Welcome!
Personal Coach
Louise Kaelin
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Good. Better. Best. Which self do you want to be?
One of the absurdities of being human is that we make being happy such a chore. It's almost as if we have to know exactly how to do it before we give it a shot. With the dawn of this extra- special New Year, there will no doubt be added performance anxiety accompanying the mother of all guilt trips:
"What's YOUR New Year's resolution?"
Enter Coach Roz, a Dallas woman who makes a living teaching other people how to live better.
"Ninety percent of their lives work the way they want it to work, and there's this 10 percent that doesn't, and they want to shape that up," she said.
Coach Roz, whose real name is Roz Van Meter, isn't a mystic and claims no prior experience with this whole-life thing. But she is trained in goal setting, life planning, pushing aside personal barriers and blasting away excuses that seem to justify staying where you are instead of moving ahead.
Van Meter is a life coach, a vocation that has exploded in popularity the past few years. In 1996, about 2,000 people were full-time life coaches, experts said. Now, life coaching is an accredited profession, with more than 10,000 people doing it full time.
People are hiring life coaches for $400 to $1,000 a month, sometimes more. Companies are employing coaches to try to clear their employees' minds and increase productivity. International Coach Federation provides an accredited training program. Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., has a life coaching certification program -- although accreditation is not a prerequisite for practicing coaching.
Five years ago, three companies were training coaches. Now there are 20, said Thomas J. Leonard, who founded Coach U. in Steamboat Springs, Colo., the first coaching school in the country.
Van Meter's clients include writers who can't finish their novels, psychologists who want to get out of managed care and practice on their own, and college students struggling to improve their grade-point averages. She also coaches groups of people who are trying to reach the same goals.
Coach Roz is a personal motivator for Kathleen Rodgers, a Colleyville writer who was so accustomed to being coddled by her husband, Tom, that it was straining their marriage.
Rodgers, 41, said she remembers panicking at small crises. Feeling guilty and paralyzed by "what-ifs." Punishing herself because her kitchen didn't look like Martha Stewart's. Calling on Tom to do simple things such as reset her malfunctioning computer or program an answering machine.
Hiring Coach Roz, which she did at the request of an editor for a free-lance article, was one of the best things that ever happened to her, she said.
"She kicked me in the butt," said Rodgers, who writes about it in an edition of Family Circle magazine called Your Personal Planner 2000, which was released last month.
Life coaches check in with their clients once or twice a week by telephone or email. They help them work through personal crises. They offer guidance on how to ask for a raise or break up with a boyfriend or girlfriend or make the first trip to a gym.
Vyki Bishop, who owns Bishop Consulting in Dallas, has been a personal coach for business people for five years. She coaches managers, presidents, vice presidents, chief executive officers and board members. She helps them brainstorm for ways to work through problems that limit their effectiveness and that of their employees. Bishop isn't required to have a master's of business administration or extensive business expertise because, she said, the executives already have that.
Her job is to be an ally.
"I don't know more than they know," she said. "People pay me to be committed to what they're committed to. ... Sometimes what we discover is that we need more information and we have to go get it. It's not like I provide all the answers for them."
Coach Roz said one of her favorite techniques is her "big deal scale."
Ranking problems on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 isn't worth mentioning, and 10 is a disaster.
Through this technique, Rodgers came to realize that the death of her brother was a 10. In that context, a car battery that doesn't work would not rank high enough on the chart to warrant an emotional meltdown.
Leonard said he enjoys the "toleration-free" principle of coaching.
"The idea is that we're all putting up with too much in our lives -- like when you have the AC on, you don't notice how loud it is until it shuts off," he said. "As soon as you take care of those, you'll have less of an anchor, and it starts freeing you up. And you get more energy and a lot more creative."
Life coaches say they liken their vocation to the work of other kinds of coaches, such as a football coach who brings out the best in the team, or a voice coach who strengthens a singer's vocal ability.
The idea is to enhance what is already there.
"I think people are becoming more creative," Leonard said. "They realize they've got hidden talents. ... They realize, `Wow, I can, I can, I can. Let me try. Support me while I do it and see what I can do.' Americans have always been individualistic, and this says, `Wow, I can be an individual and tap into something that's unique.' "
Unlocking the creative side, however, isn't the only reason people seek personal coaches, experts said. Better transportation, computer technology and faster-paced careers have made life more complicated. Its purpose, then, becomes less clear- cut.
"There's an increased emphasis on furnishing your own answers about life," said Richard Wessler, chairman of the psychology department at Pace University in New York.
"I contrast that to my great- grandfather, who lived a very traditional life, where all the answers were pretty much furnished for him by the community he grew up in. He had clear ideas about what's right and what's wrong, about how to take care of each other, what your obligations are, what your responsibilities are."
Life coaching has its critics, mainly in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. Coaches don't have counseling licenses, nor are they required to get clinical training for their accreditation.
That discredits them in the eyes of many mental-health practitioners, Wessler said.
"Every profession is jealously guarding its borders and doesn't want any intruders, but, of course, wants to intrude upon others," said Wessler, who has studied the increase in life coaches' popularity.
Coaches said they make a point of differentiating between counseling and coaching. People who need psychological attention should not substitute coaching for mental-health care, Leonard said.
But this is the age of wellness, self-awareness, personal downsizing and the quest for inner peace, Wessler said. People sometimes prefer a coach for problems that have little to do with mental health.
"People are looking for advice and guidance, and when you go to a counselor or mental-health professional, there's an implication that there's a mental problem," he said. "Where, in fact, the majority of problems aren't mental-health issues, but people do have personal problems. Questions, dilemmas, lack of information. And they want somebody to give them some encouragement and get them going, and keep them going."
© Copyright 1999-2008 Louise Morganti Kaelin, All Rights Reserved