The
following article was published in the City Lights section of the
Jerusalem Post on August 24, 2004.
Move over Manchester
United. So long Pete Sampras. Coaching - it isn't just for
athletes anymore.
Next month a cadre
of experts from the international Coaches Training Institute (CTI),
will arrive in Israel to promote Life Coaching, a newly arrived
trend that according to its proponents, can help any person come
closer to achieving their personal goals in life. According to CTI
representative in Israel Abi Shilon, the phenomenon has hit the Holy
Land hard and fast.
"When I started
studying in 2002, very few knew what Life Coaching was. Since then,
5 or 6 coaching schools have started operating in Israel and the
awareness to what coaching is and the number of people educated in
it is boosting."
Coaches are hired to
help people deal with any number of issues: finding a spouse,
earning more money, changing career direction – challenges that
people have faced for a long time. The methods used, however, are
quite revolutionary: Unlike a consultant, who comes as an authority
on an issue, a coach is not there to give advice or answers, but
rather to ask questions and be a good listener. "A coach," explains
Shilon, "…provides an environment that makes the client curious
about him or herself and able to dig in and find the answers."
Confused sometimes
with therapy, coaching has its own clearly defined parameters.
Rather than looking into the past, coaching concentrates on the
future, helping the client to define his current situation and what
he wants, and then helping him to obtain it. According to coactive
life coach Edie Ilan, "…being curious, genuinely interested in the
client and asking open-ended questions are fundamental values and
skills of co-active coaching."
The seeds of it all
began 30 years ago with the book "The Inner Game of Tennis" in which
author W. Timothy Gallwey claimed that success in sports is
determined more by an athlete's mind than by the method used to
train him. The next step was the recognition that similar elements,
such as competition and the drive to excel, are found in both sports
and business, and the idea that the same techniques used to help
athletes progress, might work in other disciplines. Athletic
coaches, reinventing themselves as Business Coaches, began to work
successfully with companies and executives, helping clients to
access their highest potentials and once that took hold, the next
step was Life Coaching.
An Internet search
will yield hundreds of sites for schools, organizations and private
coaches around the world. But will it survive in Israel? Ilan is
positive that it will. "Israelis sometimes have a high level of
skepticism. However, once they
feel something has value, they put themselves into it 100%. This is
why
I am confident coaching will become popular in Israel."
As well, according
to Ilan, the coach-client relationship is particularly suited to the
Israeli nature. "Israelis pride themselves on being knowledgeable,
so if I say to an Israeli: I don't have the answers, you do and my
job is to help you discover them, once they buy in to that model, it
really fits their personalities."
According to life coach Jason
Alster, there are still some difficulties to be encountered when
approaching Israelis with this new service. For one thing, asking a
fee for an "intangible service" brings resistance as people find it
hard to see that coaching can actually help them to make more money.
As well, "Israelis, I think, are more set in their ways and are used
to doing things with peer pressure or consensus. So anything new is
a bit hard to be accepted here."
One adventurous Israeli who has
found coaching beneficial is Itay Tsur, a 32 year old sales coach
for the Hathwaite Research Group.
"Since I am in coaching myself,
I thought, why not try that someone else would coach me. And it was
great. The strange thing that amazes me all the time is that I
never learn something I didn't already know."
One particular benefit Tsur has
enjoyed is that coaching has not only helped him to think more
clearly about what he wants to do with his life, but also enabled
him to find practical steps to immediately implement.
"There is a big difference
between saying things to someone else and saying them in your own
head - it's not the same commitment. I recommend it for anyone."
And coaching seems
to be an experience rewarding not only for the client, but for the
coach as well:
"Other than with
one's spouse, coaching is the most intensive relationship between
people that can ever be," says Shilon. This is electrifying for me -
you can see in a short time that you make a difference in people's
lives…and it's not just you - it's them….You are witnessing the
greatness in people and learning a lot about yourself at the same
time."
© Joy Pincus, 2004