Transcript
00:00:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m Joanna Lindenbaum, a coach, ritualist, and all-around transformation nerd who is obsessed with helping clients go deep to create more change and results with their clients.
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I created the Coaching Revolution podcast to share with you coaching skills, tips, and advice, as well as a deeper understanding of human behavior and of yourself.
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so that you can do even better client work and group work, grow your business organically, and know that you’re making a real difference in the world.
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This is about creating a revolution in the transformational industry so that more practitioners feel amazing about what they do and so that more of our clients experience life-changing shifts.
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Let’s get started.
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Welcome back, my friend.
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I’m so glad that you’re here because today is one of my favorite episodes of the whole year.
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It’s time for my annual State of the Coaching Industry report.
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I’ve been doing some version of State of the Industry for about 7 years now and once a year I step back and take a real look at where we are as an industry.
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what’s working, what’s not working, what’s shifted, and most importantly, what you and I need to know to be able to thrive as practitioners in the year ahead.
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And I do geek out about this.
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I gather the research, I read the reports.
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I’m gonna be sharing lots of different numbers along with insights in today’s episode.
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So if you’ve been in my world for a while, how much I care about this field, about the coaching industry, the transformational industry.
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I’ve been in it for over 25 years.
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I’ve watched coaching and transformational work change lives in ways that didn’t seem possible.
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I’ve watched people activate their self-worth.
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reconnect to what’s sacred, go on to change their families, their workplaces, their communities.
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I believe in this work with my whole heart.
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I take a stand for it.
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I think when done well and ethically, coaching and transformational work are vital to positive change individually and collectively, which is exactly why I want to talk honestly about what’s happening right now.
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And if you’ve been listening to this episode, you know I always talk honestly about what’s happening.
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2026 has been a strange year in our industry.
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So on paper, coaching is growing.
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More people than ever know what coaching is and are actively seeking it out.
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And at the same time, so many of the practitioners that I talk to are telling me that it feels harder than it has in a long time.
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Harder to fill spots, harder to earn trust,
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harder to keep clients moving.
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So both things are true.
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The industry is growing and it’s harder.
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And today I want to show you why.
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And here’s my promise for the episode today.
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There will be some sobering news in here.
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I’m a straight shooter and I’m not gonna pretend everything is rainbows and unicorns.
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But that being said, my hope, my hope is that you are gonna walk away with a lot of hope, real hope.
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Because when I look at the data and when I look at who’s actually thriving right now,
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There’s a very clear pattern and it is very doable for you.
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I really think you’re gonna like what it says about you.
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Okay, so let’s dive in.
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And let’s start with some good news because I love good news.
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The coaching industry is still growing.
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and not a little bit.
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So the International Coaching Federation released its big global coaching study done with PricewaterhouseCoopers, and it found that coaching now brings in an estimated, are you ready for this?
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$5.34 billion a year worldwide.
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Think about that for a moment, my friends.
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$5.34 billion.
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That’s a lot of money.
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And that’s a 17% increase in the coaching industry in just two years.
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There are now almost 123,000 coach practitioners around the world, which is also a record, by the way.
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And I want to name that number, 123,000, it’s actually bigger than that because those figures are
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specifically.
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They don’t fully capture the therapists, the somatic practitioners, the group facilitators, the ritualists, the energy workers who are doing deep transformational work.
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I share this because I know so many of you listening are in that wider circle and also because my Sacred Depths graduates are equipped for so much more than just traditional coaching.
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So in other words, overall, people want this kind of work.
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They’re looking for it.
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Now, here’s a statistic from that study that really made my heart happy.
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Coaches with more than 10 years of experience
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earn nearly double than what newer coaches earn.
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Now, stay with me here because I don’t think that this is only about amount of time in the field.
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We all know that years alone doesn’t make anyone
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masterful.
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And I’m sure we all know someone who has been doing this for 15 years, 20 years.
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They’re still running the same three questions on every client.
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It’s not that effective, right?
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What the number tells me is that the market rewards depth.
