Executive Times
		2005 Book Reviews
		SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless by Steve Salerno
		Rating: ••• (Recommended)
		Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com
	Repercussions My expectations were met when I learned about the destructive and fraudulent practices rampant in the self-help and actualization movement (SHAM) on the pages of Steve Salerno’s new book, SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless. What surprised me was the many ways in which our society suffers from the repercussions of the self-help movement. Salerno concludes that this movement does real harm because of what is now generally accepted in education, health care and psychology. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 6, “Put Me In, Coach, I’m Ready to Pay,” pp. 105-108: Soon a coach will be seen as someone you have as a matter of course to make your life run more efficiently, like an accountant. —Sunday Telegraph (London), July 1999 “You are the creator,” says the Web site of Jane Ellen Sexton, “whether you like it or not. That responsibility is also your gift of empowerment. So how do you cooperate with you while honoring your own divinity?” That last line does not contain a typo. “How do you cooperate with you” is the kind of question you’d expect from a self-described “intuitive life coach,” especially one who also offers “channeling” for people whose self-help needs exceed garden-variety intuitive life coaching. “Channeling,” Sexton helpfully explains, “is the process where I connect with information that flows through me from dimensions outside of the earth plane for purposes of expanding reality. This information comes from a spiritual, non-intellectual level. The best way I would describe the process is that my ego and personality move aside, and I become the vessel for the information that is the most appropriate for you in the moment.” Though she may grope a bit in defining the process, Sexton has no trouble explaining that her services as an intuitive life coach cost $150 an hour—or $250 per ninety-minute session if you go the channeling route. But most clients should be able to get away with the basic life coaching, as it’s the “experience” she has “most aligned with” since she became “certified to do spiritual work.” Sexton also promises that “while I’m listening to you, I’m not focused on anything but you.” At $2.50 a minute, that’s comforting to know. Marketdata Enterprises estimates that twenty-five thousand “life coaches” of various stripes are now active in the United States, about ten thousand of them working in corporate America alone. The International Coach Federation (ICF), founded in 1992 as the National Association of Professional Coaches, claimed seven thousand members worldwide by 2004; that’s up nearly 200 percent in just four years. And ICF is just one of several fraternal bodies that (very) loosely oversee this new SHAM specialty. Technically, no life coach is answerable to ICF or any other regulatory body. Of course, civilian penalties may apply if coaches commit a provable fraud, but even that’s unlikely to occur, since the nature of the promise is so intangible and, usually, nonspecific. Life coaching is the Dodge City of SHAM. “A HEAVY INDUSTRY” As SHAM subcategories go, the coaching sensation—and it surely is that—remains in its infancy. In a major 2002 survey of coaching practices underwritten by the California School of Organizational Studies (CSOS), 42 percent of the respondents confessed to less than two years of experience. True, an elite corps of top managers has long sought counsel from an elite corps of personal consultants; for the right price, the right person could get Tony Robbins himself for an afternoon. But in recent years, coaching has gone mass-market with an astonishing trajectory: a growth rate the Economist in 2002 estimated at 40 percent per year. Dozens of Web sites lure browsers with names like coachville.com, mylifecoach .com, lifecoachtraining .com, and solveyourproblem . corn. There is even inanimate coaching delivered straight to your desktop: A British product, LifeBuilder, claims to be “the only desktop Life-coaching and self-improvement programme available in the world and, at just £19.95 [about US$35) it’s truly amazing. Whatever your goals, aims and dreams might be, take a look at LifeBuilder.” Like the regimens themselves, costs are all over the map. In business settings, coaches are so sought after that their hourly earnings often outpace those of counseling professionals with hard-won credentials. A top executive coach like Jeffrey Auerbach, who is also president of the College of Executive Coaching, may charge $400 or more per hour, easily exceeding the going rate for most established psychologists or psychiatrists. This is where the phrase “phone it in” takes on a whole new meaning. Despite the lofty hourly sums, coaches in many cases needn’t show up on the premises. They’ll typically make three or four thirty- to sixty-minute calls, and e-mail their invoices, flexing their coaching pursuits around their 9-to-S jobs and other freelance activities. A case in point is Richard Brendan of Indianapolis. Aside from being a “Life Purpose” coach, Brendan produces and hosts the inspirationalJourneysFire radio show (featuring “conversations on life and love with Activists of the Heart”), promotes himself as a speaker-for-hire, and serves as a director of the Indianapolis chapter of HealthNet, a major managed-care provider. He says he’s also a lifetime member of the Dead Poets Society. Though it’s almost impossible to reckon a total dollar volume for all coaching activities, one can extrapolate from the CSOS survey. It arrived at a mean annual income of $37,500 for its 1,338 respondents, most of whom worked only part-time. (Those labeling themselves “executive coaches” reported an average income of $77,339.) If the $37,500 figure holds for Marketdata’s estimated universe of twenty-five thousand coaches, the end result is just under $1 billion in coaching income. “Coaching is becoming a heavy industry,” Warren Bennis, a professor of business administration at the University of Southern California’s business school and the author of the 1990 business classic On Becoming a Leader, told me in an interview. “It’s an incredible story.” All the more so because many of today’s life coaches were doing something else before the turn of the millennium; in a fair percentage of the cases that something had little to do with counseling, therapy, or training of any kind. “Whenever you get increased demand, and supply comes to meet it quickly, it doesn’t necessarily have to be of the best quality,” John Kotter, a professor of leadership at the Harvard Business School, told me. “If the demand is high enough, all kinds of muck will flow into the market.” That river of flowing muck has not prevented a steady complement of otherwise-savvy people (as well as some not-so-savvy ones, as we’ll see) from putting their faith in coaching. Today, says Jim Naughton of Psychotherapy Networker, a magazine for professionals in counseling fields, life coaching is fast becoming “the equivalent of having a personal trainer.” That’s how mainstream the once-fringe concept has gone. Fortune magazine, in a long article on the subject, called executive coaching “the hottest thing in management.” The demand is such that companies sometimes will even try to make coaches out of people who didn’t think of it on their own. For example, Linda Hill, a Harvard Business School professor, has reportedly been “inundated” with requests to coach. Managers hire coaches to facilitate divisional change (and deflect the blame that often accompanies it). Midlevel staffers, no longer anticipating the continuity of employment or professional TLC that once was expected from the business world, have turned to coaches for guidance on how to improve their morale, get that last ounce out of professional productivity, and make better, more personally relevant decisions— both on the job and off. Personal coaches are “not just sticking to corporate matters,” Bennis told me, “and that’s really the whole point of it. They’ve widened the lens to encompass all areas of the person’s performance. They’ll ask questions like ‘Does this job make you happy?’ ‘Should you even be in this line of work?” The expose parts of SHAM can be humorous, especially for those of us who are not addicted to self-help programs. The harmful impact of quacks on the rest of society will leave readers thinking about SHAM long after turning the final page. Steve Hopkins, November 21, 2005
Buy SHAM @ amazon.com			Go To Hopkins & Company Homepage
Go to 2005 Book Shelf			Go to Executive Times Archives
	ã 2005 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for this book appeared in the December 2005 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/SHAM.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 Phone: 708-466-4650 • Fax: 708-386-8687 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com www.hopkinsandcompany.com