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When San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom announced he would withdraw from the race for California governor, few would’ve expected that news would spur a debate over life coaching. But in a way, it has.
Consider the sarcastic headline on the gossip website Gawker: Is Missing San Francisco Mayor Secretly Sobbing with ‘Life Coach?’
Coaches will, of course, immediately note the use of quotation marks around the title life coach, and the loaded adverb-verb combo: secretly sobbing.
As UK coach Nicola Marshall said, comments like these betray a general sense that somehow life coaching is “airy fairy and not as professional as business coaching.”
Newsom reportedly consulted a coach in the days before he announced his decision not to run for governor in 2010, providing an opportunity for some to dish on “the bizarre practice of life coaching,” as SFist wrote, describing life coaches as people who “help you move your life forward, to attain success, to reach the next rung on the ladder of life…they also make you cry. A lot.”
A columnist in the San Francisco Chronicle—hardly a snarky blog—described the mayor as “pouting,” perhaps feeding the sense that someone who’d turn to a coach at a pivotal point in one’s life is somehow weak or troubled.
As a website commenter wrote of the mayor, “I don’t get it. He’s married to a beautiful woman, he just became a father, he OWNS a home in San Francisco, and he’s the Mayor. What’s the problem?”
One problem, some coaches believe, is a perception-is-reality issue for coaching.
“Coaching has a pretty dodgy image problem,” said Sally Ann Law, a personal and executive coach based in North London. She blames “coaches who really do not have the requisite skills to work with clients effectively” for the public’s sometime derision toward coaching. “The truth is that anyone can call themselves a life coach.”
Is the issue inconsistency among life coaches—or a belief among the public that life coaching itself isn’t a profession, but a farce?
Perhaps the most damning thing written about life coaches in the Gawker post is a paragraph that ties coaching—to reality television: “It’s a great move on Newsom’s part: making a grand show of his pain and introspection will only make his future claims that ‘I have truly changed’ or whatever all the more believable. Especially since…life coaches are well known to be dedicated reality TV viewers.”
They are?
Coach Noel Posus, who argued in a recent Coaching Commons interview that coaches need to redefine themselves to the public, not as people who make clients “cry…and cry a lot,” but people who bring “wisdom.”
“Developing our wisdom as individuals makes us more attractive, competent and valuable as coaches,” said Posus.
“Wisdom is measured by the combination of intelligence (not just IQ but our continuous collection and use of new information), emotional intelligence (our self awareness and awareness of others in terms of how we operate emotionally), our experiences and how we interpret them (positively and negatively) and finally our creativity (our ability to create solutions, opportunities and brainstorm ideas).”
How can coaches swap a reputation for staging cryfests with one of providing wisdom?
Posus suggests showing that people who work with a coach at a critical time for career or personal life, can deliver a better, wiser outcome… that will work wonders in changing people’s minds about what life coaches do.
“If we can look at the events in our lives, even the traumatic ones, and recognise what we’ve learnt from it, can identify our strengths that helped us rise above the challenge, and how we planned and implemented action to create the desired outcome, then this interpretation activity is what could make a coach stand out as having something exceptional to offer,” said Posus.
Have you run into people who consider your work, for lack of a better word, a joke? How do you address the person who thinks a successful, powerful man or woman simply shouldn’t need a coach?
Or is worrying about this perception worth the trouble?
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There are 8 Responses so far...
Mark – I’ve seen other TV types put coaching down, including Rachel Maddow (well, she has a regular guest on her show who does a comedy riff and one night, you guessed it, coaching was the butt of the joke) and Penn and Teller have slammed coaching on their show.
As a social worker perhaps I’m ‘too used to’ the disrespect. If that’s what you call it.
It does get frustrating sometimes when you see someone with no recognizable coach training putting themselves out there as a coach.
What’s the solution? Maybe it isn’t a big deal. After all, most other professions are made fun of too. Some more deserved!
We need better PR – perhaps celebrities coming out and sharing their stories of how coaching is no joke and it helped them. I remember Thomas Leonard starting to embark on that idea right before he passed. In fact, I was talking with him about spearheading that sort of a project. And, you know the rest of the story!
Oh, and, btw, I wrote to Rachel Maddow after her guest trashed coaching, but, of course, I never heard back from her.
Thanks for writing this Mark. I love it that with Coaching, the market ultimately decides if you are making wise and significant contributions to clients and community. Living with the fact that anyone–skilled, gifted, trained, or not–can call him or herself a coach is part of the deal. They come, they go. Keep writing!
Mark – Thanks for bringing this issue up. I think coaching in general does face some challenges around its image. The term “life coach” has become pretty loaded for many people. I’ve heard comments along the lines of “a life coach is what you become when you’ve tried everything else and failed”.
Also, there is a perception that if you have a coach, you have enough disposable income to “indulge” in the kind of “navel gazing” that coaching allows for.
What I would say is that these issues are focused on a very narrow band of coaching. One-on-one, personal life coaching, as in the case of Newsom, is just one of many forms coaching can take. If we want to improve coaching’s public image, why not talk about how coaching has been introduced into public schools, or how pro bono group coaching is used to support people who are out of work? We need to profile all the other beneficial areas in which the coaching practice has helped support communities and organizations as well as individuals.
Another thing I would add is that this image problem is more predominant in the U.S. I work for a global coaching company with clients in China, India, Europe, and South America, and generally, people in those places have a very positive idea of what coaching is and what it can do for individuals.
Some of the snarkiness around coaching could be removed if the general public had a broader idea of just how many forms it has taken and how many lives it has positively impacted.
To add to Kurt’s comment: my coaching niche is dating and relationship coaching. Which is a very viable alternative to marriage counseling. Although, of course not coverable by insurance (as far as I know). In some circles relationship coaching does not yet command the respect marriage counseling does, even if it may be more effective than marriage counseling. I hope to see some research tease this out in the near future.
I wouldn’t worry about it. With people like Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, and GE CEO, Jack Welch, telling the public that coaching is basically the best thing ever, we don’t really have a serious image problem.
BTW, when I heard that my ex-husband, the attorney, thinks life coaching is a joke, I thought, “Oh yeah, I should have become something more respectable, like a lawyer, because nobody makes jokes about them, right?”
Suppose you were to take a completely different perspective and see the headline as a “good thing.” That is, (1) one of the most promising politicians in the US sought out a life coach to assist with one of the most difficult decision he had to make; and (2) working with a life coach helped to free buried emotions and more deeply experience them with tears just being a physiological reaction to emotional awareness, release and resolution.
A coach can often help a client realize that a step back is a step in the right direction (for that client). Knowing Mayor Newsom, I’m delighted he sought the assistance of a life coach and reviewed what’s most important to him, where he wants to go and how he wants to get there.
I have a different take on this issue- and not a popular one.
How do we allow for the consideration that the lampooning and satire are based in reality?
Let’s face it. Many who are coaching have done years of their own work, studied at serious schools of behavior and coaching, maintain rigorous standards and even participate in regular peer review. But for many, their preparation was something akin to being fired from an HR job or attending an EST workshop and then investing in business cards. Even for those who carry credentials, the barriers and standards are closer to those associated with Real Estate than other professions. As such, we have to expect that the people whose work is questionable will be those who, sadly, create the image. As Mark rightly points out, the barriers to entry are just not that high.
One other thought on this. Maybe we need to look at why we are so thin skinned about the satire. Lawyers do not often fall to bemoaning the state of their profession based on lawyer jokes. Perhaps if we cleaned up our act as a profession, we could have a little more of a sense of humor about coaching jokes.