Choosing Rest over Riches: My Close Call with a Career I Didn’t Actually Want

“If I had more money, my life would be easier.”

That’s how capitalism works, right? The more money we make, the more services we can afford, the nicer things we can buy, the more vacations we can take, etc. It seems like stating the obvious that more money means an easier life, but what if that weren’t true? 

The belief that more money would make my life easier is how the Life Coach School (LCS) inspired me to grow my coaching business into a full-time job. That happened in spring 2022 during an LCS alumni conference in Austin. While I had initially planned my business to be just lucrative enough to ease the pain of inflation, the coaches on stage wanted me to aim much higher, sharing how they used LCS tools to pursue their wildest dreams and made hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in the process. 

I thought I’d be immune to the glorification of being a full-time coach: I had no plans to leave my day job and was only at the conference to meet in person all the dear friends I had made through the online certification program. But at some point, one of the speakers said something that made me ask myself: why work on a cruise ship in retirement when I could live on a cruise ship in retirement?  

At the time of the conference I had recently taken my first cruise vacation during which I delighted in learning about waste management regulations from the crew. I began envisioning a post-retirement career in marine biology, which is the career I had wanted as a kid. But sitting in that cold theater among 2,500 other coaches, I realized that my life on a ship as a junior crew member, twice the age of my peers, would be nothing like my luxurious maritime vacation. Intoxicated by 'dream big!!' empowerment, I began to fantasize about a new retirement plan: buying a fancy cruise apartment so I could travel the world by water and learn about international waste regulations just for fun. 

I walked out of the conference dead-set on making a lot of money, something I had never cared to do before. I justified my career pivot by seeing it as impact-driven and aligned with my social justice values while also giving me a plausible chance to get stinky-rich. If I could pull that off, how mind-blowingly cool would that be?!

While this pivot to pursuing an online coaching business as my full-time gig happened suddenly, it was many years in the making: I had been sipping the prosperity gospel Kool-Aide since I started listening to the LCS podcast in late 2019. Does that make LCS a cult? Maybe. According to religion professor Rebecca Moore, whether LCS is a cult depends on whether you like it or not.

That’s what I learned from the book Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell. Cultish, Montell explains, is the use of language to create community and solidarity, instill ideology, and align collective values. According to Montell, cults, like religions, provide “meaning, purpose, a sense of community, and ritual.” Cultish can be used for good or for bad, and that judgement lies in the eyes of the beholder.

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As happens to many cult followers, LCS teachings changed my life.

I came to LCS through “Master Certified Life Coach” Kara Loewentheil’s podcast, Unfuck Your Brain. Billed as the “feminist mindset revolution”, Kara taught a philosophy and practice that empowered me to build the self-love, confidence, and problem-solving skills that I still carry with me today. Soon after joining her group program (now called The School of New Feminist Thought), coaching myself and others became my new favorite activity. Why not deepen my practice and turn it into a side-hustle by certifying with LCS?

When it comes to having a social justice impact while making a shit ton of money, Kara takes the cake. She grew her business from $50K to $5M in six years, all while offering discounts to students with marginalized identities and giving her staff unbelievably good benefit packages. Kara’s path was an inspiration for my own coaching business, helping women move into and within the climate sector with confidence and ease.

Yet as I doubled down on my new career, I ended up falling back in love with my old one.

My own climate career had been fulfilling and enjoyable, and I still had work I was inspired to do. Despite the exhaustion of working on my business before and after a day at the office (as well as on holidays and weekends), I began to fantasize about having the reverse: a full-time coaching business with an urban policy side hustle. It did not take long to realize that too would be unsustainable, and that it was time for me to choose one.

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In the time that has passed since 2022, the true nature of LCS has become clear to me. It’s not a cult, nor a pyramid scheme or multi-level-marketing ploy– it’s just a very successful business.  From the get-go, LCS-founder Brooke Castillo has been transparent about her goal of making $100 million in a year. Lucky for her, the pandemic created demand for businesses you run online and a supply of people looking for help; soon, new coaches were certifying by the thousands.

The more coaches there are, the more advanced certifications and trainings LCS can sell. The more money we make as life coaches, the more we invest in our businesses… by hiring coaches. In fact, most of the “double comma club” coaches run coaching programs and certifications for other LCS alums. 

For every LCS alum making a living as a coach there are dozens who are not. And the more coaches Brooke certifies, the more unhappy customers she’ll have. It’s one thing to sell your product to anyone who will buy it, it’s another thing to get so good at marketing that anyone will.

LCS stands firm in their conviction that anyone can make money as a life coach. That’s because the LCS “Self Coaching Model” promises that if you are thinking, feeling, and acting in alignment, the results will come. If the results haven’t come yet, it’s just a matter of changing either your thoughts and feelings or your actions and not giving up. “Either you win or you learn” is a popular adage in the program. 

I still swear by the Model, but I also believe that for some things, not even a lifetime of aligning your thoughts, feelings, and actions will get you the result you want. And we don’t know which things we will achieve and which we won’t until after it happens. That’s because we are imperfect humans living in a world we don’t control. But “maybe you can make money as a life coach!” would not be an effective marketing strategy for LCS.

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By the end of 2023, I recognized the cultish influence that brought me to the brink of leaving a career I loved for one that I did not. Yes, making a lucrative living (or just getting by) as a full-time coach is possible for me, but it’s not probable. And at least for now, I just don’t want to— for reasons I may explain in a future blog post. If I no longer wanted to pursue making a living as a life coach, then what did I want?

It was while exploring that question that the thought “If I had more money, my life would be easier” popped into my head. Using my self-coaching tools, I recognized that this thought wasn't my true belief but rather a reflection of the neoliberal girl-boss culture I had immersed myself in. Ironically, it’s LCS who doubles down on teaching that nothing, not even money, makes life better. All change will just make things different. Some things will be easier, and some things will be harder, but no matter what, none of us can escape the human condition that is suffering some of the time.

So, what do I want?

I want to further my work at the intersection of zero waste and sustainable streets. I want to foster an organic coaching business via word of mouth, because I genuinely do love coaching people. And I want to write for the sake of writing, as I am doing here. But above all, I want to rest. Because not working so damn hard all the time is what apparently makes my life easier.

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