Beware the Life Coach Who Offers to Help You Fulfill Your Dreams

What on earth is happening out there? When I attend professional association meetings and am routinely assaulted by "life coaches" trying to pitch me as a client, I wonder if the professional world has gone slightly mad. Now I know this does make me sound solidly middle-aged, but I was doing executive coaching before it had a name. When on earth did it morph into "life coaching" and take on this strange, frothy form? Good grief. It's just embarrassing.

These days, you'll have to pierce through a lot of noise in the system to get to a good coach whether of the career, leadership, or personal variety. I know, because I am always trolling for affiliates to join my team. For what it's worth, here are the minimal criteria I think you need to use. I use them myself when screening candidates.

Screen without any hesitation for ALL of the following:

1. Good personal chemistry and a sense of trust. Done right, coaching of any variety will quickly put you in some very vulnerable and occasionally uncomfortable places (sorry!). You must be able to trust the coach both personally and in terms of his or her professional competence. If you can't let down your guard with the coach, you won't grow. A "maybe" should always be a "no." If you don't feel good chemistry and a gut-level sense of trust in your first meeting, move on.

2. Substantial demonstrated results. Has the coach worked with others at your level and in similar professions? What goals did these clients have? Were these goals similar to yours? If so, what results did they achieve? Some might blab on about how results are hard to define. That's nonsense. Don't waste your time with anyone who can't demonstrate results with clients who are in some meaningful way similar to you.

3. Availability. A coach should be available to you, and not just during prescribed meeting times. Everyone learns differently. Not everyone grows best through weekly one-hour structured meetings. It's a relatively personal relationship, but a business one between peers first and foremost. As such, I expect coaches to take calls between appointments and from time to time after the official coaching process has been tied off. Some of my clients don't even set appointments any more. They call me when they need me. If a potential coach squirms at this idea, it makes me wonder why he or she can't better manage time, client expectations, and fee schedules.

4. Speed. Unless you drag your feet, you should be able to experience some progress and personal improvement within the first 1 - 2 weeks after the initial assessment is complete, in some cases sooner. Coaching is not therapy, and no coach should assume that it will take months for you to show any improvement at all. The only thing that improves with that attitude is the bank balance of the coach.

5. Strategic focus on strengths, and not just because Marcus Buckingham made it trendy and cool. We lead from our strengths, and studies had proven this years before Now, Discover Your Strengths hit the bookstores. A good coach helps you figure out how to better leverage and develop your strengths in order to make progress toward your development goals. He or she will also help you figure out how to manage or improve your weaker areas, but your weaknesses shouldn't be where you spend all of your coaching time, or even most of it. Now if I could only convince some of my clients of that...