The Life Coach School Reviews 57

Brooke Castillo is a great teacher and coach.The value for money of the certification is low though as whilst the School considers itself the Yale of coaching there is virtually no individual attention and feedback provided to the students and the school is not recognised by ICF which makes the certification worthless for coaches wanting to apply for corporate. I enjoyed the course but just feel the product is grossly overpriced based on the services provided. I would recommend aspiring coaches to make their due diligence before committing.

I went through LCS in 2018 for my certification. The material was somewhat helpful, but the instruction, customer service, and inability to offer what they deliver is why I wouldn’t trust this company again. The instructors gaslighted you, the customer service made everything your fault and you just have to “work on your thoughts” if you provided any feedback, and the promises to make money didn’t match up with what they preached (or could provide).

I’ve heard many great things about life coaching certifications through colleges and/or ICF accreditations. Go that route if you want to genuinely help people and make a humble wage doing it. LCS is all about taking your money.

Even though I got certified 5 years ago now, the school has only gotten worse according to everyone I’ve talked to. It is rare that I hear anyone is please or feels sufficient with their trainings. More people are moving away from this school and Brooke Castillo. People are finally catching on, including myself.

It especially sucks that I’m afraid to leave this review. They have a lot of support and people in their pocket. For years I thought I would be cut off from the power the school has. I never realized that THAT was what I was buying into, not the training. Once I started stepping away because I wasn’t able to think clearly from being held in an echo chamber that is their community, I’ve been able to see the school for what it is, exploitative and dangerous.

I can hear LCS’s reaction now to this review “she needs to work on her thoughts. We are the best in the industry.” They don’t take feedback seriously. Watch out.

STAY AWAY! Back in 2019 when I plunked down $18K to become a life coach, I wasn't able to find any reviews. This school is a scam. Brooke Castillo only cares about her $100 million goal. Why not ask how many of her coaches actually made money? She highlights a few coaches that make millions - but trust me, you won't be able to do that. So many people who truly wanted to help people and make an honest living have been scammed. She is nothing like the lovely woman you hear on the podcast. She's a total shitbag. She's a total narcissist. RUN!

Be wary! There is a reason why The Life Coach School (LCS) doesn’t have ANY official place online to leave reviews. They only publish carefully curated “testimonials”. This is a huge red flag.

I certified in 2019. LCS now charges $21k for you to learn nothing more than the content you already get for free on the podcast. The school has broken numerous promises of benefits to their coaches, including lifetime access to content and other perks. Every year they take more and more of these benefits away while raising prices.

There is an unofficial “Coaching Posse” Facebook group of LCS certified coaches with >3k members. The group was created after LCS deleted their official post-certified coach community in Slack… which was an advertised lifetime benefit that they revoked. The Facebook group is full of dissatisfied coaches, many of whom regret enrolling in certification.

The majority of LCS coaches do not earn much money. The top earners primarily sell coaching to other coaches, and are constantly put in the limelight by LCS for attention because they help LCS recruit more coaches.

If you sign up for certification, be prepared to step into an endless sales funnel of constant add-ons and upgrades while you’re told that your certification isn’t “enough” and now you need “$25k Master Coach Training”.

LCS lures prospective coaches in with promises of the chance to work for their school as a coach. Well, they recently laid off a lot of their coaches with < 30 days warning after sending an informal mass message. They don’t care about their coaches or staff. The sole focus is achieving their $100m in 1 year goal. The Life Coach School prioritizes profits over people.

I enrolled in The Life Coach School with high hopes of transforming my life and honing my coaching skills. Unfortunately, my experience with this particular institution was nothing short of a complete disappointment and a waste of time and money.

First and foremost, the school's advertising is blatantly false and misleading and turned out to be nothing more than a clever marketing strategy.

One of the most frustrating aspects of The Life Coach School was the complete lack of contact with the instructor throughout the week. Despite paying a HEFTY sum for the program, as students we were not allowed to contact our instructor outside of the designated class hour (one hour per week). This lack of availability severely hindered my ability to seek clarification, discuss concerns, or gain valuable insights from the instructor.

It became apparent to me and many others in the program, that Brooke Castillo who is running this school, had ulterior motives that were far from student-oriented. It became evident that her sole interest lay in achieving her 100 million dollar goal, rather than genuinely caring about the growth and development of her students. This selfish focus manifested itself in the form of neglect and indifference towards the needs and concerns of the aspiring coaches who entrusted their time and money to the school.

The entire experience left me feeling cheated, undervalued, and frustrated.

The school rendered it nothing more than a profit-seeking institution with little regard for the success and well-being of its students.

