Coach Preaches New Message for Success

by Flo Conner
The Boston Globe

ATLANTA--Want to achieve your goals? Give them up, Thomas Leonard preaches, and they'll be yours.

Want to succeed in life? Remove your nose from the grindstone, and wait instead for success to find you.

Want to make your contribution to humanity? Become incredibly selfish, and the world will thank you.

Leonard's philosophy flies in the face of traditional professional and personal development, which revolves mainly around time management, organization, and goal setting. Leonard recommends attracting goals, rather than achieving them, and in creating environments that shape you, not shaping your world to suit you.

The self-proclaimed introvert shook up his life a year ago when he committed to a yearlong, cross-country tour to promote the concept of "coaching" and the training institute he founded four years ago, Coach University. Leonard will bring his message to the Sheraton Framingham Hotel tomorrow night in the CoachU Millennium Tour's swing through New England. He will be in Burlington, Vt., on Thursday.

Leonard didn't invent coaching, but as its leading practitioner, he has spread the concept through the Internet and by word of mouth. Most people hire coaches to solve a problem, but coaching is very different from therapy, Leonard said. Most coaching clients are already successful in their careers, but are looking for ways to move in different directions or redesign their lives.

For example, a manager who is unhappy with an authoritarian style may want to look for other ways of motivating people. Or someone may want to reorder their priorities, such as better balancing family and work. Or a CEO may have accomplished all of his goals and is looking for new challenges.

Coaches provide new perspective and structure to help clients achieve those goals, he said . Corporations also hire coaches to help individual professionals and managers with specific issues, such as communication styles or priorities.

Even Leonard's message on the back of his RV is a paradox. "Don't Follow Me," it says in foot-high letters, "Follow Your Dreams."

Yet, following the 44-year-old former financial planner is exactly what thousands of people are doing in their quest to become a coach. Since 1996, Coach University (www.coachu.com) has graduated thousands of coaches and enrolls 600 people a year in its two-year training program.

Most coaches charge $250 to $500 a month for one hourlong phone call a week. Some charge as much as $1,500 for working with top executives. A typical coach earns about $50,000 a year and those who work with top executives can earn six-figure incomes.

Leonard founded CoachU after a decade of research that started with a question about the color of a car. In 1982, Leonard was asked by his San Francisco clients to help them choose the color of their BMW. "They wanted to talk to me about their lives, but the car was the first thing that came up," Leonard recalled. "I asked good questions on the money side, and they knew I would provide a different perspective on things."

From there, Leonard began studying the concept of coaching and began working with the first of hundreds of clients, asking them questions, trying to get them to view things in different ways, and providing them with professional and personal advice. Then, with a small group of colleagues, Leonard began putting together the 36 modules that make up CoachU's core curriculum, which is taught via Internet and telephone.

Leonard has 200 Web sites, many of which are filled with his writing and presentations. Most of this information is available for free, as are the telephone classes offered through www.Teleclass.com, an online learning center he founded in the mid-90s.

Leonard is low-key in person. He has begun each of his Millennium Tour speeches with a disclaimer that he's not a professional speaker, but is able to hold an audience's attention for three hours during his presentation.

Leonard covers a great deal of territory in his presentation, discussing the concept of coaching, how to become a coach, how to find a coach, and the future of coaching, with plenty of audience interaction along the way.

Leonard began his solo cross-country tour in January, eschewing the normal well-funded, well-peopled publicity tour for a 44-foot recreational vehicle arrayed with coaching slogans, a laptop, and the company of his dog, Fringe. Leonard chose an RV and campgrounds over four-star hotels and room service because it fit his personality, he said.

"Coaching is grassroots," Leonard said. "No one's pushing coaching very hard--it's building by word of mouth. It's built on attraction, so it would be weird if I started marketing. It wouldn't fit my message."

And much of Leonard's message is provocative. The first of his 28 principles of attraction detailed in his 1998 book The Portable Coach (Simon & Schuster) was "become incredibly selfish," a concept that drew criticism and confusion when he introduced it. Since then, he said, most people have come to realize selfishness is different from being self-centered. By taking care of yourself first, you can then be generous with other people, he said.

"I try to accurately describe something juxtapositioning words that don't normally go together, and that conflict gets attention," he said. "I don't do it for the shock value, but to make it accurate. I spent a year and a half honing the three- to five-word description of each of the principles to make sure they were absolutely accurate."

Of the 28 principles, which include concepts such as "overrespond to every event", "tolerate nothing", and "endorse your greatest weakness", the hardest for most people to understand is "market your talents shamelessly", he said .

"Most people misunderstand the statement, thinking it means marketing your services or your skills," Leonard said. What it means is using your talents to help other people, he said.

"Most of us aren't aware of the many talents we have." For instance, Leonard discovered one of his talents is "uplanguaging."

"Someone will say something to me, and I can repeat it back to them in a way that more accurately represents what he really meant," Leonard said.

"What makes the difference between a friend that gives advice and a coach is training and structure," Leonard said.

"CoachU provides a set of skills for coaches to follow when advising their clients, plus in-depth training into the different paths people take and how to help them make fewer mistakes."

Although coaches vary widely in personality and backgrounds, they share common traits, Leonard says: "They're naturally curious about people, care about helping others have a great life and have a track record of coaching.

"They're the ones that friends, family, and colleagues turn to when they need advice," Leonard said. "The hardest part for some coaches is the realization that they can charge for doing something they find totally joyful," Leonard said. "But they get over it quickly."

Flo Conner is a freelance writer who writes frequently about coaching.