They Sell Courage. Where Was Theirs?

The biggest names in coaching sell owners the nerve to make the hard call. Then the closures came, and they went quiet.

By the first week of April 2020, governments had told or ordered more than 3.9 billion people, half the human race, to stay at home. California issued America’s first statewide stay-at-home order on 19 March. On 23 March Britain’s prime minister told the country, “you must stay at home”. At midday the same day, Australia’s pubs, clubs, gyms, cinemas, casinos, and nightclubs were ordered shut, with less than a day’s notice. Melbourne went on to spend 262 days under restrictions across six lockdowns, the longest of any city in the world by the count reported when the last one ended.

Then came the rest of it: curfews, checkpoints, and mandates that employers were made to enforce. In August 2021 I was living in Western Sydney, where up to 300 Defence personnel were sent to help police enforce the lockdown. I saw soldiers and armed police on public transport, and roadblocks where they asked for your paperwork. In Victoria, every authorised worker needed a first dose by 15 October 2021 to keep working on site. In the United States the federal government imposed a vaccine-or-test mandate on roughly 84 million workers, one that, in the Supreme Court’s words, “employers must enforce”, until the Court blocked it on 13 January 2022.

Not every business that closed came back. In America’s case, Federal Reserve economists’ working guess was that closures in the pandemic’s first year ran about a third above a normal year.

Here’s something I keep coming back to. I’ve worked close to the coaching industry for years. I advise owners, I’ve run the training rooms, and I’ve built and sold businesses of my own. From 2020 to today, I don’t remember one of the biggest names in that industry standing up, saying the closures were wrong, and holding to it.

I’ll say plainly what this is, so nobody mistakes it for something else. It’s a view I’ve held for years and thought through, from someone who works close to this industry, with no grudge to settle, no frustration to vent, and no envy of anyone’s following. And it’s this: something has gone fundamentally wrong with the coaching industry. It’s gone the way of so much else we’re sold. Steak from a 3D printer. Packaged food with a health claim on the front and a chemistry set on the back. Citrus waxed with fungicide so it shines on the shelf. Coaching has become as cosmetic and synthetic as all of it. It looks like courage on the shelf. Bite into it and there’s nothing there.

These are people who sell courage. The stage, the programme, the podcast, the book: all of it is built on telling owners to stop playing safe, make the hard call, and back themselves. Plenty of their customers were the owners told to close. Gym owners. Restaurant and café owners. Publicans. People running businesses they’d built with their own money. Governments shut those businesses by order, and the people who sell courage for a living kept theirs to themselves.

Fair enough, up to a point

In one way, that’s to be applauded. They stick to business. And the usual defence goes further: a sales trainer has no business ruling on medicine, and a coach who starts talking about epidemiology has wandered a long way from anything they know.

I don’t accept that, and I didn’t at the time. You don’t need a degree to read. The public record was there to be searched in 2020, and today AI research tools will pull together in an afternoon what used to take a researcher a month. Anyone with common sense and the discipline to think critically can gather what’s on the record, see a pattern, and test it against the data until it’s clear, even when nobody in authority will say it out loud, and even when the people who own the media would rather you didn’t. That’s what the coaches tell their own clients to do every day: read the numbers, trust your judgement, back yourself. Staying out of it was their call. Calling it discipline is a kindness it hasn’t earned.

And even if you grant them the medicine, a business shut by order is a business question, and it’s the exact subject they sell. You don’t need a medical degree to say that an owner with a lease, a payroll, and a few months of cash has just been handed a problem that could finish them. You don’t need one to say that an order closing businesses whose owners had done nothing wrong deserves to be argued with by somebody. That’s their field. It’s the only field they’ve ever claimed.

They had the tools to look into the medicine and the standing to speak on the business. Staying silent on both is the thing they tell their clients never to do.

On the fence

The best known of them went further than most, which makes it worse. In May 2020 he put out a panel of doctors and researchers, a Nobel laureate among them, running to more than two and a half hours. He told his audience it “appears that some of the initial facts we made decisions on have not turned out to be accurate”. He brought on two doctors whose video, he said, YouTube had taken down. He said he’d “take any hit” to spare people pain. Then he closed with this: “Please comply with what your government’s giving you. I’m not telling you not to do anything.”

Eight months later he went on national radio in the United States. He said “the level of frustration that people have is extremely high”, and that the “side effects” of the lockdowns were negative. Then he gave his listeners the position: “whether you like this or not, whether you think it is true, right, wrong and different, it doesn’t matter, you got to deal with it.” In the same interview he talked about the “Zoom stadium” he’d built to keep delivering his speeches, which he called “re-tooling to succeed in the new world”.

That’s a man who walked up to the line, looked over it, and sat down on the fence. He knew enough to question the facts. He told people to comply anyway. And when he talked about it on national radio, right or wrong didn’t matter, and the conversation moved on to his own stadium.