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When someone has had the time and the training to become deeply skilled, to be able to hold complexity,
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to really know what to do in the hard moments with a client.
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Clients are very willing to pay for that.
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And then they continue to stay for that.
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And they tell their friends about that.
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Now keep that in your back pocket because we’re going to come back to that.
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Here’s the other side of the growth story.
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And this is important.
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There are a lot of us now.
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The number of coaches grew 15% in just two years.
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Now that’s exciting for the field, but it also means that there’s more noise and more choices and more competition for every potential client’s attention.
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So the opportunity is real and
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the bar is rising.
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Okay, so if the industry is growing, then why are there so many practitioners when they start sacred apps that tell me that it feels harder than ever?
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So I want to start by saying this.
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If it’s been feeling harder for you, you’re not imagining it.
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There are some really
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very real forces at play right now and I want to walk you through four of them.
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So force #1, we are in a trust recession.
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So every year the Edelman Trust Barometer surveys 10s of thousands of people around the world about who and what they trust.
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And this year’s headline I think was pretty striking.
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They found that people have moved from
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grievance into what they call insularity.
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Seven in 10 people are now hesitant or unwilling to trust someone whose values or background are different from their own.
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Now here’s the piece I really want you to hear.
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Trust in big institutions keeps falling in the government, leaders, the media.
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But
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trust in the people closest to us is actually going up.
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Trust in our neighbors, trust in our family, trust in our friends, trust in our coworkers.
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You can think of it this way.
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Trust has kind of gone local.
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Now layer on top of that what’s been happening in our own industry.
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A lot of people unfortunately have been burned.
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I hate to say it, but I’ve been saying it for a long time because it’s true.
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They’ve invested in coaches or programs that have overpromised and underdelivered.
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They’ve been in containers that weren’t trauma informed and left them feeling worse.
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They’ve watched the hype.
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They’ve watched the make 6 figures in six weeks.
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They’ve watched the shiny influencers.
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So I share all of that to say that my future clients and your future clients, they’re more discerning than ever.
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They’re not buying on a pretty sales page and thank goodness for that, honestly, because I was never one for fancy headshots in luxurious settings.
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Future clients want to know that you’re real, that you’re skilled, and that you’ll actually be there for them.
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In other words, earning trust takes a bit more than it used to.
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Now, I don’t want you to be depressed about that because as you’ll see, that turns out to be very good news for practitioners of depth.
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Now, put a pin in that.
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We’re going to come back to that.
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But first I want to share the second force
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that is making things harder a little bit right now.
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So this has to do, this is the one that has to do with AI.
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So last year in my state of the industry,
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I talked about AI as a competitor.
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And I also confessed that even though I had resisted artificial intelligence for a very long time, I had finally succumbed a little bit.
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I had one or two kind of desperate late nights.
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And I asked ChatGPT some personal questions, hoping to kind of, I don’t know if I would say be coached, but get inspiration.
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Well, this year
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People are doing that even more than last year.
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So a recent survey from Elon University, and by the way, my older daughter, Penina, she just started at Elon, so I love that this is where the stat comes from.
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A recent survey found that more than 1/4 of American adults now turn to AI chatbots for personal or emotional
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conversations, relationship worries, life decisions, anxieties.
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In other words, 1/4 of American adults right now are turning to AI for the things that they used to bring to a friend or to a coach or to a therapist.
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And that’s because AI is quick.
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It’s always available.
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It’s basically free.
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And I hate to say it, but I will say it.
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AI is also pretty decent at a lot of what a good enough coach does.
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It listens.
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It reflects back.
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It asks reasonable questions.
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It can make a plan with you.
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In some ways it can even walk you through a visualization.
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So if your work is good enough, AI is competing with you.
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But here’s the detail in that same survey that really perked up my ears.
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Over 1/3 of people who regularly use AI for these personal kinds of conversations said,
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that the chatbot agrees with them too much.
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Of course it does.
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The chatbot is designed to be agreeable.
