Team Me!

Who needs friends when you've got a personal coach?

by Michelle Chihara

I've never met Leslie Karsner, but I'm staring at a photograph of her on the Web -- well-manicured, blonde, with a slight glamour-shot halo -- and I'm discussing the details of my romantic life with her over the phone. We're about 15 minutes into our very first conversation, and she already knows that I'm single, dating, and so enthralled with a particular author that I consider the fascination a professional crush.

Karsner is a romance coach. Unfailingly polite, enthusiastic, and warm, she plays the role of "confidante, coach, and cheerleader" to dozens of men and women between the ages of 26 and 66, spread from California to New York. She is not a therapist and not a consultant. "I don't diagnose," she says, in her peaches-and-cream voice. "I ask, 'How can I serve you best?' I stand for [my clients] in the success that they want to achieve."

Title IX Like work itself, coaching has spilled over from issues of time management and executive productivity into the world of relationships and laundry schedules. If this sounds like the part of life that used to be women's domain -- well, apparently it still is. Since American women entered the working world, they have continued to shoulder the vast majority of domestic responsibilities, so it may not be surprising that they are more likely than men to look for coaching help. In the International Coaching Federation's survey of 210 clients, 69 percent were female. Wendy Capland, president of the New England chapter of the International Coaching Federation, says both genders are searching, but she agrees that women come to her "looking for help on how to have a life and have an extraordinary career. Somebody has told them you have to either have a career or be a mother. They're trying to figure out how to be superwoman." Part of the coach's job is to tell women they don't have to do everything. Jane Shaw, a former client of Capland's, says, "I was working and the housework wasn't getting done, the meals weren't as healthy as they could be. [Capland] helped me see, `So what if you leave your beds unmade? Your children are taken care of and your job is secure.' She helped me choose what things were important. So what if we had pizza once a week?" "Women are so much more likely to feel that there's something wrong with them," says Elayne Rapping, author of The Culture of Recovery: Making Sense of the Self-Help Movement in Women's Lives (Beacon, 1996). "Lots of women feel they have to be perfect. Women who are older and having children think they have to be perfect mothers a lot of the time. It's the same reason that they're going to the gyms and having plastic surgery. The sad thing about post-feminism is that it left us with this idea that now that we're liberated, we're supposed to be perfect. We feel very guilty if we can't do everything."

The success most of Karsner's clients want to achieve is very specific: they are, as she puts it, "searching for that one relationship." I tell her that right now the word marriage gives me worse shakes than Mountain Dew, and that I'm quite happy to be "dating."

So she asks how my last few dates turned out. "What kinds of people are you attracting?" she says. "What is it you're looking for in terms of your own life?" We haven't gone through a whole dating history, as she would do with a real client. Nor have I been through her seven-stage "Romance Factor" analysis. But, despite her limited knowledge of my romantic skills, Karsner is gamely trying to persuade me to tackle my Olympian crush.

She asks me what I find attractive about the author. "You think his accomplishments are worthy of your respect?"

"Sure. I respect what he's done. I think we share some interests. I like his sense of humor."

"Why don't you e-mail him?" Karsner suggests.

This suggestion immediately halves my vocabulary skills.

"No way!"

"People love to be complimented," Karsner says, conspiratorially. "It wouldn't necessarily be an adoring-fan comment. You could say that you, as another writer, related to something he said. Coming from a fellow writer, that's the ultimate compliment. Just sort of open the door."

"What's the worst that could happen?" she says. "Well, you've complimented him."

Which, I think, is the same advice my best friend gave me when I was considering whether to ask Ben to the Winter Ball in 10th grade.

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Karsner is a specialized representative of the burgeoning field of personal coaching, perhaps an inevitable craze in a nation that worships its sports heroes, idolizes its self-made men, and hires people to walk its dogs. Coaches are people you can hire to motivate you, advocate for you, strategize with you, and otherwise shepherd you through your own life.

