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"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there." Will Roger
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About coaching

Personal coaching: what it's all about.

"In recent years, coaches have emerged as the newest breed of 'life consultant'. Drawing on psychology, career counseling, management consulting, spiritual precepts, motivational training, and common sense, this growing cadre of experts is helping clients get out of a rut, stretch themselves in new ways, and dare to follow their bliss. You might call these coaches personal trainers for the soul." (New Age Magazine)
"Think of a career coach as a personal job therapist. Pay roughly $250 and up a month for three to four sessions — generally conducted over the phone — and your coach can help you identify your sharpest skills, define your career goals, set strategies to earn more money and make you more valuable to your current or next boss." (Money Magazine)

Coaching for health, wealth and happiness.

Coaches are in the vanguard of an entirely new and distinctly 90s profession. Part consultant, part motivational speaker, part therapist and part rent-a-friend, coaches work with managers, entrepreneurs, and just plain folks, helping them define and achieve their goals — career, personal or, most often, both. A personal coach might consult on everything from selling a business to shopping for snow tires.
"Most of what coaching is about is having you find out what you really love to do and then setting up your life so you're just doing stuff that you love," says Talane Miedaner, 30, who works by day as a Manhattan bank executive and coaches part time in the evenings. "People start living their dreams."

A personal coach does just what an athletic coach or music teacher does, only in a more complete and bigger way. A coach challenges you and takes the time to find out what winning in life means to you. A coach is your partner in living the life you know you can accomplish, personally and professionally. A coach is someone to hold you accountable for your life, to make sure you really do live up to your potential.

The concept of coaching is getting a lot of attention these days, but it certainly isn't a passing fad. In fact, the profession is establishing its place as fast as business is changing. Where a boss used to be both mentor and task master, now it's left largely up to the individual. And that's where coaches can help.

"The world has really shaken itself up over the last 10 years," says Jon Husband, a management consultant and personal success coach in Vancouver.
"Organizations say they want bright, intelligent, motivated and innovative people who ware flexible, but in fact they don't. More and more successful people are quitting their jobs because they find large organizations frustrating and it's easier to make a living and doing something more in line with who you are and your personal values."
According to Thomas J. Leonard, a former Salt Lake City financial planner who has played a major role in developing the coaching profession, as many as fifteen thousand people all over the world are currently working with coaches. Hoping to lead lives that are more fulfilling emotionally, financially, and spiritually, clients are coaxed, encouraged, guided — even goaded — into actions as complex as starting a new business, or as basic as balancing a checkbook.

"If people want to make improvements in their businesses in any kind of sustainable way, they've got to make fundamental changes in their lives," maintains Leonard, who says his approach to coaching, as well as the entire Coach U curriculum, emerged from his own work with some 600 clients. Coaching, in his view, should not be about "pressing or motivating people" but rather, he says, "about helping them to change, adapt, grow, and become a model for others.".... He believes that the strength of Coach U's approach lies in its metaphysical and spiritual underpinnings. Compassion and caring are at the heart of the coach-client interaction. And coaches help clients experiment with "energy work" — using thoughts, imagination, and visualization in tandem with physical action to accomplish their goals faster and more effectively. Projecting an infectious sense of optimism, Coach U-trained practitioners encourage their clients to believe that anything is possible and that the universe is abundant and friendly. "Operating from this kind of framework," says Leonard, "the coach really becomes a partner in the person's life, an advocate and confidant."

While coaching often touches on territory involving a client's emotional life, coaches are adamant that coaching is not psychotherapy. "Therapy focuses on clearing up issues from a person's past," points out Sandy Vilas, a Houston based coach who bought coach U from Leonard earlier this year and now serves as president. "Coaching focuses on creating the person's future, on moving them from the functional to the extraordinary."

Once the province of high-priced consultants who provided corporate executives with trade secrets on hot new management techniques, coaching now focuses increasingly on matters that touch a client's private life.

As one coach observes:
"I have discovered that coaching happens most easily when the client uses the coach to set goals, grow, get a great life, make changes, make more money. This, rather than the coach trying to generically "Help" the client. We're adults here; no parenting or therapy allowed in the coaching relationship. And, most clients really enjoy and appreciate the inter- developmental nature of the relationship. You're "growing" the client and the client is coaching you on how to coach them even better!"

Whatever the motivation to hire a coach, the process requires establishing what Coach U calls "the personal foundation." In other words, getting you to take better care of yourself. Explains coach Stephen Cluney, "We get clients into a mind set of extreme self care as a basis for everything else they can have in their lives. Most of us were never taught how to take care of ourselves really well. But once we begin doing so, we have much more energy — which is necessary in order to move forward, achieve goals, and attract abundance."

"Self care" in coach talk means tending to everything from personal health and physical surroundings to finances and relationships. A coach may encourage a client to ask himself: Am I getting, proper exercise? Having enough fun? Working in a well lit space? Saving money? Felling loved? As an initial goal, a client to clean up one or two identified problem areas, agreeing, for example to organize her desk by the next session or to file those tax returns within the next two weeks. Often there's a practical payoff: once the client is able to find the documents on her desk she can start making long range financial plans. But addressing unfinished business works on a more subtle level as well. "Anything that's hanging over our heads, even if it's as seemingly harmless as having a car that needs vacuuming, is a drain," explains Cheryl Richardson. "Every time you notice that car rug, you lose some psychic energy. That's energy that could be put to much more productive use."

Learning to live without struggle is, in fact, one of the primary goals of the coaching process. There's a paradoxical coaching maxim: If you want to achieve more, begin by doing less. "People who want to earn more money or expand their business think I'm nuts," Richardson says, "when I tell them that part of the strategic plan will be to throw out their 'to do' lists and begin taking vacations. But I tell them, 'You cannot welcome anything new into your life unless you have the space for it.'"

Another way coaches help clients is to show them how to create "reserves" — more friends, money, business prospects, opportunities, energy, time, and space than they think they need at the moment. "When you have more than you need, if something happens in one area your reserves allow you plenty of time to go in and take action," says Stephen Cluney.
"Coincidences" or synchronically happens all the time in coaching work, both coaches and clients report. "Time and again," says Richardson, "I've seen the universe support people's efforts when they state their truth, set their boundaries, and express their needs and wants."

At some point in the coaching process, most clients begin to experience what Thomas Leonard has dubbed "irresistible attraction." In other words, they seem to automatically draw toward themselves whatever they need. "Coaching aims to help people become full enough inside, so that they can truly be of service to others on the job, at home, in their communities, on the street," Leonard says. "When we are living a life of integrity, peace, and creativity, and when we start giving to others, we feel really good. And when we feel really good, we become irresistibly attractive to other people All kinds of abundance flows from that.
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This page last updated on November 20th 1999

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