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And you and I both know that agreement isn’t transformation.
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Nobody ever changed a lifelong pattern because someone told them that they were right all the time.
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Transformation needs someone who can notice what’s being said.
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Someone, a real human, who can feel the shift in a client’s body when they get close to something important or tender.
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Someone, a real human, who can offer a loving truth at the exact right moment and then hold the client steady while it lands.
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That is not a chatbot’s job.
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That is your job.
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And I’ll just toss in here that I did a whole podcast episode.
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It was episode number 85 on why AI won’t replace extraordinary coaches.
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So I’ll drop that in the show notes if you haven’t listened to that episode.
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It’s really worth a listen to.
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Okay, so this brings us to force #3 that is kind of making things a little bit harder in the industry right now.
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Clients have less capacity than they used to.
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And this is 1 I’m hearing about constantly from my own clients and from practitioners in my community.
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People are tired.
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The collective weight of the last several years, the pandemic, the economy, the news cycle, the constant noise on our iPhones, it’s worn down people’s capacity.
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And that Edelman survey found that only about 1/3 of people believe that the next generation is going to be better off than we are.
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So
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That’s a lot of dread that’s walking into our coaching sessions.
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And at the same time, our clients are more aware than ever.
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They’ve listened to the podcasts, they’ve read the books on attachment and nervous system and their inner child.
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They can tell you exactly where their patterns come from and
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they’re still stuck.
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Because awareness alone doesn’t change a lifelong pattern.
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Fear and resistance live deeper than insight and right now they’re showing up stronger and more stubborn than they used to.
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So here’s what that might look like in your practice.
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You assign the action step, the homework, the practice for the week, but your client doesn’t do it.
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doesn’t happen.
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Not because your client doesn’t care, but because they genuinely don’t have the bandwidth.
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Now, the old model of coaching where we create awareness, set an action, hold accountability,
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That’s not enough when the person in front of you is running on empty, which means that your job as a practitioner has changed.
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You don’t just need to know what action your client should take.
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You need to know how to help them build the capacity to take it.
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And
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I’ll just say this simply because it’s true and I am very, very proud of this.
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is what Sacred Depths has been built around since the beginning for years and years now.
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The befriend your fear method, the navigating client resistance work, the working with procrastination, the somatically rewiring unhelpful beliefs, etc, etc.
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These coaching skills have always been at the heart
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of Sacred Depths because helping people build the capacity to change has always been at the heart of real transformation.
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I’ll say for a while, some coaches in the industry were able to get away with what’s the action, now take the action, but that’s truly not, people can’t get away with that anymore.
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I’ll just put it that way.
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Okay, and then
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That brings us to the last force in the industry right now that I wanna talk about that’s making things hard.
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And then we’ll talk about what to actually do about all of this.
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So force #4 is that clients want white glove care.
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Okay, so because people are so discerning and tired, because they’ve been burnt,
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they want to know that you are really there for them.
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They want more personal attention.
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They want holding.
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They want more white glove service.
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They want to not feel as if they’re a number inside of your business.
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And I know, I understand that.
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I think it’s completely understandable.
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And it’s also where
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A lot of big-hearted practitioners can get into trouble because what do we tend to do when a client wants more?
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We give more.
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We run over time.
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We add an extra session.
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We answer the long text on Sunday night.
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We do more and more of the pulling, the dragging our client towards the action that they keep not taking.
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And then eventually we as practitioners get exhausted.
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and maybe even a little resentful.
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I know that as loving practitioners and humans, we don’t love to admit that one, but let’s just be real, right?
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I always say it like it is.
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We can get resentful.
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And if you’re doing that dance right now, your mind might be telling you that the problem is your boundaries or your pricing,
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or your clients. And sometimes that is true. But more often than not, the other really important issue alongside all of it is a skill and a mastery issue. When you have masterful skills, you just don’t have to pull nearly as hard. You actually don’t pull at all.
