The Need, Sold Separately

On coaches, gurus, mentors, and the insecurity you were billed for before you knew you had it

Do you need a coach? Do you need a guru? Do you need a mentor?

I ask because somebody, somewhere, is very keen that you answer yes to at least one of them, and preferably all three on a monthly subscription. Scroll for long enough, and you’ll be told that every successful person has a coach, every awakened person has a guru, and every person who got anywhere had a mentor, which, by some remarkable coincidence, the person telling you this happens to be offering for £497, spaces limited, doors closing Friday.

I’ve had mentors. None of them knew they were mentors, and not one of them ever sent me a bill. They were sergeants with nicotine-stained fingers and opinions they didn’t bother dressing up, men and women who’d seen enough to know when a young copper was about to make a fool of himself, and who occasionally let him, because some lessons only stick if they sting. What they gave me wasn’t a framework or a morning routine. It was attention, which turns out to be the one thing the guidance industry has learned to package, price and sell back to people who used to get it for free.

So let’s have a look at the product, shall we?

Three words, one invoice

The trick starts with the vocabulary. Coach, guru and mentor get used as if they were three flavours of the same crisp, when in fact they’re three entirely different transactions, and the blurring is not an accident.

A coach, in the honest sense, is about performance. Somebody watches you do a thing, whether that’s a golf swing, a job interview or a difficult conversation with your finance director, and tells you how to do it better. It’s practical, it’s measurable, and a good one works themselves out of a job. The swing improves, you stop needing someone to point at your left elbow, and everyone shakes hands and goes home.

A guru is something else altogether. You’re not buying advice from a guru; you’re buying belief, and belief is a far more profitable product because it never quite finishes. There’s always a deeper level, a further retreat, an advanced tier where the real secrets are kept, presumably in a locked drawer next to the card machine. The traditional guru was a spiritual teacher embedded in centuries of practice and obligation. The modern version tends to be a man in a linen shirt standing in front of a rented infinity pool, explaining that abundance is a mindset and that your mindset, frankly, could do with some work.

And a mentor, in the old sense, was never really bought at all. Even the word comes from Homer. Mentor was the old friend Odysseus left behind to keep an eye on his son, and the goddess Athena borrowed his face when she wanted to steer the boy in the right direction. It was a relationship built on loyalty and time, and it happened because someone older decided you were worth the bother. Nobody sent Telemachus an invoice, and I’ve yet to find the passage where Athena offers him a payment plan.

Blend those three together, and you get a very convenient product. It has the practical respectability of coaching, the emotional grip of the guru, and the warm, fatherly glow of mentorship. What it rarely has is an end date.

First, the wound

Every sales professional knows that you can’t sell a cure to someone who doesn’t feel ill. So the modern guidance industry has become remarkably skilled at diagnosis, and in particular at diagnosing you, whom it has never met, from a thirty-second video filmed in a car.

You weren’t feeling lost until a reel informed you that you were “playing small”. You were quite content with your life until someone with very white teeth explained that the reason you haven’t built generational wealth is that you’ve never had anyone to hold you accountable. You thought you were tired because you work long hours and have a teenager, but it turns out you’re “out of alignment”, which is the sort of thing you’d previously only heard said about a car’s front tyres.

Once the wound is in place, the funnel does the rest. It begins with something free, because free is friendly. A webinar, perhaps, promising to reveal the three secrets that changed everything, delivered by a person whose origin story follows a template so rigid you could set your watch by it. Five years ago they were at rock bottom, often sleeping in their car, occasionally in a bin. Then came the breakthrough, the discovery, the method. Today they help high performers unlock their potential, and they’d like to help you too, although places on the programme are genuinely very limited this time, just like last time, and the time before that.

The webinar itself runs for ninety minutes, of which roughly eleven contain anything resembling information. The rest is testimonials, screenshots of bank transfers, and a lot of talk about “value”, a word that gets used so often you begin to suspect it’s being deployed as a tranquilliser. Then comes the price, which is revealed after a long preamble about how much it would really be worth, followed by a crossing-out, followed by a lower number, followed by the bonuses. There are always bonuses. I once watched one where the bonuses had bonuses, which felt less like a sales pitch and more like a set of Russian dolls with a direct debit inside.

After that, if you’ve shown the faintest flicker of interest, you’re invited to a “discovery call”. This is a conversation in which you discover that the programme is exactly right for you, and they discover how much you can put on a credit card.

A word from the cave

I should declare an interest at this point. I live off-grid in a cave dwelling in rural Spain with a small group of friends, and I’ve come to understand that this makes me either a cautionary tale or an ideal prospect, depending on which corner of the internet you ask.

