Lately my networking has brought me into contact with several life/career coaches, all of whom used to be educators of some sort. Newsflash: this is a hidden gem of an alternative career for teachers and professors looking to get out.
(You’re gonna need it, believe me. Have y’all read the latest affront to education book du jour? Oh no, apparently students just don’t feel like they’re learning enough and of course that’s 100% accurate and completely the fault of the teachers. Seriously, people, get out before the witch hunts begin.)
As a life coach, you’re basically doing the same thing you did as a teacher: motivating, giving feedback, helping with strategies — but a) you’re only dealing with one person at a time; b) you’re only dealing with people motivated enough to ask for help; c) there’s no grading; and d) you’re being paid up to a hundred bucks an hour. What did I tell you? Schweeeeeeeeet!
Not even kidding, this was the first image that came when I Googled 'Gen Y at work'. Better yet, the blogger non-ironically claims Gen Y can teach us the 'lesson' that it's 'all about life.' (http://rumi.typepad.com/rumi_shivaz/2008/10/lesson-from-gen-y---its-all-about-life.html)
I gather there’s huge market for Gen-Y life coaches. A mean person might say this is an indication of subpar parenting, but I’ll leave that to this article that actually uses the word ‘clueless’ to describe Millennials. (That’s the great thing, citing evidence goes both ways. And don’t get me wrong, Millennials, I’m totally down with your leisure-driven life — though I still don’t get how that translates into preferring praise over sex. If you do it competently, you might get praised, see how that works?)
When I was living with Dr. $hiraz, she kept telling me I should be a life coach (I did do some motivating for her, from time to time, when she was working on her book.) I don’t think it’s a very good idea. I mean, sure, I like telling people what to do. But I gather you’re supposed to be earnest and caring and at least a little warm and fuzzy. Which I am most definitely not. About the only thing I miss about teaching is making fun of my students.
I'm a graduate of the House School for Motivational Speaking.
Don’t get me wrong, I think sarcasm is an incredibly effective teaching method (hence my adoration of Stacey on What Not To Wear.) But serious education people get all upset about the idea. In fact, one high school teacher friend of mine reported a staff meeting in which the ‘issue’ of classroom irony was discussed, culminating in an admin (former Ed. major, of course) proclaiming that ‘sarcasm has no place in a classroom!’
‘Of course it doesn’t!’ my experienced-teacher friend agreed, diving under the table to cloak their sniggering.
So yeah, I think I’d need to put a big ol’ warning on my website if I became a life coach: crankiest life coach ever. I can see it now…
Coachee: I just don’t know what to do with my life!
Me: Figure something out then.
Coachee: I mean, I feel like I have so many options!
Me: Probably not as many as you think.
Coachee: But my parents told me I could be whatever I wanted!
Me: They were wrong.
Coachee: What?
Me: Trust me, I’ve taught hundreds of students, you’re not special. And while we’re at it, life isn’t fun. Reality check complete, let’s find something you’re not horrible at and start from there….
Anyone else considering life coaching? And has anyone actually used a life coach? Do they work, or what?
I’ve never met anyone who has a life coach. Are life coaches in high demand?
Having just chatted with one, I think that yes, there’s a demand, but the question is how the field is going to pan out financially! I hope to have more on this topic in the next couple of weeks.
You would be the funniest life coach ever! Love the House school or motivation. This post may be my favorite of yours yet. I could definitely go life coach on the world but wouldn’t be able to stomach that title. If sarcasm has no place in a classroom then I would’ve crashed and burned long ago. Foolish people…
Yeah, that’s about my feeling, I wouldn’t mind helping people figure stuff out but I’m just not sure ‘coach’ is the right title for me.
Oh, sarcasm, what would we do without thee? I suppose it’s horrible to tell your students that the quiz they just failed was worth 25% of their grade, just so you can entertain yourself as their jaws drop (works every time) while you snigger, “Just kidding!” No wonder I quit!
Never known anyone who was or who used a life coach. I think my slogan would be: “Look how I f#$&ked up my life. Now let me help you with yours!”
I dunno, maybe that’s not such a bad place to start — ‘learn from my mistakes so you don’t make them’?
It seems life coach is the new motivational speaker. My mom often told me that I would make an excellent motivational speaker. I guess I am, because I’m really good at teaching developmental writing…
I’ve often thought of being a life coach. And why not? You put it well.
I think you should also look into “education consultant”; now there’s a racket.
As I mentioned above, I may have more info on that particular transition in the next couple of weeks! I’m actually doing a little ‘educational consulting’ of on the side right now, but I can’t quite stomach the idea of participating wholeheartedly in the kind of system that pays consultants outrageously rather than paying teachers what they’re worth in the first place.
As Despair.com puts it: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re probably a consultant.”
Too true, and I’ll always love one of my grad cohort for introducing us to the company. The walls of my grad office were totally plastered with posters and calendars from despair.com!
You would be the Daria of life coaches. Some people (maybe all of us) can use that sometimes.