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how to work with the fear and the resistance that’s actually blocking the action so that your client starts to move on their own. When you have the masterful skills, your sessions do more so that you don’t have to do more. You can give white glove care without overgiving because the depth is in the quality of the work, not the quantity.
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So does that mean that I don’t connect with my clients in between sessions? I absolutely do. I love to connect with my clients in between sessions and offer support and mentorship in between sessions. But I don’t need to over give or overtax myself. Because of my mastery, a little bit goes a long way.
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Better skills mean less effort on your part. I can pinky promise you that. Okay, my friend.
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I know that was a lot. And here’s the thing. Even one of those four forces sounds like bad news. And for practitioners who are coasting on good enough, it is bad news. Okay, my friend, I know that sharing those four forces, that was a lot. Because here’s the thing.
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Every one of those four forces sounds like bad news. I know, I get it. And for practitioners who are coasting on good enough, yeah, it is bad news. But let’s look at them again. Here’s what I was saying. Trust has gone local to the people we already know. AI can be agreeable.
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but it can’t really be attuned to human beings. Clients need someone who can help them build capacity, not just assign homework. And they want to feel deeply held by someone who doesn’t burn out doing it. Every single one of those, I think, is an argument for depth, for mastery.
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for being extraordinary. So the market isn’t closing on practitioners like you. It’s sorting. And the extraordinary practitioners are the ones who are rising to the top. So I’ll share a short story to show you what I mean.
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One of my recent Sacred Depths graduates, she just filled her group program with 14 people. That was her goal number because she wanted a tight, powerful group where real depth could happen. Now here’s the part that I want you to notice. This Sacred Depths grad, she does very minimal social media.
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And she actually doesn’t even have a regular email list. She doesn’t have a newsletter, no big launch machine. So where did those 14 people come from? Well, graduates of her past program came back and renewed. People who had worked with her referred others because they were so impressed by what happened for them in her container.
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participants brought their friends. And she’s been invited to speak on a couple of stages and platforms simply because of her reputation. That brought in a few people. So that’s the trust recession in action working in her favor. Remember what Edelman found
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People trust their neighbors, friends, families, co-workers more than ever. So when someone’s friend says, you have to work with her, she helped change my life, that carries more weight in 2026 into 2027 than any ad that you could ever run.
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And you can’t fake that kind of referral. You can’t hack it or script it. That can only come from clients who have worked with you and have experienced magic with you. That’s why I always say being extraordinary is your best marketing strategy. And I want to be clear about something.
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because I think this is where so many of us get turned around. Most of the industry is still telling you that if your business feels hard, you need better marketing, a better funnel, a better niche, more content. And yes, we always want to improve our marketing. I’m always working on mine, that is for sure for certain. But very often,
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The reason your business isn’t growing the way you want isn’t primarily a marketing problem. It’s a depth of results problem. And you can’t market your way out of that. So here’s how it plays out. When you’re not fully confident in your results with clients, you hedge in your marketing. Maybe you post less.
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You don’t follow up. You don’t ask for the renewal. You don’t show up fully in all of your glory in a sales conversation. Because part of you, because of those not great results, isn’t sure that more people are gonna want it. You tell yourself it’s because you don’t know enough about marketing when really some part of you is protecting you from promising something you’re not totally sure that you can deliver.
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And when your results with clients become extraordinary, all of that changes. You have more clients that renew and they refer and they rave about you. And then you start to market from a completely different place because you feel confident. You know that you can co-create results.
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So that’s the loop. Mastery isn’t a quote unquote nice to have. It is a absolute need to have. It’s how my Sacred Depths grad filled her group without a launch machine. And it’s something that I wish more people realized. Okay, so what do you actually do with all of this information that I’ve been sharing
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How do you move forward? Well, here are five things that I believe matter most so that you can thrive in 2026 and into 2027. Number one, and hands down, this is the big one.
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make your skills extraordinary. Become truly masterful at your craft. That is what’s going to lift you above the noise. That’s what’s going to make AI relevant to your practice. That’s what’s going to help turn clients into raving fans. And I want to be specific about what I mean when I say become extraordinary because extraordinary isn’t a vibe.
