Would you see a life coach? This is the question I have been asking anyone who would listen for the last month. And what would you ask them? About your career? Your health? Your love life?
Well guess what: I’ve got a date with Michael Serwa, the UK’s highest paid life coach! No one could fail to be intrigued, impressed and – dare I say it – amused by his website michaelserwa.com, which reads like a Linkedin highlights reel (“I work exclusively with winners”) and features a list of baffling details – or indeed warnings – about the man himself (“I once took so much MDMA it stopped having an effect”; “My extreme confidence is sometimes mistaken for arrogance”; and, for some reason, “I’m prepared to try everything once. Except for heroin. And sex with a man”).
I’d taken the idea of life coaching so unseriously that I hadn’t really considered what it would entail. I imagined it would be a chess match with a master manipulator – one who was about to meet his match in me, a sceptic who would unmask both him and the seedy underbelly of the life coaching industry lurking beneath the well groomed facade.
The truth, however, was quite different.
•••
I feel an unwelcome anxiety as I walk up Savile Row for our meeting. It’s June but it’s wet; it’s Mayfair but it’s dirty. I locate the penthouse and a man buzzes me up. There’s no receptionist, no plants, no sign-in book. A pale, lanky man with the air of a magician opens the door and offers me his hand. He’s standing so close I get a waft of his high-end fragrance but the corridor is dark and narrow so I assume this is unintentional. His impeccable, straight-backed posture feels like an affront to my stubbornly sloped shoulders. He’s dressed in a neat black suit and crisp white shirt, open at the collar. Smart but ready to Do Business.
Life coaching guru Michael Serwa
Beaming, he introduces himself, revealing a hint of a Polish accent. Beyond the corridor, where I had expected an office, is a room that looks like the set of American Psycho: white walls, minimalist decor. He says he loves his balcony, which could, in theory, be nice (glass doors open onto it from the living room) but it doesn’t look as though he – or indeed anyone else – ever goes there: no chairs, no plants, just fake grass that looks out onto a grey London skyline.
My first real shock: the penthouse turns out to be Serwa’s home. The couch I’m shown to is modern and uncomfortable. “I’ve never used the kitchen,” he tells me, apropos of nothing. I think he expects me to be impressed. “It was very important to me that nobody be able to see the sink,” he continues. I don’t get a chance to probe this psychological quirk beyond a need for control that borders on the unhealthy: “I like to be in control of my surroundings at all times,” he says. “I’m definitely a control freak, It’s more than just liking to be in control. How to put it accurately… I would go as far as to say that I need to be in control. It’s not a preference.” Yikes, I think.
Shall we start the life coaching, I suggest. He says he would rather I interview him first because life coaching will work better if I “trust” him. His clients absorb hours of his podcasts, articles and social media content before coming to him, so when they start their sessions they already feel they “know” him.
It becomes apparent that the more I know about him, the less I trust him. It’s not that he is unpleasant or deceitful, rather that, as he regales me with stories of his success, I can’t help but feel he’s playing a role, acting the part of the ultra-confident Life Coach
It becomes apparent, however, that the more I know, the less I trust him. It’s not that he is unpleasant or deceitful, rather that, as he regales me with stories of his success, I can’t help but feel he’s playing a role, acting the part of the ultra-confident Life Coach, wielding his metaphorical magic wand, ready to wave my problems away.
When I ask him to talk about his own life, his anecdotes are actually very anodyne.
“I’m the kind of guy who would go to a restaurant and ask them to turn down the AC,” he boasts.
“Even if it’s not too cold?” I ask, genuinely curious.
“No,” he says. “If I wasn’t too cold I wouldn’t have an issue.”
Oh.
His hobbies, he tells me, are “dating” and “going to the gym”. It feels like the further I scratch below the surface, the less there is to find. This is what worries me about the cult of personal development: what if, in the pursuit of perfection, you end up polishing away your personality?
•••
Serwa is slim and no doubt in good shape beneath his extremely tight fitting suit (he tells me about his thrice-weekly gym routine). He has severe features, his eyes and nose set like those of a predatory bird. As advertised on his website, he swears a lot and the overall effect is of a mildly comical cartoon character. He eats and drinks nothing during our three and a half hours together, but generously plies me with sparkling water and snacks.
