A hair influencer I’ve followed for years recently dropped a YouTube video: “How to Start a Coaching Business Without Certification.” Her pitch to professional women? Your corporate experience—the MBA, the promotions, the six-figure salary—that’s your training ground. You don’t need certification. Just package what you already know and start coaching.
Look, I’m not mad at her specifically. I’m frustrated by what she represents: a conflation occurring across the online coaching space that’s causing real harm—to clients, to the profession, and, frankly, to the coaches themselves who don’t know what they don’t know.
So let’s talk about it. Directly. Without the cushioning.
Because there’s a difference between what it takes to run a coaching business and what it takes to actually coach people. And conflating the two is where things go sideways.
Before we dig in, I want to acknowledge something: for some coaches, the decision to forgo credentialing after completing training is deeply personal and strategic. This post isn’t about those folks. This is for people who believe coach training is unnecessary to coach people. If that’s you, keep reading.
What Corporate Experience Does Teach You: Running a Business
Corporate experience is genuinely valuable. Nobody’s arguing otherwise.
If you’ve spent years in corporate America, you likely know how to build and manage budgets, price services, navigate contracts, communicate value to stakeholders, manage projects and timelines, and present strategy that drives outcomes. These skills translate directly into running a coaching business. Operations, marketing, sales, financial planning, client management—corporate experience prepares you well for the business infrastructure of coaching.
Many people conflate the business of coaching with the craft of coaching.
Let me say that again: the business of coaching is not the craft of coaching.
Running a coaching business is logistical and transactional. Coaching people is a relational and emotional practice requiring a fundamentally different skill set—one that corporate experiences don’t teach, but in many cases, actively works against.
What Corporate Experience Won’t Teach You: Coaching People
Corporate training is built on a foundational premise: you are the expert. You have the answers. You solve problems, deliver strategy, and drive outcomes. Your value is measured by your ability to have the right solution at the right time, with tangible outputs rewarded as the success barometer.
Coaching inverts this entirely.
Coaching isn’t about you having an at-the-ready solution. Coaching assumes the client’s inherent capacity to find their way forward, with you acting as a co-collaborator, creating conditions for them to arrive at their own answers. It’s about resisting—every single session—the urge to fix, advise, rescue, or redirect.
Coaching gets Instagram-ified into corporate-speak for “makes you feel good,” when in reality, the in-session experiences can be challenging. For many clients, this may be the first space where they feel fully seen and safe enough to explore real obstacles. And navigating that dynamic requires unlearning and resisting every instinct your corporate experiences provided.
Why? Consider these questions, and based on corporate experience alone, how would you respond:
1. How do you move forward when a client asks a question outside your expertise—if your entire corporate skillset is built on having the answer?
In corporate, not knowing is a liability. In coaching, not knowing is the point. The coach’s role isn’t to solve problems, but to explore them. If you haven’t trained yourself to sit in the discomfort of not having the answer—allowing the client to process and reflect—you’ll fill that silence with advice. Every time. And your client leaves with your solution instead of their own. Not only does this transfer ownership to you, it can leave clients feeling disempowered by their removal from the decision-making process.
2. How do you hold space for someone’s messiest, most vulnerable moment when you haven’t learned to separate your own triggers from theirs?
A client walks into a session carrying grief, rage, or shame that mirrors something unresolved in you. Without training and deep self-work, you won’t recognize the moment your stuff bleeds into their session. You’ll think you’re being empathetic when you’re actually projecting.
Some examples of what trigger this:
- Client’s voice, face, or mannerisms resemble a former colleague
- Client’s situation mirrors your own unresolved experience(s)
- Client reminds you of your toxic ex or an estranged friend
- Client makes a choice you made—and now regrets
- Client rejects something you hold sacred
- Client’s success triggers your envy
I’ve been there. Some client sessions still trigger me—I’m human. Before I’d done the deep internal work, I could feel my own unresolved experiences pulling at me during sessions. I’d want to interrupt to share similar experiences. I’d plot “perfect” solutions in my head while they were speaking, which meant I wasn’t listening or being present.
Formal coach training taught me techniques and forced me to examine my own unresolved shit. But the daily decision to not extend my baggage into my clients’ sessions? That’s on me. Every time.
3. How do you respond when a client expresses beliefs that misalign with your values—and your role is to stay curious, not to correct?
This one’s like the third rail on train tracks—electric if touched directly. And it’s where untrained coaches struggle most. When your own emotional reaction threatens to hijack the coaching relationship, we know emotional separation is missing.
As recently as last year, a client mentioned—in passing, while recounting their rationale for seeking coaching—that the moon landing was faked. Internally? I was floored. Like, record scratch, what just happened kinda shocked. However, because it was mentioned as an aside and unrelated to their desired coaching outcomes, I left the belief unexplored.
That’s discernment, not avoidance. Knowing what to explore and what to leave alone—and having the emotional regulation to make that call in real time—is a trained skill.
