January 1, 2026 • 19 mins
The coaching industry is facing an uncomfortable truth.
Artificial intelligence can now research, write, summarize, and replicate most coaching frameworks for $79 a month. And that reality is about to expose who is actually transformational — and who is just performative.
In this unfiltered Thursday conversation, Kellan Fluckiger is joined by Ryan Christensen and Luisa Molano to explain why most coaches won’t survive the AI revolution, and what separates embodied, experienced coaches from those who are about to be replaced.
This episode is a wake-up call about lived experience, embodiment, emotional intelligence, and the future of real human transformation.
📌 IMPORTANT TOPICS DISCUSSED
- Why performative coaching is being exposed by AI
- The difference between information and transformation
- Embodiment as the real competitive advantage
- Why lived experience cannot be automated
- Emotional intelligence vs scripted coaching
- AI as a research tool, not a replacement for humans
- The $79/month bot problem
- Why most coaches struggle to make a living
- What must change to survive the next wave
- The future of coaching in an AI-driven world
🔥 Ready to turn your truth into impact? Join the Dream • Build • Write It Webinar. where bold creators transform ideas into movements. Reserve your free seat now at dreambuildwriteit.com
🔥 Continue your journey toward embodied coaching by connecting with Ryan Christensen at thebeliefengineer.com and Luisa Molano at luisamolano.com.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
Welcome to the show. Tired ofthe hype about living the dream?
It's time for truth. This isthe place for tools, power and real
talk so you can create thelife you dream and deserve your ultimate
life. Subscribe, share,create. You have infinite power.
(00:28):
Hey there. And welcome to thisepisode of your ultimate life, the
podcast broadcast, beenrunning for five and a half years,
almost six in April, about howto create a life of purpose, prosperity
and joy. And this is thespecial Thursday edition that I started
a little while ago talkingabout what AI is going to do or could
do in the coaching industryand what it's going to take to stay
(00:52):
in that business. And I've gota couple of coaches with me here
today. Ryan and Luisa, welcometo the show.
Thanks so much for having us.
Yeah, thanks for having us.
Cool. So we're going to beunstructured and just kind of talk
a little. I'll start it offwith a question. Ryan, you happen
to be in my upper left handcorner and I read left to right,
so you're first. The initialsort of kickoff question is, are
(01:18):
you using any kind of AI stuffin your coaching practice? And if
you are, are you doing withit? And if you're not, why not?
Yeah, it's a good question. Soa lot of what I do is very deep subconscious
belief work, kind of likebrain surgery for limiting beliefs.
And AI is at a point where,not at a point yet where you can
do hypnosis with it. So Idon't use it directly with my clients.
(01:41):
I do use it a lot forresearch. I found it very, very good
for that. And the other piecethat I really use it a lot for is
messaging. I have autism. Itend to over explain massively. And
trying to translate this crazything to normal people speak has
been a problem for me. Sobeing able to take my messaging and
I want to say drop it in AIand get a more simplified version
that's easier for people tolock onto and, you know, at a pace
(02:03):
and structure that they canuse has been extremely useful for
me. That actually lets me getmy message across in a way that is
a lot more accessible.
So it's exciting for you interms of what it can do for you in
a, in a holistic sense, notspecifically in client work.
Correct, correct. And I cansee later on down the road as I'm
(02:24):
sort of expanding some of myprograms to be longer programs, I
could definitely see we'rehaving some tools to where you could
have the interactive like Qand A to get some additional support.
I can See where that would bevery useful down the road. But the
way they're structured rightnow, with large language models essentially
being a screen grab of theInternet and very typical models
and very typical responses, itdoesn't really line up with the models
(02:46):
and principles that I use. Sothe challenge there is trying to
engineer a custom AI thatactually reflects your principles
and can leverage that in aneffective way. That's a pretty big
engineering challenge.
Cool. Luis, so what about you?What are you doing with it?
I love using AI. I startedusing it in the fall of 2020. I did
(03:10):
work for about a year with astartup operating in stealth mold,
building AI technology andleveraging AI technologies to build
an app for teen mental health.And so at the time, it was all this
talk about it, like, how am Igoing to use it in coaching? I'm
doing this work with thestartup, and so I just dove in. I
didn't know what I was doing,but I wanted to start using it. And
(03:30):
turns out that was a reallyhelpful and useful way to use it
because I tried to use it foreverything that I could, from summarizing
transcripts of calls withclients, to polishing my writing,
to admittedly outsourcing mywriting, and very quickly learned
that is not the way that Iwant to go and not the way that I
want to show up, at least tobe original and a true thought leader.
