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In 1992 Leonard kicked off a formal coach-training program he dubbed Coach University. At least in Leonard’s mind, Coach U, as it came to be known, would professionalize and standardize the growing field. Leonard eventually sold Coach U to a protégé, Sandy Vilas. (Like many others, Vilas took an eclectic route to coaching: He had worked in the energy industry, in real estate, as a speaker, as a trainer, and as a stockbroker.) Under Vilas’s leadership, Coach U became a life-coach incubator that today offers more than fifty “teleclasses”—that is, courses in coaching methodologies that are conducted via conference call.
What such instruction prepares coaches to teach today’s America can be hard to say. Life coaching is such a slippery enterprise that even explanations of its appeal sound vaguely . . . well, slippery. Patrick Williams, the president and founder of the well-known Institute for Life Coach Training, has described his milieu as the process of “futuring” people. Harvard’s John Kotter told Fortune, “As society moves from 30 miles an hour to 70 to 120 to 180 . . . as we go from driving straight down the road to making right turns and left turns to abandoning cars and getting on motorcycles . . . the whole game changes. A lot of people are trying to keep up, learn how, not fall off.” (Reflecting on that quote, Kotter told me he was simply trying to describe the appeal of coaching from the perspective of an audience who may feel that their lives are spinning out of control in today’s increasingly fast-paced world.)
Surely the life coach wears multiple hats. He or she is part consultant, part oracle, part cheerleader, part provider of tough love. (And as we’ll see shortly, at least some of the male coaches might provide a less tough kind of love.) Not all of these hats always fit as well as they might, with the result that coaches, like most SHAMsters, sometimes get caught up in the logic of their own marketing efforts. On the Web site for the online coaching organization Paradigm Associates, life coach Mark Gibson begins, “Whether you believe you will succeed, or you believe you will fail, you are right.” But Gibson makes a convenient U-turn: “Those who have a vague idea of what their full potential is, think that they can reach it alone. But let me ask you one question: Five years ago, when you imagined where you would be today, where did you see yourself? Are you there? Have you fulfilled your own expectations? . . . You can take charge of your life and how you want to live it right now, and the best person to help you plan the actions you need to take in order to get on the fast track to success is your coach.” So while Gibson opens by arguing that you can achieve whatever you think you can achieve, just a few sentences later he’s stating that even if you believe the sky’s the limit, you probably can’t reach the heavens without help—specifically, his.
Observers of the phenomenon say that these New Age therapists-sans-portfolio often function as full-service shrinks, though the coaches themselves vehemently deny any such thing, since those activities would constitute practicing psychiatry without a license. “I know the boundaries,” one independent life coach told me. “I’m not here to put people in touch with their inner child. I’m here to help them as a tactician.”
Still, the parallels between coaching and standard psychiatric practice are hard to ignore. Many life coaches begin with “diagnostics” intended to yield a reasonably valid personality profile of the customer. Typically coaches assign prep work that includes writing a journal of self-inventory; they may use formal tools like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Having established a baseline profile of the client, a coach works with him or her on a “life blueprint” and eventually formulates a series of “action plans.”
“To my ear,” Bennis told me, “it sounds an awful lot like what psychiatrists and psychologists go to school for.” But there’s a critical difference, he adds: Calling the process coaching makes it especially attractive to men. “For men,” Bennis remarks, “a lot of executive coaching is really an acceptable form of psychotherapy. Even nowadays, it’s still tough to say, ‘I’m going to see my therapist.’ It’s OK to say, ‘I’m getting counseling from my coach.’ ” Martha Beck, a popular life coach and frequent talk-show guest, has echoed that argument, saying, “It’s OK for a man to see a coach. In a lot of settings, it is not OK for a man to see a therapist.” Like so many others in the world of SHAM, coaches achieve success by cannily packaging their supposedly easy solutions for their target market. In fact, many coaches who work with high-level male executives go out of their way to pump up the machismo factor. By some accounts they’ll even act differently, putting on a swagger or affecting a more rough-hewn way of speaking. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that according to Patrick Williams of the Institute for Life Coach Training, men make up a full 60 percent of the caseload for coaching while women represent 70 percent of the caseload in therapy.
While some of the coaches who appeal to male executives adopt a locker-room style, that doesn’t mean life coaching is bereft of the usual SHAM jargon and catchphrases. The coach may “focus on helping our clients put vision into action, assisting individuals and organizations to be innovative in their thinking and actions, creating more challenging and cooperative work cultures, developing dynamic and useful programs that are effective in business and personal situations [through] state-of-the-art research [that brings] fresh, new approaches to our client systems. We offer these innovative approaches as catalysts for growth of both the individual and the organization.” The preceding buzzword extravaganza comes to you courtesy of Elaina Zuker, founder of Elaina Zuker Associates, a coaching and organizational-development firm whose clients have included Avon, American Express, Bankers Trust, Chase Manhattan Bank, Citibank, IBM, MCI, and Sheraton Corporation. Such amorphous, jargon-laced patter is typical of corporate coaching, where one almost suspects that the point is not to communicate anything concrete.