To anyone considering enrolling in this life coach school, I strongly advise you to look elsewhere for a genuine and reputable institution that prioritizes your growth and offers the support and guidance necessary to become a successful coach. Save yourself from the disappointment, frustration, and financial loss that I endured by staying far away from this underwhelming establishment!

Don't do it! I get it, you want to help people. This is not the organization to align yourself with.
I experienced the biggest bait and switch with this organization. This seems to be the consensus among many.
I paid for the certification program based on the promised certification benefits. Those benefits were removed in later years when the founder, Brooke Castillo changed her business model. An ethical organization would have grandfathered those benefits in, but not LCS.
The culture is all about getting you to spend more money for additional levels of certification because the $20K you already spent isn't enough to give you a viable business.
Brooke Castillo has a $100M goal, and sadly, you are just a pawn in helping her reach her goal. She will over-promise and under-deliver in her programs.
You deserve better.

The CTFAR model is the only thing they use and the only thing they teach coaches.

As a therapist, this is not appropriate. You are dealing with people's feelings and emotions and a rudimentary 6-month program is not an acceptable foundation.

I did Self-Coaching Scholars and it is basic and scammy - it is just a tool to get you to pay for a "Coaching Certification." The whole thing is advertised to death but the quality is poor and lazy. Stay AWAY!!

All of the marketing for the coach certification is about overdelivering. And they are good at marketing (though you won't learn how to market by taking this certification! Instead you will get business advice that is outdated, and the opportunity to purchase extra courses and 'experiences' from Brooke and her protege coaches).

When you get inside the certification programme, it quickly becomes clear that the emperor has no clothes. In other words, it is an excellent example of overpromising and underdelivering.

But I guess that's just my thoughts and I should coach myself on the experience of minimal contact time, no opportunity to ask questions about what is being taught and zero feedback on submitted coaching samples.

Not much is covered that isn't readily available for free on the podcast and concepts are presented as if they are Brooke's own invention even when they are not - there is no academic rigour or citation of sources for anything taught. The only coaching tool taught is The Model (Brooke's adaptation of the CBT model), with a focus on performing a model-based coaching session 'correctly'. There are a couple of sessions about "culturally competent coaching" and "trauma informed coaching" but these are imho very surface level and would not be very useful to students who did not have pre-existing knowledge of how trauma and social positioning affect their clients.

The school's marketing also speaks to the certification being a one-stop-shop for business support and to the ease of building a successful coaching business as a "perfect" career (success here is defined purely in terms of making money - there is no discussion of ethics or contracts or how to best serve clients or assess whether they are making progress towards their goals). But at no point is it mentioned that the success stories touted by the school are largely people who already had key components of a successful online business before they certified, such as large networks or social media presence, existing business experience and/or financial privilege. As a lower-income person for whom certification was a financial stretch, being told that you "have to invest $100k to make your first $100k" is a bit galling, to put it mildly. Also, the business advice is all about making facebook ad and sales funnels, but the guidance on how to make ads is completely outdated (ie a waste of time - the instructions don't work with current versions of facebook). As to sales funnels, Brooke is heavily promoting Click Funnels to new coaches as THE way to get clients, ie encouraging people to make further investments in software that is not appropriate for their stage of business. The business support is completely DIY, with students encouraged to form 'mastermind' groups.

It is also galling to hear how the LCS certification has been shortened over time and how the contact time/content has been reduced and class sizes enlarged in service of Brooke's $100 million goal. Perhaps it was once a good option. Who knows?

Does anyone else think it's odd that you are hard-pressed to find a negative review about The Life Coach School online? That's because there's no place within the organization to leave an honest review--they're all scrubbed. So here you go.

When I signed up with LCS, I believed they were the best of the best. I was a die-hard fan.

Since that time, I've come to realize I fell for marketing schemes and hero worship. I paid $18K for training and $25K master coach training and I can unequivocally say IT WAS NOT WORTH THE MONEY. Please do yourself a favor and walk away. No, RUN away. Get on a bullet train. Whatever you have to do, I promise it is not the place you think it is.

There are many other, better schools out there to get certified from, that teach scientifically proven methods, instead of Brooke Castillo's opinion on the world.

She's built her business around shady tactics where she built up strategically a handful of coaches to "prove" that anyone can be a successful life coach, and if you aren't, well, it's your own fault and you need to change your thoughts. She has the token doctor, lawyer, therapist, weight-loss coach, black person, mormon--someone for everyone to look up to and emulate! It was all strategically planned from the beginning to make everyone think they can have it all when in fact, these "successful" coaches were made by Brooke Castillo continuously endorsing them and having them on her podcast.

