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Lisa
Taylor Huff - In The Media
Hey, coach! I need a game
plan
Personal coaches are the latest trend in
self-improvement
By Lisa Irizarry, STAFF WRITER
Star Ledger,
Newark, NJ, January 25, 1999
It's starting to snow outside as Jay
Perry settles into his home office desk chair and gets ready for a conversation
with one of his clients.
A red sign atop the computer reads: "Nothing
is Impossible."
Today's client, a 36-year-old stand-up comic Terrill
Fischer from Texas, wants to tell Perry about a fellow comedian he met who
might be able to help him start a company to promote comics for corporate
appearances.
"We sort of connected," Fischer says. "He's got
unbridled enthusiasm and I'm more laid back."
"Cool," says Perry "Now
make a list of the top 10 uses for comedy in a corporation to help sell his
idea."
So goes the latest trend in self-improvement: personal
coaching.
Perry, a 50-year-old Maplewood resident, is a professional
personal coach, someone who gives one-on-one help to people who want to make
significant lifestyle and career changes.
The idea has been around
for nearly a decade, but as Americans focus more on quality of life issues, the
coaching profession has moved to become better organized and offer
certification.
For example:
-- There now is a Coach
University, an international virtual school where prospective coaches take
courses via computer and teleconferencing hookups.
-- The
International Coach Federation is a non-profit virtual organization, a
worldwide resource for business and professional coaches and a referral base
for clients. The organization is helping to establish official standards for
coaches through a certification process that just got off the ground in
September. It has 120 chapters in the United States and 20 countries and has a
board of directors, a staff, volunteers and members all over the world.
-- In 1997 U.S. News and World Report ranked personal and business
coaching the second-hottest consulting field, surpassed only by management
consulting.
It's a profession that appears to be growing quickly.
Verona resident Laura Berman Fortgang, a guru in the personal
coaching field and author of the book, "Take Yourself To The Top" (Warner
Books, $13.99), says when she started in the business five years ago there were
about 2,000 coaches nationwide. Today, there are about 5,000 full- and
part-time coaches. And she projects the number will explode in the next year.
"It's just booming," Fortgang says. "Three years ago we were top
people in the field getting together as friends, now it's (the International
Coach Federation) a professional organization with certification and
conferences. We've gone from 200 to 1,300 members."
At this point,
the industry remains unregulated, with no specific training required.
But the coaches say the success many have had in turning their nagging-mother
role into positive changes for their clients speaks for itself.
"Corporations can no longer take care of us (workers)," said the 35-year-old
Fortgang. "We saw that in the late '80s and early '90s with downsizing. Some
people were out of work for two years. People started to ask themselves the
hard questions like, 'Isn't there something else? and 'What will make me
happy?'
"People are redesigning success and redesigning their lives
to reflect their own creativity," she added. "We were drones; now people want
to make their own special contributions and be satisfied and fulfilled in their
lives. I think people are ready to design work to fit their life, not design
their life around work."
The coaching process is fairly simple. It's
usually done by phone and e-mail, which means the client base can be worldwide.
Fees range from $200 to $500 a month, and clients usually sign up for three- or
four half-hour sessions a month.
"Homework" is normally assigned to
the clients to keep them regularly working toward their goal.
Clients
interviewed for this story ranged from a homemaker who wants to do something
more than take care of the family and the house, to a top executive who decided
to chuck it all and take off to see the world. Some simply want to improve
their interpersonal relationships.
Fortgang, a 35-year-old former
actor, became a coach herself after hiring one for advice when she wanted to
start a business. She says her coach ended up guiding her through some personal
and professional situations as well as helping her eliminate people from her
life who were negative influences.
"Some people
call themselves coaches, and they're really consultants," says Lisa Huff, a personal coach who lives in Flemington.
"I define it (personal coaching) as empowering other people."
Literature distributed by Coach University defines the field as akin to
consulting. "But the coach stays with the client to help implement the new
skills, changes and goals, to make sure that they really happen.
"Coaching is not therapy. Coaches do not work on 'issues' or get into the past
or deal much with understanding human behavior. That knowledge may come as
clients move forward toward personal and professional goals that will give them
the life they really want, but it should not be the focus of a coaching
relationship."
Perry, who pursued a career in acting and directing
before getting into coaching, said the foundation for professional coaching is
being a person who is understanding and is someone people like to talk to.
"There have always been people around who were coaches, but there was no
movement," Perry said. "Thomas J. Leonard took it along and made it a
profession."
Leonard, a former accountant and financial planner,
became a coach in 1982 after he found his clients coming to him for help to
define their life goals. He founded Coach University a decade later.
"A coach is not a miracle worker," says Leonard. "But he or she does have a
large tool kit to help clients identify what they really want in their lives
and then decide how to get it."
Huff
agrees. "There isn't really one way of doing it. It's similar to a sports
coach. You're not out on the field actually playing the sport, but you're on
the sidelines giving support and motivation.
"They're looking to a coach to create a strategy (for the
client to make changes) and to help them stay focused on their goals," she
adds, noting fledgling entrepreneurs are some of the personal coaching field's
biggest clients.
"There's not a lot of
support," she says. "Business owners traditionally work 60- to 80-hour weeks
and take no vacation because they think everything will fall apart if they're
not there. They end up being a slave to the business -- the opposite of what
they expected (from being the boss)."
When she starts working with a client, Huff says, she first
gets the person to actually visualize what they want their entire life to look
like, and they work from there.
People look to coaches for
different reasons.
When Gameela Wright of Edison turned to Jay Perry
for assistance, she was tired of doing temp work in between acting jobs.
Wright says Perry helped her realize she had the computer skills to get
her own business, and that she could incorporate her knowledge of show business
into the venture.
She expects to open The Wright Approach Inc., a
company that creates résumé kits for actors, this month in
Manhattan.
"The coaching was really helpful, and I'm still being
coached," Wright said. "I look forward to every Thursday when Jay and I have
our call."
Jill Jeffrey, a 40-year-old former professional basketball
player with the New Jersey Gems and a former Montclair State College basketball
coach and basketball players' agent, had experience changing jobs. But the
Nutley resident found she needed to hire her own coach when she wanted to make
a change at the Park Avenue company where she has worked for the past four
years.
The company, EDP World, places computer professionals in banks
and brokerage firms, and Jeffrey wanted to know how to move up the ladder from
her job as a recruiter. Money wasn't the issue, Jeffrey says, she had already
quintupled her salary over the previous job she had held as an agent.
"I was feeling a little frustrated. I didn't feel I was tapping into my
stronger qualities -- I'm a natural leader."
After being coached for
three months, in July Jeffrey got a management job with the company.
Copyright ©1999. The Star-Ledger. All
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