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Educating for change

How schools are offering paths for personal and social growth.

Life coaches

Like transformation education, life coaching has boomed in recent years. The practice aims to transform individuals and corporations into harmonious, inspired beings. The International Coach Federation (ICF) represents more than 8,000 professional coaches in 30 countries. More than 250 coaching schools have cropped up around the world, 44 of which are accredited by the ICF. One of the most popular is iPEC Coaching based in Shrewsbury, New Jersey, which offers classes in most major U.S. cities and teaches coaches how to unlock human potential through the Core Energy Coaching process.

Success Unlimited Network, or SUN, is a network of life coaches who help clients identify and pursue their life purposes. Clients are introduced to various games—like the Results Game, which helps them track their daily purposefulness, and the Well-Being Game, which introduces them to a simple process for monitoring fulfillment and satisfaction—that over the course of five-month programs help them transform their lives. Started in London in 1981, SUN is one of the oldest life coach programs around. In the U.S. since 1987, it offers face-to-face programs as well as phone coaching and cybercoaching. The Network also runs the SUN Coach Training and Certification program for aspiring coaches.

The Coaches Training Institute in San Rafael, California, has a similar emphasis on personal transformation. As the world’s largest life coaching school, it has trained more than 20,000 coaches, including many former entrepreneurs and educators. Many graduates go on to executive coaching, working with corporations to make employees more content and productive. Others work with individuals, many of whom are looking to break free of the corporate mold.

Carrie Radovich, a life coach in San Francisco, tries to empower both. A former marketing and sales manager with Leo Burnett Advertising in Chicago and Fortune magazine in San Francisco, she got burned out in the wake of the dot-com boom and realized she was more interested in developing people than companies. Now she coaches firms like American Express, Gap and Merrill Lynch as well as individuals searching for more meaningful lives. "This idea of people from an early age having an awareness that they want to be of service and don’t want to be a cog in the wheel, I’m amazed by it," says Radovich. "It’s typically the older generations, those in their thirties, forties and fifties, who feel stuck in corporate America. Even if they yearn for that same sense of purpose, they need coaching on how to get there."

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