At LCS, it's become all about the money. How much she can make to reach her 100M goal--and guess who's helping her reach it? YOU. Where can they cut corners and brainwash you into thinking "you have everything you need" when the reality is, they don't want to bother with you? YOU even get to print off all your materials, and even your certificate at the end. Congratulations!

I worked as a contracted coach and made *literally* as much as my son working at Happy Teriyaki and getting tips. She practices "over-delivering" and yet can't overdeliver to the very coaches who are the backbone of her business. So I left--it was a TOXIC environment (even though she preaches there is no such thing as toxic people. gaslighting anyone?).

The only reason I gave it 2 stars is because it is what jump-started my life coaching journey, not because of the school itself. I am NOT bitter--I am actually in such a better place now that I've left and learned to think for myself. But I j don't want anyone else to make the same mistake I did. It's a costly one!

Do not fall for the scam of LCS.

I beg of you not to make the mistake that I did in dipping into my retirement savings to pay 5 figures for the CCP experience.

I started to see the cracks while I was in the program. There is SO MUCH gaslighting, it'll make your head spin. You will not receive feedback on your submissions such as "required audio/video." The only thing you will hear about is that you didn't follow directions and the video (for example) should be EXACTLY 2 minutes. Do I think they even watched it? Yeah, that one they did, because they kicked it back to me, telling me it was "too busy; distracting." Fair enough, but it would totally fly on TikTok. Whatevs.

I adored the podcast back in the day. I binged it daily, starting in 2018. Then I joined Self Coaching Scholars ("The Netflix of Coaching") and buffered some more.

I literally buffered for MANY hours per day and avoided building my own business because I thought I needed to know all of the things first. Things only LCS could share. And I saw that everyone else in my sphere was doing it too.

When I did go through CCP, my peers would pop up in to SCS to get coached by the leader and I fell even harder. Because surely they knew something I didn't.

Please hear me when I say this: the overdelivering ENDS the moment they take your cash. However you scrape it together (and they encourage you to go into debt and do the thing because you'll make your money back). No. NO. No, you won't. Not through their program alone. It's so very basic, it's laughable.

LCS loves to prop up their most successful coaches (who already had thriving businesses or backgrounds before certification). And they are happy to promote those top tier coaches as the ones to work with, so you are in a never ending sales funnel. Half of my cohort went on to another affiliate sales program. I was sitting here wondering why I needed to pay another coach to learn how to sell - something I should have learned here. So I gaslit myself...as I was trained to do.

I refused to buy another program after CCP. It was supposed to be everything, soup to nuts. It is NOT. And that's where I dug my heels in and said NO MORE.

The school treats coaches like commodities. We are human beings.

There is ZERO trauma-informed or suicide awareness instruction until you are finished. And only then, it's a check the box from third parties and super basic (in my experience, a full year after certification, just to stay active; not woven in to the training itself). I literally went into freeze mode and shut down after this "training."

Everything you learn from CCP, you can get FREE from the podcast. Literally, the materials are podcast content recycled. Or even just SCS....which you only get a year of access upon certification, and they put ALL of the coaching materials behind a paywall. There is no formal community or support post-cert. Zero. Nada. Absolutely nothing. Yes, there is an "unofficial" FB group of around 3K that thrives on word of mouth alone AND...gaslight coaches constantly to simply change their thoughts.

When they sell that you will have access to a
"certified site," please be aware that you'll get to view VIDEOS of previous masterminds (years old) and such. That's it. And one call per month. And the founder *screams* at her coaches that it's just our thoughts. She makes it clear that we are despicable unless we are raking in the cash ourselves. It's so very toxic and harmful, I cannot even begin to express. I'm truly trying to be fair here.

Everything of substance is in Scholars. AND....certified coaches have to pay for that too. On top of everything else. YAY, we put new stuff for coaches in SCS! Certified coaches should NOT have to pay $300/mo for access to the latest and greatest material (i.e. 3 years old instead of 6).

All of that said, what's good? I met some wonderful humans on my path. I've formed amazing relationships.

I could have done that much by simply existing. Truth.

Cult- just stay away. Her marketing techniques are just WRONG! I've head Brooke encourage people to max out credit cards, borrow from family, or drain their kids college funds to pay for her "certification." Any coach with integrity would NEVER suggest such things.

Conflicted feelings. I used to love Brooke Castillo’s teachings that I was exposed to through her podcast. A few years ago, I joined Self Coaching Scholars (now called Get Coached). I stopped after 3 years because I lost my job and couldn’t afford it anymore. Even after pleading for a pause on my membership, they refused to let me back in without waiting the required year after you cancel your membership.