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It’s a set of skills, inner and outer, that you can learn. It’s knowing what to do when a client gets stuck, shuts down, gets activated or goes into resistance so that you know what to do instead of going blank or pulling back. Being extraordinary is about working somatically, not just cognitively.
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so that change happens in the body and not only in the mind. It’s knowing how to weave one session into the next so that the breakthrough on Tuesday becomes a real transformation over months and doesn’t just get lost in the past. There is a difference between a breakthrough and a transformation.
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AI can maybe give someone an aha, but only a skilled human can walk another human through transformation. If you heard my recent episode about the changes in the Sacred Depths journey, you heard me talk about the three pillars, advanced transformation skills,
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your personal energetics and then ethical, authentic business practices. I’m not going to reteach them here, but I’ll say that this first one, the transformation skills, your in the room mastery, that’s where everything else builds from. Okay, #2, what to do? Learn to build capacity.
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not just create solutions and action steps. So if your clients are coming in with less bandwidth, the most valuable thing you can do is help them build bandwidth. This means knowing how to work with the fear and resistance that’s draining their energy.
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It means working with all four levels of learning and processing, cognitive, emotional, somatic, and spiritual. It means pacing the work with the real rhythm of change rather than the timeline that the industry says change happens in. And here’s the beautiful part. When you can do this,
00:31:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
You stop being the one pushing the boulder up the hill for your clients. The action steps start to happen because your client finally has the capacity to take them. And here’s the piece that is sometimes easy to miss. It’s really hard to help a client build capacity if you don’t have capacity yourself.
00:31:56 Joanna Lindenbaum
If your own nervous system tightens when a client is stuck or some part of you is afraid of disappointing them, you’ll feel the pull to hurry them towards action or to rescue them or to move on before the fear has really been met and worked with. Your client’s fears
00:32:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
and your own fears are always in the room together. And when your fears are running the show, your clients’ fears don’t get the space they need to soften. And this is exactly why your energetics and your own inner work is pillar 2 inside of Sacred Depths.
00:32:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
For example, you learn the Befriend Your Fear method as a technique to use with your clients, but you also learn how to use it for your own fears, your own fears of being visible, of not being enough, your fears of a client getting upset with you. The more capacity you build to stay steady with your own fear, then the more
00:33:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
you can hold space for the human being in front of you. Your energetics are what makes your skills usable in the hard moments with clients or in the hard moments when you’re marketing, in the moments where you need them the most. Okay, #3 on what to do with all of this.
00:33:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
Give white glove care without over giving. So like we said earlier, clients want to know that you’re really there for them and you can and I think should absolutely give them that. But I want you to be able to do this without sacrificing your evenings, your boundaries, your nervous system.
00:34:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
So this is your energetics again, but from a different angle. A coaching session is an exchange between 2 nervous systems. When you’re regulated, grounded or not secretly trying to rescue your clients or prove your worth, your presence alone does a lot of the holding.
00:34:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
And you can feel the difference between generous giving and care and anxious over giving. So I want you to ask yourself honestly, ask yourself, where are you working harder than your client? Where are you over giving because you’re not fully confident in what happens inside of your coaching sessions?
00:35:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
That’s usually the place your skills and your inner work want to grow. And by working on that, it’s going to allow you to give white glove service to really be there for your clients without over giving. Okay, #4 on what to do with all of this. Lead with integrity, ethics, and trauma informed practice.
00:35:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
and do that in your client work, in your group work, and in your business and marketing. So in a trust recession, integrity is a big differentiator. People can feel it. When someone has been burned by hype or by a practitioner who took them somewhere that they weren’t ready to go,
00:35:58 Joanna Lindenbaum
then their whole system is on alert, scanning to see if you’re safe. And every honest promise that you make, every aligned boundary that you hold, every time you say, you know, I don’t know yet, but let’s find out together, instead of just pretending you know the answer,
00:36:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
Every time you lead with integrity and ethics and being trauma informed, it tells your client’s nervous system, it tells your prospects nervous system, it tells your community’s nervous systems that it can relax with you. And a nervous system that feels safe is one that can actually go deep.
