Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapists | Ep 9: How to Choose the Right Coach or Program to Scale in 2026

Released: 01/16/2026

Show Notes:

In this episode, Amanda discusses the importance of choosing the right coach or program for therapists looking to scale their practices in 2026. She emphasizes the need for discernment, understanding capacity, and recognizing both red and green flags in coaching relationships. The conversation highlights the significance of trust, transparency, and a balanced approach to scaling, ensuring that therapists feel supported as whole individuals rather than mere metrics of success.

3 Key Takeaways:

1. Before investing in a coach or program, assess your real capacity—not just your motivation—so you don’t confuse burnout or dysregulation with a strategy problem.
2. Red flags like guaranteed outcomes, vague transformation promises, and blame-based culture signal over-promising, while clarity, boundaries, and shared responsibility are signs of ethical coaching.
3. The right coaching relationship should feel collaborative, transparent, and grounded—supporting you as a whole human, not just as a revenue metric.

Connect with Amanda:

• Follow on Instagram: @amandakbcoaching
• Check out the Amanda KB Coaching website

Make sure to hit follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode!

Sponsors:

• This episode is sponsored by Alma – learn more here
• This episode is sponsored by Jane – use code: AMANDA2MO for a 2-month grace period

Resources & Links:

SEO for Therapists Membership

Therapy Intensives Academy

Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Mastermind

Free Training: 3 Steps to Booking Your First Therapy Intensive

Free Guide: 3 Steps to Double Your Income

SEO Freebie

Just a quick heads up, everything I share in this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It’s not legal advice, financial advice, or tax advice. Every practice and every state has its own rules. So if you’re wondering how something applies to your situation, make sure to check in with an attorney, accountant, or another qualified professional who can give you guidance based on your specific circumstances.

Transcript:

Amanda (00:03)
Welcome back to the Happy Healthy and Wealthy Therapist podcast. I am so excited to talk about this topic of choosing the right coach or program to scale because it’s such a timely conversation as many therapists are starting 2026 with that, you know, new year new me energy. You are probably ready for something different in 2026 because 2025.

wasn’t what you wanted it to be. Maybe you had set some goals for yourself and fallen way short or just slightly short or things just got left on the back burner and you really want to make sure 2026 is different. And you see other therapists like me who are out there making 250,000, 400,000 or even a million in a year and you’re wondering how you can scale to. So if you’re listening to this episode and you’ve ever thought

I don’t know if I trust coaching programs anymore or I’ve already spent thousands and I didn’t get what I hoped for. I want you to know you’re not alone in that. I hear this constantly from therapists and quite honestly, there’s been times in my own business and my journey where I’ve felt some similar things. Often there is this quiet layer of shame underneath our experiences within a coaching program or maybe you even had like

You’ve worked one-on-one with a business coach, so within a coaching container. And that quiet self-talk might look like, you know, maybe I should have known better, or maybe I just didn’t implement enough, or maybe it’s my fault it didn’t work. So today we’re going to talk about how to choose the right coach or program to scale in 2026 and beyond without bypassing discernment and without blaming yourself for past experiences. This episode is about

separating unrealistic expectations from actual under delivery, because that’s a thing, understanding capacity, not just motivation, and knowing what a healthy coaching relationship should actually feel like. That is so important. You could choose any coach out there, but you should have a healthy coaching relationship. I have always loved my one-on-one coaches, and that is not everyone’s experiences.

So why have so many therapists been burned with coaching? You are probably inundated by just as many, if not more, ads for coaching programs out there. So there are two things happening at the same time. First, the online coaching industry has a real over-promising problem. There are vague claims, there are inflated income stories, there’s this rhetoric of like,

Anyone could do this if you just believe and try harder. Way too much hostile culture, quite honestly. And sometimes there’s zero context about time, privilege, or risk that is inherent in these income stories or what’s possible if you just do X, Y, But second, therapists are often sold programs without anyone checking capacity. Meaning, you’re still seeing clients, you’re still charting,

You’re still holding emotional labor, still being a human with a life. And then you join this $10,000 program that expects you to have a ton of time for daily implementation, carry a high cognitive load as you’re working on a ton of things, have the emotional resilience to work on all of these things, have consistent visibility that enables your business to scale. When these things collide, this over-promising problem

and this no one’s checking in on capacity problem. When these two things collide, the result is often this thought of, this didn’t work and now I don’t trust myself to invest again. This doesn’t mean you’re bad at business. It means discernment wasn’t centered. I know how easy it can feel to be disappointed when something doesn’t work, right? Especially when money is involved. You invested,

