The business of making decisions for others

By TIM WATKIN

Once a week, the managing director of Red Rocks Advertising, Laura Humphreys, spends an hour doing something she suspects her father would disapprove of.

It simply wasn't done in his day. Nowadays, it's happening all over the country.

Every Thursday at 8 am, Laura, aged 37, goes to meet her life coach.

Determined to learn leadership skills and ways of handling the rising stress she has felt at the helm of a growing business, Humphreys has sought professional advice "to help me get more balance."

And it's working for her. "I suspect that's why this sort of thing is popular. People are working harder and harder and longer and longer hours. You suddenly wake up one day and you've actually got no life. And that's not what it's all about."

Life coaches are just one of the newer manifestations of "this sort of thing." Both the demand and supply of personal advisers is growing, and quickly: life or stress coaches, career counsellors, financial advisers, household managers, space organisers, wardrobe planners, performance coaches ... there's a myriad of small businesses cropping up to help you to help yourself.

What do they all do, you ask? Let's take a few examples.

A space-organiser, such as Catherine Smith of Space Smiths, will come to you, say, if your office or kitchen is chaos or if you are panicked about moving house.

In the course of a three or four-hour consultation ($250-300) she will give you a "diagnosis" of your problem and help you to design a system to cut through the clutter. She will bring in tradespeople, order your files, even borrow paintings to make sure you're comfortable in your space.

Next, to make sure you're looking as good as your newly streamlined house or office, you'll need an image consultant. Nicole Davis, of I Image Consultants, can go through your wardrobe, reorganise it, and give you a fashion plan in just a few hours ($175). Or you can go for the full-day package: diet and exercise plan, new hair colour and style, makeover and the wardrobe plan ($525).

Now you're looking good. But are you thinking straight? Time for the life coach to help you change your job, your goals, or maybe your attitude.

Liz Constable of Career Makers will spend around two hours a week with you — on the phone, individually or in a group — guiding you through difficult decisions, offering focus or support through change, or helping you to deal with some personal issues ($220). It could be a one-off session or go on for 18 months. You choose. And be ready for homework between sessions (Constable calls it "homeplay") to figure out what you really want out of life. Exercises include going to a bookshop and deciding which section you're drawn to or leafing through the Yellow Pages to build up a list of your skills and interests.

If all that homeplay and space-sorting has taken up all your time, Wendy Claire from
A Woman's Touch will bake you a cake, organise your dinner party, take your old folks out for a drive, or buy a birthday present for your spouse ($15-30 an hour).

While there's no way of knowing how many New Zealanders are paying for some kind of personal development or advice, the anecdotal evidence is that it's rising quickly and that Humphreys, and her friends who use similar services, are the typical consumers. They tend to be cash-rich and time-poor, aged 30 or 40-something.

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While life and career coaches say they work with everyone from working-class school-leavers to wealthy retirees, Constable agrees that the bulk of their clients are "successful with the career, money, house, husband or wife, but they feel like something's missing."

Clearly, if you're working three jobs to pay the mortgage, you don't have the time or the cash for paid support. A personal adviser is very much a luxury accessory.

For some, he or she is a status symbol on a par with a butler in Victorian times. Davis knows some of her clients use her just so they can tell friends, "My image consultant says this ..." Smith was told early on that as soon as word of a new type of personal adviser gets round, some people "will simply have to use you."

Humphreys, who has also used a personal trainer, sees her use of a life coach as nothing more than a practical solution to a practical problem.

For her and her peers, a life coach or personal trainer is no different from a doctor or a hairdresser: just another service to make life a little easier.

But there's more to the evolution of this niche industry than that. Those in its vanguard know their success is reliant on a significant social, even philosophical, change.

Less than a generation ago, such services would not only have been rarer than excess pounds on a personal trainer, they would have been scoffed at. It's all American mumbo-jumbo, dad would have grumbled — dads like Humphreys', a "successful businessman of the old school."

As a nation of independent, resourceful types with a piece of No 8 fencing wire permanently in our collective pockets, surely we don't need these kinds of advisers.

Philip Gould, General Manager of Les Mills New Zealand and employer of 60 personal trainers, laughs. "It's a myth. The average Kiwi probably can't even look under the bonnet of their car anymore."

Kevin Simms, a performance coach with eight years' experience in personal training, says what used to be considered a weakness is now common sense. If you're pitching for a multi-million dollar contract, why wouldn't you hire someone to make sure your presentation skills were up to scratch?

"There's nothing soft about it. There are bottom-line, tangible, profitable reasons [for seeking advice]."

"Twenty years ago there was more stability. People went into a job for life," says career consultant Paula Stenberg of Career Lifestyle. "Today that's not happening.

"Change is all around. If people don't look after themselves, nobody else will."

Demand for such support services is a result of all the major post-war social upheavals — technology, feminism, longer work hours, family and neighbourhood breakdown, more transient jobs and mobile lives, and the sheer speed of change. Whatever other good they have brought, each one has stolen time and security.

The pace of modern life, with its demands for efficiency and productivity, is such that we have less time to do many of the things our parents considered normal parts of daily life — from cooking a meal to talking through problems to getting some exercise.

This social transformation is most apparent in the relentless corporate and business realms where, in the past two decades, more employees are expected to give more time and intensity.