(03:51):
These days, I use it still tosupport me with polishing, writing,
giving me feedback,brainstorming up to and including.
And Ryan, you touched on this.The beginnings of, like, deep transformational
work. Like, help me thinkabout this deeply. Like, I'm having
(04:12):
a conversation with Steve Jobsand Einstein on this topic. Let's
riff. And it's kind of fun.
So if you think about, I mean,we call it artificial intelligence,
but it is not intelligent yet.It is a massive collation and organization
(04:34):
and research thing. But ithasn't reached AGI yet. Artificial
general intelligence, whichis, you know, the supposedly scary
point. Ryan, if you thinkabout, I hear the word in these interviews,
creative partner. That wordcomes up a lot that people say when
(04:55):
I say, how are you using it?If I. If I think about that, or you
think about creative partner,and also a little bit of what Louisa
said. I'm having a convo withEinstein and Jobs. What occurs to
you about the possibilitiesfor AI, specifically with respect
to coaching, transformation,belief change, the kind of stuff
(05:16):
that you're working on?
Well, I'll tell you thebiggest challenge I see in AI. There's
two big challenges I see inAI. In terms of those things, not
three, actually. Number one,AI has no idea what anything is because
everything's thrown in ablender and it's all taken in one
bucket. The same words andsame concepts mean very different
things in different buckets.If you're talking about transformation
(05:40):
from psychological standpoint,from a spiritual standpoint, from
belief work, that has verydifferent implications. Right. So
getting the context right andplaying in the right bucket is something
you have to work at. The otherthing I would say is the reasoning
piece of it is very rationallystructured, so it doesn't have that
(06:00):
same emotional frame in orderto be able to establish that right
context off the. Off the rip.Right. And so you really have to
do a lot of work to set up thequestions in such a way that AI can
give you good answers. Youoften will have to say, okay, this
is what I mean by these terms.One guy I know has basically an 80
page document of treat thisterm this way, treat this concept
this way, that he has to loadinto AI in order to be able to do
(06:22):
any real work with it. Now, Ilove what Luis was saying about,
hey, give me a couplehistorical figures where there's
a good corpus of data on howthey think. I want to have a conversation
with these people so I canwork through some problems. Love
that. Haven't been using AI inthat way. Really excited to start
doing that. And so using it asa tool to do research, ideation and
(06:42):
refining your concepts andmodalities and techniques, I think
is phenomenal. But we have tobe really careful about how you set
those problems up on the front end.
Cool. Luisa, what are youthinking about that?
Well, I'll start with whereyou ended, Ryan, and you mentioned
this earlier, Kellen. Ibelieve as we move forward as coaches,
(07:06):
our lived experience, whatwe've done, the results with clients,
what we have. Back to whatyou've both alluded to embodied,
we get the information,whether that's AI, a book, a podcast,
a conversation, a speaker, akeynote, whatever. And then there's
how we can only as humans,take that integrated, process it,
(07:31):
and then distill it to ourclients that meets them where they
are and helps them move towardwhere they want to be. And that is
the differentiator. So in thatsense, there's an acceleration, at
least to me, of information ina very strategic way that I can receive.
But then ultimately the buckstops here, or maybe starts here
(07:54):
in terms of what I do with it.And that's the edge that we can leverage
AI for to differentiateourselves in the Market, do you guys?
Oh, go ahead.
If I could. If I could dub toyou a little bit off that. I think
the thing that a coach can dothat AI almost never will be able
to do, is challenge a client,see the gap in their logic and reasoning
(08:19):
and their mindset and theirframing. That is the problem they're
facing. Because if you'regoing to a saying, hey, I've got
this problem, I'm seeing itthis way, what's the solution? It
doesn't necessarily know thequestions to ask to break that framework
is. It doesn't necessarilyknow the questions it needs to explore
to figure out where the gapsare in the understanding that led
(08:40):
you to this problem in thefirst place. And that's where that
lived experience as a coach is100% critical. That is the edge that
I don't think you canduplicate with AI anytime soon, if
ever. Even if you get to AGI,I'm not entirely sure, because it's
that emotional experiences,that lived, embodied experience of
engaging with the world thatgives you that. And AI cannot engage
(09:02):
with the world, cannot getthat feedback right. And I think
that right there is where thecoach sits that can't be duplicated
by AI. But all the refiningyour process and increasing your
skill set and messaging andeverything else, using AI to support
you as a coach, I think that's phenomenal.
