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Lisa
Taylor Huff - In The Media
Personal Coaches aren't just for
business bigwigs anymore
By Theresa Forsman
The Record
(Bergen County, NJ), August 20, 2000
If someone as capable as tennis
champ Pete Sampras has a coach, then why shouldn't Michael Greenidge, Dov J.
Goldman, Donna Gerhauser, and Bill O'Hearn?
Greenidge is an information
technology professional whose personal coach helped him "realize some things
about commitment".
"This is the rest of my life," he says. "This is the
real deal."
Gerhauser, who worked in corporate communications for 14
years, left her job and hired a coach. "I felt it was time to make a change, a
real and fundamental change," she says.
Goldman, CEO of a fast-growing
software company, got a coach for himself and his employees. "I've never been
managed," he explains. "I've always been the manager. And that gives me some
flaws."
O'Hearn, a marketing director, is working with a coach. "With
two small kids and a demanding job, you almost don't have time to think," he
explains. "It is a way of forcing myself to take some time for myself."
Personal coaches aren't just for Fortune 400 executives anymore.
They're being hired by people in many fields who want to make changes and would
like a guide to help them venture into uncharted territory.
The growth
in such coaching comes as ties between corporations and employees are becoming
weaker, thus eliminating a traditional career-support system, and as technology
promises a future that holds more options, more uncertainty, and more speed.
Systems are broken
"It's a movement that's catching on,"
O'Hearn says. "The old mentoring systems are broken. No one has time to do that
anymore."
In today's working world, many people don't stay at one
company long enough to mentor or be mentored. "Those relationships don't even
develop," says O'Hearn, a marketing director at KPMG Peat Marwick in Montvale.
Meanwhile, he says, many human-resource departments have shifted their
focus to legal compliance and cost-cutting steps and away from employee
advocacy.
"There are a lot of people who need answers and are
overworked and don't have time to think about them," says O'Hearn, who says he
works in "a pretty demanding environment at a high speed."
He hired
personal coach Ron Paxton of Oakland on the recommendation of his wife, who
worked with Paxton when she lost her job as the result of a company merger.
Although O'Hearn, 41, plans to keep his corporate job for many years,
he has thought of working for a non-profit organization or teaching at some
point. ("A lot of what we're talking about is career related and getting a
handle on my personality strengths and weaknesses.")
Nancy Fox of Nyack
hired a personal coach when she decided to leave her job as a senior executive
in the apparel industry, where she had worked for 24 years.
"I had done
very well, but I was very unhappy," says Fox, 46. "I knew it wasn't a matter of
getting the next big job, a new company, or more money. It's really tough to
transition out of something you're doing well in to something that is
new."
Together, she and her coach did a lot of soul-searching about her
attitudes toward money, success, creativity, and fulfilling work - "about who I
really was," she says, adding: "The whole idea of hiring a coach is to improve
the quality of your life."
"Fox, who has undergraduate degrees in
psychology and sociology, decided on a coaching career for herself a few months
ago.
When Greenidge hired coach Lisa J. Huff of Mendham last
spring, he didn't know whether he wanted to stay in the information technology
field, whether he wanted to commit to his girlfriend, whether his attitudes
about money were holding him back in life.
'Vision becomes
clearer'
"When I started this coaching process, it helped me to see
things. Your vision becomes a lot clearer," says Greenidge, who is now engaged
to be married and who is thinking like an entrepreneur.
"What coaches
focus on is where you are now and where you want to be, and closing the gap,"
says Huff, who has been a coach for three years.
Her initial
consultation, which is free, determines whether the potential client is a good
candidate for coaching and whether they would work well together.
"I
want to make sure their challenge is something I can help them with and
something I can feel excited about," says Huff, who tends to work with
small-business owners, executives, and people anticipating a big career change.
After gather information about the client and helping him set goals and
a timetable, Huff's coaching generally consists of three to four
half-hour telephone sessions per month, as well as short e-mail or telephone
exchanges, as needed. That scenario is typical, say other coaches, and
generally costs $200 to $500 a month. Clients are usually coached for six to 18
months.
After Huff helps a client set goals and agree to certain
tasks within a time frame, the phone calls serve as progress reports and
problem-solving. "We look at typical blocks and resistances and we peel back
the layers through a serious of insightful questions to help the client
discover his own solutions," Huff says.
Coaching vs.
therapy
Coaching should not be confused with therapy, say Huff and
other coaches.
"Childhood issues are important for a client to know,
but that's not our job," she says, noting that it's not uncommon for a coach to
work with someone who also has a therapist. People who call with emotional
issues or marital conflicts are referred to therapists, Huff said.
Goldman, CEO of Cognet, the software developer in Valhalla,
N.Y., has hired coaches for himself and his staff of 65.
"I view it as
a cross between therapy and traditional business consulting. Unlike therapy,
you're not dealing with personal issues, but you are dealing with human
issues," Goldman says. He hired Paxton as a corporate coach to get people to
communicate more honestly and to get problems and expectations out in the open,
which he said reduces tension and increases Unity toward corporate goals.
