This article was written in response to the many people who ask me about coaching. The situation is bleak: so many financial professionals look for coaching help, yet so many of the coaches are ill-equipped to help them.

Today we're talking about coaches, looking at how and why so many of them fail their clients. The partners in my firm have been studying coaches for about ten years. We've been looking at who they are, where they came from and what value they represent. We scour their biographies, websites and articles. I've even interviewed some of them on my online radio show. What we consistently find is that too many of them are people who found themselves out of work, decided that coaching would give them a new career and allow them to work from home. And, as for the value, we don't see very much there. Bottom line, most coaches operating today give the coaching industry a bad name.

Here's what it looks like (these are real people)

• Jim was a mediocre salesman with a mediocre book of business. Instead of improving his skills and building his book, he started coaching other sales people. What did he teach them to do? Make the same mistakes he had made. What else could he teach?
• Suzy was a marketing writer who took a self-development class. She thought that if she became a coach, it would do two things for her: 1) take the focus off her own life's mistakes, and 2) she would get to tell other people what to do. What value did she represent?
• Scott was a really good client-service representative. He spent his days on the phone, and was very effective with people. But, he tried to generalize that success into coaching. He took some classes from one of the online Coaching Universities and went into the coaching business. Because he didn't have a background in psychology or personal improvement, the best he could do was follow a scripted guideline and ultimately underserve his clients.
• Carol was a school counselor who got tired of the political bureaucracy. She thought she could translate her work with children into a career as a coach for professionals. She couldn't. Her main mode of communication was telling, not asking. Her main demeanor was authoritarian. As a result, she was ill-prepared to help adults.

What's missing in those scenarios? Options and flexibility. People who don't study behavioral psychology simply don't have the depth of knowledge necessary to 1) offer you options or 2) the flexibility to deal with different types of problems. People who tell instead of ask can only give you what's already in their minds. That's in-the-box thinking at its worst.