We don't offer world-class coaching

Open your phone and search for gyms in any city. Scroll for thirty seconds.

World class coaching. Elite programming. Transformational results. Industry-leading methodology.

Now think about how your dentist markets their practice.

"We provide quality dental care in a comfortable, friendly environment."

Your accountant: "Specialist tax and accounting services for small businesses."

Your GP: "Committed to providing excellent care for you and your family."

Plain. Functional. Almost boring.

Here's what I find interesting about that gap.

Your dentist completed five years of regulated training, passed national board exams, operates under a licensing body that can strike them off for poor practice, and attends continuing professional development every year to maintain their registration. Their competence is tested, verified, and on public record.

And their marketing is the quietest in the room.

The loudest claims tend to come from the people with the least external verification of their ability. Not always. But consistently enough to be worth sitting with.

I wrote a piece on our gym blog in 2020 with the headline: "Why we don't offer world-class coaching."

The core of it was simple. I've never met a world-class coach. I've never played for one either.

And I genuinely don't know what scale you'd measure it against. In professional sport, maybe you'd use win/loss ratios, trophies, titles.

That works for Sir Alex Ferguson. That works for Sir Graham Henry.

What it doesn't account for is anything beneath the surface.

Any football fan knows Sir Alex didn't always have a cordial relationship with his players. Any Lions fan knows Sir Graham in the same vein.

Apply that standard to a recreational fitness coach and ask yourself: Would a relationship built on a trophy from a regional lifting competition survive a coach throwing a shoe at an athlete?

Probably not.

So if the professional sport standard doesn't transfer, what exactly are we claiming when we call ourselves world-class?

I think we're not really making a statement about skill level.

We're making a statement about anxiety.

It's the coach who isn't yet confident that the work speaks for itself, so they speak for it loudly instead.
The coach who needs the prospective client to arrive already believing, because having to earn that belief feels too uncertain.
The coach who is, whether they'd admit it or not, using their marketing to manage their own internal narrative about whether they're good enough.

And here's where it gets more uncomfortable.

That same anxiety doesn't just live in the marketing. It shows up in the coaching itself.

The coach who needs their client's transformation more than the client does. Who over-delivers, over-communicates, checks in more than is useful, struggles to hold a boundary when a client pushes back.

Not because they lack skill. Because a client leaving isn't just a business loss. It's a verdict.

The coach who publicly celebrates when a client wins their first competition and quietly absorbs it as personal failure when a different client plateaus for three months and eventually drifts away.

The coach whose sense of professional worth is almost entirely dependent on outcomes they can influence but cannot control.

I've been around this industry long enough to see what that costs people. Coaches who burn out not from overwork but from over-identification. Coaches who can't take a week off without checking in daily because the boundary between their clients' progress and their own sense of adequacy has completely dissolved.

None of this is bad character. Most of these coaches are talented, committed, and genuinely invested in the people they serve. The caring is the whole point. But caring and needing are different things, and when they get tangled up, the coach starts coaching for themselves as much as for the client.

The 2020 piece I mentioned ended with a different checklist for what good coaching actually looks like. Not a skills inventory. Not a methodology framework.

Questions like: do we know your name, can we remember it? Do we know how much sleep you had last night? Do we know not to swear in front of you? Do we know about the external stresses you carry into every session: the relationship, the job, the family pressure?

As I wrote at the time, there's very little about exercise in that list. The thing people think they've come to see us about.

I've told anyone who'll listen that the exercise itself, the movements clients place all their value on, is the easy part of the equation. I could teach you to teach me how to squat in 30 to 45 minutes.

What I can't teach, what has to be earned and learned, is how to treat the process of coaching with both gratitude and respect.

Gratitude: that someone trusts you enough to let you influence their health and their life.

Respect: for the weight of that trust, and for the responsibility that comes with it.

Those two values don't belong in a marketing headline. They belong in how you turn up every single session, whether anyone is watching or not.

Strip the hyperbole from your marketing. Strip it from how you talk about yourself at conferences, on podcasts, to potential clients, to yourself at the end of a week that didn't go the way you wanted.

What's left?

If the plain version of your answer makes you uncomfortable, that's not a reason to add more hyperbole. It's a reason to do the work that makes the plain version enough.

We don't offer world-class coaching.

We coach the individual in front of us. From the first time we meet them.

Six years on from writing that, I still think it's the most honest sentence on our website. And I still think most coaches already know, somewhere underneath the language they've borrowed from the industry, that it's the only version of this work worth doing.

Paul

P.S. If someone forwarded this to you and you'd like these directly, you can subscribe here: https://paulrichards.beehiiv.com/subscribe