Coaching should not be left on sidelines of sports fields

By Jeff Fister, St Louis, MO

I had a variety of coaches growing up. I was not especially athletically gifted but played a bunch of sports, from hockey to basketball. In high school, I found “my” sport, running, and did well on the cross country and track teams. Turns out, the best teams I was on and the most fun I had were with the best coaches. My high school cross country coach, Caroll Howell, mixed equal parts inspiration and knowledge with a little bit of stern authority. In other words, he knew when to yell at us and when to praise us.

With kids of my own on various sports teams, occasionally I will volunteer to be an “assistant” coach, which means helping keep the team organized, make phone calls, etc. It’s partly because I don’t have the time to be a coach, but really, it’s because others are much better at it.

The best coach I’ve seen at my kids’ school is John Anstey, a longtime CWE resident. By day a respected OB/GYN doctor, John spends his weekends and weekday afternoons coaching basketball in the old tile-floor gym at St. Louis Cathedral. No matter that his youngest son graduated from the school six years ago, John still takes the time to tutor young kids every year in fundamentals and sportsmanship.

Coaches are most readily associated with sports and with kids, but I recently met a new kind of coach. A sort of “career coach.” Think about it: Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone on the sidelines as you tackle your daily business, encouraging and guiding you?

I met Dieter Pauwels one chilly fall morning at Starbucks in Clayton. He’d been highly recommended by someone — and I was highly skeptical.

Skeptical because the concept of a coach in business sounded too much like a self-help guru. I immediately thought of the Saturday Night Live sketch where Chris Farley played Matt Foley, a motivational speaker hired by a father to try to deal with the father’s surly teenage kids. Unkempt and slightly crazed, Foley “lived in a van down by the river.”

But my skepticism faded after an hour talking with Pauwels. What he described for me is a disciplined, practical approach to helping people with their jobs and careers.

It’s not therapy or counseling, Pauwels said, which involves professionals helping people with personal problems by exploring traumatic childhood events. Pauwels said in a recent article, U.S. News and World Report called personal coaching one of the top career choices for 2006. The article said coaches help clients “set goals, develop an action plan to achieve them, keep on task and be supportive when the client feels deflated.”

Pauwels uses a European model of coaching that involves getting a person to examine their self image. “Every positive act of change in your life is always fostered by a change in self-perception. You cannot change any behavior, habit or belief that is holding you back without changing the image you hold about yourself.”

At first, that sounded a bit too touchy-feely for me. But Pauwels described the process of taking that perception and building realistic goals and “desired outcomes” from it. This includes identifying personal beliefs, gaining the know-how to achieve it, and creating the right opportunities. Bottom line? “Coaching offers a structure allowing people to gain clarity about what they really want.” Hard to argue with that.

Pauwels, whose family is from Belgium, moved here 12 years ago to work in one of his father’s factories in Washington, Mo. He holds bachelor’s degrees in business and information science from the University of Antwerp.

He said he tired of the business and started working in the financial services field for Fidelity National Financial and found he enjoyed public speaking and helping people with career decisions.

He began investigating the career of personal coaching and became a professional member of the International Coaching Federation and trained to be a neuro-linguistic programming coach. Three years ago, he started Dieter Pauwels International, based in the Clayton area, and became a full-time coach.

While he does do sales training and yes, motivational speaking, Pauwels said he has a number of personal clients in a variety of fields ranging from real estate to financial services. Some are in town, some out of town. Most of his work with clients is done over the phone or in person. He also holds seminars periodically and charges for his services in “packages” ranging from one month to annual commitments.

So, is a “personal life coach” a luxury for self-obsessed “busy people”? I left Starbucks thinking that we see medical doctors when we’re sick, psychologists for counseling and some pay to have “personal trainers” help them stay physically fit. But in a highly mobile business world where there’s little time to find a mentor, maybe you need a little coaching now and then to stay in the game.