Or sometimes it seems the idea is to communicate the obvious. Mary Bradford, a sales manager at Metropolitan Life, was introduced to life coaching by a friend. Bradford spoke every week with Talane Miedaner, an executive coach in New York City who had advised employees at corporations like Citicorp, Bear Stearns, Salomon Smith Barney, and Motorola.
Bradford had a habit of overpromising, a common foible among salespeople.
Miedaner told her to underpromise instead.
Those are the kinds of anecdotes that can cause teeth to gnash among people like Harvard’s John Kotter, who have devoted lengthy careers to studying corporate mechanics in minute detail. “Yes, I resent it,” Kotter told me. “When I see people throwing out junk, this river of mud, that is in my arena, and it piles on top of something I’ve done very thoughtfully and with a great deal of diligence and attention to detail over many years, well, you can’t help but resent it.”
Nonetheless, Bradford is not alone in swearing by the positive results of her coaching experience. In fact, feedback on life coaching is generally more positive than that for other SHAM products and purveyors, with companies often quoting measurable improvements in performance after coaches come in to dispense their wisdom. For example, a few years ago a regional manager for AT&T’s aggressive Growth Markets division decided to bring in coach Cheryl Weir, who in her former professional life had spent thirteen years selling for IBM. Weir’s coaching program cost $11,000 initially and about $2,000 in quarterly follow-up—but by the end of the year, revenue for the AT&T unit had grown 16 percent, double the previous year’s growth rate. An AT&T executive later told Fortune she thought the company “earned back [Weir’s fee] in a week.” The ICF site prominently features one case study involving an unidentified Fortune 500 company where coaching produced a 529 percent return on investment (788 percent if you count the “financial benefits from employee retention”), according to MetrixGlobal, a firm that specializes in quantifying corporate change.
Then again, reckoning a coach’s provable bottom-line impact proves problematic, because companies often turn to coaches when they’re undergoing other organizational changes. This makes it hard to separate out the results of the coaching from the results of the str
uctural tweaking. But corporate managers who pay top dollar for a coach’s services are inclined to view the process in the most favorable light; whether the payoff is quantifiable or not, there’s a strong incentive to report success, because the price of reporting failure is simply too high. As Deborah Carr, a sociologist at Rutgers, puts it, “You have to remember that a manager who hires a coach is going to have to explain that line item to somebody higher up.”
That focus on results now extends well beyond the corporate world. Just as people hire personal trainers when they’re looking ahead to swimsuit season, they hire personal coaches when they’re up against some fixed productivity deadline. And largely because of the broad social influences of Empowerment, whose most public face is Phil McGraw, increasing numbers of Americans are shouting, I don’t care what got me to where I am, just help me get to where I want to be. Carr sees the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps message of today’s coaches and allied advice givers as yet another form of rebellion against the Victimization theory that dominated public discourse beginning in the mid-1960s. Quoting a line that has become a catchphrase in the coaching movement, Carr told me, “Growth is hot, diagnosis is not. A lot of people today don’t care whether Mommy spanked them once too often. They want to get beyond all that, and get on with it. And they want more personalized attention than they could get from Dr. Phil.”
That same sense of forward motion makes the coaching craze perfect for a post-9/11 zeitgeist. In a sense, America as a whole finds itself thrust into a period of midlife reevaluation, suggests Carr. “Life coaching is solution-oriented and concentrates on the future,” she told me. “It has an inherent sense of hopefulness, of moving past the darkness.”
This may also explain why people who flock to coaches don’t usually expect heavy doses of ethics—because ethical considerations have this annoying way of slowing things down. “Coaching is about teaching clients to do what works,” says Carr. “It’s like they’re saying, ‘I don’t have time to be fixed, and I don’t want to worry about how my actions might be judged by history. Just help me get from A to B.’ ”
And they’re saying, Get me there fast. “Although people know instinctively that real change is difficult and long-term,” says Benjamin Dattner, “Americans want to believe that a few sessions will fix everything.”
But as one so often sees with the SHAM phenomenon, wanting to believe something will work—and having it actually work—are two different things.
THE REAL PROBLEMS
With more and more Americans turning to life coaches to solve their problems, it’s important to ask, What qualifies someone as a life coach? A better question might be, What disqualifies someone? “I do wonder about the vulgarization of coaching,” says Bennis, who, make no mistake, regards properly done coaching as instrumental in molding the next generation of visionary business leaders. “I’m concerned about unlicensed, unqualified people doing this.”
His concerns are not misplaced. Virtually anyone, whether he or she has attended Coach U or not, can anoint himself a life coach. “There are no bedrock qualifications, no unified approach to coaching, no clear and unimpeachable credentialing,” Bennis points out. “Basically this is a business that flies under the radar screen of any sort of oversight.”
The nonseriousness and laissez-faire nature of the enterprise is clear in the fact that even many of the top Web sites that offer life coaching also give the visitor the option of becoming a life coach. Indeed, the very first link on www.life-coaching-resource.com, even before the ones that click you through to the coaching help you presumably sought, reads, “Start your own coaching business.” Imagine consulting a site for medical help and being greeted by the offer “Would you like to find a doctor . . . or become a doctor?”