Helen, go ahead. I'd love toadd one more thing to Ryan. This
(09:26):
is so juicy where it's going.So one thing that I have done and
have found really valuable,that again, to your point, I cannot
replicate the space that ahuman can hold for another. And going
back to my original pointabout information and the strategic
use of AI to distillinformation, I have taken a snippet,
(09:50):
a segment of a conversationwith a client, and I said, I have
the sense I missed somethinghere. Read this. What did I miss?
And it's like, boom, boom,boom, boom.
Here.
You nailed this. You did this.And I look at it and it's all information.
And then I'll have a nugget.I'm like, that's it. Dang it. I went
right past that thing. Andthen I can take that information,
(10:13):
integrate it, and then use itin service of my clients the next
time around. And it is juicyto riff and collaborate that way
with AI.
I love that.
One of the things that when Idid an analysis of where coaches
are right now, actually rightnow is in April when I started this
(10:35):
project, so six months ago orso, I asked for an income breakdown,
and it wasn't pretty coachestoday or six months ago, including
today, most of them aren'tmaking a living, you know, a living
per se, in terms of what Idefined and in the conversation and
I did it like you guys havedescribed, back and forth and exploring
(10:57):
different ideas. It used theword performative. Performative coaching.
And it defined that, to yourpoint, Ryan, as. As going through
a series of actions,prescribed actions, checklists, processes,
modalities, systems that theylearned somewhere. And you said something,
(11:19):
both of you, about thisembodiment. And the conclusion we
got to is the reason 95% ofcoaches won't may be able to make
a living is because thatentire section, the guts of coaching
today, isn't at the level ofhuman connection. It is at the level
of performative, where coachesseem to be relying on some set of
(11:44):
principles, processes andtools that they learned, which may
be really valuable. I'm not,you know, dissing any of those things,
but unless we have personallywalked over that broken glass, all
we're doing is talking aboutthat thing over there. We're talking
about something that we knowand not something that we have experienced.
And so what it seems like tome is that as AI improves and in
(12:09):
the process of writing thisbook, six, seven months doing the
research, right, in the book,I saw the capability of ChatGPT double
and then double again in termsof its ability to research, collate,
write, explain, connectquickly and not have to have 57 iterations
back and forth, that sort ofthing. And if it does that every,
you know, three months and byChristmas, five iterations more,
(12:31):
that's going to be 32 timesbetter than it is now. And so if
you think about that kind ofgrowth, it seems to me the only thing
that's left, the 5%, is goingto be the truth of your lived experience.
And if you don't have, ifthat's not where you coach from,
you'll be replaced immediatelybecause you'll be able to buy that
(12:55):
for 79amonth in some bot thatis really good. And I have experiences
in doing this where I'm like,looking at some of the answers and
scared and then talking to itabout why am I emotional about this,
why am I reacting this way andthen going down that rabbit hole
(13:15):
and having that conversation.So what do you think has to happen?
Either one of you? I don'tcare what has to happen. What is
the pivot that coaches have tomake in order to stay in the game?
Lisa, how about you go first?If you've got the thoughts or like,
got a couple Ideas off the top.
Of my head, yeah. The firstthing that came up is spend more
(13:41):
time in your body. I know itsounds like, okay, well, if I want
to be embodied, then thatmeans more time in my body. But,
like, fully, like, feel yourbody, dance, move, whatever that
looks like. If it's golf, ifit's soccer, if it's cold, plunging,
(14:02):
like connecting with, knowingyour body. Because what that then
will do. To use your analogyof your, your, Your analogy of walking
on glass, you can know becauseyou've read or you've heard or you
have a bot. You can go to abot and go, okay, I want to walk
on glass. What do I do? Okay,well, you do this and you do that
and the theory and theinformation, and it's all very transactional
(14:25):
and maybe helpful, butcertainly not transformative. Or
you can have walked to yourpoint through glass and go, listen,
here's what no one's going totell you about walking on glass.
