Therapist as Life Coach
Transforming Your Practice
Patrick Williams and Deborah C. Davis
Overview – Excerpt – Table of Contents
Part 1: Why Life Coaching?
Chapter 1
Why Therapists As Life Coaches?
Around
1990, there was little mention of coaching except in the corporate
culture. Mentoring and executive coaching was something that many
top managers and CEOs utilized, either informally from a colleague or
formally by hiring a consultant or psychologist who became their
executive coach. We will elaborate on the history of coaching more
in chapter 2, but, for now, let us examine why life coaching is
becoming more popularized and prevalent.
The
International Coach Federation was founded in 1992 but did not have a
real presence until its first convention in 1996. They have kept
detailed archives of media coverage on coaching since the early
1990s. There were two newspaper articles in 1993, four in 1994
(including one from Australia) and seven in 1995. The majority of
articles appeared in publications from the United States. Then, in
1996, a huge increase in publicity occurred with more than 60
articles, television interviews and radio shows on the topic of
coaching. Every year since, the media coverage has increased to
hundreds of articles and live media coverage, both national and local
radio and television such as Good Morning America, Today, etc., each
year throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, Canada, Japan,
Singapore, and other countries. In addition, the only books written
about coaching before the 1990s were geared to corporate and
performance coaching. Now there are several good recent books about
life coaching; a few are national best sellers. Laura
Berman-Fortgang (1988) and Cheryl Richardson (1998, 2000),
both professional life coaches, have been frequent guests on Oprah.
Cheryl is now a regular monthly guest on Oprah as a life makeover
coach. Life coaching as a phenomenon originated in the United States
and has spread worldwide. Coaching will soon reach a critical mass
in society where people will have heard of coaching, know when they
need a coach, know how to find a coach, and know the difference
between partnering with a life coach versus seeking the services of a
therapist or counselor.
Society
Is Changing
We
believe that this new profession has emerged out of a major shift in
societal parameters. Alvin Toffler wrote the now-famous book Future
Shock in 1970. It was the most popular publication of its time
to speak about the phenomenon of how rapid change impacted the human
condition and its societal structures. His warnings and descriptions
now seem underestimated in comparison with the exponential speed of
change that society now experiences.
We
both grew up in the 1950s–then society seemed predictable and
stable. People generally stayed married, went to college for four
years, and kept their careers for life if not most of their life.
There was little emphasis on adult education, career transitions, or
moving so far from home or as often as we do today. Company loyalty
was big; you worked 30 years or so, got your “gold watch,”
and had a retirement party. But the times and society have both
changed. Now the younger generation’s motto is “Have
resume will travel!” For the baby boomer generation, the trend
is to be self-employed or well-invested and able to be very mobile
and entrepreneurial.
In
the 1950s and the decades before World War II, there were few
therapists or counselors because the profession was just emerging.
Now there are well over 500,000 licensed therapists in the United
States. In the 1950s, people went to uncle Charley, their clergy, or
their grandparents for counsel or had mentors in the workplace.
Today, mentors are not as easily available, with the decrease in
lifelong communities–the quiet
neighborhoods of the past where everyone knew everyone else and
neighbors, especially older people, could be informal mentors and
“sages.” Constant career changes has also impacted the
availability of mentoring.
In
the 1970s and 1980s, when corporate America began the great
downsizing experiment, the middle manager became a dinosaur and was
replaced by work teams, self-management, and trickle-down edicts from
executive management. The middle manager had been the mentor, coach,
and go-between for employees and the top management of the company.
As the middle manager disappeared, so did the natural mentoring that
was available to employees. People, both in the workplace and in
their personal lives, lost their listeners and their confidantes.
During this period, consultants thrived. Companies hired consultants
to come in and offer training packages that gave an outside voice and
a seemingly objective ear to address the employees’ morale,
absenteeism, conflict, and relationship struggles in a work team or
department. Consultants were viewed as both a necessary evil and a
competitive edge.
Today,
change is the norm and both entrepreneurism and isolation, even in a
corporate culture, are the result. Additionally, there are more
self-employed and home-office workers than ever before and this trend
is growing exponentially. With global communications, virtual
technology, e-mail, voice mail and wireless office technology, we are
an entrepreneurial and mobile workforce. In fact, as Judy Feld, a
friend and Pat’s first coach, writes in her SOHO Success Letter™
(SOHO stands for Small office/Home office)(1998), “growth of
the alternative workplace will continue. This
is not a fad. Current estimates place 30–40 million people in
the USA as either telecommuters or home based workers.”
