Why Are So Many Coaches Burned Out? Because the Advice Is Wrong.

Most of the best moves I've made in my career came from ignoring the advice I was given.

I can get how that might sound like bragging but it's actually kind of grim when you think about it, because the advice was the consensus, the stuff everyone agrees you're supposed to do when you're building a practice in this industry:

Work hard. See more clients.

Never admit you don't know something.

Protect your methods.

Be confident, always.

Grind now, rest later.

The protocols exist for a reason, trust the process.

The funny thing is, I've always been the guy who ignores the conventional wisdom. For better or worse, I like to go left when everyone else is going right, and I've never had much patience for "this is how everyone does it." And a lot of what I'm about to describe—the moves that actually helped me build something sustainable—I stumbled into early, sometimes by accident, just because I didn't want to do it the normal way.

Now, I need to be honest here: I still burn out. Regularly. Rejecting the industry's defaults doesn't make you immune to your own bullshit. I have my own ways of running myself into the ground—boundaries that stretch until they snap, yeses that should've been nos, one more client when I'm already so cooked I fantasize about faking my own death just to get a week off. Bad advice isn't the only trap. Sometimes we are the problem, and I am frequently my own worst enemy.

But holy shit, the advice is bad.

Take the confidence thing. So many people in this industry act like admitting uncertainty is career suicide—like if you tell a client "I don't know" they'll lose faith in you and find someone who does know. So we bluster and perform expertise we don't have. We nod along like the assessment made perfect sense when actually we're confused and hoping the protocol works anyway. We become very expensive Magic 8-Balls, except the Magic 8-Ball at least has the decency to say "ask again later" instead of pretending it knows what the fuck is going on.

I stopped doing that. I started telling my clients "I don't know, but I'm going to figure it out" and you know what happened? They trusted me more, not less. People can smell bullshit, and they'd rather work with someone who's honest about the uncertainty than someone who's pretending to have answers they don't have.

I also started telling people "I'm not the right guy for this, but I know someone who is" and referring them out, which felt like throwing away money except it wasn't, because those people came back later with problems I was the right guy for, and they sent friends, and my reputation became "the guy who'll help solve your problem" instead of "the guy who'll say anything to keep you."

I refuse to romanticize the grind. The "work more, rest is for later, hustle til you're rich" messaging is everywhere, and it's fucking poison. It frames rest as something you earn after you've made it, as if "making it" isn't a moving target that keeps receding. I watch people in this industry wear their 60-hour weeks like medals, bragging about how packed their schedules are, how they're "booked out for months." And then I watch them burn out, or get divorced, or become the kind of practitioner who's just going through the motions—dead behind the eyes, palpating the same spot and prescribing the same bullshit because the part of their brain that used to give a shit packed its bags years ago. Congratulations, you ground yourself down to a fine paste and spread yourself so thin you can't remember why you started this career in the first place. Tell me about how you love the grind, and I'll ask you where your boundary problem came from.

The fact is, the work we do can't run on a typical 9 to 5, with clients stacked back to back to maximize billable hours. I did that for a while and I was fucking miserable, because this work isn't factory work. You can't just crank out sessions like widgets. Every client is a problem to solve, and problem-solving takes mental energy that depletes whether you want it to or not. I was scheduling myself like an assembly line worker and then wondering why I felt braindead by 2pm.

So I stopped. I started protecting my mornings for thinking and writing. I put gaps between clients. I refused to apologize for not being available at all hours. And my work got better—more sustainable AND actually better—because I wasn't showing up to sessions already running on fumes.

The loneliness thing was harder to fix because nobody frames it as a business problem—it's just part of the mythology. Think about every story you've absorbed about entrepreneurship, every podcast and Instagram post and "how I built this" narrative: it's always the visionary founder who did it all themselves. "How romantic," we think while ingesting the message that isolation is the price of admission, that if you're asking for help you're not ready, and that your peers are your competition and sharing what you know gives away your edge. I bought into that for a long time.

What changed is I went through a stretch where I was utterly, ruthlessly lonely—lonely in the way where you're surrounded by clients and colleagues and you still feel like no one actually knows what you're dealing with. The kind of lonely where you start having full conversations with yourself because at least that guy gets it. 

That loneliness got bad enough that I couldn't ignore it anymore. I had people in my life—other practitioners I respected, friends in the industry—but I'd let those relationships slide into the background while I focused on the work. So I started putting them front and center, actively prioritizing them, reaching out, making time for conversations that had nothing to do with referrals or networking and everything to do with having people who could tell me if I was onto something or full of shit.

And I stopped treating my knowledge like something to protect. The scarcity mindset in this industry is real—people hoard their methods like someone's going to steal them, guarding their insights like trade secrets. I started giving it away instead. In my courses and guides, in my IG AMAs and writing, and in the conversations I have, everything I know, I share. And the wild thing is, the more I gave away the more I got back: people started sharing with me, sending me cases, asking questions that made me think harder. The generosity created the community I'd been missing.

Eventually I formalized it—I built a community for coaches because I realized I wasn't the only one who needed this, and waiting for it to happen organically wasn't working. Community is something you have to build on purpose, and in an industry that isolates people by default, choosing connection over competition is a rebellious act. And you know I fucking love rebellion. 

And then there's failure. The default in this industry is to hide your failures, explain them away, blame the client's compliance or their unrealistic expectations. God forbid anyone finds out you don't have a 100% success rate—they might realize you're just a person, same as everyone else, making educated wishes and hoping you're not ruining anyone's career trajectory. I started treating failure as information instead of a verdict. I'd try something with a client, it wouldn't work, and then I'd... try something else. Fuck around, fail, adjust, try again. It sounds obvious but it's the opposite of how most people in this industry operate, where every failure is a brick in the wall of evidence that you're secretly a fraud who somehow conned your way into a license and it's only a matter of time before everyone finds out.

Again, I'm not saying I've figured it all out. I still burn out. I'm actually coming off a rough stretch right now, which is part of why I'm writing this. But the difference is I know why it happens and I have tools that help bring me out of it. And almost none of those tools came from the advice I was given early in my career. Most of them came from doing the opposite.

The industry trains you badly, points you toward burnout, and then blames you when you get there. So, if you're feeling that slow leak—the fatigue, the doubt, the creeping sense that everyone else has figured out something you haven't—it might be a sign that the default path isn't working for you either. And the way through is more counterintuitive than anyone told you.