Here’s what happened.
I went after self-development — hard. The scams, the manifestation nonsense, the coaches who go quiet the moment they’ve got your money. I had the receipts: MOBE, shut down by the FTC in 2018 after taking $125 million from people with a fake system to “online riches.” University of Queensland research showing the people who believe hardest in manifestation are also the ones most likely to go bankrupt. A meta-analysis of 400+ studies showing even genuine, honestly-held intentions only turn into action about half the time.
My argument was simple: the industry sells you information and motivation. You already have both. What you’re missing is permission — the thing Jonathan Chase, Britain’s leading hypnotist, spent 40 years proving live on stage. Tell someone under hypnosis the chair behind them isn’t there, and they won’t sit down, no matter how loudly their conscious mind insists it’s real. The subconscious doesn’t negotiate with logic. It only needs permission. Most of us were never given it.
I thought that was the whole story.
Then Sarah D’Souza — an executive coach out of Stanford, published in the Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology — pulled me up on it.
She said most people aren’t chasing self-help for information at all. They’re chasing it for care, connection, community, and permission to just be — not constantly do.
That one comment reframed everything. It’s why 18% of 18-29 year-olds in the US have already turned to an AI chatbot for companionship or emotional support, according to Pew. It’s why the $5 billion coaching industry is quietly being eaten by something free that fits in your pocket. AI doesn’t oversell you a mastermind. It doesn’t vanish the moment it has your money. It’s there at two in the morning when no human coach is picking up.
But it still can’t do the one thing that actually matters. It can validate you, mirror you, tell you exactly what you want to hear in perfectly patient sentences all day long. What it can’t do is stand in the room the way Jonathan Chase used to, and rewire the part of you that was never told you were allowed to succeed.
So the industry isn’t dying. It’s mutating. The scammers are being replaced by something more efficient and less predatory. The actual problem — the permission problem — is sitting exactly where it always was.
I laid out the whole thing, sources and all, in this week’s video:
Watch: The Real Reason You’re Still Stuck (It’s Not You)
Nobody manifests a mowed lawn. Nobody manifests a body, a business, or a bank balance either. But permission — real, human, given by someone who’s actually done the thing — that’s something worth chasing.
If you want more of this kind of unfiltered, no-guru-worship thinking, that’s exactly what Monday Influencer is built for. [Subscribe here.]
Full sources and the article breakdown are on the blog: Can AI Replace Your Life Coach?
This is day 19 of 183. One video a day, this is an extra one…building toward 100,000 followers. Thanks for following the journey.
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