of hemming and hawing and going back and forth and feeling like I needed to get more information. And in fact, I had been told by someone else, some other trusted advisor in my life, hey, it just sounds like you need more information before you can make this decision.

But in the 50 minutes that we chatted, I went from that to what felt like all but your complete clarity about the direction I needed to go in now, it wasn't as simple as I'm making it sound in the sense that there is still a lot of mental work that then needs to be done on, okay, well how do we get there? But the actual compass kind of oriented in a way that I was like, oh, how could I not have seen all along if that was the right move. So I'm curious from your perspective as the person that was facilitating that experience with someone, that was the first time we were meeting. It wasn't like we had a relationship prior to that. Why do you think good coaches are able to draw those experiences forward from people and help them arrive at those conclusions so relatively, I'm going to say, with relative ease?

Elizabeth:

So there's almost like two pieces here. Well, they're tied together. So when I first met you, when you sent me that long ass Word doc, and I literally opened it, scrolled through it, and I was like, oh, no, closed it. And I was like, okay, we are going to go in a different direction because what I could see immediately from that prep was, damn, that girl is all up in her head. There is so much thinking going on, and my God, it must feel so busy and overwhelming. You could see that it was emanating off of the screen at me. And so when you signed on, it's funny because at the end of our call you were like, I really thought that we were going to open up the word doc and type into it. And I was like, oh my God, no. What we did in our exercise was really get you out of your mind, down into your body.

We did a hypnosis, we did a visualization and relaxed your mind and your body enough that you could actually access your feelings and your intuition and your instincts, which already sort of knew where you wanted the compass to point. You were just so, so busy. And so I think to answer your question about what makes a good coach, I think it's such a subjective question because I'm a good coach for you, but I might not be a good coach for everyone. So it kind of depends on what people are looking for and how that matches with the strengths of the coach. And I think what makes a good coach is being able to really see and be present with and read the person in front of them. If I had not seen how busy your mind was and we had gone down that rabbit hole, that just would've been unproductive and unpleasant.

Katie:

What’s funny too about this conversation about the hypnosis piece of it is I can imagine one of my more analytical, skeptical, cynical listeners, this is how I would've thought about this a year ago. So this is how I know that this is what some people are probably thinking, hypnosis, that's not real. What the heck? What are they talking about? They're in their body and her feelings like, Ugh, no, what? You need a spreadsheet. That's what you need.

And I think what I would say to that is I get it, and it is hard to put into words physically how I felt after that first session because I had not ever done something like that before. Because previously the only help that I had paid for professionally was a talk therapist. So it is a lot of thinking, at least I will speak for the one singular situation, but there wasn't a lot of emphasis on feeling and where do you feel that in your body? And I think what I realized after we met was that my, almost from the neck up, I was a different person and everything necked down had been muted and kind of ignored. So I think we should talk about what happened after our first session because I was so excited about it. I was floating for the rest of the day.

It was truly a very surprising experience in that way. And before we hung up, I was like, how do I work with you? What do you cost? How often can we meet? I was so excited about moving forward, but then there was a shift and the more distance that I got from it, the more I started to second guess what I had experienced. And if it had actually I was like, am I crazy? Did that actually feel that way? I don't know, maybe I should. And so I want to hear how that felt from your point of view and what your assessment of what was happening there.

Elizabeth:

It's so funny, it's so common. So was I surprised? Absolutely not. It's almost expected because here's what I saw happening. You come to me and you're all up in your head and you're used to making decisions with the space between your ears and it being really busy. You come to me, we have a session together, and you felt something, and like you said, oh my gosh, I realize I am muted in being able to recognize the way that I feel. But you came away feeling like, oh my God, I need this. I want more of this. And then your brain was like, shut up. It did the work of wait, wait, wait. We don't listen to the body. We're used to running the show. So it came in with all of the rational reasons. What did it cost? Is this really going to help? Was that an illusion? Because if you aren't used to feeling things in your body, then it's going to take a little bit of time to trust what you do feel in your body.

Katie:

It started to make me think differently about what are the other times where my instincts were telling me one thing, but then I rationalized something else. Because in this case, for example, the financial investment, I was mentally like, yep, I'm ready this year to invest in personal development and in help, and I want to be a happier person. I want to be a more effective person. And there are things about myself that to your point about the outside not matching the inside, almost that sense of I have all the things I thought I wanted. Why am I not happier in my day-to-day lived experience, zoom out macro level. I'm like, yes, this is great. But then in the hour to hour experience of my life, why do I always feel stressed and kind of anxious and unfulfilled? It didn't make any sense. And that was what I was really hoping to dig into.

