Life coaches help clients reach next level
By Jenn Director Knudsen
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Athletes in search of a better swing, stroke, pivot, header or dribble consult a sports coach to get them to the next level.
Increasingly, highly motivated people in search of meeting personal, parenting, business and other, more quotidian goals are seeking out life coaches for the same reason. To get to the next level.
Here are three life coaches in our community. These women are part of a growing trend of people getting trained and certified to guide clients toward meeting goals the client identifies.
But first, what is a life coach?
Lois Shenker defines a life coach as a "personal trainer for life choices and directions, for creating the life one wants to live," she writes in promotional materials for her new career. Well into grandmotherhood, with 10 grandkids to brag about, Shenker specializes in—as she puts it—"the challenges and joys of contemporary Jewish life."
In fact, a 1998 survey by the International Coach Federation found nearly 85 percent of clients believe "the main role of their coach is to be a sounding board—to listen to them and give honest feedback."
A certified life coach specializing in business coaching, Nemhauser adds that life coaching "is absolutely not therapy."
And she should know: Nemhauser also holds a doctorate in clinical psychology and still maintains a Tigard-based clinical practice. She says she keeps her coaching career of five years quite separate from the counseling work she's been doing for two decades.
"It's always the client's choice; it's not me directing," Nemhauser said in a recent interview from a vacation spot in Central Oregon. "That's one of the things that differ between therapy and coaching. ? It's not about diagnosing any illness."
The only similarity between the two professions is the clients' guaranteed confidentiality.
More and more people are becoming certified life coaches and their services are being sought out in greater numbers, too.
Starting in the 1980s, mainly men needing guidance in their lives more comfortably consulted a "coach" rather than a therapist, according to Shenker, a Neveh member and author of "Welcome to the Family: Opening Doors to the Jewish Experience."
Today, both men and women also are attracted to working with a life coach because it's client-driven and very results-oriented, said Lois Wallin-Sanchez, who this summer became a certified life coach at the Life Purpose Institute in La Jolla, Calif., where Shenker earned her certification.
"It's not like therapy, where you work for years and years," says Wallin-Sanchez of southeast Portland and also a Neveh Shalom member.
She continues in a telephone interview: "People come up with their own plan; the whole concept is that people have their own best answers" and the coach merely nudges them toward their goals while holding them accountable to those goals.
For example, in her parenting niche (thanks to 14 years as a Portland Jewish Academy educator and mother of three grown children) she recently worked with a mother yearning for more peace in her home.
Wallin-Sanchez, 56, who also holds a master's in clinical psychology, says she helped this mom realize her behaviors didn't line up with her values. Her parenting style exuded anger, and her child picked up on that tension.
This woman recognized, with Wallin-Sanchez's gentle prodding, she first had to deal more effectively with her own anger before she could respond positively to family issues and thus effect the change she desired.
Life coaches' clients not only are highly motivated to improve certain facets of their lives but also have the extra cash to pay for the guided improvements—whether one-on-one, over the phone, in a group setting, or in workshops.
Nationally, clients pay a life coach between $250 and $1,000 for between two and four sessions a month, according to the International Coach Federation, a non-profit resource for coaches and their clients.
Oregon's life-coach clients pay an average of between $250 and $500 for the same number of visits within a month, according to Veronika Noize, president of the NW Coach Association that today has 76 members, up from only 14 members in 2001. The NWCA opened its local chapter in 1999.
Shenker, Wallin-Sanchez and Nemhauser's fees all are in line with this state's average. Nemhauser, for instance, charges between $150 and $250 an hour and also will set up a three-month (or longer) package with a client. And Wallin-Sanchez's clients pay between $75 and $100 an hour.
Shenker and Wallin-Sanchez work individually, as well as in a trio (along with April Anderson) called AL2 Associated Life Coaches, LLC. The group conducts classes and workshops.
Nemhauser often is hired by companies to provide in-house business-coaching services to individual and groups of employees.
Regardless of the format in which these women work, each does it for the enjoyment of being a collaborator in another's process of self-improvement.
Says Nemhauser: "For me, it's a privilege to be able to participate with them."