Have We Swapped Our Coaching Ethics for Followers?
What the creator economy is doing to coaching, and why it matters most in burnout, menopause and ADHD coaching.
I was always told that expertise took 10,000 hours. A decade, give or take, of study, practice, feedback and failure before you could stand in front of someone and say: I know this field.
I spent over 15 years in HR before I went out on my own. In that time I watched managers who understood people problems, sometimes deeply, and I never once mistook that understanding for expertise. It used to frustrate me that recruiters insisted on sector experience for HR roles, as though HR itself wasn’t the craft. But even that frustration came from a shared assumption: that a craft exists, that it takes years to master, and that not everyone who has been near it has mastered it.
My twins are almost 26. I do not position myself as an expert in parenting twins. I have lived with health conditions for over two decades and I am not an expert in any of them. I love designing rooms in my house, but I am not an interior designer.
And yet when it comes to burnout, all of this seems to go out the window.
Somewhere in the rise of the creator economy, we stopped asking “what do you know?” and started asking “how many people follow you?” Reach became the credential. A moving story became the qualification. And an entire generation of coaches built businesses on the most dangerous sentence in the wellness industry: it happened to me, so I know how to fix it in you.
What an expert actually is.
Expertise has a definition, and it is not a vibe.
Decades of research in cognitive psychology, most famously by Anders Ericsson, show that genuine expertise is built through years of deliberate practice: structured, focused work on specific weaknesses, with honest and immediate feedback. Not just time served, but time served with correction. Ericsson’s research pointed to roughly a decade of it.
And experts don’t just know more. They think differently.
Three things mark them out:
They see patterns, not symptoms. A novice sees “this person is exhausted.” An expert sees how the exhaustion connects to the environment the person is in, their history, their sense of self, and what their body and behaviour are signalling, and can tell the difference between six situations that look identical on the surface.
They can explain why. Ask an expert why they’re using a particular approach and they can give you the rationale, the evidence behind it, and what they’d do instead if it doesn’t work. Ask a guesser and you get “this is what worked for me.”
They know their edges of practice, and say so. The clearest marker of genuine expertise is the willingness to say “I don’t know” and “this is beyond my scope.” Novices speak in absolutes: do these three things and your burnout is cured. Experts speak in careful, qualified language, because they’ve seen enough cases to know how much varies from person to person.
Notice that none of this requires a clinical licence. But all of it requires training, breadth of cases, supervision and feedback. One recovery story provides none of those things.
Lived experience is a bridge, not a credential
Let me be clear about what I am not saying.
Lived experience matters. It builds empathy that a textbook can't teach. It reduces stigma. It tells someone in the darkest stretch of their life: you are not broken, and you are not alone. I would not trust a burnout coach who had never sat close to burnout, in themselves or in the people they’ve worked with.
But lived experience answers one question: what was it like for me? It cannot answer the question a client is actually paying for: what will work for you.
In research terms, a personal recovery story is a sample size of one. It is tangled up with that one person’s finances, family, health, industry, personality and privilege. The coach who healed by leaving corporate life and going freelance had savings, or a partner’s income, or a marketable skill. The single mother working two jobs cannot “set firmer boundaries” her way out of an unmanageable rota. When a coach generalises their own recovery into a universal method, they aren’t teaching. They’re prescribing their own biography.
And sadly, in the creator economy, that biography is the product. Vulnerability has become a marketing strategy. The post about crying in the office toilets, the panic attack in the car park, the dramatic resignation. These stories are powerful, and they are shared partly because they are powerful: they build instant intimacy and lower our scepticism. But vulnerability is not a measure of capability. Sharing your worst day does not mean you understand what chronic stress does to a human being, or how to work safely with someone still living through theirs.
Where the harm actually happens
This is not a debate about titles. Untrained coaching does real damage, in at least four ways.
It pushes people who are already depleted. Standard motivational coaching, dig deeper, set bigger goals, change your mindset, is built for people with capacity. Someone deep in burnout has none. Pushing them harder is not coaching; it is another demand landing on a person who reached burnout precisely because the demands never stopped. At best it stalls recovery. At worst it deepens the harm.
It misses what coaching cannot treat. Exhaustion is not always burnout. It can be depression, an anxiety condition, a thyroid problem, perimenopause, an autoimmune condition, or several of these at once. An ethical coach never tells a client “you’re at burnout.” Diagnosis belongs to medical professionals. A trained coach works with what the client presents, adjusts accordingly, and refers the moment something sits outside their scope. An untrained coach treats everything as a mindset problem, and the client loses months they could have spent getting the right help.
It teaches coping and calls it healing. A morning routine that helps you survive another ten-hour day under a toxic manager has not fixed anything. It has made the intolerable slightly more tolerable, which mostly benefits the employer. Coping keeps you in the situation. Healing changes your relationship with it, and often changes the situation itself.
It blames the person for the environment. Burnout is not a personal failure. It is what happens when toxicity outstrips a person’s sense of self for long enough as I explain the Burnout Equation. When a coach’s entire toolkit is individual habits, the hidden message is brutal: if you’re still exhausted after my five steps, you didn’t try hard enough. The workplace that caused the harm gets off scot-free, and the person carrying the harm gets handed the blame as well.
This is bigger than burnout
I work in burnout, so that’s where I see it most clearly. But look at where the same pipeline is now heading.
Menopause coaching is booming, some of it is delivered by women whose sole qualification is having been through menopause themselves. ADHD and AuDHD coaching is growing even faster, often led by people whose credential is their own diagnosis, sometimes a very recent one, and sometimes a self-diagnosis. In both spaces you’ll find brilliant, rigorously trained practitioners. You’ll also find people offering guidance on hormones, medication decisions, careers and relationships on the strength of a personal story and a content strategy.
These are not low-stakes niches. These are people’s health, brains, livelihoods and identities. The people seeking this support are often at their most exhausted, most confused and most willing to trust anyone who says “I’ve been where you are.” That trust is precious. It is also exactly what makes them easy to sell to.
The pattern is the same every time: a real and underserved need, a regulatory vacuum, a platform that rewards confidence over accuracy, and a queue of people whose lived experience is genuine but whose training is nonexistent.
So what do we do about it?
Regulation isn’t coming to coaching any time soon. Which means the standard has to be set by two groups: the people buying coaching, and the coaches who take this work seriously.
If you’re looking for a coach, in burnout, menopause, ADHD or anything else, ask four questions before you look at a single testimonial:
1. What is your training, beyond your own experience? Not “have you lived it” but “what have you studied, with whom, and how are you qualified?”
2. How do you know when something is outside your scope, and what do you do then? The right answer includes the word “refer.” A coach who can handle everything is a coach who can recognise nothing.
3. Does your approach look at my environment, or just at me? If every solution is a habit, a routine or a mindset, you’re being taught to tolerate the thing that’s harming you.
4. Why do you work the way you work? Listen for a rationale. “It worked for me” is a story, not a method.
If you’re a coach, hold yourself to the standard you’d demand of anyone working with someone you love. Get trained. Get supervised. Learn where coaching ends. Use your story to build trust, never to replace a method. Your lived experience is the reason you care about this work. It cannot be the reason anyone should hire you.
The creator economy has taught us to measure credibility in followers. But followers measure reach, not rigour. Somewhere out there right now, a person on the edge of collapse is choosing who to trust with their recovery. They deserve better than the most confident stranger on their feed.
They deserve someone who did the work before charging for it.
Kelly
Join me for Burnoutology 101. A two-hour live masterclass exploring what burnout coaching really requires, what has evolved, and why understanding burnout has never mattered more.