Life coach Michael Serwa’s collection of biographies
Life coaching wasn’t something he fell into, it was “more of a calling,” revealing itself to him as a profession – or “that’s how it felt” anyway. So what is life coaching? Well, I can tell you what it’s not. It is not therapy, according to Serwa, which focuses on the past rather than the future. But what it is seems to depend on the individual coach.
Serwa came to London from Poland with very little, including no qualifications (not because he wasn’t smart, he hastens to add, but because he “got over” school early). He travelled to London by bus for 27 hours because he couldn’t afford the plane.
He has done well for himself. Now he says he works “with big personalities and the smartest people in the room,” clients who “have a hard time finding a coach who can meet them at their level”. He says his personality and coaching style “can be too much for most people – which is okay because I’m not a coach for most people”.
Has our society become so infantilised that we must outsource so much of our decision-making to third parties? Is this where we have arrived?
He doesn’t reveal his pricing – “it’s different for everyone” – but his services are said to cost anywhere between £5,000 to £50,000 for a course, which he claims makes him the highest paid life coach in the land. He has 15 clients in total, all “CEOs, HNWIs, entrepreneurs, executives, doctors, lawyers, and other high achievers” (none of which are categories in which I could be included), who he says have “24/7/365 access” to him via Whatsapp. This seems like an extraordinary burden, although he is true to his word: when I follow up after our session he generously responds with several messages and six voicenotes.
Some clients send him their daily calorie intakes. Others request his services for regulating the amount of work they do. They even send him screenshots of their Hinge profiles for him to tinker with. “One of my new male clients recently became single,” he says. “I’m helping him create the best profile possible so he can get to his goal of finding a new life partner as quickly as possible.”
This seems like a sorry indictment not on Serwa but on all of us: has our society become so infantilised that we must outsource so much of our decision-making to third parties? Is this where we have arrived?
•••
The world outside Serwa’s window is monotone. I drink black coffee and shuffle in my seat, once again admiring his posture. Fleeting thoughts pass through my mind: I’m glad I don’t live in Mayfair, and that I have a kitchen sink I don’t feel the need to hide. Serwa is kind, generous and talkative, every bit the extrovert he claims to be. He gives me a copy of his book, From Good to Amazing, a self-help flick-through full of one-page chapters with titles including ‘Have Money’ and ‘Smile’. Less helpful for me is page 113: ‘Stop watching the news’. He tells me I’m exempt from that one.
“I don’t have friends,” he says, confidently. “I have clients who I’m friendly with. All coaches are different but the type of conversations I’m having with my clients are not very different to the types of conversations you would have with a good friend. I see friendships as an act of service.”
The Mayfair flat where Michael Serwa holds his life coaching sessions
That feels wrong, I venture out loud. I sound a little desperate, thrown by the idea friendship might be a mere act of service, something you could pay for, as if I somehow hadn’t realised the Cold Hard Truth. But… but isn’t friendship about having fun?
“Sure, yeah. Except at 41 I feel like I’ve passed that stage of going out just to have fun. It used to be bars and clubs and restaurants but now I’m just happy doing what I do with my clients.”
Then he throws another curveball.
“Maybe things would be slightly different if I wasn’t as close as I am to my mother. My mother is by far my biggest friend even though she’s not here, she’s in Poland.”
This kind of life sounds incredibly lonely to me, especially for someone who identifies as an extrovert. I wonder if loneliness is something he often discusses with his clients?
He says it is. Not many of them – “if any” – have conversations with their friends at the level they have conversations with him. “No goal would ever be too unrealistic for me. I would never say ‘I don’t think you can achieve this’. If anything I’d say ‘I don’t think you’re thinking big enough’. That’s the first step towards being able to achieve something. If you want to be Prime Minister you better believe you can do it.” (Note: he doesn’t claim to have any clients who actually became premiers of a country).
•••
The life coaching industry is worth $4.56bn globally. In the US, the number of life coaches rose by more than half in the three years to 2022. It shares a rather murky overlap with influencer culture: lots of pictures of popping champagne in Mykonos, posts of expensive outfits, details of gruelling gym workouts and five-star meals. The promise is implicit: follow me, and you could live a similar life. Serwa’s Instagram is exclusively made up of shots of fancy cocktails, hotels like the Four Seasons (his “second home”) and headshots that make him look like an eagle searching for a mate. No one else ever appears in these photos. A water fountain filled with Moet does, though.
