Life coaching is on the rise, but amid promises of big money, experts say some are running ‘certificate mills’
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It wasn’t until after she got out that Sara Isbister realised she’d been caught in what she now likens to a “commercial cult”.
In late 2017 she was vulnerable and emotionally strained. The Australian was living in New Zealand with her husband and young family, working as a Pilates instructor.
She’d recently had her second child and was enduring a dark period of post-natal depression.
“I wasn’t thinking that I would take my life, I just didn’t want to be alive anymore,” she says.
Striving to improve and better understand herself, Sara sought out guidance from those around her and started exploring the wellness industry.
“I was spending so much time on the internet finding recipes — a lot of these people who actually wrote these recipes were coaches or some kind of influencers,” she says.
“They weave their own kind of ideology into it — over time you get exposed, and you almost get a little bit more radicalised in your own ideas.”
Sara says she had always battled a feeling that she wasn’t “good” enough.
“It becomes like a little bit of an obsession … almost like a goodness trap,” she says.
“I was so stuck in this need to be good and trying to find … almost the cure, like I had this sense of being defective.”
In her search for “good” health, Sara enrolled in a health coaching course and became a certified paleo-health coach.
She clicked with one of the teachers and found her advice about changing the way she thought about herself helpful.
Sara didn’t know it at the time, but this woman was also trained in neuro-linguistic programming.
Neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP, is a collection of psychological and communication strategies that can be applied to help someone reach a desired outcome.
Heidi Heron is the chair of the Neuro Linguistic Programming Association of Australia (NLPAA) and has a PhD in psychology. She says NLP is about understanding the language of the mind.
“When we can understand how some of the interference patterns get started, we can actually enhance them, we can change them, we can create new patterns of emotions, behaviours and thoughts.”
Some of the classic NLP techniques include using visualisation to change thought processes and habits, mirroring body language to make connections with people, and using affirmations or incantations to speak aspirations into reality.
NLP has been around since the 1970s when its co-founders, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, first studied the work of therapists like Milton Erickson, Gregory Bateson, Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir.
While NLP is considered a pseudoscience, it is popular among business coaches, sales and marketing executives, high-performance professionals and athletes.
Dr Heron says the reason that NLP is classified as a pseudoscience is because its application is unique for every client, and therefore hard to replicate.
To her, this is what makes NLP more useful to more people — if it became standardised, Dr Heron believes it would only be available to those in psychology or counselling degrees.
She says the majority of people who learn NLP aren’t planning to be coaches.
“They’re either doing it for their own personal growth, [to] be a better communicator, to get out of their own way, or to know more about how to manage their mind.”
But Dr Heron says this has opened up a space for some NLP trainers running short course “certificate mills”.
Content retrieved from: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-02-09/experts-warn-about-uncertifed-nlp-life-coaches/104685266.
