Like many others after the COVID pandemic ended, LA-based journalist Jane Marie found herself feeling depressed.
“My life didn't look anything like it had a couple of years ago. And I thought, ‘I'm going to try to find somebody who can tell me how to do this differently,’” she says.
She ended up finding a life coach, and immediately opened up during their first session.
“When she first came into the office, she did an intake, sat down with me and said, ‘What's your problem?’ And I said … ‘I want someone to tell me what to do with my feet every day. Where am I? What time do I need to do stuff? Where am I going? I feel so unmoored at the moment. And I just need someone to help me put edges on my day,’” she says.
In the third season of her podcast “The Dream,” Marie takes the audience on her deeply personal journey as she investigates the legitimacy of the life-coaching industry. In previous seasons, Marie investigated pyramid schemes and the wellness industry, so she says it was a “natural progression” for her next season to explore life coaches.
“It’s really just about: What is our deal here in America with … wanting to optimize ourselves and our days and … having the right mindset and being productive? It's exhausting, especially after the last few years we've had,” Marie says.
She found that people don’t need to be licensed professionals to become life coaches – and there are many different specialties, including microdosing, relationships, parenting, and finance. And the life coaching industry can be lucrative. Marie found someone paying her life coach $30,000 an hour for each session.
Eventually, Marie found a wellness life coach who clicked with her. “At first she really scared me. There was something cult-y about … what we were doing. So I just told her, and we talked about it. And then we just developed a real friendship through that.”
At the end of the day, though, Marie still remains skeptical about the merits of life coaching.
“Maximizing your potential, believing we live in a meritocracy … all of it's a scam is what I came away from this thinking,” she says. “These are tools [that] railroad barons and oil barons made up to make themselves richer, to convince the populace to just work a little bit harder, just a little bit harder, just a little bit harder. … And in the end, like we're all so stressed out and there is no way to get rich. They are hoarding all the money.”