Meet Derrick Sweet. He is the Executive Director and Founder of the so-called “Certified Coaches Federation”. According to Sweet, the longer and more detailed a coach training program, the more diluted the education you receive. Therefore, if you want to by-pass the hefty tuition and the extensive hours of work required to become a real coach, you can pay Sweet $979, attend a two-day seminar, and get a fancy piece of paper at the end that claims you are a “certified” coach.

There are literally thousands of people running around today claiming to be coaches who have absolutely no clue what they are talking about. Sure, they know how to charge you plenty of money to hold you accountable for your written goals, but if you want any help removing the obstacles that stand in your way of obtaining those goals, you’d better look elsewhere.

Unlike many people are lead to believe by companies like Sweet’s, coaching is not about pep-talks and inspiration. It’s about doing serious internal work to tear apart the limiting beliefs, false assumptions, false interpretations, and inner demons that are really holding your clients back. Once you are able to help them dismantle the limitations they have built for themselves, only then can you forward them onto setting and achieving their goals. Mastering the skills to do that internal work takes longer than a two-day weekend.

In fact, the nearly 9-month certification process I went through with the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching (iPEC) involved four weekends where we were in class from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. On top of that, we had weekly two-hour teleclasses, coached a classmate for an hour a week, received coaching for an hour a week, met with a peer group for an hour a week, read six books and did reports on each, and did one in-class project. I also gladly paid $8,500 for my tuition.

As the result of my extensive training, I am confident that I am one of the most dynamic coaches in the industry. Therefore, it kills me to see people like Sweet cheapening my profession and claiming that genuine coaching skills can be acquired in two days because it’s based on “wisdom”.

If you want to know if a coach is as good as their web site claims they are, here are four tips you can use to find out.

1. Ask where they got their certification and research the school: As you can see, in the rapidly expanding coaching field, you cannot judge a book by its cover. “Certified Coaches Federation” sounds awfully legit, but a simple search of the International Coach Federation’s directory comes back with zero results under that name.  This means their certification is as valuable as the paper it’s written on.

2. Ask how much they paid for their tuition: Sweet charges $979 for his alleged certification, but I paid $8,500 for mine; does that tell you anything?

3. Ask them to explain their certification process: Did it happen over a weekend? Did they do 12 online assignments? Or was the process something like I described above? If after they tell you how they obtained their certification, you don’t think, ‘Man, that’s a lot of work!’ you don’t want to hire them.

4. Ask them to give you some advice: Advice is a buzzword to a trained professional coach and we don’t give it. If they immediately start giving you their opinion on how you should proceed in any situation, back away. It may be easy to have someone give you their answer, but it will only be a short-term solution, if it works at all. Lasting results come from being empowered to know the only limitations you have are self-imposed and you can’t learn that following someone’s advice.

Follow these simple guidelines for hiring a coach and watch your results, in life or business, soar.

Lead researcher Klaus Linde states, “Overall, we found that the St. John’s wort extracts tested in the trials were superior to placebos and as effective as standard antidepressants, with fewer side effects.”

To come to that conclusion, Linde and his staff reviewed 29 trials with 5,489 patients exhibiting signs of major depression. The natural plant extract proved to be just as effective as synthetic drugs and had the added benefit of minimal adverse effects, which meant less people dropped out of the trial.

This is further proof that God created everything and, as such, works through His creation to bring about the healing of man.

If only we could finally accept that.

The Rest of the Story.