Thousands of dollars into something you didn’t get the results you wanted and that it’s not okay, right? It’s not it’s not a good thing and it doesn’t mean you don’t have to trust yourself It just means we have to slow down and be intentional So let’s talk about something that can feel really uncomfortable, but it’s a really important truth Sometimes a program is solid Right. It’s got great foundation great bones. The support within it is fantastic

but maybe the expectations placed on it are unrealistic for the season someone’s in. So for example, if you are expecting a course to create momentum when you’re exhausted, if you’re expecting clarity when you’re actually dysregulated, if you’re expecting confidence when what you actually need is containment, these are some capacity questions that typically get missed before buying something.

How many hours per week can I actually implement? What will I have to give up to make this work? Is my nervous system already maxed out? Am I buying this to escape discomfort or to build something? So here’s the key distinction. If a program clearly explains what’s required, is honest about time and effort,

doesn’t guarantee wild outcomes and it still doesn’t work because life implodes, well, that’s not a failure on anyone’s part. It’s just a mismatch, right? What the program is and what it has to offer didn’t match the season you were in. Literally, you could do the same program six months later, a year later, and you could have potentially gotten something different out of it because it wasn’t a mismatch anymore.

But I’ve seen that and again, I have felt that. I’ve been in a really good group coaching program, but I didn’t have the time and capacity for it. I was like, I think scaling to a group ⁓ practice sounds fantastic. Let me do that. So I joined one of the really big ones out there and I saw it was a fantastic program, but I just was not in the space to actually do the work required. And that was, think, a little bit more me lack of checking in.

on that for myself and it was a little bit of, you know, when I met and did the consultation call, I wish that conversation would have been had with me more as opposed to just like, yeah, we’ve got you and you’re covered. I wish there would have been more conversation around literally how does this fit into your life right now. But if a program minimizes your effort, suggests ease without structure, frames lack of results as a mindset issue,

Well, then that’s not really an expectations issue, right? It’s not about, ⁓ clearly I just, didn’t know what I was doing or, you the problem is this when I thought it was that. This is an integrity issue. If someone’s saying, this is just so easy, you put in like 20 minutes and you’ll start making 30K months, that’s just not realistic, right? There is always some amount of work that is involved in scaling something and building something new, even.

better marketing your therapy practice, and it has to be clear what that amount of work is for you to actually give informed consent, right? Because if you can’t give informed consent because you don’t know all the information, then that’s where we’re gonna have this mismatch of what can the program give versus what do I have to give? So how can you spot over-promising and under-delivering in marketing?

Let’s talk about some red flags. Number one, any kind of guaranteed outcomes. So this can be income promises like how to ⁓ add, you know, 5K to your revenue every month,

or this can be any timelines without context. So if someone’s saying, you should be able to do this within 30 days, right? I see a lot of that with like social media marketing, like how to double your followers by 30 days. If it’s not sharing more with you about exactly how much time is it gonna take to meet that timeline, then that’s important, right? Like it’s not showing you the full picture or this quote unquote,

This works for everyone. Does it actually work for everyone? Probably not. There are people who have different capacities, literally a different amount of time. My time and my capacity as a person who does not have children, as a person who has quite a bit of privilege in their work because I’m able to make what I make working the amount that I do and I’m not specifically stressed about making more. Like my time and my capacity is different than someone who

is working 50 to 60 hour weeks and has three kids and is, you know, go on and on and on with why capacity is literally just different for us. So ethical programs talk about the process, not guarantees, right? What’s the process going to be of learning how to market yourself? What is the process of, for example, one of my programs talks about SEO, search engine optimization. I don’t say how to rank, you know, tomorrow, I say,

learn the strategies that are going to help you over time, right? That time might be shorter than you think, but it’s not gonna take forever. So when we can talk about the process of what someone’s gonna go through and not just give guarantees, you know, that’s a little bit more in the green flag area. Another red flag is this vague transformation language that we probably see out there. And a lot of this, quite honestly, probably comes from

how much AI people are using in their marketing these days. So I see things like aligned abundance or quantum leaps and shifts or even six figures without burnout. Like if you can’t tell what you’ll actually be doing in a program, if it’s just don’t worry about it, we got you, we’ve got you every step of the way, but you have no idea what you’re doing, it’s time to pause, right? Because you’re not.

