More than improving your game, the services of a coach can help frame life’s big—and small—questions.

Illustration by Susan Sanford

The coach is the guy in the center of the huddle before the Big Game, right? Sure, but couldn’t we all use a good coach once in a while, on or off the field?

True, coaching is rooted in sports, business, and personal growth (versus therapy, which is rooted in medicine and psychiatry). As a field, personal coaching can be traced back to the 1975 book The Inner Game of Tennis by tennis champion Timothy Gallwey. Instead of barking orders, Gallwey wrote, a coach can work with a person’s innate ability to learn through experience. While he was ostensibly writing about coaching for tennis, his unique approach to helping people learn would launch a new trend in self-help.

What is the real difference between a coach and a therapist or counselor? There are actually many similarities: one-on-one sessions and discussion that works toward change over time. But from the perspective of the coach or therapist, the day-to-day work can be quite different.

“The reason many of us go into the therapy profession is to help people grow,” says Marriage and Family Therapist David Steele. “But in order to get paid we have to diagnose, bill, and treat. Coaching is actually very true to the personal growth roots of what inspires therapists.”

To be sure, some individuals would not be served by the services of a coach, which are not required to be professionally licensed. Certification programs are available, however, which train coaches to identify clients who actually need therapy.

For others, working with a good coach can help them meet goals, feel confident, and lead a fulfilling life.

The Game of Life

By the start of the 1990s, coaching had become a profession. Sports coaches were being hired to speak to managers in American companies, blending the ideas of coaching, management, and leadership. In 1992 former financial planner Thomas Leonard founded Coach University, which now operates in 38 countries. Former CPA and auditor Laura Whitworth, along with career development expert Henry Kimsey-House, began the Coaches Training Institute in San Rafael.

Coaches generally charge fees similar to those of typical therapists, though session lengths vary more with coaches. Therapists may also offer services in specific areas, like marriage or fertility, but coaches fall into slightly different niches. Some focus on helping women in career transitions, others offer guidance to singles looking for love, or even widows adjusting to single life. But some claim to assist clients with the whole enchilada.

Am I the only one who, upon first hearing the words “life coach,” imagined someone following me around with a whistle on his or her neck? Life coaches, as it turns out, are not so harsh.

Most describe themselves as mentors who listen, observe, and prod clients along. When clients experience challenges, coaches help set new goals and assess the client’s values. It’s an ancient, not newfangled, approach, writes Will Craig in his book Exploring Coaching. A century ago, we needed each other for our most basic needs. Over the years, we’ve moved apart and become more disconnected. That’s where coaches have stepped in, filling the supportive and encouraging roles once held by family members and elders, writes Craig, founder of the Colorado-based Coach Training Alliance.

Recently, San Francisco–based coach Dave Reiter worked with a single woman in her early 40s who wanted to start a family with a partner—but she was still single, and felt that if she didn’t have a child now, it might not happen. When she first came to Reiter, she was “beating herself up, and this huge cloud was weighing over her.” With his help, she decided that she did not want to raise a child alone, and set out to find her life partner.

Reiter—who holds a master’s in decision science from Stanford University, a B.A. in physics from Harvard University, and certification from the Coaches Training Institute—says that as a coach he tries to help clients frame problems and develop the tools to solve them. “If I’m working with someone who’s banging her head against the wall about doing IVF or adopting, that’s a really hard decision. I help people make the right decision from the head and from the heart.”

Career Connections

Jill (whose name has been changed) is a 33-year-old lawyer in San Francisco. She was burned out after years of working for nonprofit organizations, or “dead-end jobs,” as she puts it. She was thinking about finding a career counselor when she stumbled into a free talk that Reiter was giving at her local YMCA. She was struck by the way he connected one’s career to what really matters in life.

A career counselor might give advice about what to do, along with expert guidance. Career coaches say they help clients with the whole process of redefining their jobs or finding a new career. They say they help clients explore new possibilities, discover unexplored venues, and actualize goals.

Jill signed up for a free initial session with Reiter. Within a year, she says, he had helped her decide that it was time to leave her job and how to do so on her own terms. She also figured out that she wanted to start her own law practice. She describes sessions with Reiter as “action packed” and “a lot of work,” but as she opens her own practice, her dream job is becoming a reality.