Among the coaches Fortune interviewed for its story on the trend were a former certified public accountant, a low-level banking executive, and a marketing vice president for Bloomingdale’s. Coach-training firms also have sprung up as independent entities, with their own respective standards and pseudoprofessional practices. ICF says that so far it has “made little headway” in its attempts to license coaching. What the organization doesn’t say is that most of its own members aren’t all that fond of such attempts; reputable though they may be, they regard standardization as the first step in regulation, and some surely fear that their individual methods might not pass muster. Plenty of coaches are doing just fine as it is, thank you. An unaffiliated corporate coach who asked to remain anonymous told me, “Their position basically is, if the federation is just a fraternal body where people get together to meet and swap stories over a beer, that’s one thing. They’re all for it. But when it shows signs of actually governing or licensing, that’s where they draw the line.”
The coaching boom of recent years even worries a lot of the more visible coaches, who make the familiar argument about the few bad apples and their effect on the bunch. Here too, however, one may intuit a more businesslike, unspoken motive: protecting market share against the encroachments of eager upstarts. Motives aside, there’s no question that as the phenomenon spreads, attracting greater numbers of freelance coaches who are blessed with a pleasing persona and the gift of gab, hopeful clients risk being shortchanged.
Everywhere you look nowadays, you’ll see an independent life coach hanging out a shingle, selling private-label motivation. For $3,000 an East Rochester, New York, couple, John and Seran Wilkie, will fix your life through the magic of—Seranism! That’s their eponymous title for their thirty-hour course on how to put your priorities in order, live a happier life, work less, earn more, and (in today’s iffy economy) save your struggling small business, should you happen to own one. Seran Wilkie, a religious junkie and former teacher of statistics and computer programming, has no formal training in psychology. Even so, she deems herself uniquely qualified to expound on the keys to happiness and help each person find his or her singular version of it. “Say you have a boss who’s just stupid and he drives you crazy,” she posits. “Ask yourself, ‘If he’s so stupid, how is he driving me crazy? He must be pushing some button on me, and where is that button?’ And so forth. The program helps you see what really is.” So far, the Wilkies say they have provided such enlightenment to about three hundred people.
The Sedona Method, named for the Arizona city where it originated, is a group-coaching technique pioneered during the 1970s by Lester Levenson and promoted most visibly these days by his avuncular pupil Hale Dwoskin. Dwoskin convenes a dozen or so individuals in a room and runs them through a wild inspirational potpourri that borrows freely and not always seamlessly from spiritualism, neurolinguistic programming, native American rituals, “trust exercises,” and other activities, most of which have been discredited by the repentant magician and world-class debunker James Randi, among others. Dwoskin also coaches his participants to drop pens and throw chairs as “symbolic” ways of letting go of impediments to happiness and power. Though Dwoskin’s book is titled Happiness Is Free, he nevertheless feels obliged to charge each Sedona participant $295. For what it’s worth, Dwoskin is the author of what may be the single most vacuous quote ever to emerge from SHAM (and that’s saying something): “Beingness is simply that state of ‘I am’ that is here before, during, and after every thought, feeling, and experience.”
Even more troubling, evidence indicates that some male coaches prey on emotionally scattered women who have taken their lumps in life, are desperate for change, and don’t mind spending a few bucks to sit down opposite some charming fellow with an easy smile who can help them figure it all out. By the end of a few such sessions, a transformation indeed may have taken place—the guy has gone from life coach to gigolo. “It’s a great way to meet women,” the anonymous independent coach told me. “In any case, whether you ‘score’ or not, they’re paying you for your time.” These coaches begin by publicizing relatively cozy seminars in smaller hotel meeting rooms, often on issues like “love enhancement” or “relationship readiness,�
� topics apt to bring in women who’ve been stuck in a rut. Sometimes they start with hardcore financial advice, but execute a deft segue from money to happiness, happiness to love, love to sex (or “intimacy”). They smile and wink in all the right places; they encourage audience members to “get in touch via e-mail if you’d like to arrange for individualized coaching sessions.” They meet any takers in coffee shops and restaurant bars, where they usually charge modest sums—$100 an hour or thereabouts—to “listen” and “suggest” on a “one-to-one basis.” Where it goes after that depends on the signals they get from the client. A fiftyish Memphis woman we’ll call Roxanne fell under the spell of just such a coach, and had “invested” a few thousand dollars before she realized that she was “really paying for his companionship,” as she puts it. She blames herself for letting the situation get out of hand and still isn’t quite sure the coach himself did anything wrong.
File this, then, under “a word to the wise”: Women who seek honest advice, and nothing more than that, should beware of men who advertise themselves as “certified love coaches.” They’re probably certified con men, the whole thing is probably a scam, and it’s probably the closest thing this society allows to legalized prostitution. This blatant line blurring is a particular sore spot with those who argue for regulation of the industry, for canons of ethics in almost all professional situations bar “real” therapists from becoming romantically involved with their patients.