You can avoid walking onglass. Go here, do that, and then
you don't have to walk it. Orif that's what you're supposed to
do, then you're going to walkon the glass. But when you're halfway
through, you're going to feel,when it cuts your heel, there's this
(14:47):
pain that's going to shoot allthe way up your leg and you're going
to feel it in your tailbone.And in that moment, you're going
to feel like you are dying.And what you need to do is stop,
but you actually can keepgoing because here's actually what's
happening in your brain andhere's what's happening in your body.
And the person gets to theother side and it's like, holy crap,
I thought I was going to die,but I didn't. And an embodied human,
(15:08):
that's how they can unpack thehuman experience through one example,
like walking on glass. And sobeing in our body is. Is the only
way to meet the. Maybe not theonly, but the truest, most potent
way to embody our life, whichis what we're both talking about.
I think for me, there's acouple of different experiences that
(15:29):
kind of come up, come to mind.First, I joined a gym here in Austin
about six months ago, and theysay, oh, here's a free session with
the personal trainer. And I'mlike, okay, whatever. It's going
to be the usual. Sat down,talked with the guy, and like, one
of the things that's reallyhard for me working out is like,
I just really can't get in mybody, it's hard for me to be embodied,
like, actually be present. SoI was talking about, it's like, okay,
cool, let's go ahead and try acouple different exercises. And the
(15:49):
way you set the exercises up,I could not do anything but be 100%
present in my body fully. I'mlike, whoa. Blew my mind, right?
And as soon as he did that,it's like, okay, here's my money
to die me a program. Let'sroll. Cause he just absolutely fricking
nailed what I needed becausehe understood what my needs were.
The second thing I'll say isit's really easy to solve a problem
(16:11):
once you know what the problemis. The hard part is figuring out
what the heck is a problem.Right? And so if I'm there, if I'm
your. Your average Joe and I'mlooking for a coach, I'm like, okay,
I've got a weight lossproblem. So I go to a weight loss
coach and he's got this mealplan. I do the meal plan, I don't
lose it. Great. The problemsolving from that point and the diagnostic
process you have to go throughfrom that point when things are not
(16:32):
working, you got to be good atwhat you're doing. Right. So is the
performative coaching going togo away? I think there's a high chance
that it will. Right. But evenwith that, I would say two things.
Number one, there's stillgoing to be, you know, I just want
to say, like, kind of averagedough people that are gonna still
want that human interaction,even with a more performative thing
(16:53):
where you're kind of goingthrough a checklist. They want the
guy that's just going to runhim through the 12 machines in the
gym, because that's what theywant. They want to be able to talk
to a therapist who's actuallyhuman. Right. The other piece is
that AI can't do emotions.They can't really understand emotions
and what they mean and howthey land and how to navigate somebody
(17:13):
through those emotionalexperiences. So there's always going
to be that space. Until theyfigure out how to get emotions in
AI, I have no idea how theheck they're going to do that. Where
that human touches 100%necessary. And even if it's in a
more performative way, it'sstill a heck of a lot better than
what AGI can deliver or whatAI can deliver, at least for the
foreseeable future. So is itgoing to be harder to make a living?
(17:34):
Maybe. I think the other pieceis that People don't understand the
value of coaching writ large.We don't really make the case for
it the way we probably shouldin the industry. So making that case
of this is how to accelerate.This is how to save yourself years
of pain and frustration andwhatever you're doing. I think we
need to be making the casemore for why coaching is necessary,
(17:58):
just kind of at large.
Yeah, so. So let's go downthat road a minute, because I think
everybody that hangs a shingleand says they're a coach, and I'm
still seeing Facebook ads thatsay, you know, make a living as a
life coach who's got a pictureof some person on a beach in a chair,
work from anywhere, makemoney, blah, blah, blah. And you
already know that they'regoing to teach a set of principles
(18:20):
and ideas, each of which maybe valuable and have good information,
but without that trueconnection. And the true connection,
at least in my mind, can onlycome when two things happen. When
the person who is coaching hasbeen through the experience, the
embodiment piece, becauseotherwise you're just talking about
stuff and you might as wellget it from a robot. And the second
(18:43):
thing is the person deliveringwho is the coach cannot be poisoning
the conversation with, what dothey think about me? How good am
I doing? Are they going tosign up? Are they going to re up?
Am I impressive? All of thatdialogue, which is part of the. The
(19:04):
95% of people when they'rehaving conversations that ought to
be bordering onto or goinginto transformational, they're. They're
contaminated with that otherstuff, and that poisons the conversation
and reduces it to the level ofperformative stuff. That's the thesis
that I have about that and why$79 a month is going to give you
(19:26):
what you need except for thosepieces of truth. What do you think
about that?
