Coach following her dream

By JULIE MIDDLETON

Donna Andronicos went to a life coach last year seeking help to find some direction. The coach not only helped clarify her career dreams but set her on a whole new path - to become a career coach.

Andronicos, 36, a Fonterra change management specialist, has been made redundant after nearly three years with the dairy giant, and will need a new job from the end of next month.

But the Wellington woman had been increasingly questioning her career as she moved through her 30s, and spent six months under the guidance of Silverstream life coach Annette Nickalls last year.

"It was a during that time I realised that I needed to pursue my dream on the work front," says Andronicos.

That dream was to be a psychologist, and the coaching gave her the impetus to take the first step: studying part-time for a bachelor of applied science.

The experience of being coached taught her "how simple but powerful the whole process is".

"It's generally a simple framework that you follow, but if you fully engage, the results are really powerful in terms of challenging your belief systems [and] challenging the road that you're going down ... "

She started her own part-time coaching training with American expert Marcia Bench by teleclass last October, working through the models Bench teaches through her Career Coach Institute in Arizona, and practising on classmates.

Andronicos has some freebie hours with clients to make up, but she will finish by early June on the second level of a four-tier set of qualifications.

"I love the work - I've never got such a sense of energy and satisfaction out of anything I've ever done before," she says.

"I know what a difficult transition it can be if you're changing careers or being made redundant - work is such a big part of our lives ... and I think it's important that work is an extension of who we are.

"That's what I didn't feel I had fully grasped in the past - that work needed to be an extension of me for me to be happy."

Andronicos joins a growing pool of coaches in New Zealand. Life coach, career coach, team coach, spiritual coach, retirement coach - there's been an explosion of people offering help to sort out your career and your life.

Problem is, coaching is an unregulated field. Those who have jumped through the training and self-regulatory hoops which do exist worry about the damage the less scrupulous - or ignorant - might do to their reputations.

"People can say they're a coach, put their name on cards and go into business," says Linda Matuschka, who calls herself a personal coach (she thinks the term "life coach" has been "a bit debased").

Matuschka calls her business Coaching Connections and she is on the Australasian board of the International Coach Federation (ICF), founded in the United States in 1992.

There are three questions Auckland-based Matuschka asks of anyone who claims to be a coach, and it's something she finds herself doing frequently these days.

The queries are these: have they had coach-specific training, and what sort? Have they taken steps towards some sort of credentials? Are they a member of the ICF?

Matuschka is one of about 70 New Zealand members of the ICF, which covers all styles of coaching. What binds them is a commitment to working in a way that helps clients to make their own decisions.

ICF members also commit to a code of ethics and run programmes to assess coaches and those who teach others to be coaches.