15 Best Podcasts for Coaches, Sorted by What They Teach

The best podcasts for coaches let you hear coaching actually happen, or teach you something you will use with a client the same week. That splits the useful shows into three groups: shows built around real coaching conversations, shows about the craft and business of coaching, and psychology shows that explain why your clients do what they do. The 15 below cover all three, each with what you get and who should listen.

If you would rather spend your commute listening than building pages, Coachful's team will build your website, program or funnel in your account for free; how that works is near the end.

How we chose: shows that help working coaches with skills, business or the psychology of change. We checked each show's host and format on its own page in October 2026. We do not repeat download counts or chart rankings, and we name shows in plain text rather than linking to them. A podcast is a source of ideas, not training; nothing here replaces supervised practice.

The best podcasts for coaches at a glance

Shows where you hear real coaching. Most coaches rarely hear another coach work. The first three shows fix that, and they are the most useful hours on this list for your craft.

1. Coaching Real Leaders, from Harvard Business Review

Hosted by Muriel Wilkins, an executive coach who works with CEOs and senior leaders and co-founded Paravis Partners, the show presents what HBR calls real-life coaching sessions with leaders working through professional challenges.

Why it matters for coaches: you hear how an experienced executive coach opens a session, narrows a sprawling problem and lands on something the leader can try, with real hesitation and real pushback. It is closer to observed practice than almost anything else you can get for free.

Listen if you coach managers, executives or professionals, or you want to hear what a well-contracted session sounds like.

Try this: pause the episode before the coach asks their next question, say what you would ask, then compare. Our guide to questions to ask an executive coach shows what clients listen for.

2. Coaching Confidential

The show takes listeners into a real, unscripted life coaching session, then the hosts, Lisa DiMatteo and Vimla Gulabani, both ICF Professional Certified Coaches, go behind the scenes to discuss what came up for the client and the coach. The most recent episode on the show's page when we checked was Episode 24, from February 2025.

Why it matters for coaches: the debrief is the gold. You hear two credentialed coaches explain their choices, which is the kind of reflection mentor coaching and supervision are built on.

Listen if you are working toward an ICF credential, or you want to understand the reasoning behind a coach's moves, not just the moves.

Try this: after each session, note what you would have done differently, then use the same prompts on a recording of your own work. Our guide to ICF mentor coaching explains how that review works with a mentor.

3. The Look & Sound of Leadership

Tom Henschel uses what his site calls an uncommon blend of storytelling and coaching: each monthly episode is a coaching conversation listeners overhear, with practical tools on topics such as delegation, nervousness and difficult people. The library runs to more than 200 episodes.

Why it matters for coaches: episodes are short and focused on one skill, which makes them easy to share with clients as homework, and the format shows how to teach a concrete technique without lecturing.

Listen if you coach presence, presentation or communication, or you want short episodes that fit between sessions.

Try this: pick one episode on a skill a client is working on and send it with a single question to reflect on before your next session.

Shows about the craft and business of coaching. The next five are for thinking about how you coach and how you run a practice.

4. Coaching for Leaders

Dave Stachowiak has produced the show independently since 2011, with new episodes every Monday. It features interviews with experts and everyday leaders, and the show says most of its listeners are managers, executives or business owners.

Why it matters for coaches: it is a steady source of leadership ideas your clients will recognize, and a good way to keep up with books in the field without reading all of them.

Listen if your clients lead people, or you are moving into leadership or team coaching.

Try this: keep a running list of one idea per episode and the client it might help, then bring the idea into a session as a question rather than advice.

5. Coaches Rising

From Coaches Rising, co-founded by Joel Monk, the podcast describes itself as exploring the very fabric of coaching, in long conversations with guests from across the field, including the coaching researcher Tatiana Bachkirova. Episodes are tagged by theme, such as coaching mastery.

Why it matters for coaches: it is aimed squarely at practicing coaches who want depth: presence, development, the coach as a person.

Listen if you have been coaching for a while and tips no longer help, or you are interested in adult development and coaching psychology.

Try this: after an episode, write a paragraph on how it changes your view of one client. Our guide to reflective practice in coaching gives you a template.

6. 2 Pages with MBS

Michael Bungay Stanier, author of The Coaching Habit, hosts what his site calls the podcast where brilliant people read the best two pages of a favorite book, then dig into the ideas with him. Guests include authors, leaders, academics and entrepreneurs.

Why it matters for coaches: it is a quick way to sample books before you read them, and Bungay Stanier's questions are themselves a lesson in curious, short coaching questions.

Listen if you want reading ideas for yourself and your clients. Our list of the best books for coaches pairs well, as does our guide to The Coaching Habit's seven questions.

Try this: notice how often the host asks a question of ten words or fewer, then try to match it in your next session.

