Do You Need a Life Coach?
They promise to improve your personal and professional life. But are they worth the money?
Ten years ago, life coaching was seen as a fringe, New Age fad with just a few thousand practitioners. Today life coaches are represented by a trade group, the International Coach Federation, that claims more than 15,000 members. Search Google for "life coach New York," and you'll get millions of results, including links to coaches offering to help with just about any problem or anxiety. Work issues? A coach can help. Marriage difficulties? Let them reduce the conflict. Writer's block? They'll tap your inner poet. Even as the field grows, critics point out that there is no licensing system, standardized credentialing, or academic discipline behind this. "To me, it's like going to a psychic," says Dr. Marilyn Puder-York, a clinical psychologist who has coached executives for more than 30 years and who managed Citigroup's in-house Employee Assistance Program. "If you're lucky, you might find someone really good."
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Nancy Cook is a staff writer for Newsweek and Newsweek.com, covering business and economics. In 2010, she and a team of two editors won the New York Press Club Award for Best Business Reporting on the Internet for their seven-month multimedia project called “Jobbed: How America Works Now,” which examined the future of work, careers and the labor market as the country emerged from the recession.
Cook has written about the way the stimulus money affected a single neighborhood to luxury retailers thrilled by record Wall Street bonuses to accounts of rank-and-file employees whose careers were turned upside down by Lehman Brothers’ collapse. She also has reported on politics and economic policy for Newsweek.com’s national affairs blog, focusing on the intersection between Washington D.C. and Wall Street.
Prior to coming to Newsweek, she worked as a producer on the 2008 presidential campaign at National Public Radio and as an on-air reporter for WRNI, the Rhode Island NPR affiliate. There, her enterprise and feature reporting on a lackluster urban school system and a federal lawsuit against the state child welfare agency earned her two regional Associated Press awards. She graduated from Carleton College and Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where she now teaches as an adjunct professor.
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