Well, I'll say that that pieceright there of like, here's the freedom
on the beach, and I'm sellingyou, that is why you have so much
performative coaching. Right?The why that you're driving into
it. The why that you're goinginto it with. Absolutely. You know,
(19:47):
you can do the right thing forthe right reason. You can do the
right thing for the wrongreason. If you're doing the right
thing for the wrong reason,you're going to do it the wrong way.
And if you're getting intocoaching to have the freedom on the
beach, you're doing it for thewrong freaking reason. If you're
doing transformational.
Welcome to the show. Tired ofthe hype about living the dream?
It's time for truth. This isthe place for tools, power and real
talk so you can create thelife you dream and deserve your ultimate
life. Subscribe, share,create. You have infinite power.
(00:28):
Hey there. And welcome to thisepisode of your ultimate life, the
podcast broadcast, beenrunning for five and a half years,
almost six in April, about howto create a life of purpose, prosperity
and joy. And this is thespecial Thursday edition that I started
a little while ago talkingabout what AI is going to do or could
do in the coaching industryand what it's going to take to stay
(00:52):
in that business. And I've gota couple of coaches with me here
today. Ryan and Luisa, welcometo the show.
Thanks so much for having us.
Yeah, thanks for having us.
Cool. So we're going to beunstructured and just kind of talk
a little. I'll start it offwith a question. Ryan, you happen
to be in my upper left handcorner and I read left to right,
so you're first. The initialsort of kickoff question is, are
(01:18):
you using any kind of AI stuffin your coaching practice? And if
you are, are you doing withit? And if you're not, why not?
Yeah, it's a good question. Soa lot of what I do is very deep subconscious
belief work, kind of likebrain surgery for limiting beliefs.
And AI is at a point where,not at a point yet where you can
do hypnosis with it. So Idon't use it directly with my clients.
(01:41):
I do use it a lot forresearch. I found it very, very good
for that. And the other piecethat I really use it a lot for is
messaging. I have autism. Itend to over explain massively. And
trying to translate this crazything to normal people speak has
been a problem for me. Sobeing able to take my messaging and
I want to say drop it in AIand get a more simplified version
that's easier for people tolock onto and, you know, at a pace
(02:03):
and structure that they canuse has been extremely useful for
me. That actually lets me getmy message across in a way that is
a lot more accessible.
So it's exciting for you interms of what it can do for you in
a, in a holistic sense, notspecifically in client work.
Correct, correct. And I cansee later on down the road as I'm
(02:24):
sort of expanding some of myprograms to be longer programs, I
could definitely see we'rehaving some tools to where you could
have the interactive like Qand A to get some additional support.
I can See where that would bevery useful down the road. But the
way they're structured rightnow, with large language models essentially
being a screen grab of theInternet and very typical models
and very typical responses, itdoesn't really line up with the models
(02:46):
and principles that I use. Sothe challenge there is trying to
engineer a custom AI thatactually reflects your principles
and can leverage that in aneffective way. That's a pretty big
engineering challenge.
Cool. Luis, so what about you?What are you doing with it?
I love using AI. I startedusing it in the fall of 2020. I did
(03:10):
work for about a year with astartup operating in stealth mold,
building AI technology andleveraging AI technologies to build
an app for teen mental health.And so at the time, it was all this
talk about it, like, how am Igoing to use it in coaching? I'm
doing this work with thestartup, and so I just dove in. I
didn't know what I was doing,but I wanted to start using it. And
(03:30):
turns out that was a reallyhelpful and useful way to use it
because I tried to use it foreverything that I could, from summarizing
transcripts of calls withclients, to polishing my writing,
to admittedly outsourcing mywriting, and very quickly learned
that is not the way that Iwant to go and not the way that I
want to show up, at least tobe original and a true thought leader.
(03:51):
These days, I use it still tosupport me with polishing, writing,
giving me feedback,brainstorming up to and including.
And Ryan, you touched on this.The beginnings of, like, deep transformational
work. Like, help me thinkabout this deeply. Like, I'm having
(04:12):
a conversation with Steve Jobsand Einstein on this topic. Let's
riff. And it's kind of fun.