A surprising amount of guru content now recommends that you “disconnect to reconnect”, ideally at a retreat in the mountains costing roughly the same as a second-hand Škoda. You’ll sit in silence, eat something with lentils in it, and emerge transformed. I did the disconnecting bit without anyone’s help, and I can report that the main thing it reconnects you with is the water pump, which has strong opinions about when it will and won’t work. Enlightenment, in my experience, arrives mostly in the form of learning which neighbour knows how to fix things and making sure you stay on good terms with him.

That neighbour, I’d argue, is a better mentor than half the people selling mentorship on LinkedIn. He doesn’t know he’s teaching me anything. He’d laugh if I called it that. But I know more about solar panels, olive trees and the stubbornness of Spanish plumbing than I did a few years ago, and the only fee involved was a bottle of something local and a willingness to shut up and watch.

In fairness to the decent ones

Now, I’m not going to pretend every coach is a charlatan, because that would be lazy, and laziness is precisely the thing I’m complaining about. There are good coaches out there, people with real training and real experience who genuinely help. Some people have nobody in their lives willing to be honest with them, and paying a professional to do it is not a moral failing. An athlete with a coach isn’t weak. A new manager who pays someone to help them stop making the same mistakes isn’t a sucker. Grief counsellors, career advisors and the rest of them do important work, often quietly and without a Lamborghini in the background.

But in the UK, “life coach” is not a protected title. There’s no statutory regulation, no licence required, no body that can strike you off. You can decide on a Tuesday morning that you’re a transformational mindset coach, print the business cards by lunch, and be taking discovery calls before the kettle’s boiled. Some people who do this are wise and kind. Some have read one book. From the outside, with the right lighting and a ring light, the two can look remarkably similar.

So here’s the test I’d suggest, and it’s the only one that’s ever made sense to me. Does this person want you to need them less over time?

A good coach does. A good mentor certainly does, because a mentor’s success is measured by your independence, the day you stop ringing them because you already know what they’d say. The guru business model works the opposite way. It depends on you needing them more with every passing month, on the next level, the next retreat, the next premium tier where the real work finally begins. One of these relationships is designed to end in your freedom. The other is designed not to end at all.

The ones who never invoiced

I spent a lot of my working life in the RAF Police and later in senior security management, and if you’d asked me at the time whether I had a mentor, I’d probably have looked at you as if you’d asked whether I had a spirit animal. We didn’t use that language. What we had was people.

There was the sergeant who read a report I’d written, handed it back without a word, and waited for me to work out for myself what was wrong with it. There was the older colleague who, on a long night shift, told me more about how institutions actually behave than any training manual ever managed, including the bits the manual would rather you didn’t know. There were people who covered for me once, then made very sure I understood that once was the number. None of it came with a workbook. There were no accountability check-ins, unless you count being bellowed at across a car park, which in fairness was extremely effective at holding me accountable.

Going further back, to my years in Hull before any of that, the pattern was the same. A foreman who noticed I was bright and bored in equal measure. People who owed me nothing and gave me their time anyway, because that’s what you did for a young lad who looked like he might amount to something if someone pointed him in the right direction.

The thing I notice now, looking back from the far end of six decades, is that none of those people told me I was broken. That’s the real difference. They didn’t need me to feel deficient in order to help me. They saw what was already there and nudged it. The modern guidance market, at its worst, does the reverse. It has to convince you that something is missing, because the missing thing is the product.

So, do you?

Back to where we started, then. Do you need a coach? Maybe, if there’s a specific thing you want to get better at and you’ve found someone who’ll be honest with you and then let you go. Do you need a guru? I’d gently suggest that if the answer to life’s questions came with a checkout page, someone would have mentioned it by now. Do you need a mentor? Almost certainly, but I’m not sure you can buy one, and I’m fairly sure you already had some.

That’s the part I can’t quite settle. Most of the people who shaped me are gone now, or scattered, or would have no idea who I am if I turned up on their doorstep. I never thanked them properly, because at the time it didn’t feel like the sort of thing you thanked people for. It just felt like life, with other people in it. And while I wasn’t paying attention, an entire industry learned how to bottle what they gave me, stick a price on the label and sell it back to a generation who, for all sorts of reasons, don’t have those people around anymore.

Maybe that’s the real question underneath the other three. Not whether you need a coach, a guru or a mentor, but who was quietly doing that job for you before you knew the job had a name… and whether anyone is doing it for the people coming up behind us, or whether we’ve left them to the funnel.

I don’t have a neat answer to that. I’m not selling one either.

Until Next Time