The Most Misleading Word in Professional Life Today

My friend and mentor Courtney and I were having a conversation recently and she said something that stopped me cold. She told me I needed to write about this... and the reason I hesitated is because what I am about to say is something a lot of people are not going to want to hear.

The word coach has become one of the most misleading words in professional life today.

I just spent an entire weekend in a room full of people calling themselves coaches. And I want to be careful here because I have genuine respect for this work when it is real. But what I witnessed in that room stirred something in me that I have been sitting with ever since.

Because here is what nobody in this industry wants to say out loud.

Anyone can call themselves a coach. There is no standard. There is no threshold. There is no governing body or meaningful filter that separates the person who has spent decades developing a genuine ability to see into someone's thinking from the person who completed a certification course last Tuesday and opened a Calendly link on Wednesday. They both get to use the same word. And the people who genuinely need guidance have almost no way to tell them apart until they are already inside the engagement and already paying for it.

I know this because I have been that person.

Let me be honest about something first. I am not someone who dismisses coaching as a category. Since 2018 I have worked with "coaches" religiously and the variety and nuance of those experiences is genuinely like shopping at IKEA.

You walk in thinking you know what you need, the options are overwhelming, some of it is beautiful and some of it is particle board held together with optimism, and you almost always leave with something you did not plan on. Some of those relationships I walked away from having gained almost nothing. Others added so much density and expertise to my journey that I genuinely would not be where I am without them. I mean that. So this is not a screed against coaching... it is something more specific than that.

Recently I hired someone to help me figure out how to actually use LinkedIn effectively. The real practical application of showing up on this platform in a way that actually works. She came recommended. She had the credentials and the audience and the whole presentation. And she turned out to be one of the most disappointing professional experiences I have had in recent memory. She delivered nothing she promised. She could not receive feedback without becoming defensive and territorial. She made the entire engagement about protecting her own narrative instead of serving my growth. I am not sharing this to be unkind. I am sharing it because I think it represents something real and important about what happens when an industry operates without a real floor.

And then there was someone else. Someone I have genuine respect for to this day and I want to be careful about how I describe this because the failure here was entirely mine. He was deeply qualified, genuinely talented, the kind of person who operates at a level most people spend careers trying to reach. He works with leaders navigating serious exits and enterprise level decisions and he is exceptional at that work. I was just so far from that conversation that I could not even find the door. It would be like hiring a Formula One engineer to help you parallel park. The expertise was real. The fit was simply not there.

And that distinction matters enormously. One of those experiences was a character problem. The other was just two people in completely different rooms talking about completely different things.

Here is the analogy that keeps coming back to me when I think about all of this.

In 2008 when the financial system collapsed, something very specific happened to the photography industry. People who had been accountants and project managers on a Friday were photographers by Monday.

They went to Best Buy, bought a digital camera, built a Facebook page, and started shooting weddings for three hundred dollars. I was working in that industry at the time. My average wedding package was fifty five hundred dollars. You could not get a consultation with me for what these people were charging to document one of the most important days of someone's life. And I watched genuinely good people make decisions based on price and availability because they had no real way to know what they were actually choosing until the photos came back and the damage was already done.

Coaching is living that exact moment right now.

The tools are accessible. The title is available. The certification can be obtained over a weekend. And the craft, the thing that actually takes years to develop and cannot be replicated through a course or a credential, is completely invisible to someone who has not already spent years learning to recognize it.

And here is the part I do not talk about enough... I never set out to do this work. I did not wake up one day and decide to become a coach or a strategist or any of the other words people use to describe what I do. People started asking me to help them think. They kept asking. I built an agency around it, sold it, and somehow ended up here doing this work again because the demand never stopped finding me. I say that not to be impressive but to make a point.

The best guidance I have ever witnessed does not come from people who decided to be coaches. It comes from people who were so good at seeing into a problem and helping others move through it that the work found them first.

I do not call myself a coach for this reason. Not because I have not spent years doing work that looks like coaching from the outside. As an athlete, as a mentor, working alongside founders and executives and builders trying to figure out what they are building and why it feels stuck, I have been in this work for a decent amount of time. But the word has stopped being a reliable signal of anything real so I made a deliberate choice to step away from it.

I am a strategist. A builder. A provocateur. Someone who forces decisions and holds up mirrors and interrogates thinking until something true surfaces. Whatever you want to call that, it is not what most people are selling when they use the word coach.

So what does real guidance actually look like when it is working?

In my experience it feels like someone finally turned a light on in a room you have been navigating in the dark.

It is not a framework. It is not a weekly accountability call.

It is a specific kind of person with a specific kind of ability to see into your thinking and reflect back the thing you have been circling so precisely that you cannot look away from it anymore.

Someone who gets more interesting when you push back. Someone whose confidence comes from clarity rather than ego. Someone who tells you what you need to hear rather than managing your comfort level. Someone whose value has absolutely nothing to do with their title and everything to do with whether they can actually see you clearly.

That person exists. They are genuinely worth finding and absolutely worth paying for.

Just do not expect the word coach to lead you there.

Deevo is a brand strategist, identity architect, and professional interrogator of other people's thinking. He founded The Brand Storyteller to help founders, executives, and ambitious builders figure out what they are actually building, articulate it clearly, and make the decisions that move it forward. He works privately with a small number of people at a time, which is either very exclusive or very antisocial depending on who you ask. He does not call himself a coach. If you have read this far you already know why.