You’re not sure what you’re signing up for and that is not a good thing. Red flag number three, there’s no discussion of effort or trade-offs. So any real scaling requires decision-making. It requires some discomfort. It requires actual iteration, right? Like you have to know what it is that you’re doing and sometimes that takes time. Someone recently asked me,

because I’m currently doing enrollment for my mastermind on scaling. And someone had asked me on a discovery call, what have other people in the program achieved so far? Right? You’re looking for testimonials. That totally makes sense. My honest answer was, you know, everyone is on their different timelines. And there are some people who midway through the six month program decided that thing I’ve been working on for three months, I’m actually not excited by it anymore and I don’t want to do it. And so they pivoted.

And that is a part of the process. Scaling is just as much about knowing what to say no to as it is knowing what to say yes to and what to work on. So it’s important that that’s conveyed and also that there’s like permission for that, right? There have been times I’ve been in a coaching program where I have felt pressured to just like, well, just keep to the path and like, that’s the thing to do. That’s where the money and the scaling and the progress and all of that is.

And so in early 2025, when I started to make some huge shifts in my business, like that was really uncomfortable to undo a lot of what I had built. But it was all for the purpose of actually building a business I wanted to run in a way that was in alignment with my values and my energy and how I wanted to run a business.

So I wish again, I had all those conversations and all that informed consent beforehand. If something sounds effortless, right, we need to ask what’s missing here, right? Can it actually be not that easy, but can it actually be that easy if you’re saying like, yeah, like it’s no problem at all, like anyone can do it, right? So if you have a question that something’s missing, ask, right? Send emails if someone doesn’t do a discovery call or ask those questions on the discovery call.

Red flag number four, blame-based culture. So if the unspoken rule is, well, if it didn’t work, you just didn’t try hard enough, right? Like you just didn’t follow the formula. You just didn’t do the thing. You didn’t whatever. It’s not really coaching, right? It’s a little gaslighty, honestly, because there’s something to be said for, right? Not doing the work. Absolutely. If you didn’t do the work, if you didn’t,

if it’s a program that has calls and didn’t go to the calls, if it has videos and you didn’t watch any of the videos. There is something to be said for, yes, you didn’t put in the work, but again, that’s not really a reflection of what you are capable of doing, but it is a reflection of, you know, it might not have been, again, the right time for you to have done the program. Your capacity was not there. So we can’t…

just continue to fall into this blame-based culture and continue to just say, like, I’m bad, I’m wrong. We need to practice a little bit more of that discernment around, did I fully understand what I was opting into and was I truly able to give informed consent based on the information I had? So now let’s talk instead about green flags. What should you actually look for

in a coaching relationship. Now, granted, I know there’s a lot of programs out there where it is just like a video program, right? So that might not even necessarily be a coaching relationship. Obviously, if you’re gonna be watching dozens of hours of videos from someone, you probably wanna like them. But here I’m talking a little bit more about programs where there is a live interaction component. So some green flags, we wanna look for clarity.

instead of charisma, right? There are tons of people who are very likable, right? My coach called me magnetic. I was like, God, really, am I magnetic? Because I don’t consider myself that way. What I consider myself actually is clear and trauma-informed. And that has always been a cornerstone of my marketing and my branding is to make sure everything is as clear as possible. And granted, some people still

don’t get the clarity they need from some of my marketing, right? We’re never gonna be 100 % perfect with that. But clarity is more important than just how likable someone is because we have to understand what’s included, what support looks like, and what’s expected of you as the person in the coaching program, right? That has to be so clear in order for you to know if it’s the right program and the right coach for you.

We also want to think about fit generally. This is very similar to the therapeutic relationship, but a good coach understands your industry. have seen way too many therapists say that they’re working with like a marketing coach who is not a therapist or like an online digital marketing coach or a brand coach or a money mindset coach that they don’t work in the therapy realm and

That’s why in the therapy realm, talk so much about your ideal client and your niche because we know the difference between feeling like we’re experts in a specific area and how that means we can help a person, how that means we can relate to a person. And it’s the same in the coaching industry as well. Now I’ve worked with coaches who have been therapists or who have never been therapists.

And it’s not that that part matters so much, but what matters is do they understand the pain points of the industry and what being in that industry has kind of done for us in terms of how we think about things. Like, easy example is how many therapists struggle with money mindset issues. Like someone who’s not a therapist, someone who isn’t familiar with the fact of like, well, why would therapists struggle to charge?

premium fees, if they have no understanding of that, they can’t give you good personalized advice, because they’re just gonna be like, you just have to do it, as opposed to understanding why it might take you a hot second to make changes when it comes to your rates or getting off insurance panels or whatever that is. So they have to understand our industry and the way that it has shaped how we think about things and why we might have a hard time doing things. A good coach also respects your ethics.