I hadn’t thought of life-coaching as an alternative career to teaching. Do you have any ideas about where to look for careers for ex-academics?
I’d throw you to Post Academic (see below) for useful advice on transitioning. There’s also that Versatile PhD site if you feel like ponying up some cash, but I’m a little suspicious of its academic foundation — seems like they haven’t quite gotten over themselves yet, or admitted that PhD programs are basically just a way for the university to get cheap labor.
I think the closest I come to life-coaching is as follows:
Stu Dent: I wanted to be a history major, but I decided that I need something that will get me a job right out of college, so I’m majoring in Business/Communications Studies/Fashion Design and Merchandising/Hospitality Studies,** even though it’s not that interesting.
Professor Notorious: Look, the thing that no one will tell you is that, with the exception of a handful of preprofessional programs like nursing, your undergraduate degree is going to have almost no bearing on the first three jobs you get after college. Especially in this economy, when people are happy just to be hanging onto their pre-graduation jobs at Starbucks. Most people’s adult careers (should they be so lucky) are something they just kind of end up in. So you might as well spend these four years studying something you really enjoy, because this is likely your best chance to do that.
(**In all seriousness: these are the three majors that students think will lead directly to lucrative and exciting careers. They also have the reputation [at my uni, anyway] for being the majors of last resort, with the most lightweight classes. These two things combine to form bloated enrollments in classes like “Fundamentals of Event Planning”]
perfect.
i think you’re not quite on the mark about with the cliche that “what you do in college has no bearing on what you do in your career.” i mean, you can’t major in history and then jump right into marketing (they want you to know lots of statistics for that nowadays) or social welfare research (also requires special skillz) or even “event planning” (actually requires that you’ve planned some events!). and if you want to be a radio journalist, then you should probably major in communications, even if history seems like a useful major for preparing to be a journalist. no one gives a shit when they’re plowing through 100s of resumes. i don’t like this attitude that if you learn how to “teach yourself” and “think critically”, then you can do anything you want. it’s hard to get your foot in the door these days.
Gotta agree with e on one fact: It’s going to be easier to find a normal first job with a business or communications degree. Their generic oversupply and non-threatening vagueness is comfortingly familiar to HR in a way that more exotic liberal arts degrees just aren’t.
But I’d also disagree — I mean, if no one gives a shit about your degree, that’s exactly the reason to do something interesting, even realizing that you’ll have to sell it harder in the end. Also, your degree in event planning means jack squat unless you’ve actually planned some events — which you can certainly do while getting other degrees. Ditto for running a business or doing journalism — oh, you read about it? Good for you, now why not join the radio station or sell stuff online while getting some sort of actual education? For these reasons, I’d say critical thinking is certainly more valuable and broadly applicable than a generic grasp of [fill in the blank] ‘concept’, i.e. empty words that reflect no experience whatsoever.
Fair points, worst prof. Maybe the question moves to revolve around “interesting.” I operated under the snobby assumption that “interesting” meant the Interwar Avant-Garde or Critical Theory, while “boring” meant anything smacking of being low-brow and practical. I also took it on faith that school was the period of my life to invest 100% of my time into reading awesome stuff and talking about it with my friends, whereas after school was when I could figure out how to redirect those critical thinking skills (and, admittedly, those cocktail convo skills!) toward something else (or not, and go to grad school, which is what I did!).
This brings us back to the “life coach” question because I do think there is a market for life coaching from your position. I followed the advice of my parents (and everyone else’s parents I knew, and every other adult who told me I was smart), whose advice ended up being outdated. It’s hard to get advice that surpasses the cookie-cutter stuff they serve up at campus career centers.
On the life-coach phenom in general, I have this growing suspicion that life-coaching has become a cottage industry where I live in Los Angeles. Every time I go to a cafe, there’s a couple people who don’t seem to know each other well yet whose conversation consists entirely of advice on career and personal life.
Oh, I hear ya about outdated advice: Buy a house! College debt is GOOD! Etc. etc. I agree there’s a market for good life coaches — as you say, there’s so much generic crap advice out there, maybe it would help to have a realistic view of your individual situation. But even the life coach I was chatting with admitted that there’s a lot of people who just say they’re coaches without having credentials.
Never bought into the snobby part — I am low-brow, there’s no fighting it! — which I think was my salvation. But here’s the tough lesson: getting that first job is always going to be hard, especially if you’re not a natural networker (I’m not) and transitioning is exactly the same. You just have to hustle and hustle to sell yourself if you’re going to find something that works. There’s no way around it…but, as you say, that’s the only practical solution.
::sigh:: “Close paren.” This is why I’m a historian, and not a software coder.
I’ve met a few life coaches but never been coached by them. It really does seem like an awesome job to have. You get all the benefits of being a counselor, but, other than having less job security and no insurance reimbursement, none of the drawbacks. And if you’re a successful coach, of course, you don’t even have to worry about the lack of job security.
One of the life coaches – a successful one, at that – specializes in coaching people to follow their creative passions. When I saw your description of what you’d be like as a life coach, I thought of that. I wondered.. you’ve got to tell people that they’re not that special at some point, right?
