The number of people who become personal coaches and shouldn’t is quite impressive to me.

Not a week goes by without one or two acquaintances, close or distant, friends, buddies, displaying on their network profile: I’ve become a professional (or personal) coach!, I want to become a professional (or personal) coach! Misery.

Misery in my eyes, and according to my interpretation.

Any resemblance to actual events and people, existing or having existed, is absolutely not coincidental and is not the result of pure chance.

Misery? Because I observe in the vast majority of cases among people I know in my circle that the primary goal of their personal development coaching is first and foremost therapy for themselves. That’s fine, it would perhaps be even better if it were a bit more conscious, maybe, I don’t know.

So why misery? Because they come to feed the gold rush of coaching certification sellers who tell them they’re good and brilliant, some rare ones are. However, in the vast majority, they’re not when it comes to personal development coaching. And we end up with a bunch of dangerous people in an ultra-saturated market. Oh, I may need to clarify: I’m not a personal development coach, I don’t intend to be one.

Why misery? Because they’ll probably be unhappy in addition to not necessarily being competent. The market is ultra-saturated, and it’s not this job that pays the most or enough.

And misery above all, because they turn away from their real skills, their real expertise. They’re engineers, organizational coaches, or consultants, or something else. And I see good ones turning away from that. (I’m not talking here about all those executives who are certified personal development coaches because it makes them better leaders, it’s laugh-out-loud funny. Note: it’s true if they took the teaching seriously, not as a mandatory badge on their CVs).

This endless stream of candidates for this title is probably due to the harshness of the job and our current corporate environments. What meaning indeed in the world when we see Total making so much profit and the Russian opponent getting assassinated in prison? What meaning when we see wars around the world? What meaning when we see so few large companies behaving intelligently in improving their practices and products? What meaning when we observe the delay, worse the backward movement of our organizations that brake so hard in front of the approaching obstacle: the overshoot of planetary boundaries and the great transformation to come that results from it?

So yes, rather than hitting the walls of this absurdity, we prefer to become personal development coaches, in a small coworking space sipping ginger juice while eating little cakes and discussing someone’s problems with them. A person in need, and just one. Everything is easier. In any case, everything is easier at the beginning, or easier as a work framework. After that, whether it’s easier to truly have an impact certainly not, and few of you actually have one.

So okay, continue becoming personal development coaches, but acknowledge that it starts with a desire to heal yourself (which is very legitimate), that it’s an easy high posture (I coach you, oh human) and work on it, remember that you’re not necessarily gifted at it (you bought your certification) and that you’re forgetting what you’re good at perhaps. Remember that you may be doing harm. Remember that you can be dangerous (don’t forget to get insurance). And if needed, stop being one. Have that perspective, that strength.

We’ve destroyed many fine professions by saturating them with charlatans or incompetents.

What would I like? That this alienation that pushes you so much into the patchouli chakras of personal development coaching, we fight against it. That we don’t fight against personal development coaching, there are some very good ones. That we fight against the source of your alienation: this disintegration of society, human relationships, civic consciousness, etc. And that it starts by not abandoning where you have value to flee into this masquerade. That you strengthen your discipline and your will and that each of us moves forward.