Life Coaching
— Molding MVPs
By Kate Jackson
Social Work Today
Vol. 5 No. 3 P. 20
While it can be therapeutic, life coaching is not
therapy. Social workers are naturals to take proactive clients to
“most valuable player” status.
Life coaching is that rarity in the modern world—a
new profession. It’s taken off in popularity in recent years
and has caused many to jump professional ship and get on board with
this updated approach to helping individuals. Its appeal to professionals
is multifaceted, but many seem drawn to it because it’s fresh
and positive in tone. Coaching lingo is peppered with language that
denotes a can-do spirit and a certain cheerleading optimism that’s
attractive to both prospective clients and would-be coaches.
What Is Coaching?
Coaches have been described by Newsweek as “part therapist,
part consultant”—and while they often are, they need not
be either to be effective. Coaching is, essentially, providing clients
with a helping hand, a reality check, a boost, or, figuratively, a
shot in the arm. The profession emerged from a trend in the corporate
world to nurture corporate talent and help businesspeople over hurdles
that kept them from advancing or limited their efficiency. It quickly
became clear that these techniques could help people in all walks
of life with a range of modern dilemmas. Coaches help people in their
personal, professional, or spiritual lives, whether with a single
issue or sole goal or with a broader range of behaviors or issues.
If helping people with problems suggests therapy,
coaches are quick to observe that although it may be therapeutic,
coaching is not therapy. The most salient differences are that the
range of dilemmas and problems a coach encounters tend to be situational
or societal, and coaching relies on a much more pragmatic approach.
Individuals seeking coaches aren’t looking for help with deep-seated
emotional difficulties, but rather are searching for more practical
problem-solving strategies to sidestepping, smoothing, or leaping
over bumps in the road. They’re not seeking the services of
a clinically trained, analytical professional to provide them with
insight into their psyches. They want someone who will lead them to
practical, actionable strategies that will help them solve a problem
right now.
Individuals with true emotional problems and dysfunctions
require therapy. People who find themselves faced with a life difficulty
or challenge can benefit from coaching. They may not have problems
at all but merely need an objective eye. Coaching is likely to be
helpful for people who are in ruts, overwhelmed or stymied by change,
or too stressed to step back and analyze the thorns and obstacles
that chafe or bind them. Coaching might be just the ticket for someone
whose life’s path has caused them to lack direction or a sense
of purpose.
While therapy might explore and try to tangle out
the roots and antecedents of feelings and behavior, coaching simply
inspires action to change behavior. Coaching is appropriate for individuals
who are successful and competent but are bedeviled by a particular
flaw or weakness, such as a business executive with poor communication
skills or a deadline-pressured professional who suffers from procrastination.
It’s not appropriate, and not a replacement for therapy, for
someone with an entrenched fear of failure or rejection or a crippling
lack of self-esteem.
According to Becky Pine, LICSW, a psychotherapist
and coach in private practice, “There’s a subtle difference
between people who turn to coaching and those who turn to therapy.
The former are generally functioning quite well, don’t have
any DSM-IV [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
Fourth Edition] diagnoses, and are motivated and want to make positive
changes in their lives,” she explains. “They’re
proactive people and not necessarily problem-focused.”
Coaching is not interested in the past or in feelings,
Pine observes, “so the focus is on action, on here and now,
and on moving forward, not on developing insight into how events of
the past might have influenced you.”
Life coach and therapist Michael Cohen, MSW, calls
coaching a form of personal growth. “It’s very appropriate
for people who have either done therapy and understand themselves
and have a good sense of their issues but still need help walking
through some difficult challenges, or who are not inclined to therapy
but who still need a hand to hold as they face some challenge and
attempt to make changes in their lives.” As a coach, Cohen,
who specializes in working with gay men seeking to create meaningful
relationships in their lives, feels like a mentor, “guiding
people through a place in their lives where they can’t see clearly
or need some kind of support.”
There’s a somewhat new-age tone and timber to
the way coaches commonly describe their work, which may account for
a great deal of the profession’s popularity. Among the buzzwords
are balance, fulfillment, and satisfaction. And that’s not surprising,
since so much of a coach’s territory is the imbalance that’s
created by modern life. A candidate for coaching might be a woman
with a high-powered professional position and two children whose life
responsibilities seem to leave her with no time to care for herself
or indulge in activities that are creatively, spiritually, or intellectually
nourishing. A coach might help such a client out of the maze she finds
herself in and offer strategies for restoring balance.
The Team Spirit
Another difference between coaching and therapy is the nature of the
relationship between professional and client. Coaches and their clients
appear to view the connection as an alliance characterized by two-way
communication and give and take. While individuals don’t typically
view their psychotherapists as partners or look to them as role models,
people are more likely to think of their coaches as support-givers
and look to their lives as blueprints of successful problem-solving.
Coaches are viewed as allies and collaborators. They may be sources
of support, someone to lean on, or a hand to hold through a trying
phase in life.
It’s easy to see why coaching is attractive
to clients. It’s practical, goal-oriented, judgment-free, encouraging,
motivating, and empowering. Coaches tend to assess a situation or
an individual holistically and approach a challenge with the clients’
values and goals in mind, rather than working toward some sort of
norm or value-laden standard. At its simplest, coaching can be a reality
check for a client. At its more complicated, it’s high-level,
one-on-one, carefully targeted mentoring that can be difficult for
clients to find among friends or coworkers. It supports, encourages,
and motivates, depending on the clients’ needs.
