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Life Coaches

The Times - 27.06.04

Reality TV is rarely an uplifting phenomenon with its near pornography of neuroses exaggerating foibles and fears, insecurities and inconsistencies and dishing them up in bite size pieces straight to our living rooms to sup up along with our TV dinners. It is not the spectacle of the winning we enjoy but the sense of schadenfreude at the all too predictable failures along the way. Or so I'd thought until becoming curiously hooked by Channel 4's celebrity sports competition - The Games. Sure, it relishes the off track arguments and the Jacuzzi indiscretions but there's more to it than that. The Games reminds us, as does yesterday's London Marathon in spectacular style, of what we can achieve. These things inspire us to put a foot beyond the edge of the arm chair, to push ourselves, to test ourselves, to aspire.

Watching these various tests of endurance and exertion from the comfort of my sofa I realised that the best way I could hope to raise my game was my moving from the couch to the coach. Here was a legitimate reason to employ the services of a coach, or perhaps the more accessible version, the personal trainer. Watching these feats of sporting prowess had reminded me that the job of a coach is an admirable and worth while profession. Why would I have doubted that? These days, it seems, the term 'coach' has become as devalued and ubiquitous as 'genius' and 'star'. In certain metropolitan circles every second person you meet is a 'coach' and I don't even have any sporty friends. There is a whole new class of coach - not the specific sports coach - but the rather more amorphous 'life coach'. Where there once was a career's advisor - appropriately tailored to a particular need - there now are the far more portentous sounding life coaches, as though we've lost the ability even to establish our most basic of aims without seeking professional help. Burnt out city professionals and premature mid-life crisis thirty-somethings are reinventing themselves as life coaches. They are giving up the rat race apparently somehow equipped to guide the rest of us gullible and directionless rat race abandonees to happier and more fulfilled life. How? Perhaps by becoming 'life coaches' ourselves and also realising the particular fulfilment that comes with charging by the hour?

No doubt a few long established life coaches will remonstrate and claim the validity of their profession as an off shoot of the 1980's trend for management consultancy. But it seems that sudden rise of today's life coaches is a sign of more recent times - the latest incarnation of the counselling culture. Those who use a sports coach have a specific idea of what they want to achieve. They'll expect to set goals, to be disciplined, to be pushed and most importantly if they fall short, to be held to account. Those who consult the life coach may want something similar, albeit on a grander scale, but can their requirements be met? At a recent party I asked a successful life coach to explain how he worked. He said that he did not actually give advice but allowed the clients to set their own goals on which he never commented. And then if they didn't achieve the goals it was not his role to criticise either. So the concept of coaching is totally emasculated and becomes little more than a lifestyle accessory - along with personal trainer and the personal shopper, now the comfort blanket of the personal guru. Secular, competitive city life can be atomised and soulless. It isn't hard to see why we might crave such risk free guidance, a coach who could give our lives new focus. But I wonder if this trend might suddenly wane now that our fears are less about lack of achievement and more about simply surviving. How can we continue to indulge our petty insecurities when our absolute security seems suddenly at risk?

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