The Clearest Channel
Controversial Opinion: The Best Work of a Life Coach Can’t Be Certified
Life coaches are everywhere now. The term has become so elastic it’s almost meaningless, stretched across Instagram bios, weekend certification courses, corporate offsites and side-hustles alike. There is no governing body, no universally recognized bar of entry, no singular definition of what this profession actually entails. Anyone can claim the title, and so it has become both accessible and completely diluted at the same time.
I get why this unsettles people. When you are considering entrusting someone with your inner world, your fears, your patterns, your marriage or partnership, your career, your sense of self, you want something that signals credibility. You want evidence. You want to know the person sitting across from you has been trained, tested, measured against some external standard.
I come from a profession where that standard is not optional.
Before becoming a coach, I was, and still am, a lawyer. I went to law school. I wrote the Ontario and British Columbia bar exams. I articled. I practiced inside institutions that do not tolerate incompetence. Every letter after my name was earned inside a system that requires proof before permission. And I believe in that rigor. The legal profession carries enormous responsibility, lawyers handle the most high-stakes moments of people’s lives, and it would be dangerous to pretend that standards don’t matter.
But fifteen years inside that system taught me something I did not expect.
It turned out that what made me a truly good lawyer, the kind clients trusted with the parts of their lives that felt unbearable, had almost nothing to do with what I was required to learn to get licensed.
It was never the memorization of statutes or procedural rules that made the difference. It was how I listened. It was how I could sit with someone in the middle of betrayal, fear, rage or grief without needing to rush them toward strategy. It was the ability to hear what was really being asked underneath what was being said. It was the steadiness to stay present instead of performing competence. None of that was examinable. None of that was graded. None of that was in any curriculum.
And here’s what I’ve learned about legal entanglements after fifteen years: most of them have less to do with the merits of a case and everything to do with hung up emotions. Without the ability to truly be with someone, to understand what they actually wanted or whether they wanted resolution at all, I was just applying tools to the wrong wound. Were they looking for genuine resolution, or were they holding onto resentment dressed as spite and using the law as a weapon? That distinction, the ability to feel into it, to stay with someone long enough to find out, had nothing to do with my license. No exam tested this ability. No curriculum taught it. And yet I believe it is the thing that makes me worth hiring over any other lawyer.
My license gave me the right to practice law, but it did not make me a good lawyer.
And so when I decided to become a life coach, I thought I already had the most important thing figured out. I thought presence was my edge. I had fifteen years of evidence that I could read a room, hear beneath what was being said, sit with someone in their most impossible moments without flinching. If presence was what made a great lawyer, and presence was what made a great coach, then surely I was already halfway there.
When I moved into coaching three years ago, I had trained. I had invested significant fees. I flew from Whistler to Brooklyn for group intensives and continued with months of online coaching and mentorship. I learned frameworks and sequences and lines of inquiry. I understood the map. And I walked into my early sessions believing that my legal background, my years of sitting with people in impossible moments, my natural ability to read beneath the surface of what someone was saying, had prepared me to be present with a coaching client.
I was wrong.
What I didn’t yet understand was that presence in a coaching context requires something law never demanded of me: the complete removal of my own agenda from the room. In law, I could listen deeply and still be building a case. I could be fully present and still have a point I was moving toward. The two were not in conflict. In coaching, that same combination quietly destroys the work. Because the moment you have a conclusion you’re steering toward, you are no longer with the client. You are with yourself.
In my early sessions, there was a part of me, subtle but fiercely alive, that needed to feel valuable through my demonstration of “my brilliant intellect and insight”. I know that sounds bloated with ego, but this is exactly how pervasive it can be and why it’s so hard to see in yourself. The easiest way to feel valuable as a coach is to believe you are responsible for your client’s breakthrough.
“If they have a realization, it must have been my question.”
“If something shifts, it must have been my insight.”
And so, without realizing it, I would lean toward the moment. I would guide the conversation in the direction I believed was true. I would lawyer my way into coaching, building a case for the pattern I thought I saw, needing the client to see what I was seeing.
Well, it backfired. Greatly.
Clients went quiet.
Some ghosted me.
Some accepted the reflection politely and never came back.
In the very beginning of my coaching, I offered a friend a gifted session and he said, directly to my face, “I would never pay for this, Tanya.” Every one of those moments felt personal and each time I sat with the quiet devastation of wondering if I was simply not cut out for this work.
It took profound humility and self-examination to understand what was actually happening. And that examination did not come from reading about ego or studying a framework. It came from a moment of new consciousness, a sudden awareness of my own body in the middle of pushing.
I felt it. The urgency. The tightening. The relentless inner pressure to keep going until the other person agreed with me. Not just heard me. Agreed with me. Reflected my point back to me as true. That was the unmet need I hadn’t yet seen. It wasn’t to help or to serve. It was to be received, to be right. And I wouldn’t stop, I couldn’t stop, until I had that agreement.
The moment I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. And what I saw wasn’t flattering. I saw someone who had mistaken their hunger for validation as a gift they were giving to others. Someone who called it insight, called it coaching, called it care, while underneath it all, the nervous system was simply begging to be told: you matter, you’re valuable, you’re enough.
That is not coaching. That is need wearing the costume of service.
And here is what surprised me about that moment of seeing: it didn’t break me. I had expected that kind of honesty about myself to feel like collapse. Like confirmation of every quiet fear about whether I was cut out for this work at all. Instead it felt like the opposite. Like something released. Like I could finally put down something heavy I hadn’t even known I was carrying.