A part of that experience was through the work and then just so happened that the financial investment upfront triggered this same kind of thought spiral is, well, how do I know it's working? How do I know I'm getting an ROI? How do I know that this isn't a scam? And I think I asked you, what are the KPIs that we're using to measure progress? How do we know that I'm making progress that this is working? Can we have a off ramp at three months if I feel that the investment is not paying off? I sent you a proposal and you were like, whatever you need, whatever you need to make you feel better about this. I think you knew. Sure, Katie, if at three months it's not working, walk away. Because typically you have people sign a contract.

And I think your willingness and faith in that moment of like, yeah, okay, don't pay for it all upfront, pay for it however you want and walk away whenever you want, was kind of like, oh, okay. So she's pretty confident that her approach works. And I think that was what gave me the confidence to trust myself and to be like, what do I have to lose? Let me just commit to it for this short period of time. And then I think it was after our first page session that I said, yeah, just send me the rest of the contract. I was like, I'm ready. I already can tell that this is working.

Elizabeth:

What you sent back was so clearly coming from the exact same place that you sent me the original Word doc with this is what I want to talk about in our session. Here's all the A, B and C and blah, blah, blah, cost benefit analysis. And I think this comes into coaches are really different with how they handle these type of things. And I was like, oh, she's going to be so fun to coach and I know that I can help her. I think you had asked me for, could we do the whole thing, but could you have an off ramp in the middle? And I was like, Nope, you can't. There's no middle off ramp, but we can create a little bespoke package for you where you see, let's just commit to the three months and then you can see what happens. And then, yeah, after that first session you were like, but how about a year?

I was like, okay. It's almost as though we have these little antennae and we're reading and sort of responding. And the way that we are brought up, if you're brought up that way you're describing as well as the way that women are treated in workplaces in college, et cetera, is turn your antenna outward. See how you can best fit in. So, and it serves us wealth because it gets us ahead. We are great chameleons. Those of us who have our antenna truly turned outwards. That works for a lot of us to rise through the ranks. But what we're then missing is we turned on the volume of turning that antenna inward to actually listen to ourselves. It is so reinforced in the workplace. Emotions don't belong here, go cry in the bathroom. Emotions make you vulnerable, right? And it's totally reinforced. You can't have a woman president, she'll be too emotional, right? Fuck that.

Katie:

I do want to get into the financial side of it because I think that obviously this episode is somewhat focused on the financial side of it, but there's something there in that I want to go slightly deeper on because it was such a valuable insight that you gave me that has been recurring for me that I want our audience to walk away with, even if they never end up hiring anyone to help them specifically, which was that it's about that emotion. Cause I think sometimes if I were hearing you say that and I didn't know anything else about emotional regulation or how to honor your emotions without letting them run your life, you'll often talk to me about how, hey, sometimes I'm going to say things that sound a little contradictory because this stuff is not black and white. And the thing that you told me about emotion was sometimes actually oftentimes our biggest emotions are the compounded ones.

It feels really big and intense because it's not just based on one thing, it's a compound emotion that has been growing in intensity over time. And so that big emotion might spur you to feel like, well, I have to take big action. This is a big problem because this emotion feels so big. And I think what you've taught me and what I feel like is probably a lifelong practice is going into the emotion and getting the information out of it, going into it, feeling it. What is the information this is giving me? The information may not be big action. It might be actually this is actually a small thing that's just been in there getting more and more and more and more and more exacerbated. But the thing itself is actually quite small. And so I'm curious if you would add anything or clarify that at all because I do think that it's one of the more valuable and resonant takeaways that I've had from working with you that I want our audience to have too. Because I think about it frankly all the time now.

Elizabeth:

So yes, you're so spot on. If I were to give a gift to every single person in the world, it would be that knowledge and takeaway to really land with people that your emotions are the messenger. They're not the message. And if the messenger is getting ignored over and over and over again, it's going to get louder. And it's kind of like we see this happen physically too. Say you get a cold and you go out in the rain and you stay up all night and you eat poorly, you're going to get more sick because your body's like, Hey, you need to stop this. You need to take care of me. And so talking about compounding emotions, taking an example, like say you have a boss who is constantly asking you to just do that little bit extra, which first time they ask, you're like, sure, I'm a driven, I'll do the thing, right?

