Mid-career move: answering a call to coach

Terri Levine still recalls the conversation she had back in 1998, with a woman she'd just met at a conference in Boston. As the two women chatted, Ms. Levine asked her new acquaintance the standard conversational query: "What do you do?"

When the woman replied that she was a coach, Ms. Levine, then president of a national healthcare company, asked, "Oh, what sport?"

The woman then told her all about a job that had nothing to do with athletics. Her line of a work, as a personal coach, involved helping individuals define and reach their goals through conversations built on careful listening and questioning.

"I thought, 'Well, I've been doing that all my life,' " recalls Levine, who says she'd spent 20 years helping friends and colleagues in their search for personal and business solutions. "I knew right then it was the profession for me."

Within two days, Levine had signed up for a 200-hour coach-training program through Coach U, which was founded just as the coaching profession began taking off in the early 1990s. Levine took just over a year to complete the course, which now costs $4,295 and is conducted over the telephone.

Although she thought she'd done a pretty good job of coaching all her life, she says, she found there was a lot to learn.

"I learned that I interrupted too much, I said too much, I didn't listen enough," says Levine, who now trains other people to be coaches through her own business, called Comprehensive Coaching U. "I learned to listen in a deeper way, in a much more connected way."

An increasing number of people are doing what Levine did – answering the call to coach. The International Coach Federation (ICF), a professional association, counts more than 4,500 members – more than triple its membership in 1998. It estimates there are some 15,000 to 20,000 coaches worldwide.

"It's really growing," says Susan Cantwell, a coach and marketing director for Coach, Inc., which operates Coach U and its sister program, Corporate Coach U. Since 1991, she says, some 6,000 students from 36 countries have gone through the company's coach training.

Laura Berman Fortgang, who became a coach in 1991 and was one of Coach U's first students, says these days she's more likely to be approached by people who want to be coaches, rather than be coached. "It happens ... five times a day," she says. "[The career] speaks to something in people."

Economic conditions may be another factor in coaching's rise, with more highly trained professionals finding themselves in an involuntary state of free agency.

Levine, for example, says that since last October she's had some 60 people who had been laid off come to her for coach training.

More than half of those people, she says, were chief executive officers with valuable business experience.

Experts say coaching generally appeals to people who have a passion for helping others, a readiness for listening carefully to someone else, and a willingness to help someone else find their own answers, rather than tell them what to do.

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