So if you think about, I mean,we call it artificial intelligence,
but it is not intelligent yet.It is a massive collation and organization
(04:34):
and research thing. But ithasn't reached AGI yet. Artificial
general intelligence, whichis, you know, the supposedly scary
point. Ryan, if you thinkabout, I hear the word in these interviews,
creative partner. That wordcomes up a lot that people say when
(04:55):
I say, how are you using it?If I. If I think about that, or you
think about creative partner,and also a little bit of what Louisa
said. I'm having a convo withEinstein and Jobs. What occurs to
you about the possibilitiesfor AI, specifically with respect
to coaching, transformation,belief change, the kind of stuff
(05:16):
that you're working on?
Well, I'll tell you thebiggest challenge I see in AI. There's
two big challenges I see inAI. In terms of those things, not
three, actually. Number one,AI has no idea what anything is because
everything's thrown in ablender and it's all taken in one
bucket. The same words andsame concepts mean very different
things in different buckets.If you're talking about transformation
(05:40):
from psychological standpoint,from a spiritual standpoint, from
belief work, that has verydifferent implications. Right. So
getting the context right andplaying in the right bucket is something
you have to work at. The otherthing I would say is the reasoning
piece of it is very rationallystructured, so it doesn't have that
(06:00):
same emotional frame in orderto be able to establish that right
context off the. Off the rip.Right. And so you really have to
do a lot of work to set up thequestions in such a way that AI can
give you good answers. Youoften will have to say, okay, this
is what I mean by these terms.One guy I know has basically an 80
page document of treat thisterm this way, treat this concept
this way, that he has to loadinto AI in order to be able to do
(06:22):
any real work with it. Now, Ilove what Luis was saying about,
hey, give me a couplehistorical figures where there's
a good corpus of data on howthey think. I want to have a conversation
with these people so I canwork through some problems. Love
that. Haven't been using AI inthat way. Really excited to start
doing that. And so using it asa tool to do research, ideation and
(06:42):
refining your concepts andmodalities and techniques, I think
is phenomenal. But we have tobe really careful about how you set
those problems up on the front end.
Cool. Luisa, what are youthinking about that?
Well, I'll start with whereyou ended, Ryan, and you mentioned
this earlier, Kellen. Ibelieve as we move forward as coaches,
(07:06):
our lived experience, whatwe've done, the results with clients,
what we have. Back to whatyou've both alluded to embodied,
we get the information,whether that's AI, a book, a podcast,
a conversation, a speaker, akeynote, whatever. And then there's
how we can only as humans,take that integrated, process it,
(07:31):
and then distill it to ourclients that meets them where they
are and helps them move towardwhere they want to be. And that is
the differentiator. So in thatsense, there's an acceleration, at
least to me, of information ina very strategic way that I can receive.
But then ultimately the buckstops here, or maybe starts here
(07:54):
in terms of what I do with it.And that's the edge that we can leverage
AI for to differentiateourselves in the Market, do you guys?
Oh, go ahead.
If I could. If I could dub toyou a little bit off that. I think
the thing that a coach can dothat AI almost never will be able
to do, is challenge a client,see the gap in their logic and reasoning
(08:19):
and their mindset and theirframing. That is the problem they're
facing. Because if you'regoing to a saying, hey, I've got
this problem, I'm seeing itthis way, what's the solution? It
doesn't necessarily know thequestions to ask to break that framework
is. It doesn't necessarilyknow the questions it needs to explore
to figure out where the gapsare in the understanding that led
(08:40):
you to this problem in thefirst place. And that's where that
lived experience as a coach is100% critical. That is the edge that
I don't think you canduplicate with AI anytime soon, if
ever. Even if you get to AGI,I'm not entirely sure, because it's
that emotional experiences,that lived, embodied experience of
engaging with the world thatgives you that. And AI cannot engage
(09:02):
with the world, cannot getthat feedback right. And I think
that right there is where thecoach sits that can't be duplicated
by AI. But all the refiningyour process and increasing your
skill set and messaging andeverything else, using AI to support
you as a coach, I think that's phenomenal.
Helen, go ahead. I'd love toadd one more thing to Ryan. This
(09:26):
is so juicy where it's going.So one thing that I have done and
have found really valuable,that again, to your point, I cannot
replicate the space that ahuman can hold for another. And going
back to my original pointabout information and the strategic
use of AI to distillinformation, I have taken a snippet,
(09:50):
a segment of a conversationwith a client, and I said, I have
the sense I missed somethinghere. Read this. What did I miss?