Right? There is a difference between do it my way, this works. And well, this is how I do it. This is why I do it that way. But tell me how does that work for you? Or there’s been times where I have had to tell some of my coaching clients before, it doesn’t sound like you are doing something you like. It sounds like you’re doing something because you think you’re supposed to be doing something or okay. Like if part of your ethics and how you want to build your practice is you want to have a

an offering, whether that’s in your therapy business or your coaching, whatever business else you build, you want to have an offering that is lower priced so that you can be more accessible. I’m going to say, fantastic, let’s build that as opposed to, no, that’s a money mindset block. You have to go for all the money because if someone’s not respecting your ethics, if they’re trying to get you basically just to get results.

That’s a little bit more for their marketing, right? They want more of those testimonials of, how I helped my clients scale to 100K, than it is caring about supporting you as an individual. Because ultimately a good coach isn’t trying to turn you into a carbon copy of themselves. They are trying to help you figure out what it is you want and to get really, really clear on that. That was a huge thing for me as I was in transition between two coaches.

I told the one I would be working with and the one I’m working with now, I was like, there’s a lot I want to change in my business. And that’s because I don’t feel completely in alignment with who I want to be because I felt forced from a previous coaching program to be basically a carbon copy of that person and how they ran their program. And she’s like, I’m all about that. Let’s figure out what works for you. And now I feel so much happier in my business because I’m doing things my way.

Another green flag is boundaries around access, right? Similar thing that we do in our therapy business, we have to have boundaries. Unlimited access isn’t actually supportive, right? When we have clear containers around this is how you can contact me, these are the types of questions, these are the ways to contact me, what you can expect in terms of responses, those are safer and those are more sustainable.

But when you see things like unlimited voxer support, I think there’s a little bit of a difference between you can ask as many questions as you want. I think that’s what a lot of us coaches mean. That’s what I say when I say unlimited slack support. It’s like, can ask as many questions as you want. But what it should not do for the coach is to mean they’re bending over backwards to respond to things like within an hour. But it’s more about realistic expectation setting for everyone.

Another green flag is shared responsibility. So good coaching sounds like here’s what I can provide and here’s what’s yours, right? A coach, think about it when you think about like a basketball coach or any other traditional way where we think about coaching. I was an academic coach and I was a career coach. Those were two of my graduate assistantships when I was in grad school. Most coaching relationships is very, very clear.

the coach acts as I have the information, I have the resources, I can give you tips and personalized support, and now here’s your part, right? Now it’s your part to take it away and practice and implement. And I think that’s really important because there can’t just be this aspect of like, just trust me and it’ll work, right? Like just follow my lead blindly. And right, like the shared responsibility part is

I’m giving you what I can provide. I’m showing you what part of that is yours and how you need to implement that and assess like the barriers around why that might be difficult or help to keep you accountable, but also too, to help you strategize when that’s not working, right? Don’t just say, just trust me and keep following the process. A good coach should actually attune to you and listen to you and again, respect you, even if that means

Yeah, I didn’t do the work. had so many people in my coaching program that was geared towards intensives and SEO. So many people would be like, I know you probably said this in the videos and I just didn’t get around to watching them yet. So tell me to like kick rocks if you don’t want to answer this question right now. And I’m like, no, I completely understand. Like part of why you all are here is because you don’t have a ton of time. So yeah, the videos are there as a resource for you, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to provide you.

that personalized guidance and support right here and now, because I don’t believe in a method of just like offloading to the videos. Honestly, people are probably not buying my videos. They are buying time with me. So having shared responsibility is a huge green flag. So like ask any coach you are considering working with, like what does that look like for us? And obviously it’s a huge green flag. If you can feel that felt sense,

of self-trust. So this one matters more than anything. After a sales conversation, so a discovery call, a consultation, anything where you might be buying a course or a program, you should feel clear, not rushed. You should feel grounded, not frantic. You should feel like you are the one who’s choosing something, not being pulled into something. I’ve been on

at least two calls for coaching programs where it very much was like, you have to join by XYZ and you really want to get in right now and well, let’s just get the credit card while you’re here. And like that never felt good to me back when that was a part of my coaching program, because I was told this is what you have to do and you have to hire this position called a closer where now someone who’s not you is having conversations with those people. Again, I did it to do it because that’s what I got told to do.

but it was not in alignment with my values and my ethics. And that’s a whole thing that I was working on undoing in 2025. So really to feel that sense of like, I trust myself. I am making this decision from a grounded place and I feel good about this and not, I’m doing this because I feel rushed to grab a deal or because I feel bad or I feel peer pressured. That’s huge. So if you’ve been burned before,

whether it’s by a one-on-one coach, whether it’s from a coaching program, maybe you’ve gone through multiple that have not worked for you, the work now isn’t finding the perfect program, it’s rebuilding trust in yourself as a decision maker, right? Ultimately, that is the problem that I laid out in this episode today is that how the coaching industry is run in a lot of ways.