Part of me wants to buy into the idea that my problems can be fixed by a handful of meetings, my failings addressed by this charming guru, my ambitions realised with a little expert guidance.
To me, life coaching seems a somewhat dubious business. I am already sceptical about therapy culture, and life coaching seems like its even less regulated cousin – anyone can (and, judging by Linkedin, does) pop up and brandish their newly stamped Life Coach credentials.
But while I am cynical, I do want to hear what he has to say. Part of me wants to buy into the idea that my problems can be fixed by a handful of meetings, my failings addressed by this charming guru, my ambitions realised with a little expert guidance. Maybe it really is this easy? Maybe my problem is that I don’t believe I can be one of Michael Serwa’s “winners”?
When I was younger, my dad always told me to strive to be average. You don’t want to be the most beautiful, he would say, you want to be average looking – like most people (not that I had much of an option in this regard). You don’t want to be the most intelligent either, nor the richest. The idea was that being exceptional is problematic: you can live a happier life if you are in the majority.
Unsurprisingly this is the opposite of Michael the Magician’s philosophy. When I ask him what he thinks of my father’s counsel he is, for the only time in our conversation, truly taken aback.
“I think it’s… I think it’s… it’s hard to reply elegantly,” he stutters before becoming almost angry. “Okay, I think it’s total and utter bollocks.” After a pause he switches to incredulity: “Are you sure? Are you sure he said that? Was he serious?”
“I think he was serious. He’s an economist,” I say, as if this makes him incapable of being unserious.
“That should be illegal! It’s like clipping a child’s wings.”
•••
Almost three hours have passed by the time Serwa and I come to the session itself, and I’m exhausted. It’s been like talking to an extremely friendly jack-in-the-box. I don’t know what he runs on, seeing as I was the only one who had been chugging coffee and gluten-free-vegan snacks, from a tray he produced with a flourish out of thin air (ever the magician). We start with The Assessment, which involves a checklist of 24 items. The exercise: from the following categories, rate where you are out of 10. They include Love Life, Health, Career, Energy, Bad Habits (I don’t mention my vape), Family Life, Clarity of Goals, Leadership and Assertiveness.
Michael Serwa’s life coaching book
My lowest score is for Sleep Quality for which I put zero, being a chronic insomniac. Serwa suggests meditation. I baulk at this but he says people who are most resistant to spending time alone with their thoughts are the ones who most need to consider it.
I get stuck on Leadership – what if I don’t want to be a leader? He says as long as I’m satisfied, I can still score highly: a single person who wants to be single can have a 10/10 Love Life score, he says, clearly alluding to himself (he doesn’t have a partner but assures me he’s “highly successful” in that department). “Anyway,” he says after a moment. “Aren’t you a thought leader?”
Oh god, I think.
Ultimately I find it hard to open up. My organs curl when speaking about my most intimate worries and anxieties. Do I arrogantly assume I’m above his help? Or worse, do I consider myself beyond help?
I vehemently dislike the idea of my life being itemised and scrutinised and scored out of 10. I hate lists, charts, checklists, scoreboards, setting goals, and other similar activities. Yet despite all this, my general happiness came out at seven, which Serwa says is higher than most of his clients and indicates that I don’t need too much help (little does he know…).
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But I don’t want to approach life in his surgical style. I want to live qualitatively, not quantitatively. I don’t want to rate my sleep quality from zero to 10 every morning and obsess over the perfect night’s kip. I don’t want to channel my gaze inward, continually assessing and “optimising” myself (and to whom’s values?). It’s the same reason I don’t want to use Strava to track my runs. I used to – methodically, obsessively – until I realised what that took away from me: the pleasure of the experience.
There’s always room to analyse oneself, to find space for improvement, to see imperfections as problems that can – nay, must – be solved. But what do you sacrifice if you start to look at life as a series of categories?
Despite his best efforts, my encounter with Serwa has only hardened my resistance to self-optimisation. I want to keep the rough edges that define whatever ‘I’ am – even if my editor might prefer I work on my toxic habit of procrastination and score a 10/10 for Effectiveness & Productivity.
In the end, when I file this article late after yet another bad night’s sleep, I will tell my editor – and reassure myself – that these flaws are what make us human.