The AI Coach

People often say, “I’m not sure I can do this… it feels like too much work.”

But work has never been the real fear. People handle hard things all the time — family, jobs, illness, uncertainty. What unsettles them isn’t the effort. It’s the isolation that effort usually comes with.

And this is where app-based or AI-driven solutions quietly fall short. Not because they lack intelligence, but because they lack human presence — the one ingredient effort depends on.

Apps can remind you to walk. A coach asks why you didn’t — and helps you fix the reason.

Apps can give you a meal plan. A coach checks your fridge, your schedule, your stress levels — and adjusts the plan to your life.

Apps can send automated notifications. A coach sends a message because they remembered you had a tough day coming up.

This is the difference most people underestimate.

The difference isn’t in the data.

The difference is in the relationship.

If information alone created transformation, everyone would be healthy by now. Google has enough advice to fix every problem, yet people still feel stuck — not for lack of knowledge, but for lack of companionship. An app can tell you what to do. But it can’t sense the fear behind your questions, the shame behind your slip-ups, or the loneliness behind your “I’ll start again tomorrow.”

And that’s the real question hidden inside “I’m not sure I can do this.”

It’s not a question about effort.

It’s a question about support.

Because with an app, you carry your doubts alone.

With a coach, your doubts become part of the process — something to work through, not hide from.

In the end, transformation isn’t technical. It isn’t a list of steps or macros. It’s emotional. It’s human. It’s two people walking together so the burden never becomes unbearable.

Apps guide the body. Coaches guide the human inside the body.

And that’s why coach-led change endures — it dissolves the one fear no algorithm has learned to solve:

The fear of walking alone

Recognizing Value

There’s something subtle that happens in service professions — especially in coaching. We become so familiar with the work we do that we stop seeing how much of ourselves is embedded in it. Not in the obvious places, like the plan or the protocol, but in the quiet, everyday gestures that no one else notices.

A client sends a photo of a half-eaten meal, and you instinctively know what went wrong. Someone messages at 10 p.m. saying they’re craving sugar, and you talk them through the moment instead of ignoring it till morning. You remember their routine, their challenges, the things they shared casually but that mattered to them. You hold all of this — their doubts, their momentum, their fragile motivation — as if it were your own responsibility.

And strangely, we forget that this level of attention is rare.

The world has already placed a high value on focused expertise. Doctors bill for a few minutes of consultation. Dermatologists charge heavily for follow-ups. Trainers set fixed rates for sessions whether the client shows up or not. Nobody questions it, because the value has been normalised. You pay for the container, not the guarantee.

But coaching operates differently. It’s not a container — it’s companionship. And companionship is harder to price, because it comes from a very human place. We don’t measure our care in minutes or appointments. We measure it in desire — the desire to see someone succeed, to see them change their own story.

This is why so many coaches hesitate when they quote their fee. Not because the price is unreasonable, but because they’re unaware of the invisible work they’re offering. They compare their number to the plan on paper, not to the life they help someone reclaim. They forget that clients aren’t paying for information; they’re paying for the presence that keeps them accountable, the guidance that stops them from repeating old mistakes, the steady voice that helps them stay with the process when the process gets uncomfortable.

And when you look at it that way, the question shifts. It’s no longer, “How do I justify my price?” It becomes, “Why did I assume my work needed justification at all?”

Because value doesn’t come from the length of a session or the sophistication of a chart. It comes from the heart and discipline you pour into someone’s transformation — the kind of effort that can’t be outsourced, automated, or easily replaced.

When you recognise that, pricing stops feeling like a defence.

It feels like telling the truth

Profit = Self Image

We’ve all had that moment where someone hears a price and instantly freezes. It doesn’t matter whether you say 90000, 60000 or 45000 — the reaction is the same. The eyebrows lift, the breath tightens, and the familiar line appears: “I’ll think about it… maybe after two months.”

And for a long time, we assume the number is the problem. We think if we had said a smaller amount, the person would have felt different. But if you watch closely, the size of the number rarely changes the size of the reaction. Because the truth is uncomfortable but liberating: a price feels like a bomb only when it arrives without context.

I’ve seen this play out with PCOD cases, IVF journeys, even something as simple as stubborn acne. A couple tries for years, visits doctor after doctor, and finally reaches the word nobody wants to hear — IVF. One cycle costs around 2.5 lakhs, and there’s no guarantee the first cycle works. Or the second. Or the third. The emotional toll alone is heavy, but the financial cost? Lakh after lakh, often with nothing to show for it except more fear and more fatigue.

Now imagine someone already carrying that weight. Already spending that much. Already hurting that much. For them, is ninety thousand really a bomb? Or was it a bomb only because we dropped it without showing them the landscape they’re actually standing in?

We forget that people are already paying a price. For the girl with hormonal acne, it’s fifteen or twenty thousand scattered across dermatologists, tests, creams, treatments she had to throw away because her skin reacted badly. For the woman with PCOD, it’s years of medication, missed cycles, emotional breakdowns, and the slow erosion of hope. When you look at that honestly, the program fee — whatever it is — isn’t the real expense. The real expense is the life they’re living right now.

That’s why context matters. Not as a sales trick, but as a kind of compassion. When we ask what they’ve tried, what they’ve spent, what they’re afraid of, we’re not interrogating them — we’re helping them see the full picture. Most people don’t make decisions based on information; they make decisions based on clarity. And clarity only comes when someone slows the moment down enough to say, “Let’s look at what’s actually happening.”