Since then, I’ve seen the Life Coach School transform into (in the words of their own CEO) a boondoggle. They charge $23k to be certified as a Life Coach—a number they say will soon increase. They seduce me potential customers by platforming the handful of uber-successful coaches they have as examples of what is possible (keep in mind, this is only a handful of high-earners out of thousands of certified coaches).

But it is misleading marketing. Most coaches do not make their investment back from coaching and they are stuck with tens of thousands of dollars of debt. Some sell their cars, their blood, their eggs, mortgage their homes, etc.

Brooke’s podcast has devolved into one big advertisement for certification. She is pumping out coaches (most of whom coach other coaches) at record speed without seeming to care about their complaints that they are not being trained properly to become entrepreneurs. I hate to say it, but it seems to me that her business has become a grift.

It is not all bad. The 2 stars is for the teachings the school delivered in the past, some of which still have value for me. But the way Brooke treats her employees (sky high turnover, burnout, reported PTSD), her students, and her customers has slowly appalled me. She is not the same. Neither is the school.

I am certified through their CCP program. I wanted to share my honest review of the experience to help others make an informed decision.

The good:
-I like LCS tools. I use the model and the self-coaching and it works for me. I love that I can use this with my client.
-I haven't gotten to attend yet but I'm excited that they do an annual in-person Mastermind event for coaches
-I enjoy the training videos and there is useful information in them

The bad:
-Very limited feedback on our coaching. I do not believe this program gives you nearly enough feedback to be a good coach. I worry that the limited feedback will create a lot of mediocre life coaches that will dilute the value of the certification. They have changed the format of the program since I completed it but I would guess I got less than an hour of feedback and instruction total on my coaching. You had to submit audio for certification but I'm pretty sure no one even listened to them. We never got any feedback on them.
-Outdated materials in the post-certification portal. When I signed up we were told this is the only program you'll ever need to buy because it includes all the business-building tools you need. The problem is the information is very surface-level and extremely outdated. These resources are never updated.
-Overuse of the model. This is really beaten into you during certification and it's really the only coaching tool they teach you to use.
-Ongoing support costs extra. When I signed up for this certification it was pitched as "the only program you'll ever need". However, if you want ongoing help and support with your coaching you will have to continually pay $300 a month for Scholars forever. All new workshops and materials are added to Scholars and NOT the certification portal. I wish the school was upfront about this. They do one group call a month in the certification portal everything else is in Scholars at an extra fee. We were also recently pitched a $5000 virtual business course even though I was told we would never need to buy anythi
-Overuse of success stories. When the school sells this certification they focus on how easy it is to become a six-figure or multiple six-figure coach. Most people who create this result already have a following or marketing experience. It is very rare for someone to come in with no experience and use only the tools in the certification program to build a business. A lot of successful LCS coaches end up spending thousands more on Mastermind and additional courses to get the tools they need to grow their businesses. I wish LCS didn't sell people on this dream of making tons of money because I think it's very misleading. I doubt most of the people who take certification ever make their money back. I would not sign up for this program if you can't afford to lose $23,000.
-Pushy marketing. I decided to write this review after I heard there was a live event where people were told to max out credit cards or do whatever they need to do to join this program. This honestly made me really sad to hear. Please just know there are lots of coaches who graduate from this program and are not good coaches and do not make their investment back. There is no support for you after you certify to make your investment back. You're going to get a portal with extremely outdated videos and one call a month. I have read a few comments of people who faced real financial hardship because they invested in this certification and were not able to make their money back.
-Bare minimum everything. When I was in this program it felt like they did the bare minimum on everything. We didn't receive any material in the mail and had to print our own diplomas. It really felt like if they could have done less they would have. Their goal is to maximize profits and it feels like it when you're in the program.

SUMMARY
If you have the money and want to be able to use the model and other LCS tools in your practice go for it. The certification is great for that. I actually am a huge fan of Brooke and the School and wanted to be able to use the model so this certification was worth it to me. HOWEVER, I think there is a big gap between the quality that they claim to offer and what you actually get. It definitely feels like you're a number to them and they don't care about you once you're in the program. This is basically a DIY program with little feedback and for $23,000 I think you can find a lot better ways to grow your coaching skills.

If you want feedback on your coaching look elsewhere and don't sign up thinking this is an all-inclusive program. The School loves to share flashy success stories but do not get sucked into them. I would guess the majority of people who take this certification never make their $23,000 back. While I got value from the program I would not recommend it because of the price and low quality and minimal effort.