How I Became a Life Coach

Living can be messy these days, but now you can hire someone to guide you. So who are these amazing, well-adjusted people who qualify for the title "life coach'? Melinda Houston puts on her trainers.

Its like a cross between Gesalt therapy and a job interview. One woman - blonde, in a suit leans forward gravely, asks a great many questions, and says, "Mmmm?" and, "Oh?" in a mildly interrogative fashion. The other - brunette, tracksuit pants - looks at her hands, looks at the ceiling, and struggles to articulate exactly what it is she wants from life.

I'm three hours into my Life Coach training, a residential weekend at the lovely Glen Erin Vineyard Retreat, in the foothills of Victoria's Mount Macedon Ranges, and finally we're getting down to the nitty-gritty. Despite failing the CoachFit quiz provided by a rival life-coach training company, I've decided to forge ahead, hauling out to the country on a drizzly Saturday and taking my place with a dozen other hopefuls. I want to see what all the fuss is about. Because there is a fuss.

Life coaching is the second fastest growing industry in the US (behind IT), with 4,000 registered coaches worldwide, and about a gazillion unregistered ones. Top executives use them. Artists use them. Hillary Clinton has used one. Life-coach clients are, typically, high achievers. (You have to be to afford the $100-plus for a 30-minute session.) But it does raise the question: if you're already achieving, why to do need a coach?

Sydney life coach Judy Cole suggests that successful people take on life coaches because, despite their success, they're just not happy. "Action can become a habit, to the detriment of reflection," Cole says. "So people are achieving more and more, yet feeling less and less at ease in their life." Life coaches ask their clients, "What do you want?" and they keep asking until they get a clear, achievable answer. If Ms Executive's initial response is "more time", a coach will first help her nail down a more precise goal - one day each weekend with the kids, 18 holes of golf every Sunday, leaving work by 6pm every night. Then they'll help work out ways to do it.

As more and more of us are plagued by the big questions in life (what do I want? Am I happy?) and feeling like hamsters trapped in the exercise wheel of life, finding someone to help with the answers is increasingly attractive. And learning how to find the answers, both for ourselves and other, is more attractive still.

In Australia, professional life coaches are still a rarity (there are 160 certified and practising), but such is the buzz surrounding this next big thing that already this year hundreds of people have enrolled in life-coach training. Training like I'm doing now. Our mock-coaching group consists of business people, parents, disillusioned Amway reps and semi-retired professionals. But they all have one thing in common. Like the brunette in the tracksuit, they're all asking themselves what they'll eventually be asking their clients: what do I want from life? Each has a navy-blue ring-binder decorated with the Life Coaching Academy logo (a lion rampant) and the prosaic words Residential Course Handouts. All of them are hoping the answer lies somewhere between its covers.

To be honest, while I'm plagued by life's big questions as much as the next guy, I find it kind of fun trying to figure out the answers myself. But to distract myself from the brunette's personal revelations (I am so unfit to be a life coach), I start to turn the pages. Section One is titled Emotional Intelligence and contains extracts from books with names such as The Aquarian Conspiracy and The Dolphin Within Life coaching sells itself as a feelgood business opportunity, but like most Next Big Things, its bedrock is self-development and it does attract its quota of self-help junkies.

One trainee spends his spare time attending Christian revivalist meetings. For another pale young woman with earnest, searching eyes this is her 10th or 12th seminar (including one on white witchcraft). During a discussion on emotional intelligence quotient, she asks, "If you have a high EIQ, wouldn't you be more emotionally porous? Wouldn't you be inclined to be for neurotic?" The trainer explains that a high EIQ is different to having lots of emotions. "From personal experience, I don't agree with that statement, the pale woman says firmly. The trainer lets it pass but during a break, the course convener takes pale-face aside for a one-on-one chat.

More alarming was a beefy fellow from the same session who seemed in some kind of perverse denial about what he wanted and why he was there. He shared with us an anecdote about a period in his life when he was experiencing a great many difficulties. "I didn't read any of those self-help books," he says brusquely. "No mumbo jumbo. I just though it would screw me up more." He went on to talk about the value of "cutting off" emotion. He makes himself get up at 2am, two days every week "for the discipline", he tells us. "Beautiful," says the trainer. "That's a great example of emotional intelligence." It is? "Thank you for sharing that. That's what we're on abut as coaches. It's not therapy." Indeed.

I feel a little frightened for potential clients of Mr 2am, but console myself with the though that coaching is not therapy. In face, we are warned sternly and repeatedly never to offer clients advice. We're even instructed never to ask "why" during our questioning. "Why" encourages people to look back. Life coaches want people to move forward. One of the students, a psychologist, finds this particular ethos extremely attractive. Frankly, she's tired of spending all day, every day, encouraging people to wallow in their past. She loves the idea of starting from year zero and helping them get on with it. But I do privately wonder just how long some of the other ex-teachers and ex-therapists and ex-HR consultants will last before putting their two bob's worth in - or cracking under the strain of not doing so.

Of course, searching for answers - for oneself or others - is not intrinsically ridiculous. And to its credit, most life coaching, and most life coaches, do try and bring a certain pragmatism to the process. By the time I've reached Section Five of my course notes, I'm feeling a bit easier. Its called The GROW Model and subtitled A Proactive Way To Achieve Goals And To Solve Problems.

It's a strict template of questions to ask clients, including how much time should be spent on each. The first is "What issue do you want to work on? It must be real and important to you" (three to five minutes). The last question is "How strong is your commitment to taking that first step?" (three to five minutes). No set of questions is allowed more than 15 minutes. Each set of questions is firmly directed towards goal-setting and action. My training notes do concede that, in reality, I will "use, modify, add to and, in some cases, discard" the questions. But the model is there.