There’s another way to read it, and I’ll be clear that it’s my reading of a pattern, with nothing behind it beyond what’s on the public record. Governments spent the pandemic recruiting influencers to carry their message. Britain’s government paid social media influencers, reality television stars among them, to promote its test and trace service in 2020. In July 2021 the White House brought in a pop star with more than 28 million followers to record videos for its vaccination push, and worked with content creators on YouTube to spread the message. This man’s whole career rests on persuasion technique: he learned the neuro-linguistic programming that Richard Bandler and John Grinder developed in the 1970s, and made it his own. I’ve no evidence anyone asked him for anything, and I make no claim that they did. The same facts fit just as well a man who meant every word he said, or one who simply didn’t want the fight. What I can say is that if you wanted a trusted voice to walk a sceptical audience back towards compliance, you couldn’t script it better: raise the doubts, earn the trust, and close on “please comply”. That’s my opinion, drawn from the record above, and you’re as able as I am to read it and reach your own.

A permission slip

One of today’s biggest names in business coaching was selling to gym owners in 2020, the same owners whose doors had just been shut. In March and April that year his podcast told them to move their members online, cut the overhead, and let go of the staff he called “non-essential”. He called the moment “a permission slip from the world” and “one of the biggest opportunities of all time for people who own a gym”. In April he said: “now we’re getting permission from the government and from society to do this for ourselves. So I would take that opportunity and run with it.” In another episode: “thank you to the government for educating all consumers on online and remote setting fitness.” By August it was: “I can’t change the government. I can’t change what they allow us to do.”

Some of that advice was useful, and I’d have given some of it myself. But I went back through six of his episodes from that year, and not one line says the closures were wrong. The owners he’d built his name on were being shut by order, and what he offered them was a way to make the best of it.

It isn’t an accident

I understand why, and I say that as someone who’s built companies of my own and taken five of them through to exit. It’s the model, and there’s nothing accidental about it.

A mass-market coaching business sells to everyone. The funnel doesn’t ask how you vote, and it can’t afford to. Take a public position on the most divisive question of the decade and you split the list down the middle, lose the half that disagrees, and hand every critic a clip. You also put your reach at the mercy of the platforms the whole model runs on. In 2020 YouTube’s rules had it removing videos that disputed official guidance on physical distancing and self-isolation, and three strikes ended a channel. Saying that a closed business was a catastrophe for its owner broke none of those rules. For a business that lives on YouTube, though, the safest clip is the one you never record.

I know what that risk looks like from the inside, because I took it. Through those years I had several of my own social media accounts blocked and some deleted outright, one of them an account I’d held almost since the platform began, and other business systems I relied on were shut off as well, for what I said. None of it was untrue. It just wasn’t publicly true yet. It was pattern recognition: reading what was there, noticing what wasn’t being said, and saying it. A lot of it came straight from public data that nobody in authority was compiling that way, because the numbers were being manipulated. Lies, damned lies, and statistics. A great deal of what I said then has since turned up in public hearings, inquiries, and the official data.

Silence sells to everyone and offends nobody. As a commercial call, it’s rational. I’d even call it sound.

That’s the problem, and it goes further than commerce. The product they sell is the willingness to make the call that costs you. They tell owners to fire the client who’s draining the business, to raise prices and lose the ones who won’t pay, and to stop trying to please everyone. They tell them a business built for everybody is built for nobody. And all of that’s right. It’s exactly what an owner should do. Then the one time it would have cost them, they did the opposite of everything they teach. Call it what it is: a lack of integrity, and a lack of moral fortitude, from people who sell both.

I know what the critics will say: “Paul, just fuck off and focus on business. Your job is helping owners turn their companies into assets they can step out of.” That’s true, and it’s exactly what I do. Why get into this at all, then? Because there’s a design to how these things are done, and a pattern to it, and there comes a point where you have to take a stand. If I’m going to tell an owner to hold their nerve, I’d better have held mine.

The line was there to be drawn

It could be done. On 13 May 2020 one of America’s best-known sales trainers told his state’s governor and the President, in public, that he was “reopening my businesses on Monday regardless of the Gov of Florida decision”, because “I have 107 families, tens of thousands of customers & investors who depend on me being open.” You don’t have to like him, or agree with him, to see what that is. It’s a line in the sand, drawn in his own name, where it could cost him.

Lines got drawn the other way too, by people the public had looked up to for decades. In August 2021 a film star and former governor, a man millions have turned to for discipline and drive since the 1970s, told a CNN interviewer what he thought of people worried about their freedom: “No, screw your freedom, because with freedom comes obligations and responsibilities.” He called anyone who wouldn’t wear a mask a “schmuck”, and posted the clip to his own followers the next day. His argument was about obligation. What went round the world was three words. A man who’d spent a lifetime telling people to take charge of their own lives told them their freedom came second.