The coach’s role isn’t to correct a client’s worldview. It’s to stay curious about how that worldview serves or limits them in relation to their goals. If you haven’t practiced separating your moral reaction from your coaching presence, you’ll correct instead of inquire. That’s not coaching. That’s moralizing.
Feeling uncomfortable reading these questions? That’s data. What do you want to do with it?
The consequences of coaching without training
When untrained “coaches” show up with corporate energy—solution-oriented, outcome-focused, advice-ready—clients feel it. They might not name it as “that’s consulting, not coaching.” But they’ll say things like:
“He doesn’t listen.”
“Coaching is easy. She just tells me what to do and I do it!”
“I’ve had a few coaches; coaching doesn’t work.”
“I did everything he said, why isn’t this working? It must be me.”
That last one. Ooph.
A client who has a bad experience with an untrained “coach” doesn’t just leave—they leave believing coaching doesn’t work and that they are somehow the cause. Which means they either stop seeking the help they need or dissuade those around them from trying coaching.
Using clients as your learning curve isn’t just unfair to them. It actively damages the profession.
The Training vs. Credentials vs. Competence Distinction
Let’s get precise here, because the ambiguity around these distinctions is where many conversations get muddled.
Training is the process—the hours of practice, supervision, feedback, ethical rigor, and self-examination necessary to build deep coaching skills. You can complete coach training without ever sitting for a credential. Many coaches make that personal and strategic choice.
Credentials are the outcome—what you hold after completing a training program and meeting a governing body’s standard of rigor. The International Coaching Federation (ICF) and European Mentoring and Coaching Council Global (EMCC Global) are two of the most recognized credentialing bodies in the profession.
Certifications are typically add-on ongoing professional practice and development. Many organizations offer certifications ranging from Somatic coaching to Improvisation for Coaches to LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®.
Competence is what you can actually do. As with any industry, credentials signal qualification, not competence. A credential indicates someone has met a standard. It does not guarantee they are a competent or ethical coach.
For some clients—especially corporate clients—credentials are non-negotiable. For others, particularly individual clients, they’re irrelevant. More value is placed on fit, results, and at times price. Knowing what your audience values is imperative.
Why would someone undertake coach training and a credential? Think of it this way: Would you hire a “financial coach” who’s just a former accountant—no credentials, just corporate experience? Probably not. You’d want to see Series 6, 7, 63, or 65—proof that a governing body determined they’re qualified and licensed to handle your money. Those credentials don’t guarantee your financial advisor is brilliant. But they do mean someone held them accountable to a standard.
Coaching works the same way. And when something goes wrong with a credentialed coach, there’s a pathway for accountability: you can file an ethics complaint with ICF Complaint Processes for Coaches and Education Providers or EMCC Global Complaints.
The catch is you can only file complaints against coaches who are members of those respective bodies. If your coach holds no credentials and belongs to no governing body? You’re largely out of luck. This is one of the reasons credentials matter—they create accountability structures that protect clients and help filter bad actors from the industry.
So What Should You Call Yourself?
If you have deep corporate expertise and want to monetize it by helping others—absolutely do it. The world needs your knowledge.
But be precise about what you’re offering:
Consultants solve problems at the behest of clients by offering specialized advice via personal or professional expertise.
Mentors illuminate the path and share their personal and professional experiences by offering a perspective or pathway relevant to the client’s desired outcome.
Coaches collaborate to create the conditions for someone to be their own problem solver and changemaker.
Therapists specialize in the therapeutic medical treatment of impairment, injury, disease, or disorder.
All are valuable. All are needed. They are not interchangeable. Calling consulting “coaching” further confuses the market and invites harm to the people we’re all trying to help.
Why This Matters
This isn’t about gatekeeping who gets to call themselves a coach. It’s about integrity—specifically, the integrity required to say: “I’m not yet equipped to do this work without risking harm, so I’m going to call it what it actually is.”
Here’s what that integrity looks like in practice:
A client once sent me an email after a session. A phrase I used—”walked over addicts”—made her uncomfortable, and she asked me to use more inclusive language. I didn’t get defensive. I didn’t explain myself. I thanked her for feeling safe enough to tell me, and I committed to being more mindful.
That response wasn’t just good coaching technique. It was the result of deep internal work—the kind that allows you to receive feedback without personalizing it, to hear “you caused harm” without your ego hijacking the conversation. The kind of work that separates trained coaches from people packaging their corporate expertise.
Your clients—the real, vulnerable, trusting human beings paying you to hold space for their growth and development—deserve a coach who’s done that work.
And if you’re realizing you haven’t done that work yet? Well, today’s the day to take action. The question is: what’s your next step?
What are you seeing in the coaching space? Drop your thoughts below.
P.S. If you’re considering coach training, start by exploring the credentialing and ethics standards at ICF Ethical Standards in Coaching and EMCC Global Ethics. Even if you never sit for a credential, understanding what governing bodies consider ethical practice is a solid place to start.