You take it on, you do a good job. And yeah, you worked into the night, but no worries. Next time they ask you and you're like, I had plans tonight. That's kind of a bummer. Third time, fourth time, fifth time, suddenly you're there for two, three years and your boss comes in and even looks at you and you already feel overburdened and taken advantage of and really that, and you're like, maybe I should leave my job. I have to leave. This isn't right this, and that may be true, maybe it's time for you to leave your job, but also it might be a simple, when I say simple in quotes, a simple boundary issue, it might be saying, no, I actually can't take that on. And if you had said that very early on and sort of nip that in the bud, you might not have had all these compound emotions where every time it happens, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Our emotions are what drive our actions. And so we feel like, oh my God, I'm feeling this really big thing. I must need to quit or move to another country or whatever. But when you really drop down and remove the layers of emotion, be like, Hey, what is this actually telling me? What is creating friction here? What message is this giving? It could be something simple. I'm going to try saying no the next time that my boss asks me to do something and see how that goes.

Katie:

Well, and I think what this gets at is the fact that you have said to me before, well, you get to choose the context in which you move through these things. You get to choose the context in which you're going to grow. There's no right or wrong choice, but you're going to pick. And what I'm kind of hearing here about, well, this is actually kind of a boundary issue that's happening. And so the emotion might be like, quit your job, burn it all down. But what I'm imagining is this same person with that same instinct is going to recreate that same scenario kind of wherever they go. They haven't actually solved the real problem. And so what I feel as though I am paying for on a monthly basis is the hour every week where we sit down and apply these types of learnings very directly to situations that I am in the midst of.

Or I will text you and say, Hey, this is happening and I'm feeling this way. And kind of have that thought partner in real time. And I feel like what's interesting now that we're like five months in is in the beginning I felt like I was texting you all the time. I was having these issues all the time. And as I've learned and built that muscle, now I am able to almost coach myself in a lot of those moments. And I don't need to throw up the SOS of like, well, now I feel this way, and what do I do about it? And I think that's kind of the growth piece. But what occurs to me is that coaching is often very expensive and especially good coaching. There's really no way around that fact in a conversation like this one on a show like this one.

And in that sense, I would say this is something that often requires a certain level of privilege and resources and comfort to even be able to experiment with something like coaching in the first place. Because it is a risk, right? You don't know. You could hire a coach and it's just not a good fit. There doesn't even have to be intent involved, but it could just be a wrong fit, not even necessarily like, oh, it's a scam, or This person's no good. And I don't know. There's something that feels very kind of sad and ironic to me that something like coaching is often out of reach for the people who might need it the most, or benefit stand to benefit the most from it people who don't have as much privilege and resource. And I am curious if that has crossed your mind before, I often used to feel this way too about boutique fitness because that became such an outlet for me. But going to the classes is so expensive and I was like, God, I wish everyone could do this. But it's expensive. And having those really great experiences that help you grow and change is particularly in this very personalized way, costs money.

Elizabeth:

Yeah. You said, I dunno if you think about that. I think about that all the time and I really struggled with it in the beginning when I started my business and it really kind of weighed me down and made me very sort of ashamed and uncomfortable to offer what I offer. And let me be clear, I've hired coaches that, yeah, wasn't my favorite investment. So it does happen. I think there are two things going on here that it would be good to unwind underneath all of this. I just want to say, yeah, it does suck. It does suck. It isn't fair. The systems in which we live in this country and what it takes to survive and have a living to not set up for us to charge nothing or to charge minimally. I will also say though, that coaching is an unregulated industry. And so there are coaches with a wide variety of pricing options and the way that they provide their services.

So if someone is listening to this and being like, damn, I wish, I feel like I could really benefit from this, but I don't know if I can afford working with Elizabeth. There's lots of coaches out there. I am so not the only coach, and I truly believe that there are a lot of good fits for a lot of people. So I'm just going to put that upfront. But I do think that there are two things to unwind, both of which are related to internalized patriarchy and misogyny. And the first is examining the idea that, and shifting the idea that helping professions shouldn't charge much if you were to actually think about it and think about the helping professions, the regulated industries, something like hospice care, nursing, things that are historically women filled professions, compare that to finance and things that are historically white male driven.

Huge gap in our idea of how they should be compensated. So there is an inherent idea of if you help people, it should be from the goodness of your heart. The second thing is, and we haven't mentioned this, but I think it does come into play or it often shows up when people are thinking about hiring a coach and that is, well, but a therapist, I could go on better help or something like that and hire a therapist for X amount and it's covered by insurance. Why isn't that true? Or how come coaches can charge so much or whatever.

Katie:

What's crazy about that is that, I mean, I have a decent good health insurance plan through work and it was still $200 a session. So I do think that even then anything in that realm is going to be expensive. And I think the difference or where people bristle, where I would bristle before I met you is like, well, therapists have a formal education, they're medically trained, and coach is like, who knows how this coach? But I can't deny that My own experience has been that I have gotten far more from coaching than I did from therapy. It feels weird to admit that personally. And I don't mean that as a commentary as all therapists because I think people are helped in different ways, but just in my particular instance, I was shut off to the idea of coaching because it did not have the medical accreditation element that therapy did. And yet the methodologies that I have experienced with you have just worked better for me personally.