Others who went loud built followings on it, and one of the most popular business channels on YouTube has since become a political brand. That’s a different thing again, and I’ve written before about how the divisions themselves are engineered. The real choice was never silence or noise. Somewhere between the two sits the thing the coaches had been selling all along: a position you hold because you think it’s right, and keep holding when it costs you.

The record since

The record has filled in since 2022, and none of it takes a medical degree to talk about. In April 2022 Boris Johnson became the first sitting British prime minister to be punished for breaking the law, fined over a gathering in the Cabinet Room on 19 June 2020, under rules his own government had made. In October 2022 Pfizer’s own executive told the European Parliament its vaccine hadn’t been tested for stopping transmission before it went to market, a year after owners around the world had been made to stand down staff who wouldn’t take it. In September 2023 Gavin Newsom, who issued America’s first statewide stay-at-home order, said: “I think we would’ve done everything differently.” In 2024 Anthony Fauci told congressional investigators that the six-foot distancing rule, the one businesses and schools were made to plan around, “sort of just appeared”. In September 2026 Newsom called the pandemic-era beach closures “insane, in hindsight”.

Every one of those was an open goal for anyone who sells courage to owners. I haven’t heard one of the biggest names in coaching go back and take it.

What you were buying

People treat these names the way they treat a doctor. I’ve got a problem, I want the fix, and I don’t care what they think about anything else. I hear it all the time, and for a doctor it’s fair. A doctor sells a procedure. If the knee’s fixed, their politics are their own business.

A coach doesn’t sell a procedure. A coach sells a way of being: how to decide, how to hold your nerve, how to walk into a room and say the thing nobody wants to hear. You can’t separate that product from the person selling it, because the person is the demonstration. If the way of being folds the first time it’s tested, what you bought was a script about courage, read by someone who’s never had to use it.

Who you are in business is who you are in life, and who you are in life is who you are in business. You’re a different person on a football field than in a kitchen, but the same person turns up to both, and there’s a thread through everything you do that’s simply you. If the person on the stage and the person in the storm aren’t the same, there’s a disconnect, and you’re paying for the half that isn’t there. A position you drop the moment it costs you is a preference, and preferences are cheap.

When it’s your business

There’s an old line for this: you have to stand for something or you’ll fall for anything. Most owners will never run a coaching empire. The same test comes for you anyway, smaller and quieter, and usually with nobody filming.

Check the people you buy courage from. Before you pay anyone to teach you to back yourself, look for the last time they backed something in public that cost them customers. A hard workout doesn’t count. If you can’t find one, you know what you’re buying.

Decide your lines before the call comes. Write down the handful of things you’d hold even if holding them cost you a client, a contract, or a year’s growth. If you can’t name them, you don’t have them, and you’ll find that out at the worst possible moment.

Start on your own ground, and don’t let anyone tell you it’s where your thinking has to stop. The coaches had a perfectly good way through 2020 without ruling on a single medical question: speak about what was happening to the businesses they serve. You’ve got the same way through. You don’t need to rule on anything outside your field to say a decision is wrecking your industry, your customers, or your people. That’s ground you know better than anyone, and nobody can tell you it isn’t your place. When the question runs past your field, do the reading. Go to the public record, the data, the hearings. Use your judgement. If you can see the pattern, you’re entitled to say so, as long as you say that’s what it is.

Say it out loud. When something’s being done to your customers, your industry, or your people, say what you think, plainly, to the people it affects. You’ll lose some of them. The ones who stay will know exactly where you stand, and they’ll trust you with the things that count.

Remember who’s watching. In 2020 every owner with staff made calls in front of them: who stayed on, what got said about the orders in the lunchroom, whether people were told the truth about the cash. Your people learned more about your standard that year than from anything you’ve ever put on a wall. The next test will teach them again.

The verdict

The biggest names in coaching sell courage to owners. Governments around the world shut those owners’ businesses by order, and from the stage came advice on coping, a permission slip, and a reminder that right or wrong didn’t matter. They were entitled to stay out of it. They weren’t entitled to keep selling the thing they wouldn’t use.

I don’t say any of this out of anger, or out of frustration, or because I missed out on something. I say it because I stood my ground. I said what I saw, in public and on my own video stream, and I’ve paid for it many times over. If you’ve read this far, you know where I stand. Whether you agree with me or not doesn’t really matter.

Here’s what I’d ask you to take from it. Buy a procedure from whoever does it best; you don’t need to share a surgeon’s politics to get your knee fixed. Buy a way of being only from someone whose values you share, and who’s shown you those values when holding them cost something. A quick win from someone you don’t admire is still a win, and there’s nothing wrong with taking it. Just don’t mistake it for what you’ll pass on.

Who you are in business is who you are in life. A stand is a position you’d hold if it cost you. A tribe is a position that pays you. Preach courage and practise compliance, and you’ve built a tribe with opposing values under one roof. Holding that together is politics. Silence is the one position that costs nothing and still sells to everyone, and when it counted, that’s the one they took.

Don’t take it. Choose what you stand for, and be prepared to hold it when it costs you.