I think it’s possible to help people follow their passions, but I don’t know what it would be like to deal with a mediocre person who didn’t seem to have much potential — I mean, what could you tell them? Then again, it seems like those are the ones who wouldn’t recognize their own incompetence and/or seek help. As for the lack of security and insurance, well, that’s exactly what 70% of the university faculty has already.
I have known a few life-coaches, and they all tend to be as crazy as, if not crazier than their clients. I’m not sure why, but perhaps it’s because they’re on-call all the time and have to deal with other people’s neuroses so often that they start to pick them up themselves.
That said, you’d probably be one of the most *productive* coaches, due in part to your sarcasm, and in part to your “you’re not special” attitude. I also imagine that it would drive you crazier, though.
I think I’d be terrible at telling other people what to do. (At least at this point in my life, when I’m still in the “omg what am I doing with myself” phase.)
I think trying to get people to fulfill their potential would be a recipe for making yourself crazy. The only thing I can think of that’s worse is marriage counseling, since I hear that 95% of couples wait until it’s just too late — oy, what a job that must be!
I’ve never met one (as if they’re “The Other”), although my guess is that is where a few of my current colleagues will end up. And y’know.. you would make a good life coach… cynicism, honesty, and a cocktail with every meeting, perhaps? I can see it as a million dollar venture.
Yeah, and then it would be a ‘Life In Hell’ coach. But yes, the cocktail would be a must!!!
Your imagined Life Coach Exchange is what most people need. I wonder if that’s what people crave when they call up a Life Coach. Do they want the tough love they probably deserve, or do they want more sarcasm-free nurturing?
I’ve never met a Life Coach. I always imagined they were these mythical creatures that appeared in biz stories or sitcoms, but they were actually therapists or career counselors. Hmmm … maybe there’s a niche out there for a whole lot of us …
I’ve met a few people who’ve used life coaches, and they’ve been an interesting mix. Some just wanted validation; some wanted actual help but didn’t want to listen to anyone who told them things they didn’t want to hear. So I don’t know what the general population is expecting…but I think there’s something to the fact that former teachers could bring some serious skilz into it!
But do you really want to be the person hired to help someone who then refuses to listen to you? I thought that was the job you just quit?
Oh, I don’t. But for those who enjoyed the mentoring part but are tired of having to do it en masse (which kind of lowers the pay rate) I suspect there might be something to it.
My husband saw one… she was both a life coach and a cognitive behavioral therapist. He saw one because after wearing some kind of weird thing on his chest all day the doctor said whatever was causing the heart attack symptoms was not his heart so it must be stress. (They also prescribed an anti-anxiety medication that I googled and turns out it causes suicidal tendencies and is difficult to wean off of… so we decided to try CBT instead. If they’d prescribed beta blockers maybe he wouldn’t have gone.)
She wasn’t particularly helpful.
Taking a sabbatical and reading Your Money or Your Life helped much more in terms of direction and angst. We’re still not sure what caused the heart palpitations. It might be stress, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a physical cause either.
Also I am reminded of Dennis Leary’s No Cure for Cancer sketch: Shut the F Up!
And a scene from the first Bob Newhart show in which he gives similar psychotherapy.
I’ve heard from reliable sources that’s there’s way more money to be made in teaching people to be life coaches than there is in actually doing it. Is there a message here?
That doesn’t surprise me…the life coach I talked to acknowledged this but seemed to think the field would grow into something. But yeah, maybe we need to rethink all this certification instead of experience stuff…
Mmmmmm…I think whether or not you’d consider a life coach really is dependent on your cultural background. Personally I’d avoid them like the plague since they remind of those awful career councillors that existed in my secondary school and Sixth Form College (I’m not from North America so I didn’t attend high school but came through a different system). They used to inflict (make us take these tests frankly) when every two years when we entered a new batch of courses (courses last two years since we take national exams at the end of them and we’re graded on a national level). I remember having no choice but to take tests that were determined to tell me my life career and what I was supposed to do with my life. If I’d paid attention to these tests/twerps I would be a traffic light operator……..and I’d have never have gone to university. I disagreed with the test results…told the career councillor/lady who was supposed to guide my life choices to think again. I was deemed a ‘rebel’…but at the same time these tests were devised since when I did finally go university (two years after taking these tests) back in the early 90s is that only 5% of my age group attended university. Life coaches were definitely something that North Americans did…so the entire idea of even consulting one is beyond those of us who are English speaking but not culturally North American. So, yikes..yeesh…we’d probably talk to friends/colleauges ..or someone who had a career that we thought was interesting.
Pst… I should add that I came to North America, like many colleauges of mine from around the world, to do a PhD here..so we’re now stuck between two worlds and their world views in tackling the problem of what next.
That’s a good point and I know several people with the same problem. One thing I did like about academia was meeting people from all over the world (although elite is elite, wherever you are, unsurprisingly!) But I agree that one should be very choosy about the people/tests/certifications one listens to!