The whole idea of "coaching" began in the office as a kind of one-on-one consulting, a source of guidance and answers in the increasingly unstable world of corporate America. By now, executive coaching is so established that magazines like the corporate-hip Fast Company run articles not merely about coaching, but about how to find the right coach. The International Coaching Federation (ICF), a trade association, counts about 75 members in New England and 1400 overall. Its estimates put the total number of coaches working in the US at around 10,000.

Executive coaches often focus on workplace skills such as presentation and delegation. But the personal coach's arena is infinitely broad: anything from organizing your household chores to putting the spark back into your marriage. There is no one area that coaching is limited to, and there is no one background that coaches have in common. Anyone can put out a sign and call him- or herself a coach. As the industry gains popularity, however, trade groups and training programs have sprouted up across the country; there is even a Coach University, based in Colorado, which holds conference-call "teleclasses" and did $4 million in business in 1998, according to Sandy Vilas, its president and owner.

The field is spreading and fragmenting, giving rise to subspecialties that range from romance coaching for lovelorn adults to college coaching for teenagers. In New York, a nonprofit organization called Future Possibilities is even working to bring coaching to children, to teach them "goal setting" and "life skills." Its founder, Lorraine White, envisions a time when we'll all say, "I have my parent, my teacher, my coach. . . . How cool would that be?"

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Coaching is not for the underfunded; the average fee is around $200 a month, and in a survey of 210 coaching clients, one of the only controlled studies done on the industry, the ICF found that the average yearly income for coaching clients is $63,000. Lorraine White talks about someday making coaching available to underprivileged children, but for now, coaching is primarily a luxury for what coaches call "high-achievement" professionals -- people like Nick Miller.

Miller, who owns a sales-management consulting firm in Acton, allowed me to sit in on one of his coaching sessions. A tight, wiry man with a receding hairline and wire-rimmed glasses, Miller has been running his own business for eight years, and working with coach Wendy Capland, the president of ICF's New England chapter, for two and half. Miller is also one of the many Americans who now have more than one coach. Capland is one of four.

In the bright, clean offices of Miller's company, Clarity Advantage, Capland is holding him accountable for his promise to do something for himself. And Miller is delivering. When his wife and two kids went away for a vacation, he says, "before the car was even cold, I was at Tweeter." He bought himself a stereo, something he found so difficult that "it made me sick. I almost threw up. But when I listened to my music on it, at home. . . . I just thought, 'I've wanted this for 25 years.' "

Miller and Capland discuss his yearly goals, which include setting a good example for the kids, improving his company, and playing a positive role in his community. Another goal is to go out with friends at least once a month. They also try to find realistic ways that Miller can find time for singing -- "Close harmony is really my thing," he says -- and other activities that he considers "for me."

"What about golf?" Capland asks. "I was hoping we could go out and play golf."

"Well, we can," Miller says, "but usually, golf is too much like work."

As a small-business owner, Miller says, he hires coaches to provide the kind of sounding board and fresh perspective that other corporate workers might get from a management team. As Miller describes them, one of his coaches sounds like a high-powered mentor, one is a marketing consultant, and one is a licensed social worker -- a counselor whom Miller has asked to act as a coach "because that's the kind of relationship I wanted," he says. "It's helpful for me to think of him as a coach."

The fourth coach is Capland, who is now urging him to add an item to the agenda for his weekly meeting with his wife. Miller promises to call his friends Rick and Arlene.

"I was on my way to being one of those guys who dies of heart failure at 55," he says. "There are times when I call Wendy, when everything's a muddle. I just need someone to put a finger in and stop the gears."

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After I watch Miller's session, Capland offers to coach me. She asks me to think of three goals that I would like to accomplish in the next 90 days, and we make an appointment for a phone session on Friday at 11 a.m.

I write down three goals -- "Hit my stride, be more productive at work"; "Get my apartment into shape"; and "Exercise more regularly" -- but we never get past exercise.

