Becoming a Professional Life Coach Lessons from the Institute for Life Coach Training Second Edition Patrick Williams and Diane S. Menendez W. W. Norton & Company New York • London A Norton Professional Book This e-book contains some places that ask the reader to fill in questions or comments. Please keep pen and paper handy as you read this e-book so that you can complete the exercises within. We dedicate this second edition to all the coaches, mentors, and teachers who inspired us, and to the students of our writings and teaching, so they may inspire those they engage with. CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction: Life Coaching as an Operating System Part I: Coaching Fundamentals Chapter 1: Listening as a Coach Chapter 2: The Language of Coaching Chapter 3: Coaching as a Developmental Change Process Part II: Beyond the Basics Chapter 4: Empowering the Client Chapter 5: Stretching the Client Chapter 6: Creating Momentum With the Client Chapter 7: Coaching the Whole Client: Mind, Body, Emotions, Spirit Part III: Coaching from the Inside Out Chapter 8: The Power of Purpose Chapter 9: Design Your Life Chapter 10: What Gets in Your Way? Chapter 11: Steering Your Life by True North Chapter 12: Walk the Talk Chapter 13: Play Full Out Chapter 14: How Wealthy Are You? Chapter 15: Mind-set is Causative Chapter 16: Love Is All We Need Appendix: The Evolution of a Profession References Index Becoming a Professional Life Coach Introduction LIFE COACHING AS AN OPERATING SYSTEM Personal and professional coaching, which has emerged as a powerful and personalized career in the last few decades, has shifted the paradigm of how people who seek help with life transitions find a professional to partner with them in designing their desired future. No matter what kind of subspecialty a coach might have, life coaching is the basic operating system: a whole-person, client-centered approach. Coaching the client’s whole life is the operating system working in the background. A client may seek creative or business coaching, leadership development, or a more balanced life, but all coaching is life coaching. Before 1990, there was little mention of coaching except in corporate culture. Mentoring and executive coaching were resources 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 later elaborate on the history of coaching but, for now, let us examine why life coaching is becoming more popular and prevalent. The International Coach Federation (ICF) was founded in 1992 but did not have a real presence until its first convention in 1996. The ICF has kept detailed archives of media coverage on coaching since the early 1990s. Two newspaper articles appeared in 1993, four in 1994 (including one from Australia), and seven in 1995. The majority of articles appeared in publications in 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 then, media coverage has increased to hundreds of articles as well as live media coverage in countries such as the United States, Europe, Australia, Canada, Japan, Singapore. This coverage has comprised both national and local radio and television, including Good Morning America, Today, CNBC, the BBC, and other outlets around the globe. In print, the only books written about coaching before the 1990s were geared toward corporate and performance coaching. Good, solid books about life coaching are now becoming numerous, including some recent national best sellers. Life coaching as a phenomenon originated in the United States and has spread rather rapidly. Coaching will soon reach a critical mass in society— 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 and seeking the services of a therapist or counselor. Understanding the history of coaching provides current and prospective life coaches with a framework for understanding their profession and insight into future opportunities. This framework also helps life coaches place themselves squarely within the larger context of a profession that is still evolving. Casting our eyes across the diverse threads of the past can assist us in understanding the present more accurately and better prepare us as life coaching expands in the 21st century. We believe an examination of the evolution of life coaching also helps counselors, and others from helping professions to make the transition to life coaching by clarifying the similarities and differences between life coaching and other fields. When Pat Williams first founded the Institute for Life Coach Training (ILCT) in 1998, then called Therapist University, the profession of coaching was in its infancy. Only half a dozen coach training schools existed. Independent of one another, Diane and I had both been executive coaches since 1989 and were expanding our practices to include life coaching. We saw that psychologically trained professionals would have unique skills to transition into coaching, and we had begun to work with a few individuals and small groups, mentoring therapists who were intrigued by this new profession of coaching. At the second ICF conference in Houston, in 1996, Diane and I met for the first time and discovered our common passion and interest in teaching coaching skills to therapists, psychologists, and counselors. Given our reverence for the theoretical foundations of our training, we realized that much of coach training was borrowing theory and technique from psychology, philosophy, and organizational development. It was natural for us to join forces. I shared my vision of creating a curriculum uniquely designed to train therapists and psychologists to add coaching to their practices. After a few phone calls with other therapists who had entered the coaching profession, I invited Diane and Sherry Lowry to help write the curriculum. Part of my vision for training was that a complete curriculum would address the coach’s personal development because coaching requires that coaches live their life as fully and purposefully as possible. Sherry and Diane became excited because they had just completed about half of just such a series of articles for an online magazine called The Seamless Life, which included many ideas and skillsets for life coaching. In the fall of 1998, as Sherry and Diane were meeting to develop the content for the training manual, they were looking for texts that would complement and offer outside reading for students. One week, Diane and I both received an email announcing the publication of a manual by Dave Ellis titled Life Coaching: A New Career for Helping Professionals (Ellis 1997. I immediately called Dave, told him that we noticed his manual, described the development of our curriculum, and asked if we could use his book as one of our texts. He had written the book but didn’t have a clear goal in mind with how to utilize it. He was thrilled we had developed our training and invited me to a life coaching think tank at his ranch in South Dakota in March 1999. During this conversation, I learned about Dave’s previous book, coauthored with Stan Lankowitz, Human Being: A Manual for Happiness, Health, Love, and Wealth (Ellis & Lankowitz 1995)which became the supporting text resource guide for “Coaching from the Inside Out,” the personal development portion of our