It’s 9 o’clock on a Monday evening and I’m sitting in my living room complaining that I’m tired because I haven’t had a holiday in 18 months, that I hate my flat and where it is located, and that my love life is exhibiting all the vigour of a discarded carrier bag drifting across a disused car park.

In other words, a normal beginning to the week. Except for a few things. First, I am sipping tea rather than the necessary glass of wine. Second, the man I’m moaning at is not telling me to get a grip but is instead nodding and saying “thank you for your honesty”. And, third, he is being paid £100 to listen to the whining. You see, this week I finally gave in and tried executive coaching.

The decision was taken reluctantly, because in 2004 I attended a training course for coaches and was so horrified by proceedings that I have since denounced the coaching to anyone willing to listen on the grounds that: (a) it is a long and expensive way of reaching an obvious conclusion; (b) most coaching sessions could be replaced with a meal and the company of a friend; (c) coaches tend to be people whose lives have gone wrong and are in need of coaching themselves.

But maybe I was rash. What seemed a passing fad, a moment of collective madness like the brief popularity of The Cheeky Girls, has turned out to be an important business trend. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development recently surveyed its members and found that no less than 63 per cent use coaching. Many serious executives employ one and last year it was reported that even Cabinet Ministers are employing £250-an-hour so-called “critical friends” to help them to cope. To find out if I had missed the point, I decided to give coaching another shot, this time as a coachee.

There was no shortage of people to choose from. The International Coaching Federation, one of several trade bodies that have cropped up to regulate the new profession, estimates that there are now some 30,000 coaches working worldwide, each of them seemingly with their own web pages suggesting they can “transform your career” and help you to “discover limitless joy” in your working life. I picked the sanest-looking one I could find, a man called Simon who had the added attraction of living down the road, and he arrived at 8pm in motorbike leathers.

As I made some tea, he explained that his background was in teaching and asked if I had previous experience of the transformative power of coaching. I mentioned the weekend training course in 2004, that the new age talk of “inner voices” and “powerful thoughts” had driven me away after just three hours with the conviction that coaching was one of the most moronic trends of our age. As coaching does not allow for negativity, he said this was “interesting” and that he was “excited” at the challenge that lay ahead.

In the living room, there was a vaguely familiar speech about the difference between therapy and coaching: while the former dealt with your past, coaching was about the present and setting “inspiring goals” for the future. And to help to identify these goals, Simon asked me to talk through various aspects of my life, such as career, relationships and health. As I whined on, Simon listened, occasionally repeated back what I had said (“so you are saying you are tired?”), asked nonjudgmental questions along the lines of “mmm?” and “Oh?” and “how tired are you?” (always avoiding the question “why?” because it is regarded as judgmental and coaches do not judge) and egged me on with the occasional “well done” and “I think we’re reaching clarity’’.

Before I knew it, 90 minutes had passed, I had set myself a series of “inspiring goals”, which included the decision to take a holiday soon, and Simon was asking whether I had changed my view of coaching.

The answer wasn’t straightforward. On the one hand, the session raised new anxieties. The vocabulary of coaching, pilfered from the fields of mentoring, psychology and sport, is cringe-making. Also, coaching is based on the principle everyone has answers to their problems: we just need to talk them through. But many of us have issues no amount of talking will solve. Meanwhile, the ceaseless positivity of coaching is exhausting. Frequently, when trying to articulate a goal (eg: “I want to feel less tired”), Simon encouraged me to rephrase it to make it sound more inspiring (eg: “I want to reclaim my life and have time for reflection and the people I love!”) But not all goals, especially when it comes to work (to not die before retirement, to work less) are positive and inspiring.

However, the session also made it clear that some of my initial objections were misjudged. Yes, coaching is about reaching obvious conclusions, but human beings quite often need the obvious pointed out to them. It is true the profession is unregulated and attracts all sorts of cowboys and weirdos, but that doesn’t mean they all are. Simon wasn’t – he is typical of a new generation of coaches who take their trade seriously and is working towards an ICF accreditation. Besides, it doesn’t always matter if coaches are not high achievers – in the way good sports coaches are not necessarily the ones who had the most illustrious athletic careers.

But the thing I was most wrong about was the suggestion that coaches merely replicate what friends do. For it was at the end of 90 minutes that I realised I had never spent so long discussing problems with a mate. Friends rarely listen as much as you want them to and shouldn’t be expected to, while managers are too busy to even try, and in this respect it must be conceded coaches play a useful role. They save friends, spouses, colleagues and bosses from the brunt of our most repetitive and most tedious whingeing and whining.

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