SANDY Vilas, the owner of Coach University, is excited. This week, his American online self improvement organisation enrolled its first Irish student, a Cork woman who will receive her tuition free of charge and then qualify as a personal coach.
"The first five people to join from any country get us for free," Vilas explained on the telephone from Houston, Texas. "Our vision is that everybody will have a coach and that tens of thousands of coaches will help people world wide." The current figure is 1,000, but you can't blame Vilas for getting carried away. This virtual institution's campus on the Internet pulsates with positive feeling.
Coach University sweeps its believers along on a tide of New Age emotion, 12 step programme discipline and self esteem morality. "People are tired of waiting for the life they want," Vilas says. "We want everyone to live in the present perfect, where everything and everyone in your life is in great shape." Life, according to this philosophy, should be a problem free zone". And a personal coach, by listening and by identifying a client's impediments, can eliminate them.
Sounds too good - or at least too vague - to be true? Perhaps but in the hallowed tradition of American consumerism Coach University supports its vision with a proven method and is unapologetic about its tuition fees and coaching rates.
The Coach training programme costs $2,495 but CU points out that "you earn as you learn". Individuals following the two year programme may coach clients for $100 to $200 an hour, a fee that covers weekly telephone sessions along with email and fax advice. Coaches themselves have coaches and clients often become coaches in a process reminiscent of another great entrepreneurial tradition - the chain letter.
"I couldn't have got through the past few years without my coach," says physician and Coach University graduate, Rainbow Casey. "She provided constant unconditional support and attention." With 20 years' medical experience, Casey now practises "health coaching" by telephone and in person, supporting "happy, strong people" with homeopathy and other techniques outside the "authoritarian, patriarchal model of standard medicine". This may involve telling clients to cut down on coffee or cigarettes.
Mostly it involves application of the university's central text: 25 Secrets Of Having The Life You Really Want. A selection reads: "Having it all is just the beginning. For an effortless life, get more than you need and far more than you deserve. Stop hanging around with people who have less to lose than you do."
John Leonard, who founded Coach University in 1988, is the author of the 25 Secrets and its companion volume, Top 10 Steps To Becoming Irresistibly Attractive ("Eliminate the holes in your life. Learn from people who are naturally attractive.") "John is a genius when it comes to language, Sandy Vilas explains.
Leonard may have worldwide ambitions but Coach University remains a distinctly American phenomenon. About 500 individuals a year enter its programme there, the overwhelming number of them in California and Colorado, the traditional spawning grounds of quirky belief systems. Dispensing its motivational wisdom on the Internet, the virtual hearth for a growing number of Americans, CU has successfully marketed its own blend of phone in booster/ psychotherapy to people who want individual but faceless consultation.
It is analogous to the radio shows where therapists answer questions from listeners, except that this is one on one," observes Daniel Anderson, professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts. "It's also a logical extension of the Internet, where chat rooms have already become a substitute for serious communication with a trained adviser, friend or family member."
Friend? Family? Snap out of it, Prof Anderson. We're talking about success here, not duty.
"Friends have an emotional investment in their relationship with you, in staying connected," says Laurie Riddell Geary, a coach and coachee in Boston. "But coaches are supposed to be honest. Mine will interrupt me when I'm off the point and say `Here's what I'm hearing.' They facilitate what we call breakthrough thinking."
Coach University graduates also have an investment, however, in what is, above all, a business relationship. You stop paying; they stop calling. And once money is involved, honesty has a way of becoming ego massage, a service that appeals to both client and adviser in these confusing times.
"A lot of therapists become coaches because it's a relief to work with healthy people who have goals," explains Geary, a Boston University graduate in educational psychology, "And there's more flexibility. You can coach from your car, even get on a phone bridge with 20 other people."
A "phone bridge" is CU terminology for a conference call. And "flexibility" as it is most commonly used in both the American corporate and healthcare contexts usually means cost cutting. "There is a definite movement in medical care to shorter, cost effective times with a patient," says Daniel Anderson, "so that consultation becomes a commodity rather than a personal relationship."
Coach University does not claim any association with or endorsement from the medical or psychiatric profession. Its service can be seen, however, as part of a trend in those larger areas to market human services as commodities, a trend that worries observers like Prof Anderson. "When the certification procedure is arbitrary and without oversight, the potential for abuse of any service like this is troubling," he concludes.
ITS followers insist that, far from being a commodity, Coach University is an enriching experience with spiritual potential. "We've lost touch with the human in our culture," says Rainbow Casey, "and coaches can encourage their clients to develop human qualities, whether in their personal or professional lives."
Human qualities being developed anonymously through electronic connections? Coach University may sound more like science fiction than real life to the uninitiated. But what do they know? They haven't even reached Step One.
