Hello, this is Mark Butler and you are listening to a podcast for coaches. A while back, I outlined a whole episode about certifications and then it got long and too complex. And so then I simplified it down as much as I could and it became a podcast about coaches selling training to other coaches. It's the one whose title has something to do with, How to read a sales page. You could go listen to it.
I think it was pretty good, but in the last week, a listener emailed me and said, I would love it if you did an episode on certifications for coaches. And I appreciated that email and I think it's a worthwhile topic. So, here we are today and I'm giving you my opinions on certifications for coaches. And as usual, we should probably start with a story because stories make things less boring.
So if you listened to last week's episode, you know that as I record this, I am still wearing a boot on my left foot. Good news. I'm meeting with a surgeon today. I'm hopeful the surgeon is very confident. We need confident surgeons. I want the surgeon to say, don't worry, Mark, I've got this. It's all going to be okay. You're going to be able to go on walks again soon.
I'll keep you posted, but I've had an interesting experience with this whole foot issue and interacting with different doctors, because many of you as coaches will bring some of your insecurities and some of your imposter syndrome to the conversation about certification. And I get it. I don't blame you for it.
You might think that it's only in the world of coaching, that some people are critical of the industry or critical of practitioners within the industry because of the certifications they have or don't have. You might think that it's only therapists looking at the world of coaching and saying, ah, that's all made up. There's no adult supervision in that industry and there can be a lot of harm there.
And it's because they lack this formal certification and it's because they haven't gone through a licensure process. Well, yeah, kind of. I think there's something to that. I'm not upset with therapists for having some of those concerns. In a minute, I'll talk about how I would give those concerns back to those same therapists if they have those feelings. But let's look at a world.
The world of medicine, which we all know to be highly regulated where people take their certifications and their licensure very seriously, and where I, as a consumer of their services, also take their licensure and their certification very seriously. And yet, the licensure and the certification seems to be an insufficient signal. To practice medicine legally, at least here in the United States, I'm sure elsewhere, you have to have Licenses, you have to have certifications.
There are hoops you have to have jumped through. I, as a consumer of those services might have gone through life thinking that by virtue of having completed that, I don't have to wonder or worry about the quality of care that a person who's been licensed and certified would give. I've probably been guilty of thinking one doctor's like another doctor. They all played the same game. They all passed the same tests and checked the same boxes. They're probably inherently trustworthy as a result.
Well, it turns out it's not true and not even they think it's true. I have a foot injury So I've seen probably three different podiatrists who are doctors of the foot about my foot injury. I think I've gotten great care and advice from a couple of those. I think I've gotten not great care and not great advice from at least one of those. And then the other day I was having a conversation with my friend who's an anesthesiologist and we were talking about my journey with this foot.
And I was telling him who I had seen already and who I might be seeing again. And he got a very concerned look on his face. And he said, I'm going to connect you with the husband of one of my practice partners. He's an orthopedist. He's legit. He's done X, Y, and Z additional training things. And when I've talked to him, he told me, Much of his work is correcting the work of podiatrists. And internally I laughed and I said to myself, see, this is everywhere. Everywhere that humans operate.
You have territory battles, you have tribalism, you have people's declaration that my badge is better than your badge. And the thing is on a case by case basis, it's true. And on a case by case basis, it's not true. Do I believe my good friend? Yes, he's trustworthy. When he says that his colleague Does a lot of repair work on podiatrists mistakes? Yes, I do. Do I also believe that there are amazing podiatrists who would give me a higher standard of care than some other orthopedist? Yes, I do.
I believe these things exist on a case by case and a person by person basis. Different people choose to check different boxes. What I care about as the consumer of services is when I interact with the surgeon today, I want to have a feeling that he's able to give me my best possible chance of success with this injury. I will use a bunch of signals to decide that he's trustworthy or not. His certifications will be a factor. His experience is a factor. His demeanor will be a factor.
I met with a surgeon a couple of weeks ago and he was so unenthusiastic that I walked out of that office and I thought, it's not that I don't like that guy. And it's not that I think he was giving me poor care. He was trying to manage expectations. He was trying to tell me the version of the truth that he thought was fairest and most accurate, but he communicated such a lack of confidence. In my situation that I thought, even if he's right, I don't want to have further interaction with him.
I want to meet with someone who still manages expectations, who still sets the right tone for the whole interaction, but who can look me in the eye and say, I'm one of your best chances at a good outcome here. I'm not the only person who can do it, but I'm totally confident that I give you a great, Possibility of a good result here. That's what I'm looking for. I'm going to use all of these signals, including the endorsement of my friend, the anesthesiologist, his, his opinion matters to me.
If he's endorsing the surgeon, that's important. I'm using all of these signals to go into this appointment, hopefully today. But I will tell you this, if I don't get a good feeling in today's appointment, I've already found another surgeon who lives in Boise, Idaho, which is a six hour drive from me. One of her important trust signals is that I found her by searching my condition on YouTube. She is a speaker on the topic.
She gets invited to conferences to speak about my particular issue with my foot. She speaks about it enthusiastically. She speaks about it with great confidence. She's licensed and certified and et cetera. But above all, if I don't get a good feeling today here in Salt Lake, I will drive myself to Idaho to meet with her because what I want is a functioning foot. I don't really care how I get it. If it means flying across the country, I'm going to fly across the country.
The licensure is a, necessary, but insufficient signal for me as a consumer of services. It is exactly this way in the world of coaching, maybe even more so, because in coaching there is no regulating body. People draw the closest comparisons to therapy, I get it, I'm for that. You've heard me say on this podcast before I love therapists. I love therapy, but what matters is trust. There are plenty of people who would never meet with a coach because a coach is not a licensed therapist.
I have no problem with that. It's more likely that people who buy coaching have some other reason to trust coaching. Either they are a coach or they have a friend or a family member who's a coach. They have a relationship that compensates for the trust deficiency that might come from the lack of a license, from a lack of permission to practice that comes from a regulatory body. I have no problem with any of this. It all works out fine.
What we find in practice is that there are great coaches and there are terrible coaches. We find that there are great therapists and there are terrible therapists. In my family, we have experienced both. A couple of years ago, my wife, Kate, she wanted to go see a coach or a therapist. She found a local therapy practice. She liked the idea of meeting in person. She was paired with a wonderful young therapist. He was very young. She's maybe 29 or something at the time, 28.
The rapport that Kate felt with her was exactly what you're looking for in your relationship with your practitioner. The therapist had some life experiences that, that related to life experiences that we're having in our family. Which helped the trust. She's a fantastic therapist. Unfortunately, she then moved out of the country and that relationship ended.
What we found is that when Kate went on the hunt for another therapist, She would come back to me and say You're a better therapist than any of the therapists I meet with and I'm having a hard time trusting them. I just, the rapport is not there. And I said, yeah, I mean, well, first of all, I don't know if I'm a better therapist than they are because I'm not actually a therapist, but I understand what you're saying.
What you're saying is you're struggling to feel the rapport with them that you feel with me, given the fact that we have lots of conversations that look a lot like coaching and a lot like therapy. Kate coaches me, I coach Kate. We, we have tools. We interact this way. And what she's saying is in the people that she was interviewing, she wasn't feeling that sense of confidence and rapport. So she didn't continue the relationship. She's also looked at coaches.
Sometimes she struggles a little bit in the coaching world because. My place in the coaching community makes it so that it's likely that the coach she's going to be interviewing knows me and so sometimes she doesn't feel quite safe in potentially working with someone who knows both of us, etc. It's the rapport and the trust that matter. We've even had a relationship with a therapist where it just went completely off the rails. It was so bizarre.
I don't need to go into the details, but what I can say is in that moment, the official badge from the regulating body did not help. It did not help. So certifications in some industries like medicine. We might call a necessary trust signal, but in every situation, they seem to be an insufficient trust signal by themselves. So then as coaches, how do we think about whether to do more certifications? I think one of the things we've got to talk about is why certifications are so appealing.
If you grew up in the United States, and I think other parts of the Western world, you grew up in a permission culture, you grew up in an authority culture, you went to school, they gave you information to learn, they tested you on that information, and then they gave you a grade based on your ability to recall that information or synthesize that information or analyze that information.
But there was an authority figure whose job it was to tell you that you did it right, or that you did it wrong. And to certify your competence or your knowledge in that area. It's called a grade. All of your grades rolled up in what's called a grade point average. The grade point average had consequences to your future.
And I believe it indoctrinated us to believe that before we do something, especially something that we find a little bit scary or something where we think there's potential for us to do harm to ourselves or to others, we need to go get the permission and the certification from the authority figure before we start. And this for me is something that has truth in it, but is not true. In other words, there are good principles in there, but the overarching message is false.
If that overarching message is, you're not allowed to do this until someone else tells you it's okay. And that's just not the case. Now as coaches, just like with therapists,, I think we should proceed with care. I have had many experiences as a coach where certain topics or certain sets of circumstances come to me and I will tell the person, I really think you're going to be better in the hands of another practitioner. That practitioner might be a coach that I refer them to.
It might be a therapist that I refer them to. If there seems to be something clinical or diagnosable, if this seems like something that a psychologist, a psychiatrist, or maybe even a, an MD should be involved in, then all the more. So I'm going to say, I am either qualified or not. Nor certified because here, I think it matters to address this issue with you. I think that's good ethics. I think those ethics apply equally to therapists as to coaches.
And even though therapists will likely have had to go through classes, And examinations that reinforce that sense in them, that sense that there are times when we need to refer this person elsewhere in practice, we have no idea whether they will actually act on those instructions, act based on that ethic. The person who is certified does not operate under the close supervision of the governing body. In their licensure phase, in the period that we might call practicum, they're being supervised.
After they get out of that supervisory period, they may choose to engage in further supervision. On a longer timescale, a person who is prone to bad behavior will behave badly. A person who is prone to ethical behavior will behave ethically. Their license or lack of license won't be the factor that we think it should be. To be clear, I'm not anti licensure. There's a very real possibility that in the next two, three, four years, I will become a licensed therapist.
I will jump through the hoops that I just got finished telling you are insufficient trust signals and insufficient guarantees of quality of care. I still might do it. It makes sense to me that if a person intends to be in the coaching world, if they intend to have a career as a coach that would extend to 10 years and 20 years and 30 years, I cannot think of a reason you wouldn't pursue licensure for the simple reason that it opens some doors and closes none.
If my title becomes Mark Butler, licensed marriage and family therapist, certain doors open to me. Where people who say, I won't work with someone who is not a therapist, now they're available to me. And still, everyone who doesn't care about the license is still available to me. So it opens a door, it closes none.
Also, in a very practical way, The word coach requires explanation in a way that the word therapist doesn't in our lexicon, in our culture, I have this happen all the time, if people say, what are you up to with your, with your work right now? Because my friends and neighbors know me to be a person who does many things and changes them quite often. What are you up to with work right now, Mark? Well, I've got the accounting business still really enjoying that.
And I'm doing a lot of coaching, coaching. What does that mean? I have conversations with people about their thoughts and their feelings and their behaviors and their relationships and the title that the world uses for that is therapist. I once had a coaching client refer to me to a friend in my presence. This is my therapist.
I did not correct him because who cares he, in that moment used the shorthand that he knew would require the least explanation in his conversation with his friend, because coach means a lot of things. A coach is a person who works with children playing soccer. A coach is an executive coach. A coach is a marriage coach. A coach is a health coach. A coach is a life coach.
But whether people actually understand what therapist means, they've heard the word enough times that they don't seek further explanation when they hear it. Oh, you're a therapist. Okay. That alone might be reason to pursue licensure in the long run. So when people say, what are you up to? You can say, Oh, practicing as a therapist. So it opens some doors. It closes none. The person who emailed me probably wasn't even wanting to talk about this.
They were probably wanting to talk about the fact that every coach under the sun offers a certification. I have what's called Butler's law. I'm claiming it. I'm not going to trademark it, but I'm claiming it. Butler's law states that all coaches. We'll eventually offer two things, a mastermind and a certification. Don't fight it. Don't be mad about it. It's happening.
The day will come where in the post roll ad on this podcast, I say, Oh, everyone, I'm so excited to announce my new certification. I'm launching a mastermind. Let's not fight it. It's coming, you know, it's coming. I know it's coming. You're going to do the same thing. Let's move on. It's Butler's law. Quote me Here are the reasons not to do a certification in my opinion.
And there are really just two, one is FOMO where you say, I don't want to miss out on that certification because I have friends and peers who are doing it and I don't want to fall behind. You're not falling behind. They're not going to come out of that certification. More qualified than you. They're not going to come out of that certification more marketable than you. You're not falling behind. Go talk to people. Go work with clients. Your skills will improve. Your relationships will improve.
Your network will grow. You will thrive. It's going to be great. You're not falling behind. The second reason not to do a certification is imposter syndrome. You observe some people. No judgment. Who've done three and five and six coaching certifications. There is such a thing as a person who just absolutely adores that experience. And I say power to you. If you've got the money and the time and the enthusiasm have a blast, I really am thrilled for you.
If you're a person though, who finishes one certification and due to some sense of internal lack. Some fear that you're not good enough, that you're not qualified, that you can't do a good job. You go on the hunt for the next certification, hoping that will solve the feeling that you have. Well, you're a coach, you know, that's not how it works. So you can absolutely bury yourself in debt, trying to solve your imposter syndrome, or you can acknowledge it as imposter syndrome.
You can hire a coach, you can work on that, and you can save yourself all those thousands and tens of thousands of dollars in certifications, which aren't going to make you feel confident anyway. So FOMO and imposter syndrome are terrible reasons to do FOMO and imposter syndrome. They won't solve those problems. I also think the certifications themselves, the badges, the pieces of paper, which are probably not pieces of paper, but you know what I mean?
They're not going to move the needle in your marketing directly. They're not a strong trust signal. Usually Except to other people who have the same badge. But even then it's not a strong differentiator. Kate and I have a good friend who now is an office manager for a therapy practice. This friend knows the work I do. She knows Kate, she knows we're into all manner of mental health services. And she says, what do you think of working at the practice?
And she said, well, there's four or five, six therapists. There's one that I would send everyone to. He's amazing. There are one or two who I wouldn't send anyone to. She gave us the name of the one she would send everyone to. And because I think about these things, I went and Googled him. Where did he get his education? He got his education at a now defunct, what I would call diploma mill. A for profit university, the master's degree probably was cheap. It was probably relatively easy.
He checked the box. He went into practice and apparently he's doing amazing work. I can assure you he would never put that school's badge on his website. It would, it would be a counter signal. But the signal that matters is that the woman who runs his office says to her friends, he's amazing. I would send a family member to him. I would send friends to him. So the badge doesn't really matter.
And unfortunately, especially in the coaching world,, if you attach your credibility to the credibility of the certifying person, company, whatever, Then if they go down from a brand and a trust perspective, you go down with them. I've never had a badge on my website. I don't really believe in badges on websites. That's me. What I believe in is the trust that grows through relationships. So FOMO and imposter syndrome are not reasons to do certifications.
Badges are an extension of FOMO and imposter syndrome. I understand that the badge means something to you because you paid a lot of money for it and you worked hard, maybe for the badge. So the badge means something to you. Please believe me. It means almost nothing to the person who observes it. And in some cases it makes them trust you less.
What will always increase their trust in you will be the recommendation of their trusted advisor, friend, family member, other practitioner, the badge itself, meh. There are reasons to do certifications. They're almost entirely experiential. If the experience of the certification is enriching and challenging, Great. That's why it's worthwhile.
Also, if the certification puts you into a new network and that network becomes a relationship farm for you, and you become part of other people's relationship farm, that network is powerful. And that could be a reason to do a certification. I was talking with a very good friend who employs hundreds of people. The other day, we were talking about a certification called a master's in, business administration. And I said, what do you think is the value of an MBA? He said, network.
And I said, what else? He said, nothing. There's no value in it beyond the network. It's the network. You go through your MBA with people. They're intelligent. They're ambitious. They're driven. They go out into the world and they build their network. You go out into the world and build your network. You share networks in the future, job opportunities, business opportunities come through it. It's beautiful. It's the network that matters. I did a certification in 2018.
I enjoyed the certification experience very much. It was at the life coach school. The certification experience has changed a lot since then. It's no longer one that I would be enthusiastic about sending people to, but what mattered more was the network. I have very close friends from that certification. I've had many client relationships.
If you look purely at ROI, the money I spent on that certification has come back to me many times over as the relationships formed there led to client relationships later. I think there's some knowledge to be had in certifications, but as I've said in other episodes, knowledge has never been cheaper in the history of humanity.
So information and knowledge are the weakest good reason to do a certification unless again, the experience is so strong that you absorb and you internalize and you're able to implement the knowledge more quickly and efficiently because of the certification experience. I trust that. I trust that completely.
But the information itself, if you find yourself saying, I want to join that certification so that I can learn things, learn better mean experiment with apply challenge, et cetera, because if learn just means become aware of, then it's not worth the thousands of dollars you're going to spend on a certification. I want to run a certification. You will see me in the next couple of years, maybe. Launch a certification. I probably won't call it a certification, but it will have that intent.
I will not launch that until I'm confident that the experience is so rich and important and valuable that a person should pay me those thousands of dollars. The information itself. Once I put all the information together, I will very likely make it freely available on a website. I'll say, here's all the information. If you want to consume it, by all means, have a blast. If you'd like to take that information and implement it.
In a challenging environment, sign up here because information wants to be free. Experience wants to be expensive. Implementation wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free. I think that's what I have to say about certifications. If it offers you a rich experience, if it enhances and enriches your network, if you just want to do it because it sounds fun, I think these are all great reasons. From a marketing perspective.
From a credibility perspective, from a quality of service and care perspective, I don't know. I don't, I don't know that the certifications I see in the world are the most efficient ways to achieve those things. So who knows? Maybe I'll wake up tomorrow morning and say, no, you got that wrong. And then you'll hear from me again on this topic next week. But I have thought about this a lot. I feel pretty good about these points. If you disagree strongly, please email me. I promise I'll read it.
There's very low chance I'll reply, but I am listening and I appreciate other people's perspectives. And with that, I'll talk to you next time.