A market full of truths that destroy each other
You think that when you hire a coach or consultant, you’re buying expertise?
Wrong.
You’re buying a story. A positioning. A neatly packaged belief system – and that can be in direct contradiction to another story claiming to be the only solution.
In the pressure cooker of the consulting and coaching market, one law is stronger than any professional standard: If you don’t polarise, you disappear.
The result? Solutions aren’t created because they’re evidence-based, but because they’re different enough to sell.
This isn’t a side effect – it’s the engine that drives everything.
The positioning trap: When differentiation matters more than truth
At the root of this mess lies a simple mechanism:
The fuller the market, the louder you must shout. The louder you shout, the more extreme your message must sound.
The truth? It suffocates in the process.
You can see it in the radical contradictions:
– Coach A preaches: “Success only comes through relentless discipline.”
– Coach B sells: “Success only comes through ease and letting go.”
Both address the same problem – burnout, loss of performance, lack of direction – yet offer diametrically opposed “solutions.”
And because marketing textbooks don’t say “stick to facts” but “make yourself different,” the contradictions aren’t seen as a flaw – they’re a feature.
Provocation gets clicks. Contrast gets bookings.
Your truth as a client? Secondary.
When consulting becomes a marketing caricature
What’s sold today as “unique positioning” is often nothing more than manufactured absoluteness.
The methods are rarely new, often just rebranded.
Some recycle old concepts with a trendy buzzword.
Others invent an alleged “method” from thin air – with no hope of surviving real-world testing – as long as it sounds like a breakthrough.
The result: a consulting market where you don’t choose between “works” and “doesn’t work,” but between “which story do you like better.”
It’s not a market of knowledge.
It’s a fair-weather theatre where consultants compete over who can tell the more charismatic myth.
The illusion of choice – and the random factor
For you as a client, this means: Your decision rarely rests on the actual suitability of a method.
You can hardly test it beforehand. You see the performance, the promises, the testimonials (often from the provider’s own network).
You hear the polished language that suggests certainty.
And then you place your bet – figuratively – on red or black.
Sometimes you win.
Sometimes you lose.
It has nothing to do with your judgment – it’s a structural problem:
A market where success depends on shouting the loudest inevitably produces contradictory “truths”, of which only a fraction hold up.
The psychology behind the chaos
Why do so many fall for it?
Because as clients, we respond to narrative coherence, not to factual validity.
A consultant who speaks with conviction, draws a clear line, and offers simple cause-and-effect chains feels credible – even if their approach is empirically absurd.
Add to that the deep, almost religious longing for the method that “finally works.” This expectation opens the door for anyone who can package it into a catchy sentence.
When “opposite” becomes the real sales pitch
Here’s the sharp edge:
Many consultants and coaches know perfectly well their approach isn’t the only truth – they create exclusivity on purpose.
Why? Because in a crowded market, the strongest sales trigger is the absolute opposite.
“Everything you’ve learned so far is wrong – only my approach is right.”
That’s not professional insight.
That’s market engineering.
Why it’s not about the method in the end
Here’s the bitter realisation:
Whether a consultant helps you often depends less on their method than on your ability to work with it at all.
The “right” solution doesn’t exist as a fixed truth – it only exists in the interaction between context, personality, and timing.
The problem?
The market won’t tell you that you need to check this context yourself.
Instead, it sells you the impression you’ve found the one perfect solution – until you hear the exact opposite in the next ad and start to doubt.
The gambling system at work
Step into an overcrowded, competition-driven market where differentiation matters more than validity, and contradiction is inevitable.
And because, as a client, you have almost no way of verifying actual effectiveness beforehand, you end up choosing based on secondary criteria: likability, rhetoric, performance.
That’s exactly how gambling works:
– You pick a stake (time, money, attention)
– You bet on an option that feels attractive
– The outcome is uncertain and beyond your control
The difference?
In a casino, you know it’s gambling.
In the consulting market, you think it’s a rational decision.
The Rethinking conclusion: Step out of the lottery
As long as you treat consulting as “solution shopping”, you’ll remain part of this system.
The only way out is to stop buying solutions and start checking thinking structures.
Not “Which method sounds good?” but “Which thinking architecture fits my problem – and can I understand it?”
If coaches and consultants truly want to help, they must stop defining themselves by opposition – and start defining the context in which their approach works.
That won’t happen as long as the market rewards loudness over clarity.
R2049 