Millions of workers can now conduct their business away from office
buildings and can live almost anywhere they choose. This trend has
forever changed the traditional nature of the “workplace.”
Why People Need Life Coaches
Society
has gone from being stable and mostly predictable to being
fast-paced, impersonal, and constantly evolving. As mentioned
earlier, with such swift change in all
aspects of life and the loss of mentors for most people, life
coaching becomes the new profession where one can hire a mentor as
their personal coach. Carl Rogers once said that psychotherapy was
often like “buying a friend”; hiring a coach is a way to
buy a mentor and guide that one cannot easily find. Similarly,
having a coach has become a sought-after employee benefit in many
companies and for those that are self-employed, a coach is someone to
keep them focused, connected to their desired outcomes, and living
their life “on purpose.”
There
are many types of coaching available to people today and, as the
profession grows, mental health therapists will be able to fill many
specialty niches, such as relationship coaching, parenting coaching, teen coaching, family business coaching,
etc. In the corporate arena, executive coaching is popular
and prevalent but often focuses primarily on work goals and work
teams, not necessarily whole life coaching with, as we say, “the
person behind the job.” Because more and more people are
getting more interested in having a life and a job,
companies are discovering that coaching can lead to more balanced,
vibrant, and happy employees, and that leads to less turnover, better
working relationships, and increased productivity and efficiency.
With all the pressures from society and its lack of stability and
predictability, a coach becomes someone who can assist the client in
being a change master.
A
well-trained and experienced life coach may also refer the client to
other coaching specialists as needed or requested. To be certain, a
corporate or executive coach needs some special training for the
uniqueness of the corporate world, but often coaches with other
skills can be used for specific goals. We have referred our
individual clients to relationship coaches when our client and his/or
her spouse needed some relationship guidance. Likewise, other
coaches (acting as the personal life coach) have referred to
specialized coaches for clients who needed tips on getting a book
published, help with financial planning, or advice on how to deal
with an unruly teenager. General life coaching can continue or be
resumed after the referral coaching is complete. A life coach is the
one person who is central to the client’s life and with whom
they cannot work, live, or sleep. The life coach can be the person
who keeps a client focused, motivated, purposeful, and accountable.
Why Therapists Can Make Great Life
Coaches
Successful
coaches come from a myriad of professional backgrounds. Business and
professional consultants, human resources managers, organizational
consultants, entrepreneurs, and marketing specialists are a few of
the careers that coaches might have had before adding coaching to
their résumé. For the purpose of this book, we want to
discuss those unique skills trained and experienced helping
professionals bring to the life coaching relationships. The
following list highlights some of the reasons we believe therapists
are uniquely qualified for making the transition into life coaching.
THE UNIQUE SKILLS THAT
THERAPISTS BRING TO COACHING RELATIONSHIPS:
Skillful
listening Deep and empathic listening is at the heart of
the therapeutic relationship, and helping professionals have had
much professional experience honing their listening skills. In
addition to listening, they are able to hear what is not being said
and to detect how nuances of expression, voice, and energy unite or
contradict what the client is saying with their nonverbal cues.
However, therapists would have to “unlearn” the tendency
to analyze and dig into the past in order to be successful coaches.
Gift of
reframing The skill of putting a positive or less innocuous
spin on a statement or belief expressed by a client is critical to
effective life coaching. For example, a client might be distraught
over not getting her desired promotion. The reframe might be to ask
her to consider what she can learn from the experience and to
mention that maybe there is a greater opportunity in the future.
Turning problems into opportunities is one way to use reframing as a
coaching skill. You put the belief into a new “frame”
thereby changing the perspective of the statement or belief toward
positive thinking.
Ability
to suspend judgment Helping professionals have
heard it all! They can listen to “truth telling” from
their clients and not be shocked. Most of the time, what client’s
need to be truthful about is not earth-shattering, except to them.
Having a place to “dump” frustration or anxiety and
express their deepest desires or fear, as in the coaching
relationship, is very freeing.
Experience
with confidentiality and ethics Professional therapists
already respect confidentiality and have strong ethical guidelines.
In fact, the boundaries and professional guidelines in therapy are
so strong, coaches will actually find that clients, since they are
not generally emotionally fragile, are much looser with their own
boundaries. Coaching clients are proud to have a coach and will not
keep that a secret. However, the trained therapist- turned-coach
will err on the side of strict confidentiality until clear guidance
by the client redefines the expectations.