"If you had nirvana in this area," Capland asks, "what would it look like?" Nirvana, I decide, includes running three times a week.

"I hear a couple of roadblocks," Capland says. "What I hear is that laundry is a roadblock, getting up is a roadblock."

She tells me to figure out where my priorities really lie. "Keep a calendar of how many times you say yes [to social engagements]," Capland says, "and if you find that you're saying yes more than you're saying no, then you're choosing not to exercise regularly because it's not more important than your social engagements. If that's the case, then you need to cross running off your list of priorities."

The problem is that my priorities are fluid. On Wednesday night before my friend's band goes on, going out is a priority. After I've seen the band, my priorities are back with running, but I'll be damned if my priorities are going to stop me from hitting the snooze button six times. The result is that, four days later, I haven't been running at all, and I'm heading into another full-blown laundry crisis.

Capland did suggest delegating tasks that one does poorly. But I suspect that that was for people on an executive's budget.

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Capland's advice struck me as solid, if unexceptional; it's impossible to tell, on the basis of one session, whether she might have succeeded in cheerleading me to a better exercise schedule. For contrast, I undergo a session with Shel Miller, a personal coach based in Brookline.

Miller has asked me to prepare by filling out a workbook called the Clean Sweep(TM) Program. The program, jargon-laden and peculiarly specific in its details, is the closest the coaching movement comes to dictating a lifetime game plan. It was written by Coach University founder Thomas J. Leonard, author of The Portable Coach (Scribner). "The objective of the program," writes Leonard, "is for the participant to get complete about 100 possible incompletions in their life." The Clean Sweep asks you to mark statements in four categories as "completely true" or "untrue." For example:

Physical Environment

I surround myself with beautiful things.

I recycle.

My hair is the way I want it.

I don't injure myself, fall, or bump into things.

Well-Being

I rarely use caffeine (chocolate, coffee, colas, tea) -- less than three times per week, total.

My cholesterol level is healthful.

I have no habits that I find to be unacceptable.

I have been tested for the AIDS antibody.

I use well-made sunglasses.

As I arrive to meet Miller at his quiet, cake-icing-blue house in Coolidge Corner, I am defensively contemplating my dirt-cheap sunglasses, which lost me a point of my all-around dismal score on the Clean Sweep Program. But I like my sunglasses. I bought them at an amusement park in Los Angeles, their even-cheaper predecessors having fallen off while I rode a roller coaster called the Riddler.

Looking around Miller's house, I notice that some of his paint is peeling. I figure that must lose him some points on the Physical Environment scale. Plus, his plants don't look "bathed." Healthy and watered, sure. But the Clean Sweep(TM) Program Leader's Guide says plants should be "bathed."

Up the wide, varnished pine stairs is Miller's office, which is furnished with a purplish-beige flecked couch and a bookcase full of therapy and self-help books. A pale, soft-spoken man in a dark suit, with graying hair parted on the side, Miller is intelligent and pleasant. He asks me to rank my three goals (lists and goals are a coaching staple). I tell him my job is the most important thing going for me at the moment. He points to my Clean Sweep Program scorecard. "You know, you don't really need that," he says. "That's just a tool. You're already really good at creating a goal and a focus for yourself."

We have a wide-ranging conversation about how to find and maintain creativity. He says something I find interesting: we can trigger our muscle memory -- with music, for example -- in order to re-create certain moods. Moods, he says, generate particular types of thought, and not the other way around.

The session is fun -- I get to be self-indulgent and mildly introspective without stirring any muddy waters. If the conversation sounds something like therapy lite, perhaps that's because Miller is also a therapist. He keeps the two sides of his practice separate; the coaching clients, he finds, are sometimes leery of the mental-health implications of the word therapy, and the therapy clients come for looking for help with problems or symptoms, not with motivation.

