"You must be barmy, hen.” My taxi driver is not impressed when I tell him I’m on my way to see a life coach. It’s a common enough reaction and I don’t blame him. Somehow, the idea of paying somebody to “coach” you through life seems like just another weak link on the lifestyle chain: a sop for a generation unable to make even the simplest decision without someone to light a scented candle and hold their hand.
Yet the life coach has joined the personal trainer, nutritionist and nail technician as an essential aid to getting through the day. According to the International Coaching Federation, an independent professional body of personal and business coaches, there are about 650 life coaches already at work (or finishing their training) in Britain. The association has 7,500 members worldwide.
Recent research by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy claims that 80% of Scots admit they would like to share their problems with a professional counsellor or coach. The past three years has seen a slow but steady increase in people signing up, be it with executive coaching (offered to certain pampered professionals in their workplace) or personal coaching.
While some rogue coaches are practising without qualifications, the majority have gone through a course of professional exams and workshops, as well as a racking up a minimum of 250 coaching hours. For further peace of mind, statutory regulations will soon be in place.
So what exactly is life coaching and how does it fit into the myriad other alternative and self-help therapies that promise enlightenment, fulfilment and happiness?
Rick Hughes, a Glasgow-based coach, who is also deputy chairman of the Association for Counselling at Work, describes it as a “solution-focused therapy”. (The first stage of life coaching is a quick session of jargon coaching.) Unlike counselling, which aims to help people cope with personal crises, life coaching is about where you are now and where you want to be going in the future.
“It’s a developmental process,” says Hughes. “We offer reflective facilitation. The main issues that tend to come up are career changes and relationships at work. If you’re having problems with your boss, for instance, coaching can help develop the power of empathy, to help you work with the person. We also help identify fear factors that may be inhabiting change.”
Hughes originally trained as a counsellor but then realised a rosy future in reflective facilitation lay ahead. He now combines both disciplines. For him, experience in the former is essential in order to be effective at the latter. “Sometimes you have clients with quite complex needs, so you need to be able to identify when counselling or coaching is most appropriate,” he says.
All of which might sound very impressive as part of a PowerPoint presentation and persuade a firm to hire a team of life coaches to help develop their employees. But as the one who is going to be writing the cheque, do I really want to hand over between £45 and £80 for an individual coaching session with a personal consultant — no matter how convincing they are — when I can blether about my work dilemmas over a cup of tea with a friend?
However, it is when the dilemma is too complex, or close to home, that even the most cynical can see the value of bringing in a trained professional. When Lennox Morrison, a journalist, wanted to spring-clean her life — changing her weight, her career and even her name (she used to be Margaret) — she realised it was no job for a well-meaning amateur. Four years later she has left newspapers, written two novels and only answers to the name of Lennox.
Morrison maintains that she would have penned her first novel, Reinventing Tara, without a life coach, but that the sessions “pressed a fast-forward button”. She adds: “My coach, Fiona Harrold, convinced me to approach a literary agent when I’d written only six chapters. The agent’s response was so positive it gave me the motivation to devote weekends and holidays to completing the manuscript.”
Hiring Harrold, who Morrison describes as “a cross between a cheerleader and an athletics coach”, was the right thing for her to do, she says. “When I was seven years old I felt everything was possible. Coaching helped me recapture that confidence. I’m now at work on my third novel, so coaching was definitely a worthwhile investment.”
Where Morrison does suggest caution, however, is for those who seek life coaching as a way to work out a nagging sense of things being not quite right. “If you don’t have a definite aim, it’s simply not worth paying somebody else to help you look for it.”
Which makes it all the more remarkable to report that I walked into the Edinburgh office of the life coach Kate French without a goal and came out with at least two positives steps towards improving my own working life.
Having come to terms with my — and my taxi driver’s — doubts, what happens next? According to French, the benefit received from coaching comes down to having a one-on-one rapport. “I like to hold a sample session first so that I can gauge whether people have the right expectations for coaching. It’s not counselling and, yes, sometimes I do recommend that clients should go to that next level. But often people just need someone to talk to at a transitional phase in their life.”
To my great surprise it really works. Well at least it feels like it does. French is neither a scary schoolmarm nor a death-by-incense type. There is no hierarchy or role-playing. Instead it’s like catching up with an old friend over a cup of coffee. The difference being that all the communication is one-way — I talk, she listens. And, aside from throwing in a few token buzz words and the odd cheesy moment, that’s it.
At one point I’m appalled to realise I’m gesticulating a gushing motion from my belly: a feeling I get when I’m proud of myself. Then French asks me to give this feeling a colour. Thoroughly caught up in the moment, I unashamedly announce “pink”. Who would have thought it? My follow-up session focuses on one of the problems we identified in the first session. It’s a common one for the self-employed: how to extricate my home life from my work life. Over the first hour we look at the difference between being an office drone and a fancy-free freelancer and how I react differently to the two very different ways of working.
Not only is this wonderfully revealing but it helps me to identify some practical changes that would improve my situation. Over the days that follow I’m inspired to organise a monthly lunch for my self-employed contemporaries and join a screenwriting course to add another dimension to my week.
After our final session I’m reminded of something French tells me on our first meeting. “I don’t tell you anything you don’t already know. You have the answers to all your own questions. Once you answer one question, it has a knock-on effect.”
Kate French is available for personal coaching for three 40- minute telephone sessions a month for a minimum of three months at £200 per month. (www.katefrench.com or 0131 467 0642)
Rick Hughes can be contacted at rickhughes@calma.co.uk
