What if there were someone you could hire who would advise and support you as you switched careers and found your dream job, then help you quit smoking, lose 50 pounds, and organize your closets? Not a fairy godmother or godfather, but someone pretty close: a personal coach.
Two years ago, a 35-year-Old Boston woman we’ll call Linda, because she insists we not use her real name, decided she needed to make some changes in her life and hired Ingrid Joy Wolfson of Watertown, a coach with a business background in human resources and communications. Wolfson helped Linda define her goals and workup a good resurne. She taught her how to get work and interview. As Linda began feeling more confident about her professional goals, she started working on her personal issues. Off came the weight, she quit smoking, she tackled those closets.
“It was all about understanding that I could take control of my life," says Linda, now happy with a job in television production. “As Ingrid worked with me, she gave me techniques that made me understand that I could make decisions and change my life.”
Coaching started in the business world to help stressed executives cope with their professional and personal 1ives, and it still thrives in the corporate environment, But, increasingly, individuals are turning to coaches for help with every sort of problem.
Part therapist, part consultant, part motivational expert, part professional organizer, part friend, part nag, the personal Coach is what you - might call an expert in teaching you how to live your life in the best way possible; a man or woman prepared to do for your life what a personal trainer does for your body. Tone it up. Shed the flab. Get it in shape, finally.
Self-improvement is an American obsession, so it shouldn’t be any surprise that in the self-obsessed '9Os coaching is a fast-growing field. Generally, coaches charge between $200 and $500 per month for weekly consultations, although some prefer to work for hourly rates. Some coaches prefer to work with clients on the phone, others prefer to meet face-to-face, still others combine the two.
As yet, there are no national standards for coaching, but professionals organizations such as the International Coach Federation and training programs such as Coach University. and the Coaches Training Institute are trying to establish guidelines. Nor are there any reliable figures about how many coaches are practicing. Estimates range from 1,000 to 5,000.
No matter how many there may be it’s safe to say their numbers are growing as more potential coaches see the possible rewards, financial and otherwise, of the job. Coaches come from many disciplines: business, psychotherapy, teaching, accounting, and acting, to name just a few.
Cheryl Richardson of Newburyport, president of the International Coach Federation, came to coaching with a background in business consulting. Most of her coaching begins with business-related problems, she says, but invariably the work-related problems are intertwined with personal issues.
Richardson, who coaches only over the phone, says her goal is to help clients advance their success without compromising the quality of their lives. “The profession has grown incredibly in the last three years," she says. “A lot of people are motivated to ‘seek coaching when they realize that having it all isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. I think that the simplicity movement has people asking: ‘What’s really important to me? What am I working so hard for?’”
Richardson says her job is to help clients decide what is important and then help them to say no to everything else. This might sound a little selfish, but Richardson prefers to call it “extreme self-care,” a popular coaching concept. Distinctions between coaching and consulting tend to blur, Richard said. But the two are different.
“A consultant is paid to solve problems and find solutions,” she says. “A coach can do the same thing, but the focus is on developing the clients strength so that he can solve problems and find solutions himself.”
With the structures placed on pyschotherapy by HMOs, many therapists are adding coaching to their professional repertoires. Distinctions between and therapy can get a bit muddled, too, but there are obvious differences.
Jay Miller of Brookline, a clinical psychologist who recently began to coach, is on a national committee to delineate those distinctions. “With a therapist your’re looking a the past,” he says. “With coaching your focus on the here and now. The coach is working on observable goals, with people who are interested in self-actualization, being happier, being successful, making money.”