00:36:53 Joanna Lindenbaum
So in your client work, that means not going beyond your depth. It means listening without bypassing. It means honoring your client’s agency. And it means having the skills to help someone get regulated in the moment if they collapse under emotion so that they feel safe going deep with you.
00:37:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
and ethics and being trauma-informed in your marketing, it means not over-promising, being honest about timing, the time it takes for change. It means messaging that isn’t fear-based, that isn’t shaming. It means not pumping up and hyping things. It means not having fake urgency
00:37:48 Joanna Lindenbaum
that dysregulates people into a decision that they’re not ready for. The practitioners who market this way are building trust that lasts. The ones who don’t are adding to the reason why everyone is so skeptical. So this brings us to the fifth piece here.
00:38:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
And that’s about activating the trust that you’ve already built. So again, I’ve mentioned this a few times in this episode because it’s so important. Remember that trust has gone local. That means that the most powerful marketing available to you right now isn’t out there with strangers. It’s with the people who already know you.
00:38:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
So for many years, I’ve been talking about the three Rs, referrals, renewals, and reputation as a way to grow a sustainable business. So I want you to invite your current and past clients to renew with you if it’s aligned and to work with you on what’s next.
00:39:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
I want you to let your happy clients know that you’d love for them to refer people that they care about. I want you to gather testimonials and speak openly about your values so that people who share them can find you. In my own business, a big portion of my revenue comes from referrals and renewals,
00:39:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
And my private practice has been full for years with very little public promotion. And this is not because I’m a marketing genius. I’m really not. It’s because I’ve spent decades becoming extraordinary at the work and continuing to become extraordinary at the work. And then the work does the talking. The work brings in the renewals and the referrals.
00:40:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
Okay.
00:40:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
So here’s where, as we wrap, I land on the state of art industry in 2026 into 2027.
00:40:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s growing.
00:40:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s noisier.
00:40:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
Yes, trust is harder to earn and has moved closer to home.
00:40:26 Joanna Lindenbaum
Good enough because of AI isn’t quite good enough anymore.
00:40:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
And clients are more tired, more aware, more discerning, and they want to feel truly held.
00:40:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
And all of that adds up to one clear message.
00:40:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
This is the era of the extraordinary practitioner.
00:40:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
You can only take your clients as far as you’ve gone yourself.
00:40:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I deeply believe that the practitioners who keep going deeper
00:41:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
in their skills, in their own inner work, in their energetics are the ones who are going to thrive, who are going to make the biggest difference in the world right now.
00:41:12 Joanna Lindenbaum
The world needs that kind of practitioner.
00:41:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
I think it might need you.
00:41:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
This truth is what I’ve operated on for the last 25 years, being extraordinary.
00:41:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
This is what all of my programming is based on and built on.
00:41:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I really believe that this is what’s going to be even more true moving into next year.
00:41:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
So before I let you go, I want to leave you with a few questions to sit with this week.
00:41:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
And maybe if you even have time, journal on them.
00:41:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
First question is, where in my work am I good?
00:41:53 Joanna Lindenbaum
And where do I know I could be extraordinary?
00:41:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
Second question, where am I working harder than I know I should be, pulling my clients or overgiving?
00:42:09 Joanna Lindenbaum
And which skills would help me to pull less and overgive less?
00:42:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
And then the third question, who already trusts me and have I given them a real chance to renew, to refer,
00:42:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
or through testimonials to share what our work has meant to them.
00:42:34 Joanna Lindenbaum
Go deeper with all of those pieces.
00:42:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
Thank you, my friend, for being here.
00:42:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
Thank you for caring so much about this work, about the people that you serve and will serve.
00:42:47 Joanna Lindenbaum
It just fills my heart to know that you are doing the good work every day.
00:42:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’ll see you next time.