Goldman, CEO of Cognet, the software developer in Valhalla, N.Y., has
hired coaches for himself and his staff of 65.
"I view it as a cross
between therapy and traditional business consulting. Unlike therapy, you're not
dealing with personal issues, but you are dealing with human issues," Goldman
says. He hired Paxton as a corporate coach to get people to communicate more
honestly and to get problems and expectations out in the open, which he said
reduces tension and increases Unity toward corporate goals.
"You're
seeing a flattening of hierarchies within organizations," Goldman says. At the
same time, the pace of innovation and business has accelerated, "so all of a
sudden we have to get comfortable with change on a regular basis."
"Today's world gives limitless options; that can be intimidating," says
Gerhauser, of Scotch Plains, who became a personal coach after working with
Huff on some career-transition questions.
Many people who hire a coach
to help them make career changes end up changing other aspects of their lives
first.
Greenidge, a 37-year old from Bay Shore, N.Y., didn't start
thinking entrepreneurially until he cleaned the physical clutter out of his
life, paid off some nagging debts, and learned how to communicate better and
set boundaries with friends and family members.
"Those things help you
clear up your thought processes and your life in general," says Greenidge, who
then was able to think more clearly about what he might want to do with his
career.
Gerhauser agrees: "The reality is, when you get into the
process, it's impossible to separate personal from professional."
Not
only impossible, but not advantageous, says Paxton, who learned from his own
experience.
"I was looking at it backwards," says Paxton, 56, who was a
strategic management consultant for 20 years before beginning his coaching
career.
"People think that first you have to have the beautiful home,
the luxury car, the certifications, the money, the college degrees before you
can start to do the things that you were meant to do and be the person you were
meant to be. That's all wrong. Be the person you were meant to be. By being
that person, you will get the rewards, whether it's money, satisfactory
relationships, the ability to help others. I've had all the toys, but it hadn't
given me satisfaction."
Common steps
Although the process
and content of coaching vary with each person, some concepts come up time and
again in conversations with several coaches and coaching clients:
- People need to identify those things that
are draining their energy or focus. What day-to-day burdens are weighing them
down and keeping them stuck in the status quo? Coaches call these needless
burdens "tolerations." They can be an unhappy relationship with a friend,
family member or colleague, or a messy home or something as seemingly
insignificant as a squeaky door.
"If every time you open the squeaky
door, you think 'I've got to fix that', you are draining your energy," Paxton
says.
One of the most common tolerations is clutter.
"It sounds
like a small thing, but it's really not," Greenidge says. "There's a linear
relationship between how much clutter I have in my physical life and in my
mental life," he says. After he cleaned out stuff that had been collecting in
the trunk of his car, his closets, and elsewhere, he says, he noticed "a change
in thought patterns - a renewed vigor and energy."
The stacks of
magazines and junk mail, the boxes of moldering newsprint and old clothes in
the basement, the unmade bed, the dirty car, the mess on the kitchen counter -
all are energy drains, Huff says, things that literally get in the way
of moving forward.
"You are living in chaos, wasting time looking for
things, trying to hold on to the past, making excuses about why you can't have
people over. When you literally have no room in your life for things to happen,
physically clearing out clutter carries over - you are freeing up energy, which
goes in to other things."
- People give too much time to their low
priorities.
"One of the reasons people are overwhelmed with time
constraints is that they are not putting their time into the things that matter
most to them," Huff says. "A lot of people don't know how to say no."
That becomes part of boundary-setting during coaching, confronting what she
refers to as "this cultural disease of I-have-to-please."
- Establish integrity. What it means to live
with integrity will vary, according to individual standards, but it's important
to establish values and to live by them.
Huff has her clients
define integrity, then list ways they may be "out of integrity".
"A lot
of people make it up as they go along, and they live in a very reactive state,"
Huff says. "When you start making it a habit to put your integrity at
the top of the list, you decide what kind of person you want to be in the world
and have a set of standards for yourself and boundaries for others."
To
Greenidge, getting financial integrity meant paying off debt, including $750 he
had owed to his father for 12 years. "Bad debt carries a certain bad energy,"
he says.
They must be real
Coaches come
from a wide range of backgrounds, but the one quality they must have is
authenticity, Paxton says. They must be able to establish trust between
themselves and clients. Coaches recommend that potential clients interview
several coaches to find one with whom they feel compatible and
trusting.
The person-coaching field, which had only a handful of
practitioners until the 1990s, now numbers up to 30,000 worldwide, says Paxton,
head of the New Jersey chapter (www.njcoaches.org) of the International
Coaching Federation (www.coachfederation.org).
The Federation, which
has about 2,000* members worldwide and about 45 members in New Jersey*, was
established eight years ago to self-regulate the industry, in which licensing
is not required, he says.
Members of the federation must be certified
and have completed training at one of the three** accredited coaching schools
must have worked with clients as a "student coach", must have references, and
must agree to the federation's bylaws.
"What's really important is not
so much the certification but the relationship with the client," Paxton says.
"The chemistry is more important than the certification."
Copyright ©2000. The Record (Bergen
County). All rights reserved.  More Media Articles
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