And it's like, boom, boom,boom, boom.
Here.
You nailed this. You did this.And I look at it and it's all information.
And then I'll have a nugget.I'm like, that's it. Dang it. I went
right past that thing. Andthen I can take that information,
(10:13):
integrate it, and then use itin service of my clients the next
time around. And it is juicyto riff and collaborate that way
with AI.
I love that.
One of the things that when Idid an analysis of where coaches
are right now, actually rightnow is in April when I started this
(10:35):
project, so six months ago orso, I asked for an income breakdown,
and it wasn't pretty coachestoday or six months ago, including
today, most of them aren'tmaking a living, you know, a living
per se, in terms of what Idefined and in the conversation and
I did it like you guys havedescribed, back and forth and exploring
(10:57):
different ideas. It used theword performative. Performative coaching.
And it defined that, to yourpoint, Ryan, as. As going through
a series of actions,prescribed actions, checklists, processes,
modalities, systems that theylearned somewhere. And you said something,
(11:19):
both of you, about thisembodiment. And the conclusion we
got to is the reason 95% ofcoaches won't may be able to make
a living is because thatentire section, the guts of coaching
today, isn't at the level ofhuman connection. It is at the level
of performative, where coachesseem to be relying on some set of
(11:44):
principles, processes andtools that they learned, which may
be really valuable. I'm not,you know, dissing any of those things,
but unless we have personallywalked over that broken glass, all
we're doing is talking aboutthat thing over there. We're talking
about something that we knowand not something that we have experienced.
And so what it seems like tome is that as AI improves and in
(12:09):
the process of writing thisbook, six, seven months doing the
research, right, in the book,I saw the capability of ChatGPT double
and then double again in termsof its ability to research, collate,
write, explain, connectquickly and not have to have 57 iterations
back and forth, that sort ofthing. And if it does that every,
you know, three months and byChristmas, five iterations more,
(12:31):
that's going to be 32 timesbetter than it is now. And so if
you think about that kind ofgrowth, it seems to me the only thing
that's left, the 5%, is goingto be the truth of your lived experience.
And if you don't have, ifthat's not where you coach from,
you'll be replaced immediatelybecause you'll be able to buy that
(12:55):
for 79amonth in some bot thatis really good. And I have experiences
in doing this where I'm like,looking at some of the answers and
scared and then talking to itabout why am I emotional about this,
why am I reacting this way andthen going down that rabbit hole
(13:15):
and having that conversation.So what do you think has to happen?
Either one of you? I don'tcare what has to happen. What is
the pivot that coaches have tomake in order to stay in the game?
Lisa, how about you go first?If you've got the thoughts or like,
got a couple Ideas off the top.
Of my head, yeah. The firstthing that came up is spend more
(13:41):
time in your body. I know itsounds like, okay, well, if I want
to be embodied, then thatmeans more time in my body. But,
like, fully, like, feel yourbody, dance, move, whatever that
looks like. If it's golf, ifit's soccer, if it's cold, plunging,
(14:02):
like connecting with, knowingyour body. Because what that then
will do. To use your analogyof your, your, Your analogy of walking
on glass, you can know becauseyou've read or you've heard or you
have a bot. You can go to abot and go, okay, I want to walk
on glass. What do I do? Okay,well, you do this and you do that
and the theory and theinformation, and it's all very transactional
(14:25):
and maybe helpful, butcertainly not transformative. Or
you can have walked to yourpoint through glass and go, listen,
here's what no one's going totell you about walking on glass.
You can avoid walking onglass. Go here, do that, and then
you don't have to walk it. Orif that's what you're supposed to
do, then you're going to walkon the glass. But when you're halfway
through, you're going to feel,when it cuts your heel, there's this
(14:47):
pain that's going to shoot allthe way up your leg and you're going
to feel it in your tailbone.And in that moment, you're going
to feel like you are dying.And what you need to do is stop,
but you actually can keepgoing because here's actually what's
happening in your brain andhere's what's happening in your body.
And the person gets to theother side and it's like, holy crap,
I thought I was going to die,but I didn't. And an embodied human,
(15:08):
that's how they can unpack thehuman experience through one example,
like walking on glass. And sobeing in our body is. Is the only
way to meet the. Maybe not theonly, but the truest, most potent
way to embody our life, whichis what we're both talking about.