Because once I could see the need, it couldn’t run me the same way anymore. I could feel it arise, that familiar tightening, that urgency to land the point, to be received, and I could make a different choice. I could let it pass. I could stay with the client instead of steering toward my own relief.
That one moment of radical honesty with myself changed my coaching more than any training ever had. Not because I became egoless (I don’t think that’s possible) but because I became conscious.
And consciousness, it turns out, is the whole game.
Today I now know that no breakthrough ever comes from the coach. It only ever comes from the client seeing themselves in a way they can no longer unsee. And that kind of seeing cannot be forced. It arrives when someone feels safe enough, steady enough, and ready enough to let truth reorganize them. When a coach needs the client to agree, something in the room contracts. The nervous system knows when it is being managed, instead of met. You can feel when someone needs something from you, even when that need is disguised as brilliance.
Which brings me to the cornerstone of this whole piece:
This is exactly what a certification cannot touch.
A curriculum can teach you how to ask questions. It cannot teach you how to release your need for the answer.
It can give you a methodology. It cannot dismantle your ego.
It can show you a map of the inner landscape. It cannot walk you through your own.
This is what I refer to as purification. Not moral purity, not some spiritual ideal, just the slow and humbling work of removing yourself from the center of the room so the other person can finally occupy it.
But here’s the thing about purification; its not something that can be assigned as homework, that can be trained. You cannot ‘should’ your way into it. A curriculum can teach you the vocabulary of the inner landscape, the concepts, the frameworks, the language of ego and pattern and nervous system. But actually walking through your own? Facing your own unmet needs, your own confirmation bias in favor of your ego, the parts of you that are still hungry for something, still protecting something, still performing something? That only happens when someone is driven there by their own will and by being so “undone” by their own experience that they have no choice but to look.
What my early clients were feeling when they ghosted me were my own needs. And when you can feel that someone needs something from you, something in you closes. You stop being fully honest. You start managing them instead. Maybe you give them what they’re looking for and then you leave. It’s not because they were wrong, but because the dynamic didn’t feel safe enough to be truly seen inside.
No certification protects a client from that experience. The only thing that does is a coach who has done the work of seeing their own needs clearly, honestly, without letting the ego soften the blow.
What transformed my coaching was not a new technique. It was a practice of radical honesty with myself and a conscious separation of my ego from what I actually am underneath it.
I began noticing the precise moment my nervous system would tighten, that subtle urgency to land the insight, to make the point, to move the client toward the conclusion I had already formed. And instead of following that contraction, that need to be right - I learned to be OK not having the answer or to be wrong and to let it pass. I learned to stay. To remain with the client’s words instead of steering toward my interpretation of them. At first it took real effort and active conscious redirection. Eventually it became cleaner. I could release the point before the urgency ever fully formed.
And from this place, something in me simplified. Listening stopped being a strategy and became a state of being. My attention was no longer scanning for confirmation of what I thought I saw, it was resting in genuine curiosity. I became interested in the gaps, in what was skipped over, in the moments the energy dropped, in the contradictions between language and tone. Instead of consolidating everything into an overriding truth I needed to deliver, I stayed with the open questions:
“What am I not yet understanding?”
“What hasn’t been spoken yet?”
And paradoxically, coaching became much less exhausting and cringe-worthy.
When I believed I had to create the breakthrough, I was working constantly, building, analyzing, assembling insight like a case I needed to win. Now the work is presence. When enough evidence emerges organically from the client’s own story, the reflection almost speaks itself. “Do you see what you’re doing?” “Do you notice how these two things don’t align?” “Did you hear what you just said?” The truth lands differently when it arises from what they have already revealed. It is no longer my point. It is theirs, returned to them.
This is what I mean in my title of this piece by the clearest channel. Not the absence of perception, but the absence of need. The willingness to sit in the not-knowing without reaching for certainty. The discipline to keep examining my own wounds so they don’t distort what I’m seeing in someone else. The commitment to make myself my first client, continuously, not just ceremonially at the beginning of a career.
No certification can assign that work. No institution can require genuine self-reckoning. That confrontation happens when life unravels your ego so much that you have no choice but to examine it, like in the quiet moments after a client ghosts you and you’re forced to ask what in you needed their agreement. It happens when you finally recognize that your urgencies aren’t service. They’re fear.
So if you are looking for a coach, I would not start and end with the certificate on their wall. I would ask:
Has this person actually looked at themselves?
Can they name their own sabotage without flinching?
Can they tolerate not being right?
Can they sit with your confusion without rushing to resolve it for their own comfort?
Do they require your agreement to feel steady?
Can they actually be a clear channel for you?
Certification may signal that someone has studied coaching. It does not guarantee they have studied themselves. And in my experience, the best work of a life coach, the work that changes how someone relates to their own agency, their own fear, their own power, cannot be certified. It can only be embodied. It can only be earned privately, repeatedly, in the unglamorous and completely unsexy discipline of self-honesty.
A license or certification gives you permission to practice, but it does not make you clean.
The clearest channel is not the most accredited coach in the room. It’s the one who has done the work of getting out of their own way, so that you can finally find yours.
If this lands, it landed for a reason. 🤍
Tanya Kong is a coach and lawyer based in Whistler, BC. She works with high-achievers who are done performing and ready to become.