In his coaching role, he peppers his conversation with fortune-cookie wisdom: "Make sufficient requests," he says. "I hear you saying you want to learn to live with pressure and not turn it into stress." He is quoting from Success Is a Choice, a book that happens to be written by an actual coach, the Celtics' Rick Pitino.

Miller videotapes our entire session and, at the end, shows me the tape. He says that I look "more in the zone" at the end. I can't say, never having seen myself in the zone, but I conclude that I do look more relaxed by the end. Also, my glasses look terrible on film.

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Clearly, coaching means different things to different people. The vast majority of clients polled by the International Coaching Federation -- and all the coaching clients I spoke with -- felt their money had been well spent. But ultimately, it's unclear what, exactly, they thought they were buying. People tend to approach coaches for help with time-management issues and come out speaking in broad self-help terms about having increased their "sense of balance" and "self-awareness."

It's easier for coaches to explain what they're not than to explain what they are. They're not therapists. They're not priests. They're not coworkers. They're not your mother.

But in a sense, they are all these things. For that one hour per week, a coach replaces trusted mentors at work; he or she can stand in for best friends and parents, for an agony aunt, even for a minister. There is something uniquely American about this need for a coach, and not just because of the sports analogy.

"We're no longer being taught how to have friends and have communities," says Elayne Rapping, author of The Culture of Recovery: Making Sense of the Self-Help Movement in Women's Lives (Beacon, 1996). "It's kind of the ultimate end of American individualism."

Chrissy Carew, a spokeswoman for the ICF, says she focuses on coaching people to build "support structures" for themselves. "Jesus Christ had 12 apostles," she says. "I empower them to find their 12 apostles."

But for clients who haven't quite assembled the apostles yet, a coach serves as a stand-in for friends -- or, often, as a better version of them.

"You could tell your coach anything," says Jane Shaw, a former client of Wendy Capland's. "And you know that it would always be kept confidential. There's never any judgment. I felt much closer to my coach than I did to my girlfriends."

No one client, of course, can speak for every participant in these appealing, yet undefined, relationships. But still, Shaw's comments surprise me. I trust my friends, of all ages and both sexes -- and I trust them because of, not despite, the fact that they spend time with me for free. They are by no means professionally trained, and they do have their own agendas. But so far, their advice seems to work -- or at least it hasn't gotten me into too much trouble.

Coaching on the Web Most of the coaches mentioned in this story maintain Web sites that provide more information about their work, and about coaching in general. Romance coach Leslie Karsner's site is at http://www.artofattraction.com. Shel Miller's company is at http://home.att.net/~E.P, and Wendy Capland's is at http://www.visionquestconsulting.com. The International Coach Federation's page is at http://www.coachfederation.com, and Coach University is at http://www.coachu.com.

For comparison's sake, I run the romance coach's suggestion past my primary free-of-charge coach. Mom, much like a ball-club owner, is always further from the fray, and always has an eye on the bigger picture. I ask her what she thinks about the idea of e-mailing a complete stranger whom I admire. "E-mailing him?" A pause. Maternal skepticism drips from the receiver. "Maybe you could maneuver yourself into a place where you can meet him first. I mean, people who look ideal on paper tend not be what they look like. Sometimes it's better to keep your ideal as an ideal."

Maybe I'm lucky to have a network in place, even if it's far-flung -- the club owner in California, a head coach in New York, others in Connecticut and Chicago. I certainly couldn't afford to pay for it if I actually had to hire these advisers. Speaking with Leslie Karsner, the romance coach, was a lot like gossiping with one of my girlfriends. But if I hadn't been a journalist, Karsner would have charged me $250 a month for three conversations plus some e-mails. For my current "coaching" costs, I figure I spend about $60 a month on long-distance calls, plus who knows how much on dinners and coffee. I get a lot of my coaching on a barter system. All of it comes out to well under $250 a month.

I still might write my crush that e-mail, though.

Michelle Chihara can be reached at mchihara[a]phx.com.