"At first I though, "Life coaching!" Jaycee Chatter grimaces. The 28-year-old was working in hospitality when a friend decided to set up a life-coaching business in New Zealand. Chatter was deeply skeptical. "But I got some info on it and my friend coached me. It's not as airy-fairy as I thought it would be."

Chater is now planning to join her friend's company as a coach. She likes the fact that the training is starting to focus on getting to the heart of the problem and working out a solution. "I didn't really have much of an idea of what to expect, but my friend said to keep an open mind," Chater says. "Today it's starting to make more sense."

Howard Doyle, an accountant in his late 50s recently gave up his day job to teach at TAFE. He and his wife want to retire in a few years and to Doyle, life coaching is more a business opportunity than a personal revelation. "My wife and I went to a coaching information night and we had a good feeling about it," he says. "I'd been to other seminars and some of them seemed a bit shonky, but there was a feeling of integrity about this one. I need a change, I'm sick of the nine-to-five, sitting in an office. Coaching might be it."

In fact, the students of the Life Coaching Academy seem remarkably resistant to what Mr 2am referred to as mumbo jumbo. After lunch, the floor is taken by Marian Durrands, the English woman who introduced the academy to Australia. A big bottle-blonde in a beige suit just an inch too small in every direction, she has, until now, had a no-nonsense approach. So we're disconcerted when she perches on a stool in the centre of the room and tells us how she cured herself of a rare and deadly disease through sheer willpower. Willpower, and the help of a Californian life coach.

No-one wants to make light of someone else's near-death experience, but several of us are exchanging "what the…..?" glances. Chater half raises one hand and says, "I'd challenge some of those…" then trails off in uncertainty. "Your experience is amazing, don't get me wrong," says another woman in poncho and pigtails, "but let's not get the life coaching mixed up with the theology."

I guess it's the kind of thing that happens when you introduce Californian theory to and Australian audience. IN the US they're more open to it. Coaching institutions over there have names such as The Relationship Club and Life On Purpose and Better Me. Here names are more likely to be built around solid, no nonsense words such as "results" and the plain "life coaching". In practice, many of the US coaches exhibit a distressing woolliness; the result, perhaps, of mixing the life-coaching ethic with New Age mysticism.

Good 21st century phenomenon that it is, a lot of life-coach training is conducted via the internet. It seemed logical to send out a few global e-mails asking if I could sit in on some web-based training. And to prove I wasn't a freeloader, I invited would-be teachers to check my credentials with my editor. Instead, about a third responded directly to my editor (to her increasing annoyance). Those who did manage to hit "reply" rather than entering another e-mail address offered my free trial coaching, told me about their trip to Sydney, a person they met in Melbourne once. One even offered to tell me about her "functional alcoholic mom, divorced family, married to verbal abuser, divorced, custody battle, property settlement battle for my business, bankruptcy, surgery, more lawsuits from ex, etc". I want to introduce her to Mr 2am.

On the upside, the more useful responses showed not just the breadth of fields coaching has infiltrated, but excellent marketing skills. At the invitation of Deborah Phillips, who runs Coach Parenting from New York, I listened in on an international parenting coaching session. It was fascinating to hear Phillips guide parents through the "four steps to being an ideal parent". It was textbook stuff: not therapy and not advice. Instead, Phillips talked her clients through what each of them thought made an "ideal parent", then asked them to suggest ways to achieve it.

What coaching offers, to clients and practitioners, is not The Answers. It offers questions and, perhaps most importantly, a framework in which to both ask and answer them. So instead of boring your friends, who inevitably have their own agenda, or worse, torturing yourself with the Big Questions in bed at 3am, you do it with your coach once a week.

Nevertheless, coaches themselves are aware of the attraction to the less-than-stable, as both clients and practitioners. Nancy Taylor, a Canadian who trains for Results Life Coaching, has had to refer clients to psychologists, psychiatrists, GPs and social workers.

"I think for people who are already working to help others achieve, there's a very natural attraction to life coaching," she says. "People like teachers, HR people, nurses, trainers, psychologists." That said, she freely admits that the buzz around life coaching attracts the shysters and seminar junkies. "It's impossible to ignore the fact that people do see it as the next great fad," she says. "Which makes managing standards more and more important." Taylor herself has numerous qualifications, but in an unregulated market it's still difficult to gauge the status of her titles.

The current benchmark is registration with the International Coaching Federation, involving at least 125 hours of training and 750 hours of paid coaching experience. (It costs about $6000 for the training.) Naturally, given the burgeoning state of the industry, experienced coaches such as Taylor are spending more of their time teaching. But unlike traditional work-for-yourself, earn-a-million pyramid scams (where selling the product comes second to recruiting other to sell the product), this actually seems to be about teaching people. And all the trainers still practise as life coaches. "The training is just a part of what I do," Taylor says. " I do coach a lot of coaches. But my core business is just coaching."

I've pretty much decided that the CoachFit quiz was right: Id be a pretty crap life coach. But I saw nothing during my training that made a call to the authorities necessary. Trainee Jill Hoskens is certainly cautiously optimistic about life coaching's cred. A former secondary-school teacher, she's tried a few schemes and courses, and had her fingers burned a couple of times. She reckons this one just might work. "It's not like you're pulling the strings on someone else," she says. "Its letting them know they're in control of their own strings. It's not going to work for everyone," she concedes. "But that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile."

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