curriculum (Part III of this book). We now use the newer, condensed version of Dave’s book called Falling Awake: Creating the Life of Your Dreams (2002). Many ILCT students over the years have told us that this portion of the curriculum has been transformational, offering unique methodology for working with clients. This initially surprised us because helping professionals are expected to have done a great deal of inner work as part of their training. We came to realize that the “Inside Out” topics were unique in that they are more about designing one’s life rather than cleaning up and completing old issues. With our texts chosen and ordered, Sherry, Diane, and I outlined a curriculum, wrote a very basic training manual, passed chapters back and forth, and looked for a couple of texts to accompany the manual so that the course would take the shape of a graduate program. We felt that this was important because our students were primarily doctoral level and master’s-level practitioners. We wanted them to bring the best of what they knew and leave behind what was specific to therapy and psychological treatment. So our curriculum—but not this book—included discussions, exercises, and specifics about what needed to be learned for coaching and what needed to be unlearned from therapeutic training and practice. Our students brought quite a bit of knowledge and experience, and they had much to leave behind as they transitioned from therapist to coach. The first class was held in February 1999. It included 20 students, several of whom went on to become ILCT faculty. We were pleasantly surprised at the students who were attracted to our training. We thought we would be getting a lot of burned-out therapists. Instead, we got the cream of the crop. We drew therapists who, for the most part, were already coach-like in their orientation: they were future-oriented, most were trained in solution-focused methods, and they were future-oriented, most were trained in solution-focused methods, and they were ready to work with high -functioning clients who wanted to live their lives beyond mediocrity. This first crop of students was also excited about working by phone and expanding their client base. After the class, Sherry, Diane, and I gathered our feedback, listened to student comments, and refined the curriculum design and execution for the second class, which began in April 1999. At that time, the basic curriculum was 30 hours of foundational training. Today the foundational training is 40 hours, and it is the first course in an accredited coach training program (ACTP) leading to the Professional Certified Coach designation by the ICF. (We were the 12th approved ICF program in 2000. Today there are hundreds of ACTP programs.) Since our first program in 1998, we have learned a great deal from our students, the ILCT faculty, and our work with clients. The feedback received from students is that they are extremely thankful that the content, and the research on which it is drawn are so rich in theoretical foundation. Readers should be aware this book covers much of what is taught in the ILCT foundational course (the first 40 hours of the 130-hour ACTP). Those wanting the deeper and richer experience of becoming a coach will want to consider taking the live training, where learners are able to experience the power of group learning, modeling from the instructors, and the opportunity to practice coaching while receiving feedback. The full ILCT program consists of 90 additional hours that go into depth in specialty areas of coaching (relationship coaching, executive coaching, emotional intelligence applied to coaching), and many other areas such as coaching ethics, evidence-based coaching research, use of assessments, practice development, advanced practice, and other graduate- level courses. Anyone who reads a book with this much content is well aware that to put it into practical use often requires a more formal learning structure. Explore the ILCT website and discover the options available at www.lifecoachtraining.com. (Note: As the more recent Board Certified Coach designation is gaining popularity, ILCT is also an approved provider for the BCC from the Center for Credentialing and Education, www.CCE-Global.org. See more information in the appendix.) The Roots of Life Coaching Coaching has a unique paradigm, but it’s not new in its sources, theory, and strategies. Much of the foundation of coaching goes back many decades and even centuries. The draw of pursuing life improvement, personal development, even centuries. The draw of pursuing life improvement, personal development, and the exploration of meaning began with early Greek society. This is reflected in Socrates’s famous quote, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Since then we have developed many ways of examining our lives, some useful and some not; some are grounded in theory and are evidence based, while others are made up and useless. What persists, however, is that people who are not in pursuit of basic human needs such as food and shelter do begin to pay attention to higher needs such as self-actualization, fulfillment, and spiritual connection. In ancient Greece, as now, people have always had an intense desire to explore and find personal meaning. Coaching today is seen as a new phenomenon, yet its foundations can be found in modern psychology and philosophy. Coaching is a new field that borrows from and builds on theories and research from related fields that have come before it. As such, coaching is a multidisciplinary, multitheory synthesis and application of applied behavioral change. Coach training schools today, both private and academic, must be clear about their theoretical underpinnings and the philosophy that supports what they teach. From its inception, ILCT declared that its intention was to have a content-rich, theoretically based curriculum equivalent to a graduate-level education. Because the original participant base consisted of helping professionals—therapists, counselors, psychologists, industrial-organizational practitioners, and psychiatrists—they knew that they needed to discuss participants’ common and varied education, the impact of psychology and philosophy on coaching practice, and coaching’s use of adult learning models. The curriculum that emerged was written by and for therapists transitioning into coaching. It has since expanded in its reach to other aligned helping professionals who have a similar educational background and a psychological orientation for achieving greater human potential. Contributions from Psychology So what has the field of psychology brought to coaching, and what are the major influences? There have been four major forces in psychological theory since the emergence of psychology as a social science in 1879. These four forces are Freudian, behavioral, humanistic, and transpersonal. In recent years there have been three other forces at work, which we believe are adaptations or evolutions of the original four. Cognitive-behavioral psychology grew from a mix of the behavioral and humanistic schools. Positive psychology utilizes cognitive- behavioral approaches and repositions many of the theories that humanistic