I think for me, there's acouple of different experiences that
(15:29):
kind of come up, come to mind.First, I joined a gym here in Austin
about six months ago, and theysay, oh, here's a free session with
the personal trainer. And I'mlike, okay, whatever. It's going
to be the usual. Sat down,talked with the guy, and like, one
of the things that's reallyhard for me working out is like,
I just really can't get in mybody, it's hard for me to be embodied,
like, actually be present. SoI was talking about, it's like, okay,
cool, let's go ahead and try acouple different exercises. And the
(15:49):
way you set the exercises up,I could not do anything but be 100%
present in my body fully. I'mlike, whoa. Blew my mind, right?
And as soon as he did that,it's like, okay, here's my money
to die me a program. Let'sroll. Cause he just absolutely fricking
nailed what I needed becausehe understood what my needs were.
The second thing I'll say isit's really easy to solve a problem
(16:11):
once you know what the problemis. The hard part is figuring out
what the heck is a problem.Right? And so if I'm there, if I'm
your. Your average Joe and I'mlooking for a coach, I'm like, okay,
I've got a weight lossproblem. So I go to a weight loss
coach and he's got this mealplan. I do the meal plan, I don't
lose it. Great. The problemsolving from that point and the diagnostic
process you have to go throughfrom that point when things are not
(16:32):
working, you got to be good atwhat you're doing. Right. So is the
performative coaching going togo away? I think there's a high chance
that it will. Right. But evenwith that, I would say two things.
Number one, there's stillgoing to be, you know, I just want
to say, like, kind of averagedough people that are gonna still
want that human interaction,even with a more performative thing
(16:53):
where you're kind of goingthrough a checklist. They want the
guy that's just going to runhim through the 12 machines in the
gym, because that's what theywant. They want to be able to talk
to a therapist who's actuallyhuman. Right. The other piece is
that AI can't do emotions.They can't really understand emotions
and what they mean and howthey land and how to navigate somebody
(17:13):
through those emotionalexperiences. So there's always going
to be that space. Until theyfigure out how to get emotions in
AI, I have no idea how theheck they're going to do that. Where
that human touches 100%necessary. And even if it's in a
more performative way, it'sstill a heck of a lot better than
what AGI can deliver or whatAI can deliver, at least for the
foreseeable future. So is itgoing to be harder to make a living?
(17:34):
Maybe. I think the other pieceis that People don't understand the
value of coaching writ large.We don't really make the case for
it the way we probably shouldin the industry. So making that case
of this is how to accelerate.This is how to save yourself years
of pain and frustration andwhatever you're doing. I think we
need to be making the casemore for why coaching is necessary,
(17:58):
just kind of at large.
Yeah, so. So let's go downthat road a minute, because I think
everybody that hangs a shingleand says they're a coach, and I'm
still seeing Facebook ads thatsay, you know, make a living as a
life coach who's got a pictureof some person on a beach in a chair,
work from anywhere, makemoney, blah, blah, blah. And you
already know that they'regoing to teach a set of principles
(18:20):
and ideas, each of which maybe valuable and have good information,
but without that trueconnection. And the true connection,
at least in my mind, can onlycome when two things happen. When
the person who is coaching hasbeen through the experience, the
embodiment piece, becauseotherwise you're just talking about
stuff and you might as wellget it from a robot. And the second
(18:43):
thing is the person deliveringwho is the coach cannot be poisoning
the conversation with, what dothey think about me? How good am
I doing? Are they going tosign up? Are they going to re up?
Am I impressive? All of thatdialogue, which is part of the. The
(19:04):
95% of people when they'rehaving conversations that ought to
be bordering onto or goinginto transformational, they're. They're
contaminated with that otherstuff, and that poisons the conversation
and reduces it to the level ofperformative stuff. That's the thesis
that I have about that and why$79 a month is going to give you
(19:26):
what you need except for thosepieces of truth. What do you think
about that?
Well, I'll say that that pieceright there of like, here's the freedom
on the beach, and I'm sellingyou, that is why you have so much
performative coaching. Right?The why that you're driving into
it. The why that you're goinginto it with. Absolutely. You know,
(19:47):
you can do the right thing forthe right reason. You can do the
right thing for the wrongreason. If you're doing the right
thing for the wrong reason,you're going to do it the wrong way.
And if you're getting intocoaching to have the freedom on the
beach, you're doing it for thewrong freaking reason. If you're
doing transformational.
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