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In
the late 1990s, Christopher McCluskey ran a thriving marriage and
family-therapy practice in Clearwater, Florida. He had four colleagues
working for him, none of whom needed managed-care clients to keep their
appointment books full. His hourly fee was $95, yet he still had to
refer potential clients elsewhere. McCluskey had every right to consider
himself a success, but he wasn’t content. His daily regimen--commute,
work, commute, sleep--left him physically and emotionally drained. He
didn’t have enough time for his wife and children, and secretly, he
pined for his family’s 440-acre homestead, in the foothills of the
Ozarks. But Edgar Springs, Missouri, population 195, was hardly the kind
of town that could support a psychotherapist.
One
day in 1997, at a workshop on keeping free of managed care, he heard a
five-minute presentation on “coaching,” the hybrid of therapy,
organizational psychology, and self-help that’s attracting therapists
eager to reconfigure their practices. The new discipline intrigued him,
not least because coaching, unlike therapy, was typically conducted over
the telephone, which meant that a coach could work just about anywhere,
even in a town as tiny as Edgar Springs.
“I’m
not one to get right on the hype train,” says McCluskey, who considered
his move for a year before hiring Pat Williams, the former therapist who
founded the Institute for Life Coaching, to introduce him to the field.
After completing Williams’s training program, he dismantled his therapy
practice and began marketing himself as a coach. In 1999, he and his
family decamped for the Ozarks. By 2001, he was making more money as a
coach than he had as a therapist. And he spent less time doing it--which
meant that he could help his wife, Rachel, home-school their five
children.
“Coaching has made it possible for me to be much more a part of their
day,” McCluskey says. “I don’t just see them early in the morning or at
bedtime. I’m very much part of their day, every day.”
McCluskey is one of thousands of therapists who have ventured into
coaching within the past five years. Officials of the International
Coach Federation (ICF) estimate that some 10,000 full-time coaches now
practice in the United States, roughly 40 percent of them former
therapists. In addition, the ICF estimates that one in five clinicians
offer coaching as part of their practice. These numbers don’t tell the
full story, however, for more coaches may be in training than in
practice. In the past decade, at least 70 coach-training programs have
sprung up around the world. The largest of them, Coach University, has
more than 6,000 students. In 2001, several universities, including
Georgetown and George Mason, began offering coaching courses--a sign
that the field is gaining academic acceptance.
The
coaching movement already enjoys a privileged position in popular
culture, thanks to Oprah Winfrey. Her enthusiasm for the work of Cheryl
Richardson, author of the bestseller Take Time Out for Your Life,
and Martha Beck, author of Find Your Own North Star, has turned
these women into coaching’s first celebrities. Richardson appears often
on Winfrey’s talk show, and Beck writes a column for Winfrey’s magazine,
O. Together, they’ve popularized the image of the coach as a
caring advocate who helps clients discern and realize their deepest
desires.
Once
primarily a means of educating and motivating junior executives,
coaching has become associated with almost every human endeavor. There
are life coaches, relationship coaches, money coaches, dating coaches,
spiritual coaches, weight-loss coaches, peak-performance coaches,
coaches for students, coaches for professionals, coaches for therapists,
and even coaches for coaches. “It’s hot,” says coach and therapist Ben
Dean, who founded MentorCoach, one of several training programs aimed at
therapists. “In places like Seattle, at parties, you hear people talking
about it, saying, ‘You’ve got to get a coach. Everyone has a coach.’”
For
all the hype that surrounds it, however, the coaching boom remains
largely unexamined. Williams and other proponents argue that the field,
with an upbeat, antidiagnostic approach and an emphasis on collegial
relationships between coach and client, is the logical next step in the
evolution of humanistic psychology. But critics, especially within
academia, counter that the coaching model relies heavily on untested
self-help nostrums, and that many of its practitioners have no formal
training in psychology. “It plays on what our society desires--the quick
fix,” says David Fresco, assistant professor of psychology at Kent State
University, who has emerged as one of coaching’s most vocal critics.
“The practitioner wants a quick fix for their bottom line. The client
wants a quick fix for their suffering--only they don’t want to call it
suffering because that would be stigmatizing.”
Before the legitimacy of coaching can be explored, however, a
fundamental question about coaching must be answered: what, exactly, is
it?
In
Search of "Life Balance"
Sharon Botwinik’s life wasn’t going as she’d hoped. She had a good job
with a financial services firm in Boston, a nice house, a loving
husband, a healthy child--the works. Still, she wasn’t happy, and she
didn’t know why.
She’d been in therapy during her late twenties, and knew the benefits of
professionally assisted soul searching. But now, at 36, it was less her
self than her situation that troubled her. She worked too hard and too
long, and found too little satisfaction in her job. And it didn’t seem
that there was much a therapist could help her to do about that. Her
husband, Stephen Bacharach, had just finished working with Harriett
Simon Salinger, a former therapist, now a coach. He raved about the way
she’d helped him refocus his professional life, and encouraged Botwinik
to call her. Finally, she did.
There are many approaches to coaching: some have roots in industrial and
organizational psychology, some in therapy, and some in the human
potential movement and New Age metaphysics. Their intellectual
sophistication varies wildly. Catherine Fitzgerald, coauthor of
Executive Coaching: Practices and Perspectives, bases her coaching
on the cutting-edge theories of Harvard University education professor
Robert Kegan, who has identified five “orders of complexity” in adult
mental and emotional development. At the other extreme are two
self-proclaimed (and ICF-certified) “prosperity” coaches, who base their
practice on the insights of “Abraham, a group of Nonphysical beings,”
who “teach through the physical apparatus of Esther Hicks.” Regardless
of its intellectual underpinnings, coaching tends toward one of two
aims: improving clients’ performance of specific tasks (such as
communicating with subordinates at work), or enhancing the quality of
clients’ lives. Executive coaching (in its more traditional
manifestations), peak-performance coaching, and student coaching are
examples of the former, while “life” coaching or “personal” coaching is
an example of the latter. But these categories frequently bleed into one
another.
“When you’re coaching in a corporate or organizational setting, the task
is always paramount,” says David Coleman, an organizational psychologist
in Takoma Park, Maryland. “But deeper issues do come up in the course of
getting things done.” And it’s equally true that most clients in “life”
coaching have concerns about the value of their work and the amount of
time it eats up.
Harriett Salinger’s first step with clients like Botwinik is to help
them identify their needs. If these aren’t being met, she says, progress
is almost impossible. Though she says she’s “not a big assessments
person,” she sometimes uses a tool called Need-less. Designed by Coach
University to help clients prioritize their needs, this instrument
consists primarily of a list of needs--physical, mental, and emotional.
Clients highlight those that seem particularly pertinent, rank their top
10, and choose 4 of those to focus on. The exercise helps clients
understand “what has to be cleaned up for them to move forward in their
lives,” Salinger says.
Once
these needs have been identified, Salinger turns her attention to
clients’ values. “She asked me things like ‘Where were you at your best?
What gives you the most satisfaction? If this was your last day on
earth, what would you want to do?’” Botwinik says. These questions
helped her identify what was important to her, and led her to examine
whether her life was reflecting her values.
Botwinik and Salinger focused on two trouble spots. The first was a
common concern voiced by coaching clients: not spending enough time with
family. The second was that Botwinik objected to the way her financial
services firm was shunting senior employees aside. Neither of these
situations was amenable to change if she remained in her job, so, with
Salinger’s encouragement, she began looking for another one.
When
clients begin to consider making major changes in their lives, the
coach’s role expands from framing issues in revealing ways to serving as
goad and cheerleader. “A coach will say, ‘You said you wanted to do X.
What’s blocking you?’” Botwinik says. “Sometimes they’ll give you
exercises. If you’re having trouble keeping in touch with your emotional
side, they might ask you to spend 15 minutes a day for two weeks writing
in a journal about what you’re feeling. If you’re thinking about
starting your own business, they might tell you to interview 10 people
about why they’d hire you. Or to talk to 10 people who are doing that
kind of work already.”
After several months of coaching, Botwinik took a job with a high-tech
startup, but soon found that managers heaped work on subordinates and
then took the credit for their accomplishments. She took this not as a
misstep, however, but as a sign that she hadn’t yet found the “life
balance” that she and many other coaching clients cite as their goal.
For six more months, Salinger served as her career consultant and
cheerleader, urging her to keep searching and experimenting until she
found--or created--a position that allowed her to harmonize her
financial and familial concerns.
“I
think people know what they want,” Salinger says. “What they need are
arms to hold them as they make the discovery.” Last year, Botwinik went
into business for herself as a customer-relations consultant. Her income
doesn’t yet match her former salaries, but she works only with firms
whose values she shares, and she’s on the job just 30 hours a week,
leaving plenty of time to devote to her son.
For
Botwinik, the difference between coaching and therapy is stark. “Therapy
was focused on looking backward into why I was the way I was. Coaching
looks at where you are today, where you want to go, and how you’re going
to get there.”
“Therapy can be a painful, upsetting, draining experience,” she adds.
“You’re digging around in your unconscious. It’s heavy, strenuous,
occasionally elating work. Coaching is hard work, but it isn’t
gut-wrenching. It isn’t like, ‘Oh this happened to me when I was 3 and
it was so terrible.’ It’s more emotion in the moment, rather than stored
emotion.”
It
isn’t that coaching lacks emotional intensity, she says: “If you’re
making a change in your life, there might be some sense of loss. Or if
you’re getting out of a dead-end relationship, you might be feeling
anger. But these are emotions that arise from the situation.”
In
her case, therapy focused on affect; coaching, on aspiration. But many
therapists who do both solution-focused therapy and coaching say they
see little difference between these approaches. “I’ve been calling it
coaching for 4 years, but I’m mostly not doing much different than when
I was doing therapy for 20 years,” says Carol Sommer, a coach and
therapist in Downers Grove, Illinois. “There isn’t as much etiology and
diagnosis involved in coaching,” she says. “But beyond that, they’re
really similar: both approaches really look at what’s happening right
now, rather than what happened in the past. Where’s the person stuck?”
But
Pat Williams disputes this equation. “Coaching is beyond
solution-focused therapy,” he says. “It’s more than solving problems.
Coaching isn’t focusing on the problems, but asking what you want and
how you can get it. If you go toward what you want, the problem will go
away.”
Barnumesque Boasting?
Skeptical therapists aren’t persuaded. They argue that practicing
coaching is basically practicing therapy, only on more well-adjusted and
affluent clients. The new field has no methods of its own, they say, and
is intellectually indebted to solution-focused therapy and other
approaches. To their way of thinking, coaching clients create their own
visions of the future, a´ la constructivism and solution-focused
therapist Insoo Berg’s “miracle question.” In the hopes of reaching that
vision, these clients employ behavioral-modification techniques, such as
setting goals, measuring progress by increments, using positive
self-talk, and participating in a process that builds in encouragement
and accountability. As in the work of positive-psychology advocate
Martin Seligman and his cadre of optimism researchers, the focus is on
clients’ strengths and possibilities, rather than on their weaknesses
and wounds.
Life
coaching is “little more than a clever way of practicing psychotherapy
without the restrictions or oversight,” says David Fresco, who is
himself an optimism researcher. “It’s just a clever way to make money.”
For coaching to be taken seriously, its methods will have to be
validated by empirical research, he adds. To date, only one small study
suggests the effectiveness of coaching, and he says that’s a thin reed
on which to rest the “Barnumesque boasting” of the coaching movement.
Coaches, for the most part, acknowledge the field’s debt to therapy, and
while they concede that coaches and therapists frequently work from the
same tool kit, they see certain essential differences.
“What distinguishes a method as a coaching tool versus a therapy tool
isn’t just the skill-set, but also how it’s applied, in what setting,
with what population, for what intention, and with what results,” writes
Lynn Grodzki, a coach and therapist in Silver Spring, Maryland, in her
book The New Private Practice. “If the intention is to help a
person further his or her progress, take action, set and reach better
goals, do more, focus better, and produce results fast, the
therapist-coach will make choices that will reflect a coaching style. If
the intention is to help a person heal, get in touch with feelings,
resolve past issues, or relieve symptoms, the choices will be more
reflective of therapy.”
Ben
Dean puts it another way: “In therapy, you empathize with a client’s
pain; in coaching, you empathize with their excitement.”
Perhaps the most important difference, however, lies not in distinctions
made by practitioners, but in a distinction made by the general public.
“Coaching,” Williams says, “doesn’t have the same stigma as therapy.”
For that reason, individuals who avoid the latter are comfortable with
the former. This seems to be especially true of men. According to
Williams’s figures, roughly 70 percent of therapy clients are women, but
60 percent of coaching clients are men. Maybe men prefer the athletic
connotations of the word “coaching.” Or maybe they feel comfortable with
coaching because so much of it takes place within the male-dominated
world of the executive workplace. Or maybe they suppose that successful
coaching doesn’t require the same kind of emotional vulnerability that
successful therapy often does.
Whatever the reason, coaching’s popularity among men suggests why the
new practice has become so popular: it fills a cultural hole that
therapy doesn’t.
A
New Discipline
The person usually credited with establishing coaching as a professional
discipline is Thomas Leonard, an accountant, who in the late 1980s
concluded that many of his clients needed advice that went beyond
financial planning. What they needed, he says, was a “life planner,”
someone who could help them sort through the options that prosperity had
provided them: where to live, where to work, how to spend their leisure
time. And since no such person existed, Leonard set out to train people
to fill the role. His mother was a child psychologist, but he knew that
he had a different sort of expertise, so he steered away from the
soul-searching of psychodynamic therapy and concentrated on changing
specifically identified behaviors and attitudes.
The
result was an array of checklists, exercises, and self-assessment tools
designed to help clients set goals, identify obstacles, and streamline
their lives. Each of these instruments embodied Leonard’s organizing
insight: that people waste mental, physical, and emotional energy
dealing with “tolerations,” things they put up with because changing
them requires too much time and effort. He believed that by eliminating
“tolerations,” people could free up the energy necessary to begin
reenvisioning our lives, or devoting themselves to new endeavors.
The
best known of Leonard’s early creations was the “Clean Sweep,” a
self-test that asked respondents to answer yes or no to self-care and
life-maintenance statements like:
My
personal papers and receipts are neatly filed away.
My car is in excellent condition.
I recycle.
I use non-ozone-depleting products.
My teeth and gums are healthy.
I use well-made sunglasses.
I currently save at least 10 percent of my income.
I tell people how they can satisfy me.
Answering these questions helped people identify their “tolerations,”
and that was the first step toward removing them. If this sounds like
little more than sophisticated self-help, that’s because Leonard’s
initial approach to coaching placed great importance on the quality of
the coach’s life. He believed that only an individual who’d taken
control of his own life could teach others to do the same. As a result,
much of his most popular material has less to do with relating to
clients than with leading a successful life.
Among his creations are the Twenty-Eight Principles of Attraction,
which, if followed, supposedly help individuals attract the things they
desire. These include:
Become Incredibly Selfish.
Affect Others Profoundly.
Thrive on the Details.
Sensitize yourself.
Simplify Everything.
Have
a Vision.
Be
More Human.
Why Now?
At first blush, these may not seem like the sort of insights that would
catalyze a mass movement, but Leonard had timed the cultural moment
perfectly: a confluence of social and economic forces was presenting
Americans with an unprecedented array of options on how they should earn
their livings and lead their lives; at the same time, it was depriving
them of the mentors who could help them make these choices.
Since World War II, increased mobility and the decline of family and
community ties have reduced intergenerational contact. The rise of
commuter culture has diminished young people’s exposure to role models
in their own communities. The rapid diversification of the U.S. economy
has bred a need for specialists, and made it less likely that young men
and women can find mentors outside of their field.
“A
lot of the support structures in people’s lives have broken down,” says
executive coach Catherine Fitzgerald. “And one of the last places you
used to find them in was organizations.” Fitzgerald, who once worked for
the federal government, says old hands at the General Accounting Office
told her that when they’d been hired, it was common practice for the
director of human resources to accompany them to buy their first suit.
Downsizing throughout the economy changed all that, she says.
At
the same time, outsourcing, and telecommuting gave rise to a generation
of independent contractors, who needed help in bringing structure and
focus to sometimes chaotic lives. As the influence of the
human-potential movement spread through the culture, legions of
middle-class Americans embraced the gospel of self-improvement, and
looked for a secular chaplain to direct their progress.
Anxiety, ambition, and the challenges of modern life had combined to
create a market for men and women who could provide, for a fee, a
service that older generations had once performed for younger
generations as part of the social contract. “People got a sense that
they could design their lives from the ground up,” Leonard says. “They
wanted it their way, and they wanted it fast. Coaching is an
accelerant.”
Some
of those who became coaches were organizational-development consultants,
armed with tools like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Some were
therapists who, at the least, had been trained in how to question,
listen, and form relationships with clients. Others were alumni of
personal-growth seminars, like “est,” impressed with their own growth
and eager to make money sharing their secrets with others.
In
1992, to educate people new to the field, Leonard founded Coach
University. Two years later, to hasten the evolution of minimum
standards and competencies, he started the International Coach
Federation. (The federation requires that to earn certification,
students receive 125 hours of training, conduct 750 hours of coaching,
and pass written and oral exams.) Leonard sold Coach University in 1996,
and now spends much of his time touring the country in a motor home. He
rents studio space, most recently in Phoenix, for intense bursts of
work, creating additional personal- and professional-development
courses. A fastidious man with a fertile mind, he recently founded
CoachVille, an Internet site that functions as a clearinghouse for
coaches and the point of sale for his publications, including The
Radical Quotes Collection, A Course About People, and The Life
Models Book. For certified coaches who want to deepen their
knowledge of the field, he has established the Graduate School of
Coaching.
