Contemporary Western societies witness a rise in life coaches, which can be situated against the neoliberal tendency to strive for a free entrepreneurial self: The individual is responsible for their own wellbeing, and self-investment and self-knowledge are the recipes needed for a well-managed life. Within this discourse, life coaching responds to people's desire to develop their full potential in life. There are societal concerns, however, in relation to life coaching, concerning the commodification of self-improvement, its legitimacy, and the potential for disadvantages. The overall objective of the project is to examine these concerns by addressing how life coaching as a new profession simultaneously works and seeks legitimacy in today's western industrialized society in which individual responsibility for well-being is assumed. The project’s research objectives are to scrutinize how the ideology of self-improvement takes form in life coaching communicative practices, to explore to what extent life coaches ground this ideology in evidence - and if so, what evidence, to examine how life coaches (and their clients) perceive and experience legitimacy, and what benefits and harms the former perceptions, and practices bring to individuals and society. This input will be used as an evidence base to critically reflect on the role of life coaching in contemporary society, in an attempt to inform and bring nuance to current debates over the sense and nonsense of life coaching.