What is a Life Coach?

To answer a lot of questions (and to engage in a bit of shameless self-promotion), I wanted to explain what a “life coach” does. This is one facet of the work I do and, judging by the response, it is something I am good at. I use the information provided by the Birkman Assessment to produce a Coaching Report Workbook. This, along with a person’s personal coaching goals, provide the basis for the relationship.

"Part therapist, part consultant, part motivational expert, part professional organizer, part friend, part nag -- the personal coach seeks to do for your life what a personal trainer does for your body."- Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune

"Once used to bolster troubled staffers, coaching now is part of the standard leadership development training for elite executives and talented up-and-comers at IBM, Motorola, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and Hewlett Packard. These companies are discreetly giving their best prospects what star athletes have long had: a trusted adviser to help reach their goals."- CNN.com

What Is A Life Coach? A life coach uses their personal experience and knowledge to help someone else achieve their personal goals and ambitions.

Personal coaches assist their clients to achieve their coachable goals. Clients set their goals and the reason they hire a coach is to accomplish their goals.

Personal coaches have expertise and training in some areas, but are more focused on helping their client. Coaches assist their clients to become the world’s leading experts on themselves.

Personal coaches are Equal Partners with their clients. Coaches are like a copilot sitting in the passenger seat of an automobile traveling to the same destination. Coaches do not do the driving, but they sometimes read the map.

Personal coaches do not answer every question. Coaches encourage their clients to find the answers that have virtually been there all along.

Goals that are best suited for the coaching process require clients to grow and improve to accomplish them. Coaching clients reduce their stress, increase their energy, make better decisions, increase their life balance, increase their peace of mind, and focus more on what is really important to them, BECAUSE of participating in the coaching process.

Clients have almost total control over the results they reap from coaching. Coaching clients set the goals they want to achieve through coaching. The purpose of hiring a coach is to achieve their goals. Their coaches concentrate on the goals achievement. The achievement of the predetermined goals produces the results desired and more. The choice is simple, control the process with consulting or control the results with coaching.

Clients develop a strong personal bond and trusting relationship with their coach. The very personal nature of the coaching process requires clients and their coaches to develop a very strong mutually trusting, mutually respectful and mutually focused partnership.

Coaching clients receive all of the fame and adulation that goes with participating in the coaching process. Personal coaches avoid the limelight or taking any credit. Plus, the coaching process is very confidential and private, and unless the client says something, no one will even know a person has a personal coach.

If you have questions, drop me an email.

To What Do You Cling?

In the book The Great Crash 1929, John Kenneth Galbraith writes, “When people are least sure they are often the most dogmatic.” Faced with uncertainty – or even fear – people will hold even more rigidly to their beliefs. (This is, I believe, part of what President Obama had in mind with his “bitter clingers” comment.) When dealing with unknowns, it is natural to return to what is known.

One of the great theologians in history was Karl Barth. In the course of his life he wrote prolifically, including a several volume collection entitled Church Dogmatics. His thought and theology have shaped literally hundreds of thousands of lives. J.M. Boice records the following story about Karl Barth,

"Several years before his death the Swiss theologian Karl Barth came to the United States for a series of lectures. At one of these, after a very impressive lecture, a student asked a typically American question. He said, 'Dr. Barth, what is the greatest thought that has ever passed through your mind?' The aging professor paused for a long time as he obviously thought about his answer. Then he said with great simplicity: ‘Jesus loves me! This I know, for the Bible tells me so'"

What are the basic truths of your life? What are your foundational beliefs?

Post Christian United States

It is obvious that the Christian religion is on the decline in the United States. On April 4th of this year, Newsweek magazine published an article by Jon Meacham entitled “The End of Christian America.” President Obama visiting Turkey this week said "We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation…." The influence of Evangelicals in politics is waning and church attendance continues to decline. We are on the verge of entering – if we have not already entered – a Post-Christian era in the United States. For many, this is more than a little depressing.

The teachings of Jesus were never meant to be the foundation for a religion. In fact, Jesus is one of the most antireligious voices in history. From the beginning, his words were meant to be lived, not simply studied and memorized. The “church” was intended to be a fellowship of strugglers whose intention was to walk as Jesus did – not a place for club members to gather weekly. Religion is humanity’s attempt to redeem itself. Jesus reveals a Heavenly Father who reaches to us.

The call of Jesus in 2009 is the same as it was when he proclaimed it. "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." Decline in a religion does not change our responsibility to our commitment.

Right or Wrong?

By Travis Andersen, Associated Press

CHICHESTER, N.H.—A pastor in this quiet, picturesque New England town thought he was doing the Christian thing when he took in a convicted child killer who had served his time but had nowhere to go.

But some neighbors of the Rev. David Pinckney vehemently disagree, one even threatening to burn his house down after officials could find no one else willing to take 60-year-old Raymond Guay.

More than 200 town residents on Tuesday packed a selectmen's meeting, the first since news of Guay's arrival broke over the weekend. Most called for Guay's removal, claiming repeatedly that their children couldn't sleep and were afraid to play outside.

Lindsay Holden told the selectmen that she has met with state and federal officials and has pressed them to move Guay somewhere else for the sake of her children.

"I wouldn't be a good mom if I stood by and did nothing," she said.

Pinckney, pastor of the evangelical River of Grace Church a dozen miles west in Concord, and Guay, who was paroled in September after 35 years behind bars, did not attend the meeting.