Therapists who have become coaches tend to view Leonard with respect,
but his influence with ambivalence. “I think he’s gifted,” says Carole
Kunkle-Miller, a therapist-turned-coach in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
“But I don’t think that everybody could take the kind of training he has
had and be as effective as he is.” Like many other former therapists,
she believes that Coach University and its imitators don’t give students
sufficient grounding in developmental psychology, interviewing
techniques, and other elements basic to sound therapy.
The
fear that the credibility of coaching will be undermined by meagerly
prepared or cosmically wacky practitioners is widespread among former
therapists in the field. “In terms of legal liability, I have a much
greater risk as a psychologist than as a coach,” says Ellen Ostrow, a
therapist-turned-coach in Silver Spring, Maryland. “But I continue to
insure myself as a psychologist because I don’t want to be associated
with people who are doing crystals.”
Terrie Lupberger, president of the Newfield Network, which offers a
nine-month training program grounded in the work of Chilean biologist
Humberto Maturana, agrees that intellectual vacuity is prevalent in the
field. “I was at a convention once and someone was asked to give a
demonstration of coaching,” she says, “And this woman got up and she
said, ‘Okay, how many of you out there are ready to have all of your
wildest dreams come true?’ And I just got up and left.”
For
those who regard their coaching colleagues with alarm, Leonard urges the
long view. “Relatively and comparatively, we’re like the surgeons of the
18th century with a sharp saw and really good whiskey,” he says,
predicting that coaching methods will become more diverse and more
sophisticated as the movement grows.
Therapy Without Tears?
On one level, the development of coaching as an offshoot of, and
alternative to, traditional therapy presents clinicians with a simple
choice: do they add this approach to their practice? or should they
treat it as a competitor? The answer is a matter of temperament and
therapeutic style. When Williams first heard about coaching, he realized
it was similar to what he’d been doing all along. Others find no way to
bridge the differences between the two endeavors.
Allison Dorsky, a therapist in Gaithersburg, Maryland, attended a
seminar Williams presented not long ago. On maternity leave after the
birth of her second child, she was considering alternatives to her
previous job, working with sexually abused children and teens. “I was
really immersed in trauma,” she said, “and now that I have children, I
don’t want that trauma following me home.” After listening to Williams’s
presentation, she was pretty sure she didn’t want to become a coach.
“It’s a nice, slick package, but I don’t think it’s right for me. As a
therapist, it’s hard for me to keep out of the guts and the heart of
things.”
But
if coaching becomes more popular, will therapists have the luxury of
ignoring it? Many coaches think so. “I don’t think coaching takes
anything away from therapy,” says Lynn Meinke, a therapist-turned-coach
in Philadelphia. “We need good therapists to work with people who aren’t
doing well.” Maybe, but if coaching claims all clients except those with
clear-cut cases of mental illness, the field of traditional therapy will
shrink to a sliver of its current size. And if all but the most
desperate and deeply traumatized clients gravitate to coaching, the
stigma that attaches to seeing a therapist may intensify.
That
day is probably not close at hand. Most coaches, particularly those with
advanced degrees in psychology or organizational development, charge
almost as much for their services as therapists. But therapy is usually
covered by insurance, and coaching is not. Until the price comes down,
coaching may remain an upper-middle-class phenomenon. If, however, it
doesn’t proceed on the path toward professionalization, if it becomes a
field of lightly credentialed practitioners relying on self-assessment
tools and intuition to provide cut-rate counseling, then it could become
to therapy what storefront tax preparation outfits have become to
accounting. And if coaches prove that they can be as effective as
clinicians with the worried well, they’ll indeed pose a profound
challenge to therapy as a profession.
Whatever its long-term prospects, coaching offers an illuminating lesson
for therapists looking for an alternative to the medical model of
treatment, for in eschewing a diagnostic-driven approach to the helping
relationship and focusing instead on the clients’ insights, desires, and
resources, coaches have developed a method that incorporates many of the
ideas and values of therapeutic reformers who would reestablish
psychotherapy as a more humanistic enterprise. If evidence suggests that
coaching clarifies and simplifies the helping relationship, it would
bolster the argument that therapists must disengage from HMOs and the
DSM and cut their ties to the health care system. But if coaching falls
captive to intellectual featherweights and spiritual faddists, if
empirical support for its methods fails to materialize, or if the public
perceives that having escaped the thrall of medicine, coaches are
governed only by the discipline of the market, it may wind up
underscoring what many regard as psychotherapy’s core values: its
theoretical richness, its enduring fascination with human complexity,
and its unambiguous commitment to easing clients’ pain.
Jim
Naughton
is a senior editor of the Psychotherapy Networker. |
