Is Life Coaching a Scam?

This video answers the questions: Is life coaching a scam? How does it relate to counseling? Should I become a life coach or should I become a counselor? What can I expect to get from life coaching? Is it a substitute for counseling? When we talk about life coaching one of the difficulties here is there's no real single definition for this construct. Life coaching is an unregulated field, so anyone with or without training can go out at any time and open up a life coaching business as long as they're in line with other applicable laws. There are no laws that I'm aware of that regulate life coaching. Counseling is regulated. Counselors at some point, we would hope, achieve level of licensure and that's the level where they can bill insurance companies. They have other certain rights and privileges like the ability to diagnose.
They go through certain steps like education, testing, and postgraduate supervision to make sure they reach a level of competency. None of those safeguards exist in life coaching. Just because something's not regulated doesn't automatically make it a scam, but it certainly makes it more vulnerable to be a scam in any particular instance.