Coach Specialists?
Although coaches may deal with a spectrum of issues, many have their
niches and prefer to work with clients grappling with similar difficulties
or attempting to achieve comparable goals. Among the areas of specialization
are helping clients improve relationships, reduce stress, encourage
personal growth, enhance parenting skills, facilitate decision making,
grow a business, carve a career path, improve productivity, manage
time, bolster motivation, clarify objectives, and develop concrete,
attainable goals.
If there’s any one overriding emphasis in the
coaching field, it’s helping individuals navigate change. More
than anything else, perhaps, coaches are called on to help individuals
through transitions brought about by various life changes.
Coaching Conundrums
Coaches come from a variety of life paths and comprise a number of
professions, including social workers, consultants, lawyers, teachers,
business executives, psychologists, medical professionals, and human
resources personnel. One of the controversial aspects of the coaching
phenomenon, says Pine, is that there’s no special training,
licensure, or credentialing required, and there’s no oversight
of the profession.
There is a credentialing process created by the coaching
community, but, she says, even professional coaches acknowledge that
those credentials don’t carry a great deal of weight to anyone
outside the profession, nor do they open doors to coaches. “This
means that social workers and others who are already trained as counselors
can make the transition without necessarily incurring more expense
or training,” says Pine, “but it also means that people
without training are out there being coaches.”
An Opportunity for Social Workers?
Coaching is a natural draw for social workers and may be particularly
appealing to those who wish to work independently and flexibly and
seek alternative ways of helping people. Coaching is frequently done
by telephone so a coach can cast a wider net in search of clients
than a therapist can.
Many believe social workers and other therapists are
in the strongest positions to dominate the coaching industry and provide
the best service to clients. They come to coaching with well-developed
skills that are crucial to effective coaching. The coaching training
industries that have arisen have a strong appeal for social workers,
enticing them to explore this potentially lucrative opportunity.
Although she does believe it’s an area of opportunity
for social workers, Pine is quick to point out that a thriving coaching
practice is not a given, nor is it necessarily easy to achieve. “There’s
a certain amount of overselling that’s being done,” she
says. “Some people who are presenting training programs are
making a lot of money convincing social workers that this is a good
career move and that they will be able to make a lot of money.”
Although it may be a good opportunity for some, “those promises
should be well-scrutinized.”
Pine is mindful of the pros and cons. On the downside,
it’s difficult to market oneself as a coach, and to succeed—since
there is no reimbursement for coaching—its necessary to attract
individuals who can pay for the services out of pocket. On the positive
side, social workers may bring more to the profession than others
lacking such specialized training. “Having the education of
a social worker or a psychologist provides individuals with a better
background for that kind of work.” Furthermore, she observes,
“social workers aren’t going to do things that inadvertently
ride roughshod over people’s emotional vulnerabilities.”
The coaching world is less strict about boundaries
than that of social workers and other therapists and it’s not
subject to malpractice actions. According to Pine, however, social
workers or psychologists working as coaches will pay attention to
boundary issues because they understand the repercussions of crossing
lines and, simply because they call themselves by a different name,
they won’t walk away from ethical or other obligations even
if they are not mandated by law when they work as coaches.
People who have been therapists, agrees Cohen, make
the best coaches for a variety of reasons, perhaps the most important
of which is that they can discern when coaching isn’t enough
and when therapy might be necessary. Furthermore, social workers have
been trained to look at people holistically—that is, to assess
their whole environment and the social, spiritual, economic, physical,
and ethnic influences that shape them. That, he observes, is a valuable
perspective from which to help individuals. Effective coaches, he
adds, have also had the experience of having been coached. “I’ve
had several times in my life when I need to have someone hold my hand
literally or figuratively, and to have had that experience is very
important.”
Another prerequisite for being an effective coach,
he says, is the ability to have made changes in one’s own behaviors
and to live a good life. Cohen recalls the time he was interviewing
a prospective financial planner and asked her whether she was rich.
He reasoned that if she was good with investments, she would be wealthy
herself. It’s the same with coaches, he suggests. It’s
reasonable and even necessary, then, he says, for clients to ask coaches
whether they live good lives.
Training
Although social work training is helpful to individuals who wish to
take the leap to coaching, specific training in coaching is essential,
say Pine and Cohen. Pine advises social workers to take advantage
of free introductory experiences offered by some training institutes
that give social workers a taste of the profession so they judge their
interest and ability. It’s easy, says Cohen, for social workers
and therapists to think they’re already equipped to coach, but
he observes that there are aspects of coach training that can be enormously
helpful—for example, how to set up contracts, make coaching
different from therapy, and maintain and monitor clients’ progress.
Both Pine and Cohen suggest that social workers wanting to explore
coaching actually hire a coach themselves to fully understand the
experience. “And when you’ve hired a coach, ask him or
her, ‘How’s your life?’ and ‘Why are you a
good coach?’ You can’t easily ask that of a therapist.
You can’t ask a therapist how’s your marriage, how’s
your mental health.” But it should be a perfectly reasonable
question, says Cohen—“rather like kicking the tires on
a car you’re thinking of buying.”
— Kate Jackson is a staff writer for Social
Work Today.
Resources
The International Coach Federation
www.coachfederation.org
The Coaches Training Institute
www.thecoaches.com
The Institute for Life Coach Training
www.lifecoachtraining.com
Coach U
www.coachu.com
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