Jill had been in therapy previously, which she said “can take years to work things out. But in coaching, you have to be moving forward, and be committed to that. You can’t sit and dwell on anything.”

Coach . . . or Therapist?

Therapist David Steele, who founded the San Jose–based Relationship Coaching Institute eight years ago, recalls the first time he heard the title “life coach” in the mid-1990s. A therapist in practice for over 15 years, Steele wondered if this was a gimmick for practicing without a license. He was skeptical that someone without a graduate degree or license could help people be happy, he says, while charging hundreds of dollars. But he was also intrigued—and also disappointed by the number of couples in his practice getting divorced—so he looked into coaching.

“I like coaching better,” says Steele, author of Conscious Dating: Finding the Love of Your Life in Today’s World (available in December). Steele’s institute offers a complex array of services to clients (singles as well as couples) and “helping professionals”—coaches, therapists, and counselors. Professional membership includes services like marketing support, referrals, and mentoring.

Steele says it is important that individuals choose a trained coach who has completed a certification program.

San Francisco–based coach Paula Love, who works with singles and couples on relationship issues, writes in an article “From the Deadly Dance to the Dance of Delight” about her experience: that clarity about where a feeling is coming from does not alone necessarily help in overcoming it.

Love holds a master’s in counseling, a B.A. in psychology, is certified as a Master Coach by the International Coach Federation and as a Master Somatic Coach by Rancho Strozzi Institute in Petaluma.

By incorporating somatic coaching into her practice, Love blends traditional therapy with techniques that help clients notice the physical manifestations of their emotions, and then intervene in those patterns.

Like most coaches, Love gives her clients homework, such as writing personal ads and screening potential partners. Also like most coaches, she asks for a commitment to the coaching work. Her request is six months; some ask for up to a year.

Walnut Creek coach Marsha Wehrenberg works mainly with widowed women, suddenly alone in the second half of their lives. She gives her clients weekly assignments, but stresses that these tasks emerge from the clients themselves as they “rediscover who they are after having raised a family.”

Wehrenberg is certified by the Coaches Training Institute. Her previous career background was in business, then two years ago she discovered coaching. Widowed herself 15 years ago, she found a population of women from their 60s to their 80s at the beginning of a new chapter in their lives.

“They find that they can look inside themselves and see things they’ve always wanted to do,” she says. “Part of what the coach does is make it very safe to go out and try those things.”

Carolyn Marley, Director of Medicare Finance at Kaiser Permanente, concurs that homework makes all the difference. While working with Oakland business coach Kerrie Halmi for eight months last year, she got assignments between every session—to improve her management skills—after which Halmi checked “to make sure I was on track with the things I agreed to do.”

Halmi, who has an MBA, has coached clients from such companies as Wells Fargo and Adobe Systems, Inc. Her specialty is helping businesswomen succeed as managers. Marley says that she did not consult Halmi for answers to life’s big questions. Working with Halmi, she says, helped her “come up with the ideas on my own,” while leaning on her coach’s insight and wisdom to challenge and push her in the right direction.

Group Work

It’s not just individuals who seek the help of coaches. After all, coaching did begin as an approach for sports teams and corporations. Oakland Life Coach Tara Marchant and Executive Coach Michelle Randall have teamed up together to coach businesses, nonprofits, and public agencies on their leadership skills and sustainability.

Recently, Randall consulted with the management of a large building-materials manufacturer to strengthen its leadership skills. But with her background as a building-materials supplier, Randall was able to apply some of her coaching methods as well.

“There’s an important distinction between coaching and consulting,” she says. “[As a consultant] I would walk in with a plan of action, make specific suggestions, and possibly use coaching to help them figure out how to implement my suggestions.”

As a coach, Randall says, the client sets the agenda. In fact, that’s the real power of coaching. “It’s the one place a person can be certain they are receiving support and feedback from a professional who has no agenda for them, other than that they achieve the agenda they set for themselves.” l

——————————— Rachel Sarah is a Berkeley-based freelancer. Her dating memoir, Single Mom Seeking, is due out in 2006 (Seal Press).

——————————— Illustration by Susan Sanford