Guay already had a criminal record when he was charged in 1973, at age 25, with abducting and murdering a 12-year-old boy in Nashua. Authorities said he planned to sexually assault the boy, whose body was clad only in socks and undershorts.

Guay pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to up to 25 years. He kidnapped a Concord couple after briefly escaping from the nearby state prison in 1982 and was sent to a federal prison in California, where he stabbed an inmate in 1991, court records show.

He was released from a federal prison in West Virginia in September after New Hampshire officials lost a bid to keep him incarcerated as a dangerous sexual predator under federal law.

After New Hampshire officials protested his relocation to Manchester last fall, Guay went to a halfway house in Connecticut. A judge recently ordered him to spend the remaining 2 1/2 years of his parole in New Hampshire.

Two rooming houses turned Guay away when he returned to Concord last week.

A Concord prison chaplain contacted Pinckney, who agreed to take Guay in after meeting him and clearing it with his wife and their four children living at home, ages 13 to 18. Their oldest son is away at college. Guay is staying with the family while he looks for a job and place to live.

The local selectmen, before they heard from residents, voted unanimously to ask federal probation officer Thomas Tarr to move Guay. Selectman Richard DeBold stressed that his board has no legal authority in the matter.

Tarr told residents he had to comply with a federal judge's order to place Guay in New Hampshire. He said Guay has agreed to wear a monitoring device while staying with Pinckney's family. He blamed "inflammatory" media coverage for the flap.

Several residents said they doubted the system could save their children if Guay snapped.

Pinckney did not return calls or answer the door when a reporter visited his house, but he assured the town in an open letter published Tuesday that Guay poses no threat.

"We would not be doing this if we thought we were endangering our town, neighbors or children," he wrote.

Though Guay "has committed some horrendous crimes in his past," he has been on "a very different course" since a religious transformation in 1993, Pinckney said.

Pinckney has told Guay he may only leave the house in a car with another adult and can live with the family for no more than two months.

When residents asked what would happen if Guay didn't find a job or a new place by then, Tarr said he couldn't guarantee Guay would leave, adding that authorities have begun scouting two or three new locations for him outside Chichester. He would not elaborate.

Resident Greg Steelman stood out from the crowd Tuesday, telling his neighbors to tone down the hysteria surrounding Guay.

"Our kids probably have a better chance of getting hit by a drunk driver than getting killed by this guy," he said.

Another resident, Brandon Giuda, urged neighbors to pipe down and vote for pro-gun and pro-death penalty candidates if they really wanted to protect their families.

Many residents said Chichester, population about 2,200, is too small and rural to be suitable for Guay.

Conrad Mandsager, of Nottingham, just southeast of Chichester, disagreed. In the 1980s, Mandsager worked for the Prison Fellowship, a faith-based group that helps parolees find jobs, and took a violent felon into his home with his family of five. He said the man got a job through the Prison Fellowship and turned his life around.

"You create more opportunities for problems by putting (convicts) in a larger city where there's no accountability," Mandsager said by phone. He said he expects better results in a home like Pinckney's, "where there's accountability and care and love for the guy."

What Am I Doing?

A Purpose or Mission Statement is a declaration of your reason for existence. Companies use these to challenge their employees, educate their shareholders and to inform their customers.

McDonald's brand mission is to "be our customers' favorite place and way to eat."

Levi-Strauss and Company: “People love our clothes and trust our company. We will market the most appealing and widely worn casual clothing in the world. We will clothe the world.”

"At Microsoft, we work to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential. This is our mission. Everything we do reflects this mission and the values that make it possible."

NIKE: "To Bring Inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world."

What is the Purpose or Mission Statement of your life?

What is your reason for existence?

Cyber-Hedonism

"The question in many internet-watchers’ minds is this: as young surfers are exposed to facts, sights, sounds and a range of interlocutors that are far beyond their parents’ ken, how will they use that access? Will they try to change the world, or simply settle for enjoying themselves?

"There is so much evidence of the latter choice that pundits have invented a new word—cyber-hedonism—to describe it. To the dismay of idealists, young people in many countries seem to be giving up the political struggles of previous generations and opting instead for a sort of digital nirvana, reveling in a vast supply of movies, music, instant communication and of course, sexual opportunity."

Welcome to the Brave New World.

From Economist.com, February 10, 2009

Microgod

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, was interviewed November 1995 on PBS by David Frost. Below is the transcript with minor edits.

Frost: Do you believe in the Sermon on the Mount?

Gates: I don't. I'm not somebody who goes to church on a regular basis. The specific elements of Christianity are not something I'm a huge believer in. There's a lot of merit in the moral aspects of religion. I think it can have a very very positive impact.

Frost: I sometimes say to people, do you believe there is a god, or do you know there is a god? And, you'd say you don't know?

Gates: In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don't know if there's a god or not, but I think religious principles are quite valid.

Gates was profiled in a January 13, 1996 TIME magazine cover story. Here are some excerpts:

"Isn't there something special, perhaps even divine, about the human soul?" interviewer Walter Isaacson asks Gates "His face suddenly becomes expressionless," writes Isaacson, "his squeaky voice turns toneless, and he folds his arms across his belly and vigorously rocks back and forth in a mannerism that has become so mimicked at MICROSOFT that a meeting there can resemble a round table of ecstatic rabbis."

"I don't have any evidence on that," answers Gates. "I don't have any evidence of that."

He later states, "Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning."