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Lisa
Taylor Huff - In The Media
Tapping Inner Potential:
Life coaches bring out the best in their clients
By LORRAINE
ASH
DAILY RECORD, Morris Life Section, Sunday, June 20, 2004
Diane
Schilke had worked in her family's business for 25 years. After a rift she
found herself out of a job and out of confidence.
"I had never felt such
despair," she said. "I didn't think I could be successful without this business
that was handed to me on a silver platter: I was afraid of who I would have
been in life without the opportunity my family gave me. I had terrible
self-esteem but nobody knew it."
She was biding time working in a flower
shop when Rich Largman of Mendham, a good customer, walked in. He told her he
was a life coach and they chatted. She read the quote on the back of Largman's
business card -- "The universe is holding its breath, waiting for you to take
your place" -- David Whyte.
The thought stayed with her; and she hired
the 41-year-old Largman as her coach.
"I found out I could create the
life I wanted, just by changing the conversations in my head," she said.
"Working with Rich, I felt valuable, and when you feel valuable, it's easy to
move forward.
Recently, she and Largman reviewed how her life was going
during a walk in a Bernardsville park. The 55-year-old Hillsborough Realtor had
achieved most of the 10 items on her "Life Goals" list, including marrying her
longtime partner, driving a BMW Z-3 convertible, having a successful real
estate career, becoming physically fit and building a house to sell. She also
exudes the kind of confidence borne of achievement.
"Coaching is not
about talking about getting to a place you want to be," Largman said.
"It's about getting to that place."
In a world racked by
terrorism, war and a difficult economy, some people are turning to coaches to
help reinvent themselves. Sept. 11 helped Americans realize they are not immune
from death and there is nothing as precious as the present.
"Perhaps
that is the silver lining of living in uncertain times: There are no rules
now," said Laura Berman Fortgang of Montclair, one of the country's first life
coaches and author of the new book "Now What? 90 Days to a New Life
Direction" (J.P. Tarcher/Penguin, $19.95).
But negotiating the
territory of personal possibilities takes an open mind, say coaches, who for
the past 20 years have started to provide a support role once filled by
others.
"Coaches play the role once filled by mentors," said Fortgang,
41, "and now that people move from company to company, it's hard to establish a
long-term mentoring relationship."
Getting impartial guidance from
family members is also difficult, she added, since their lives can be directly
affected when a loved one makes a life-changing decision.
Coaches are
clear about what they are not: They are not therapists. They are not
advice-givers. Rather, they are professionals trained in a particular technique
of question-asking. The most highly qualified complete some 200 hours of
training at the likes of Coach University, perhaps the best-known coaching
school in the nation, and are certified by the International Coach
Federation.
The goal of the coach-client relationship is not for a coach
to impose his or her judgments on a client. Rather it is to unlock the best
judgments and instincts of the client. The difference is
profound.
Largman put it this way: "Everyone has magnificence inside
them. My job is to help bring it out."
Many sets of coaches and clients
rarely physically meet, and often do so only to celebrate a client's success.
Thirty- to 45-minute phone conversations, usually weekly, are enough to keep
most clients focused. Rates range from $250 to $500 monthly, depending on the
coaches' experience level and on the length of the sessions and if they're
conducted in person, as they sometimes are.
Fortgang, a contributing
editor of Redbook and one of the country's celebrity coaches, charges
individual clients $1,000 to $1,500 a month.
The process is called life
-- not career -- coaching because separating the two is not necessarily
fruitful.
"We all live one life," Largman said. "Achieving a big
professional goal will open something in your personal life and vice
versa."
What coaches try to unlock is simple but not easy -- personal
passions. Finding what clients love often is a matter of helping them remember,
according to Fortgang, who holds that a large part of the coaching process is
getting people in touch with the past.
"Somewhere along the line they
made very logical decisions that took them away from the more heart-based
things," she said.
Sometimes realigning a life to be happier and more in
touch with personal passions requires subtle changes. At other times the
changes are more dramatic. A sales trainer turns minister. A gymnast whose
career was cut short by an injury and worked for years as a manager in an
office furniture store starts studying sports psychology. The president of a
food marketing company creates a five-year vision for his business and
increases sales.
Coaching is about concrete results such as these, and
coaches have a way of breaking down personal inclinations, education,
experience and expertise into component parts and helping a client rebuild them
into a new lifestyle, or line or style of work. Or just a stronger and more
viable existing enterprise.
A variety of concrete exercises can be used
to work the magic. Fortgang, for instance, urges some clients to moonlight or
volunteer in fields that attract and intrigue them.
Life as an
egg
Using the metaphor of an egg, she also urges them to think about
who they are as opposed to what they do. Innate talents and passions are the
cores, or yolks, of personhood, she writes in "Now What?" Individual job
descriptions, or skills, are the whites. A yolk is an unchangeable thing, the
dream, but the whites can vary. Realizing this cracks open an individual's
career opportunities.
One woman who attended a talk by Fortgang
responded immediately to the metaphor, sitting up in her seat and sharing that
she had been frustrated by unsuccessful attempts to thrive in her dream job of
newscaster. The yolks/whites concept caused her to realize the essence of that
news business dream -- its inner wellspring -- was a passion to be a source of
information that helped people. Immediately, new career possibilities sprang to
her mind.
Lisa Taylor Huff, a Mendham
coach, urges clients who feel tired at the prospect of looking for
yet another job in a field that does not excite them to think about what skills
they have that are transferable to other professions.
She also gives
clients field work assignments to loosen up their notions of what is possible
for them. Bob Drum, 37, of Andover benefited from one such assignment. He wrote
up an interview of himself as if it were an article to appear in a
publication.
"The idea was to focus on the things about him that were
newsworthy," said Huff, 43.
In
conversation, Huff and Drum, who had spent
15 years in network security jobs, unearthed his passion for writing. At one
point in his life, nothing had made him more happy than writing, but he had
abandoned the pursuit.
"I left a long-term computer career at one
company at the end of 1997," Drum said. "I bounced around from company to
company following the same methodology. I looked for these things: How much
money can I make? What are the benefits like? What's the geography like? Is the
work within the technology background I have? I was very successful at raising
my salary but I was also really successful at making myself miserable. I fully
would have anticipated repeating that pattern had I not found Lisa."
In
the past three months he has landed another high-tech job, but one that deals
as much with people as with technology. He loves it. As he earns a living, he
also is taking writing courses, strengthening his skills in his oldest love,
and he anticipates earning a master's in fine arts so that, eventually, he will
teach writing on a college level.
His life, he said, is
enlivened.
Making choices
One of Largman's key techniques
is to bring clients along what he calls a "spectrum of awareness". The first
end of the spectrum, he said, is showing people that their lives are comprised
of a series of choices and that they can choose love or fear, happiness or
misery.
"After they realize they can choose comes the consciousness they
are choosing every moment," he said. "After that comes the realization they
have a responsibility to make the best choices."
Largman is convinced
anything is possible in anyone's life. His conviction stems from two life
scenarios. The first is a trip he took with his father to Derinkuyu, an immense
and elaborate underground city in Turkey built by Christians wanting to escape
persecution by the Romans.
The other is a scene from the movie "Apollo
13," in which NASA scientists realize they need to talk the astronauts on the
seriously damaged spacecraft into creating an adapter that will filter carbon
dioxide out of the air. Before that, though, they need to figure out how to
make the adapter using only random materials available to the crew in
space.
A NASA scientist dumps a box of supplies, including tape and a
hose, on a table, and presents the challenge.
"You know what? They do
it," Largman said. "Moments like that are how I know people can really do
anything."
That is the theme of a coach -- using elements, evident and
latent, to change life for the better.
Lorraine Ash can be reached at
973-428-6660 or lvash@gannett.com.
Copyright ©2004. Daily Record.
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