7. Reboot Podcast

Hosted by Jerry Colonna, a former venture capitalist who became an executive coach and co-founded the coaching company Reboot, with Reboot coaches joining him, the show explores the emotional side of leadership: imposter syndrome, burnout, major transitions, anxiety and co-founder conflict.

Why it matters for coaches: founders and CEOs rarely talk about fear in public. The show gives you language for those conversations and a model for staying with hard feelings without rushing to fix them.

Listen if you coach founders, entrepreneurs or senior leaders under pressure.

Try this: ask a leader client what they are not saying to their team, and listen for the answer under the first one. Colonna also appears in our guide to famous executive coaches.

8. The Life Coach School Podcast

The Life Coach School's own show describes itself as a resource for learning and growing with the school's tools, applied to listeners' own lives. The school is taught by Brooke Castillo, and the show's episode numbers run into the hundreds.

Why it matters for coaches: the school's Model, which its site calls the foundation of everything it teaches (thoughts create feelings, feelings drive actions, actions create results), is a plain-language cousin of cognitive behavioral approaches, and many clients have heard it. It helps to know it whether or not you use it.

Listen if you coach mindset, thoughts and self-talk, or clients mention the show.

Try this: when a client describes a feeling, ask what they were thinking just before it, and write the thought down together. If the pattern looks like anxiety or depression, refer to a therapist.

Shows on leadership, decisions and work. Two for coaches whose clients work in organizations or chase high performance.

9. HBR IdeaCast

A weekly show from Harvard Business Review featuring leading thinkers in business and management, hosted by Alison Beard, an executive editor at HBR, and Adi Ignatius, its editor at large.

Why it matters for coaches: if your clients work in organizations, this is where many of the ideas they read about come from. A weekly episode keeps you current on what your clients' managers are talking about.

Listen if you coach professionals, managers or executives, or you sell coaching to companies.

Try this: turn one episode's idea into a question for a client: "Your company is pushing X; what does that mean for how you spend your week?"

10. The Knowledge Project

Shane Parrish hosts long-form interviews with leading figures in business, investing and performance, aiming to uncover the principles behind success. Some episodes look at historical figures.

Why it matters for coaches: the conversations are about how high performers think and decide, which is useful background when your clients are ambitious and impatient.

Listen if you coach entrepreneurs, investors or athletes, or you are interested in decision-making.

Try this: borrow one question a guest asks themselves before big decisions and offer it to a client as an experiment for the week.

Shows on the psychology behind your clients. The last five explain why people do what they do.

11. Hidden Brain

Shankar Vedantam, a journalist whose reporting focuses on human behavior and the social sciences, launched the podcast with NPR in 2015 and founded Hidden Brain Media in 2019. The show explores what it calls the hidden brain: influences that shape us without our awareness, from mental shortcuts to memory and attention errors.

Why it matters for coaches: clients often explain their behavior with stories that leave out the forces actually driving it. Hidden Brain gives you a library of research-based angles to bring into a session.

Listen if you want a better understanding of habits, bias and why people act against their own goals.

Try this: when a client says "I don't know why I keep doing this", ask what happens just before it, and look for the cue rather than the character flaw.

12. The Happiness Lab

Laurie Santos, a Yale psychology professor whose course Psychology and the Good Life became the most popular course in Yale's history, hosts this Pushkin Industries show based on that course. It walks through the latest research on happiness and why people often do the opposite of what would make their lives better.

Why it matters for coaches: life coaching clients frequently chase goals they expect to make them happy. The show gives you research to question those expectations kindly.

Listen if you coach wellbeing, purpose or life satisfaction.

Try this: ask a client what they expect to feel when they reach their goal, then what they could do this week that might produce a little of that feeling now.

13. The Science of Happiness

Hosted by Dacher Keltner, a Berkeley psychology professor and founding faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, and co-produced by PRX and the Greater Good Science Center. Keltner is known for his research on emotions such as awe and compassion.

Why it matters for coaches: it brings the research on positive emotions to a general audience, and the Greater Good Science Center also produces Happiness Break, a short, practice-focused series on compassion, stress resilience and joy that suits clients who want something to do rather than just listen to.

Listen if you want practical wellbeing exercises with some science behind them.

Try this: try one practice yourself for a week before suggesting it to a client, so you can describe it honestly.

14. Being Well

Rick Hanson and Forrest Hanson host conversations that explore the challenging parts of being human, drawing on clinical psychology, contemplative practice and lived experience. Recent topics include self-acceptance, shame and people-pleasing.

Why it matters for coaches: it is good on the inner life your clients bring to sessions: harsh self-talk, anxiety about change, the need to please. It also helps you notice when a topic belongs with a therapist.

Listen if you coach stress, confidence or self-compassion, or want to take better care of yourself as a coach.