"These people tend to be quite driven," says Institute of Management chief executive, Ron Eddy. "If you're really driven it can become all encompassing. Now, with all the slimmed down structures I don't think people have enough time."

As we move between jobs — or projects, or contracts — more often, competing more with colleagues, there's less chat and support among workmates. Much work is transient: call it flexible if it works for you, feckless if it doesn't. Then there's the rapid creation of new jobs and industries unthought of just a few years ago, which creates a constant need for retraining.

Professor Kerr Inkson, of Massey University's Management and International Business department, says it's no coincidence the people working in this environment turn to professional consultants as a way of coping with the change and stress.

"There are parallels in the way businesses outsource things they feel they can't do for themselves. That serves as a role model for business people in finding some effective ways of running their own lives."

While organisational services like Smith's sometimes meet with resistance from people who equate an empty desk with slackness, Eddy says some New Zealand firms are following trends in America where secretaries who basically act as 1950s-style home-making wives are offered as part of the salary package.

"They [some executives] almost need someone to run their lives for them while they run the business."

"Organisations," Inkson adds, "feel it's not a waste of resources to make sure these people perform."

What's more, these social upheavals follow us home.

Moving more between jobs, we also move more between cities and countries, letting relationships slide and isolating ourselves from traditional support networks. We don't talk to our neighbours because we either don't know them or, if we do, they're just as busy as us. Friends go far and wide. It's common for families to break or drift apart.

With more women in paid work, the traditional divisions of responsibility are also redundant. Yet the housework, and many other unloved labours, still have to be done and the children cared for.

In the end even the change itself, stressful and time-consuming as it is, urges us to call in help. Modern solutions to modern problems in a modern society, our advisers give us an oasis of order in our lives when we often feel out of control.

Author Fay Weldon has a name for the society we have created — "the ergonarchy: rule by a work ethic closely entwined with a consuming duty."

Writing in the New Statesman in April, she argues: "Where once we worked in order to make things, and thus keep warm and fed, now we work in order to earn, and earn in order to spend in order to work.

"We live longer and healthier lives, but not necessarily in tranquillity and contentment."

Under orders from the ergonarchy, says Weldon, we compete with each other, train, and retrain for jobs that disappear as soon as we get them; we work longer hours under the misapprehension it's in our own interests; our children are socialised by others; the old and weak are ignored; and science finds ever new ways of keeping us productive and reproductive for longer.

The ergonarchy is a devil who "thrives at the citizen's expense ... And we never even asked him in: he just happened."

Into this stormy scene steps the flock of new service providers, offering shelter from the rain and hail of uncertainty, isolation and inadequacy.

"So any business services which offer people a sense of control are the emergent businesses," says Smith. "All these business are following the same trend — to simplify things for us."

In other words they act as substitutes. A mother, priest, neighbour, or friend when the original is not available. Gould realised this slightly Freudian truth long ago — his personal trainers are "part coach, part mum."

"We don't have to worry whether we're having peas or carrots for probably 20 years or more. We are used to having our mums look after us.

"It looks like we're a country of wusses, but the truth is we are just trying to make the most of a world that is increasingly complex and we're trying to give ourselves some time back."

But there's a muddle of paradoxes here: people seeking to simplify their lives by hiring more people and seeking more information; adding another appointment to their list of commitments because they're so busy; bringing in a stranger to gain more control over their own life. To extend Weldon's thesis, they buy further into the ergonarchy as a means of fending it off.

Buying is the operative word. These days, we're prepared to pay for this support. No time for wishes, but if you can write a cheque, a fairy godmother will be there in minutes.

As with rugby, we have professionalised a part of life that until recently occurred informally and at our leisure. Advice and support was commonly sought and given around the kitchen table or at the pub and our time was organised around family and friends. When we wanted to get fit we joined a local sports club or went for a run.

But in contrast to rugby, where the country has shown its discomfort with the commercialisation of tradition by embracing Todd Blackadder, the public appetite for professional personal advice seems to be far from sated.

Wendy Claire describes it as a "takeaway mentality," buying some freedom, some support, some time, whenever we need it. But she worries about the repercussions of outsourcing emotional and physical chores that we used to do ourselves.

"I'm wondering about the whole raft of life skills that may be being lost," says Claire. "Just anecdotally, most women of my generation could cook. I'm not sure you could say the same about young women today."

The advisers point to two good reasons for buying in: impartiality and expertise. Your mum or mate has fixed opinions of what's best for you and isn't in the business of keeping up with the latest trends in fashion, finance or careers.

Then there's the added benefit of external motivation.

Gould, who used to swim 40 to 60 lengths a session, remembers when a swimmer friend offered to help him train.

"All that worry and analysis was taken away from me because I had someone at the other end taking responsibility. I ended up doing 120 lengths and it was fantastic."

All he needed was some encouragement, someone to ease the burden. "Everybody is inundated with decisions about what to do next," he says. "These days it's all the details, all the minutiae. I think people are exhausted by it."

Vicky Gray, a life coach with her own business called Careers in Colour, says she sometimes feels people come to her just for the chance to sit still and talk.

An adviser allows us to justify some quiet time, to get looked after, to have someone to listen.

Smith laughs that even a yoga class can act as permission to just lie down for 10 minutes. "The soothing voice is all very nice, but in our day dad just lay down on the couch with his eyes shut for a bit."

Good idea. And it didn't cost the old man a cent.