I don’t know if I want to say like is predatory, but like some of them are definitely predatory and some of them are just lots of people who don’t have the best of intentions or lots of people who are prioritizing something like profits over people and relationships. So you need to learn, I’ve had to learn to trust myself as I can make this decision, right? I’m not going to fall prey to any kind of

scare tactics or I’m not going to be bullied into something or I’m not just going to buy something just to make this conversation a little less awkward or so that they stop emailing me. But it’s really about remembering you know how to make decisions. You know what is right for you. You know the difference between a risk that’s a little bit uncomfortable and it’s a little scary but if you feel good about it versus

This feels like a risk and I feel so uncomfortable with it and I have no idea what I’m doing. Because scaling in 2026 doesn’t require more urgency, more pressure, more bypassing. Instead, what it requires is more honest capacity assessment. So like truly, where is your capacity? Do you have time to scale at all? Or do you have time to scale in this specific way? Or can we find a different way?

Scaling in 2026 requires transparent relationships. No more of this just like, again, trust me, I’m the expert. my gosh, I have seen some coaching programs where part of what they brag on is like, there’s an AI version of me that’s trained to answer all your questions. And my coaching clients love it because you get your questions answered right away.

but I don’t know about you, I’m going to pay a lot of money to work with someone. I want to actually work with them. I don’t want to work with the AI bot of them. But transparency in relationships, it’s always been huge to me as a coach. I’m going to also share where I struggle with this and I’m going to also share what I just talked about from my coaching calls and what I’m working on because I know I’m not perfect. I know I’m not where I want to be in all ways in business and in life. And I believe in sharing that.

with the therapist that I work with because I think it’s so important that, again, we set those realistic expectations around, like, yeah, sometimes owning two businesses is really hard, even if it’s also really exciting. Yes, sometimes you hire someone just to fire someone, and how much does that suck, and how much does that pull on our people-pleasing tendencies, and all of that stuff. So quite honestly, again, when we think about…

scaling in 2026, choosing the right coach, choosing the right coaching program. It’s so important and it is a requirement to get support that treats you like a whole human, not just some metric of like, I’ve helped hundreds of thousands of, know, whoever it is, whether it’s couples or therapists or people with ADHD, whatever. But when you get support for being

who you are as a whole human, not just what revenue you’ve brought in for that coach, that coaching program, not just because you helped them sell out their group. It feels so different and it helps you trust yourself better. And honestly, it helps you succeed better and faster. A good coaching relationship feels collaborative, grounded, and respectful.

And if that is the type of support you’re craving, where you can talk about what actually fits your life, before we just talk about like, here’s the 76 strategies of everything to implement so you can grow, that is exactly the type of work I do. This is one of those examples where I love the people I work with will always say it better than I say it myself. But to say my coaching is really grounded in like nervous system support.

It’s grounded in what can you actually handle? And so that’s why when I was coming up with the name for my mastermind, I landed on happy, healthy, and wealthy because it has to be all three. Being wealthy isn’t gonna be exciting if it’s costing you your happiness and your health. So they have to all balance out and it has to mean you have the right support to do that.

You can’t just have this hustle culture crap. You can’t just have these vague promises around, how quickly I did it and everyone can do it and so can you. So if you’re interested in talking more about working together in my mastermind, I’m going to link everything in the show notes. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for thinking through this conversation in this thoughtful way with me for me to just essentially gab in your ear for the past half hour because I think it is so helpful.

And it’s such a good reminder of what we need to think about when it comes to what is next for us in 2026. So go back, relisten to those red flags, those green flags, whatever it is that you need as you think about doing this for yourself in 2026. And honestly, just good luck. We have so much time left in the year. You all are capable of doing so much and keep in touch. I’d love to hear what your goals are, what it is you wanna work on and

Again, feel free to reach out if you’re interested in working together.