Warren Sperling wasn't a happy guy. The team leader at
a Vancouver market research firm wasn't where he expected
to be. On a friend's advice, his wife Sherry got him six
sessions with a life coach for his 33rd birthday. Since
then, Warren has kissed mediocrity goodbye and has been
preaching the gospel according to the International Coach
Federation (ICF): "achieve extraordinary results in life."
He's also managed to bag a big promotion at work.
SKEPTIC'S
TAKE
But when Warren tried to make a convert of Sherry's
GP brother, the man of science was far from convinced.
More flaky hoo-hah, he said, but also felt a little
twinge of concern. Is life coaching harmless, and does
it have any evidence to back it up?
"My concern with life coaches is
that they might be undertrained," says Dr Mark Berber,
a staff psychiatrist at Markham Stouffville Hospital
and lecturer in psychiatry at the University of Toronto.
"If a patient went to a life coach with a problem that
required a more advanced level of professional help,
he might not get it. The fact that a life coach is being
paid directly by the consumer may deter him from referring
patients appropriately," he says.
YUPPIE
CURE-ALL
The phenomenon was started by Thomas J Leonard, a financial
planner turned self-help guru, in the 1980s, when he
realized that newly minted yuppies needed more than
just investment advice. There are now more than 7,000
ICF-member life coaches worldwide, including 47 accredited
practitioners in Canada.
To get ICF certification, a life
coach has to complete 60 hours of in-class training
and 250 hours of client work. Life coaches act as 'partners'
who help clients achieve specific goals -- but they're
not supposed to offer advice about unresolved emotional
issues or past personal conflicts. The ICF insists that
life coaches are not therapists, but somewhat worryingly
they do offer to help with potentially heavyweight issues
like personal relationships and attention deficit disorder.
FINE-TUNING
According to Dr Berber, it all depends on how the client
approaches life coaching. It's harmless enough, he says,
as long as clients are aware of its limited focus and
that its mantras are often lifted from established fields
like cognitive behavioural therapy. "It's not original,
but there's nothing necessarily wrong with it," he says.
"I've known relatives and colleagues who've been to
see life coaches, and they've enjoyed the process. But
they were pretty healthy, well-adapted people who were
just going for a fine-tuning of already adequate life-coping
strategies."
|
