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By day, she worked in a cubicle at Hewlett-Packard in her spare time, she took long walks and listened to personal development gurus’ cassettes on her Walkman.įrom inspirational speaker Byron Katie, she learned not to blame outside circumstances for her problems. Starting with Robin Norwood’s Women Who Love Too Much as a teenager, she embarked on a decades-long journey of self discovery. She came of age in California during the golden age of self-help.

Is Castillo empowering her largely female client base with the tools and support they need? Or selling them an unattainable fantasy?Ĭastillo, now in her late 40s, wears her cropped blond hair swept to the side, her eyes ringed thickly with liner. Operating in the murky realm of “empowerment”, where personal development and financial success blur together, LCS is certainly having a moment its revenue more than quadrupled between 20. “People that had been on the fence about changing their lives, this was a good catalyst for so many of them.”īut the rapid rise of Castillo and the Life Coach School also raises questions about an unregulated industry at a time when the demand for mental health services is outpacing supply. “Our enrollments went way up,” Castillo told me. As employees left their jobs in droves, seeking better working conditions and more fulfilling careers, LCS trained a record number of aspiring life coaches. Last year, with more people than ever anxious, indoors and online because of the pandemic, the company made $37m in gross revenue. The Life Coach School caters to the idea that anyone who works hard can build a thriving career as a life coach. The certification is not recognized by any outside authority, but Castillo likes to say that in the unruly world of coaching, her program is the gold standard, the “Yale of life coaching schools”. If they complete the program successfully, she proclaims them to be “certified” life coaches. Coaching is distinct from therapy, in that it tends to focus on helping functional people improve their lives, rather than treating people with clinical issues – although those lines aren’t always clear.Ĭastillo, who has an air of efficiency and an undergraduate degree in psychology, founded the for-profit Life Coach School in 2007 in the years since, she has inspired thousands of people to enroll in an online certification program that costs as much as a year of college. Soon, Olivia began considering quitting her job to become a life coach, too.Ĭoaching is an entirely unregulated industry – there are no oversight boards, no standard curricula, no codes of ethics if I wanted to hang out my shingle as a life coach tomorrow, no one would stop me. She had learned to manage her mind and was rewarded with a fulfilling life: a happy marriage, two teenage sons, a pristine home and a thriving multimillion-dollar business helping other people self-actualize.

On her podcast, and in her persona, Castillo offered the promise of something better. And, like many, she found Castillo at a time when she felt an itching dissatisfaction with her life.
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Like many of Castillo’s listeners, Olivia was a successful professional middle-aged woman. Olivia has gone back and listened to the program starting from the very first episode, taking notes on particularly revealing insights. “This felt more like, ‘I’m on your plane, let’s figure this out together,’ which was very appealing.” She began to eagerly await new episodes, which drop every Thursday – Castillo hasn’t missed a week since she began her show in 2014. “When you work with a therapist, you’re talking to someone who doesn’t necessarily share your issues,” Olivia said. She opens up about her own struggles with weight and anxiety, and punctuates her anecdotes with a warm, trilling laugh. She is accessible and direct she sounds like a no-nonsense big sister who wants the best for you.Ĭastillo tells listeners that their problems are not caused by external circumstances – bad bosses, difficult mothers-in-law – but rather their inability to manage their own thoughts. In episodes with titles like Self-Image and Why Change Is Hard, Castillo delivers firm but friendly advice about boundaries, time management, and emotional regulation. Olivia initially discovered Castillo through the Life Coach School podcast, which regularly ranks among iTunes’s top business podcasts its episodes have more than 45 million downloads.