Try this: notice one moment this week when a client's self-talk shifts, and reflect it back before you ask anything else.

15. The Mel Robbins Podcast

Mel Robbins, an author and podcast host who began working as a life and executive coach in Boston in 1999, has hosted this show since 2022, with new episodes on Mondays and Thursdays. Guests are experts in science and human behavior, and topics include anxiety, confidence, habits and relationships.

Why it matters for coaches: many of your clients listen. Knowing what they have heard helps you build on it, or gently question it, in a session.

Listen if you coach individuals on everyday change and want to know the ideas they arrive with.

Try this: when a client quotes a podcast, ask what in it rang true for them and what they have tried since. That is usually a better session opener than any framework.

Also worth knowing

• The ICF's podcast collection. The International Coaching Federation hosts a free collection of 85 podcasts in seven languages on topics such as supervision, conflict and the ICF Core Competencies. It is no longer taking new submissions, so treat it as an archive.
• The Psychology Podcast archive. Scott Barry Kaufman's show ended in 2025 after 478 episodes on creativity, wellbeing and self-actualization, which remain available; its site says a successor, Human Potential Lab, premieres on October 28, 2026.

How to listen like a coach

A podcast changes your coaching only when it changes what you do in a session. A simple routine:

1. One idea per episode. Write it down in a sentence, with the client it might help.
2. Turn it into a question, not advice. "What would it look like to try that?" beats "I heard a great podcast...".
3. Review monthly. Which ideas did you actually use? Drop the shows that never make it into a session.

Coaches on Coachful capture these in Brain, which has a "What would you like to remember?" box and editable pages for methods, and discuss them in Coach Corner, the community for coaches on Coachful that clients never see. Our guide to coaching skills shows which skills to practice first.

Start a podcast of your own for clients

Many coaches eventually want their own show, either a private one for clients or a public one that brings in new ones. In Coachful, Podcasts is a resource type under Create > Resources: you upload episodes, and a show you list publicly gets an RSS feed for podcast apps, while an unlisted show stays inside your client app, included in your membership. Recordings of live Q&As and group calls can be added as audio or video resources alongside it. If you would rather be a guest on other people's shows first, our guide on getting booked on podcasts as a coach has nine steps.

Free help with the rest of your setup

Coachful's white-glove service is free on every plan. From Create > We'll build it for you · FREE, describe what you need, such as a website, a funnel, a program, a course outline or an email sequence, and add up to 8 reference links and 10 files. The team replies by email, usually within about 24 hours, and builds it in your account so you can edit it afterwards. The team does not record your audio or video, and nothing gets invented: credentials, testimonials and prices you have not supplied are left for you to fill in. See what Coachful offers life coaches and executive coaches.

The bottom line

The best podcasts for coaches let you hear coaching (Coaching Real Leaders, Coaching Confidential, The Look & Sound of Leadership), think about the craft and business (Coaching for Leaders, Coaches Rising, 2 Pages with MBS, Reboot, The Life Coach School Podcast, HBR IdeaCast, The Knowledge Project) and understand your clients (Hidden Brain, The Happiness Lab, The Science of Happiness, Being Well, The Mel Robbins Podcast). Pick three, listen with a notebook, and judge each one by whether it changes a session.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best podcast for new coaches?

Coaching Real Leaders and Coaching Confidential, because you hear real coaching sessions. Coaching Confidential adds a debrief in which two ICF-credentialed coaches discuss their choices, which is close to what you will do in mentor coaching.

Are there podcasts with real coaching sessions?

Yes. Harvard Business Review's Coaching Real Leaders presents real coaching sessions with leaders, Coaching Confidential records unscripted life coaching sessions and debriefs them, and The Look & Sound of Leadership is built around coaching conversations listeners overhear.

What podcasts should executive coaches listen to?

Coaching Real Leaders, Coaching for Leaders, HBR IdeaCast and the Reboot Podcast cover executive coaching sessions, leadership ideas, management thinking and the emotional side of leading.

Does the ICF have a podcast?

The ICF hosts a free collection of 85 podcasts in seven languages on coaching topics such as supervision and the core competencies. It is no longer accepting new submissions, so it works as an archive.

Do podcasts count toward ICF continuing education?

Do not assume so. Check the ICF's current rules for continuing coach education before counting any podcast toward a credential renewal.

Can I host a private podcast for my coaching clients?

Yes. In Coachful, Podcasts is a resource type: you upload episodes and keep the show inside your client app, or list it publicly with an RSS feed for podcast apps. It is included in your membership.

Will Coachful build my coaching website for free?

Yes. The white-glove build is free on every Coachful plan. Request it from the Create page, describe what you need and attach your materials; the team usually replies within about 24 hours and builds it in your own account.