Elizabeth:

Totally. And that literally brings me to this second point. Let's look at that assumption and that assumption of let's leave the helping to the professionals, AKA the licensed people. If you look at those licenses, that's a reinforcement of academic supremacy. Get more schooling, invest in that. And while coaching isn't licensed, there are accrediting bodies. It's not as though, well, someone could wake up and be like, today I am a coach. Absolutely.

Katie:

And by the way, you can do that as a financial advisor too. There is no specific calling yourself a financial advisor is technically not. It's kind of like the label of all natural. It doesn't really actually mean anything. What it might come down to, at least as I zoom out and examine this, is like I'm trying to get back into the mindset that I was in, which is all of it's expensive. All of it's expensive. One realm of this world has a level of licensure and accreditation and academic stamp of approval that makes it feel like a safer thing to play with. Totally. And to be fair, there is a degree of truth to that. To your point, anyone can call themself a life coach. Not anyone can claim they're a clinical therapist. So that is valid. But I think to your point about experimentation and openness is being open to things that might help you that don't fit that mold and that even the practices that you try in therapy, a lot of it is theoretical.

And there are even within the realm of psychology, professional psychologists and therapists and what have you, I only know this, I listened to a Dr. Becky interview where she was talking about this, where she was actually my entire training in academia and everything that I had to do to get licensed. She's like, I ended up going through all of that and being like, there is something about this that doesn't feel right to me. And her kind of villain origin stories that she was in a session with these parents telling them in her professional capacity how they should be parenting and what they were doing wrong. And that she in the middle of the session was like, I'm sorry, I don't believe a word I'm saying to you right now. And that sent her down her path to develop this new way and this different approach.

And that was formerly though, according to her, not really something that you learned in school, not something that was part of her training and was a new way to do it that actually flew in the face of and had some strident differences with the popular methodologies in the space at the time. And so I think a lot of these things are evolving and so that the idea that we've kind of arrived at this finished state or we now in history are at the point where now we've figured it all out and this is the one right way isn't true. But I do think that it takes a level of openness and financial ability and willingness to try and commit and know that you might work with someone that is actually not a good fit and that is possible. I think that this experience has opened my eyes to the fact that I feel like it has been an amazing use of my money and the type of thing I want to spend my money on because it has, I told you this the other day, and I would share this with anyone who's listening that it's now several months in that I've had multiple people I work with or am friends with who have unprompted been like, you seem different.

You seem really good. I dunno, there's just something different about you. And I'm like, wow. People are noticing that. As corny as it sounds like, oh, the work is working. And I think that that's a really valuable thing to invest in beyond just go keep buying index funds and rack up more money. It's like, yeah, am I going to have less money in 40 years? I paid for this? Sure. But this is in service of me being a happier person in those 40 years. I really appreciate you being here and being willing to talk about what it's like to do your job and how you think about a lot of this stuff.

Elizabeth:

Yeah. Oh my gosh, it's been the best being on the other side and getting to chat with you about all this. Thanks for having me.

Katie:

So where have I landed now? It's interesting because when I started writing this episode a few months ago, I was in a bit of a valley emotionally, psychologically. You kind of heard me allude to that in my conversation with Jane. And since then I've come out the other side and have been feeling a little more optimistic about things, and I've made some real progress. And I think where I've landed is that if you can find a really good coach, someone that's a good fit for you, which is obviously easier said than done, and you have it in the budget to support that I am a convert to this. Cause I think that when it works, it works exceedingly well. And I do feel like I've made a ton of progress, more progress than I've made in years. But at the same time, it's really hard, I imagine, to find the right person.

And I think that there's something illustrative in the way that I found Elizabeth, which is that it was a friend connected us, a friend who had been working with her for years and could vouch for her efficacy. And Elizabeth isn't a social media star. She posts about coaching stuff on her profile, but she doesn't have hundreds of thousands of followers. And I think that oftentimes coaches will promote themselves on Instagram or build this public persona and then charge top dollar for their time. I'm not so convinced that that path is one that I would feel super comfortable going down.

But if you have people in your network who have found someone they can vouch for and you have it in your budget, it might be worth taking the free consultation call if this episode resonated with you and if you think that this might be something that can help you too.

That's all for this week. I will see you next week. Same time, same place on The Money with Katie Show.

Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and me, Katie Gatti Tassin with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is our chief content officer. Additional fact checking comes from Kate Brandt.