There’s a deeper layer too. When we rush to the price, we’re often revealing our own self-image. One coach quotes ninety, another quotes sixty, a third quotes forty-five — not because the value changed, but because their confidence did. Meanwhile the client, regardless of the number, still feels the same confusion because they still don’t understand the context.

Context is oxygen. In conversations, in relationships, in health, in selling anything that can genuinely help someone. When the story is clear, the price becomes grounding instead of frightening.

And maybe the quiet lesson beneath all of this is simple:

People aren’t scared of the cost.

They’re scared of paying for the wrong thing… again.

Listening for References

One of the quiet shifts that happens when you stop thinking like a service provider and start thinking like an entrepreneur is this: you stop looking for clients, and you start noticing connectors. The world suddenly looks different. Every person you meet carries a small universe of relationships you’ve never accessed. And most people don’t even realize the value of the worlds they already move in.

A real estate agent, for example, isn’t just someone helping families find homes. He meets dozens of people every week — people in transition, people under pressure, people talking about their lives more openly than they planned. A makeup artist meets people before big moments. A school administrator meets parents navigating stress. Even your neighbourhood shopkeeper hears more stories in a day than most people hear in a month.

But we often dismiss these people. We assume they’re not “our audience.” We forget that business doesn’t grow in straight lines; it grows through networks — through the person who knows a person who knows another person who needs exactly what you offer.

The art is simple: sit with people, listen to their stories, appreciate what they do, understand their world a little. Not to sell — but to build a bridge. When you show genuine curiosity, people naturally want to reciprocate. And when they trust you, they remember you. Not for your pitch, but for your presence.

Partnerships aren’t built in boardrooms. They’re built in casual conversations, everyday encounters, and the courage to say, “If you know someone who needs help in this area, send them my way. Maybe we can grow together.”

Every person you meet is a doorway. Most people walk past the door. Entrepreneurs learn to knock.

Being an Entrepreneur

Sometimes I meet wellness coaches who introduce themselves with a quiet apology in their voice. “I’m just getting started,” they say. Or, “I’m still learning the protocols.” And I smile, because I know what they don’t yet see: this work was never about becoming a wellness coach. It was always about becoming an entrepreneur who happens to operate in the domain of wellness.

That shift sounds small on paper, but it changes everything. A wellness coach looks at a client and sees problems to fix — weight, sleep, skin, energy. An entrepreneur sees something different: an outcome to be created. A path to design. A set of skills to refine. Where others say, “This is what I know,” an entrepreneur quietly asks, “What do I need to learn?” There’s a hunger in that question… a kind of restlessness that pushes you to upgrade yourself long before anyone asks you to.

But here’s the part we often miss: entrepreneurship is not built on knowledge alone. It’s built on identity. And identity grows through the less glamorous skills — how you speak to people, how you make them feel, how deeply you listen before offering a single piece of advice. These are the muscles most coaches forget to build. They chase every new nutrition book, every new protocol, every new supplement strategy, hoping it will magically make them successful. It won’t. Not on its own.

Because clients don’t follow information. They follow energy. They follow presence. They follow the person who makes them feel understood, not assessed. The one who asks, “How’s life going?” and actually waits for the answer. Leadership, in many ways, is the emotional atmosphere you create around you — the feeling people carry after a conversation with you.

And that’s why mindset and people skills are not optional extras; they’re the quiet foundation of a thriving coaching practice. The books on leadership, influence, and human connection — those are not for corporate managers. They are for anyone who wants to guide another human being through change. Without that growth, you stay stuck in the identity you started with: employee, student, housewife, technician. You may know the perfect detox, but you won’t know how to lead a person through their own resistance.

The real shift happens the day you stop saying, “I am a wellness coach,” and start feeling, “I run a business that transforms lives.” One is a role. The other is a responsibility. One limits you to information. The other demands that you grow — in confidence, in character, in your capacity to hold people’s stories without rushing to fix them.

And maybe that’s the secret nobody tells you at the beginning: entrepreneurship in wellness isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about becoming the kind of person people trust enough to ask their questions. When that identity clicks, everything else starts to move. The protocols matter, of course. But the person delivering them matters more.

Here are some mandatory books for everyone to go through: How to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie, How to have power and confidence in dealing with people by Les Giblin, 25 ways to win with people by John Maxwell

The Man(ual)...

Every machine comes with a manual. Even the simplest ones — a toaster, a washing machine — arrive with a small folded booklet that says, “Here’s how it works. Here’s what not to do.”

But when you become a man — when you marry, when you lead a family, when you try to make sense of your own purpose — no such booklet appears. No list of instructions. No index of what to do when fear, doubt, or fatigue creep in. You’re expected to somehow just know.

That thought came alive again for me in one of our Band of Brothers gatherings. As men stood up and shared, I realized we were all saying the same thing in different ways — we’re trying to figure it out as we go. Each of us learning how to lead ourselves first, then our families, and perhaps, one day, others.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe life was never meant to be mastered from a set of steps, but discovered through shared experience. We don’t need someone to hand us the answers — we need spaces where we can ask the real questions aloud.

Perhaps the “manual for men” was never missing. Maybe it was never meant to exist in the first place. Maybe it’s meant to be written in conversation, in brotherhood, in the quiet notes we take from each other’s stories.

Every time we share openly, we add a page to it. Every time we admit we don’t know and still take the next step, we add another.

And one day, when a younger man looks at you and says, “How did you figure all this out?”, you’ll smile — because you’ll know the secret. You didn’t. You just kept showing up, learning, and living your way through it.

That, it turns out, might be the only manual there ever was.