By Brian Sommer
The modern coaching industry presents itself as a moral enterprise. It speaks in the elevated tones once reserved for clergy, educators, and statesmen. It claims to liberate human potential, awaken authenticity, and empower individuals to become the “best versions of themselves.” This is the sales pitch. The reality, however, is far less noble and far more evasive.
At its core, much of contemporary coaching operates not on evidence, but on affirmation. It traffics in reassurance rather than understanding, in consolation rather than clarity. Its favored vocabulary alignment, purpose, confidence, mindset, trust the process, etc., is deliberately soothing and conspicuously vague. These words sound actionable while remaining resistant to definition. They are elastic enough to survive any outcome, including failure.
This linguistic slipperiness is not an accident. It is a feature of the business model.
Coaching, as it is commonly practiced today, is structured to avoid falsifiability. If a client succeeds, the framework claims credit. If the client fails, the explanation is reliably internalized: insufficient belief, unresolved resistance, lack of commitment, failure to “do the work.” The system itself is never wrong. This is not merely bad science; it is the defining hallmark of pseudoscience. That such a structure has become normalized indeed celebrated in leadership development, athletics, education, and executive life should give us serious pause.
The industry’s fixation on authenticity is particularly revealing. Authenticity is marketed as a skill, a posture, something one can cultivate, signal, and eventually monetize. But authenticity that must be advertised is already compromised. Once sincerity becomes strategic, it ceases to be sincere. What remains is performance an act carefully calibrated to appear genuine while remaining safe, palatable, and non-disruptive.
This is not authenticity; it is theater.
More troubling still is the moral inversion at work. Coaching rhetoric routinely implies that outcomes are primarily a function of mindset. Structural constraints, institutional incentives, economic realities, power asymmetries, and sheer randomness are either minimized or ignored altogether. This allows coaches to sell hope without confronting complexity. It also allows organizations to offload responsibility onto individuals under the flattering guise of empowerment.
If you fail, it is not because the system is incoherent or unjust. It is because you did not believe hard enough.
Nowhere is this inversion more visible or more damaging than in performance domains such as sport.
Athletes are told to trust, commit, and stay positive, as though ball flight, muscle coordination, and perceptual timing obey slogans. Failure is framed as a psychological deficiency rather than informational feedback. Curiosity is replaced with judgment. Observation gives way to intention. The athlete is no longer learning; they are auditioning for approval, for legitimacy, for the right to feel competent.
The language of coaching begins to resemble the language of self-help: relentlessly upbeat,
How Reassurance Replaced Understanding
impervious to contradiction, and curiously uninterested in what actually happened.
The modern coach, in this sense, increasingly resembles the modern motivational speaker: fluent, confident, rhetorically agile, and insulated from accountability. What is missing is not compassion or enthusiasm, but intellectual honesty.
An honest coach would say things that make people uncomfortable:
“I don’t know yet.”
“Let’s test that.”
“What actually happened?”
“This might not work.”
These statements acknowledge reality as it is, not as we wish it to be. They invite inquiry rather than compliance. They allow for failure without moralizing it. They restore learning to its proper place as an encounter with uncertainty.
But uncertainty does not sell well. Certainty does.
And so, the industry rewards confidence over clarity, charisma over rigor, narrative over evidence, and performance over truth. Coaches are incentivized to appear certain, not to be correct. To persuade, not to inquire. To reassure, not to explain.
The result is an industry that talks incessantly about growth while actively discouraging the very conditions that make growth possible: doubt, curiosity, exposure to error, and honest confrontation with limits.
Let us be clear: the tragedy is not that coaching exists. Coaching should exist. Thoughtful guidance, skillful instruction, and honest feedback are indispensable to human development. The tragedy is that coaching has drifted so far from inquiry and toward persuasion. It has become less about helping people see reality more clearly and more about helping them feel better about avoiding it.
The modern coaching industry, for all its talk of empowerment, often does precisely this: it replaces understanding with affirmation, replaces evidence with intention, and replaces honesty with hope.
And hope, when sold as a substitute for truth, is not a virtue. It is an abdication.
Brian Sommer holds a Ph.D. in Leadership from Concordia University Chicago, where his dissertation, “A Paradigm Shift in Teaching and Learning Golf”, reflected his commitment to presence-based learning. His academic background also includes degrees in History, Political Science, Business Administration, and Finance (Cornell University, University of Miami, and Lynn University).
As a Partner at CDI Global, Brian has advised clients across the aerospace, defense, construction, technology, and energy sectors, supporting transformational growth in companies ranging from startups to multinationals.
In each of his roles – coach, professor, strategist, and partner – Sommer brings people back to the ground of being. He invites them to look beyond technique, narrative, or image, and return to the source of authentic performance.