Ability
to seek solution and think of possibilities Trained and
experienced therapists are typically good solution seekers and
possibility thinkers and their professional training and experience
has undoubtedly enhanced these skills. This is especially true for
therapists who have embraced humanistic and client-centered
paradigms, including the recent advances in solution-focused
therapy.
These are the five unique skill-sets
that experienced therapists bring to the coaching profession.
Eventually, of course, the goal of masterful coaching is to digest
the techniques, add new skills, and reach a level of comfort just
being a coach, more than just doing coaching!
How
Therapists Become Life Coaches
If
a therapist or counselor chooses to add life coaching to their
practice, they can easily market their services nationally and even
internationally with the practice of telephone coaching. There are
many therapists who now offer therapy and counseling services via the
Internet or telephone. While we do not want to go into an extended
discussion of tele-therapy here, we believe that it can be risky
depending on the client. Coaching should be done with mature,
responsible persons. Therapy should be done in person with
occasional phone sessions when the person is not at risk or
emotionally fragile. Adding coaching to your practice, allows
your business to grow geographically, you can live where you want
without licensing concerns, and you can even travel and still be in
contact with your coaching clients. The hourly fees also are higher
than usual and customary therapy fees and clients pay by a monthly
“retainer” often for several months if not years. Coaching
clients stay for the long haul because they want to,
not because they need to.
Characteristics
of Successful Coaches
So,
as we already mentioned, life coaching is appealing to helping
professionals who want to either add coaching to their business or
move into coaching full-time (to which one can still include
training, consulting, speaking, and writing). Most therapists are
generally “people persons” meaning they like people, are
pleasant, relate well with others and want clients to have more
fulfilling lives. But, as we all know, there are therapists who make
us wonder how they stay in business–they either don’t have
effective professional personalities or business sense, or both.
We
have found through our anecdotal research and experience with the
hundreds of therapists we have trained that those who are drawn to
coaching tend to share some important characteristics. You will
notice that these also apply to well-adjusted, masterful therapists.
They are
well-adjusted and constantly seek personal improvement or
development.
They have a
lightness of being and joie de vivre.
They are
passionate about “growing” people.
They understand
the distinction and balance between being and doing.
They are able
to suspend judgment and stay open-minded.
They are “risk
takers” willing to get out of their comfort zone.
They are
entrepreneurial–even if they do not have great business skills
they are visionaries, able to see the big picture and reinvent
themselves and their business to meet current trends.
They want to
have a life and a business.
They have a
worldview and a more globalistic vision.
They are
naturally motivational and optimistic.
They are great
listeners who are able to “empathize” with their clients.
They are
mentally healthy and resilient when life knocks them down.
Their focus is
on developing the future, not fixing the past.
They are able
to collaborate and partner with their clients, shedding the “expert”
role.
They have a
willingness to believe in the brilliance or potential for greatness
in all people.
They look at
possibilities instead of problems and causes (as do solution-focused
therapists).
They exude
confidence, even when unsure.
They present as
more authentic and genuine, with high integrity.
They are
willing to say, “I don’t know,” and explore where and
how to learn what is needed.
They enjoy what
they do and are enthusiastic and passionate about life.
So,
as life coaching grows as a newly defined profession, many therapists
with the above characteristics will recognize that they have been
coaches for a long time, they just did not know what to call it! We
strongly believe that the paradigm and powerfulness of coaching will
attract more healthy clients than therapy did and in fact, many of
the “problems in living” that clients sought the assistance
of a therapist for are better served by a life coach, avoiding the
stigma of therapy altogether.
While
there may be a new word developed in the future for the coaching
relationship, the term life coach (or personal coach) fits very well
right now. Other terms like personal consultant, life strategist,
etc., seem to be too vague and constrained.
We
believe that life coaching is part of a larger paradigm shift toward
people wanting to live their lives more purposefully. This could be
called a movement away from the paradigm of pathology to the paradigm
of possibility. There are many reasons that one could cite beyond
the scope of this book, but life coaching has evolved because it
makes sense to people today to have a partner who will elicit their
unique greatness and who will assist them to move from mediocrity to
excellence in living. Life coaching exists because it is helpful,
and it will prosper because it is transformational.
About the Authors
Patrick Williams, Ed.D., is the founder of Therapist University, now called The Institute for Life Coach Training. He has trained hundreds of therapists and counselors to add coaching to their practices. He is a licensed clinical psychologist with over 20 years of professional experience.
Deborah C. Davis, Ed. D., is a licensed family therapist and teacher. She is the CEO of Human Dynamics.
ISBN: 0-393-70341-X
2002
Hardcover
