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Be a player.
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Be a player.
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By Michael McLeod ©1999 No practice field, no gym, no locker room. No pennants, no trophies, no slogans on the walls. The decor in the coach's office runs more to a 10-inch cutout of Albert Einstein by the computer and a small stuffed gorilla in cardboard sunglasses on the desk. If you poke it, the gorilla talks. Great idea! he says. That's fabulous! Exactly! That's awesome! You're a genius! Vince Lombardi would have stuffed a mascot like that into a trash can. Woody Hayes might have punched it in the nose. Jaye Myrick gets her clients to believe in its every word. From a makeshift office in a small apartment near downtown Orlando, Myrick coaches creative people. Some are struggling artists. Some are what Myrick calls ``closet creatives'' - office drones with the souls of writers and actors, wasting away in cubicle world. All of them pay her from $200 to $400 a month to coax them, via telephone and e-mail, towards best sellers and leading roles. Or not. Once sprung loose from furtive hearts, creative impulses are as wild as school children let out to play, and just as unlikely to travel in predictable directions. After five years and 150 clients, Myrick knows better than to expect creativity to smash off-tackle and head for the goal line. Creativity puts its helmet on backwards. Creativity drifts away from the huddle to play yard darts with the first-down markers. One of Myrick's early clients was an Orlando actor who tired of parts in theme-park skits and headed to New York City in 1995. By the time Myrick began coaching him in earnest he'd been in New York three years and hadn't landed a single role. His part-time jobs couldn't pay his bills. He lived in an illegal loft in a part of Brooklyn so scary that the cabs wouldn't stop for fares. The only good news was that he no longer had to worry about his chronically ill, rusting Jetta: Somebody had done him the favor of stealing it. Working with Myrick helped him turn his life around in six months. He got the part of his life on Broadway and became romantically involved with Sigourney Weaver and was hailed by The New York Times as the rising stage presence of his time. Or not. What actually happened was that the talks and the exercises Myrick led him through helped him rediscover creative impulses he'd long since forgotten. She asked him what he really liked to do, what he would do if he were to cultivate his spare time. Read and write poetry, he said. Since childhood, he also had wanted to build furniture, a notion he had long since given up, assuming that a man's mid-40s were far too late in life for him to learn a new trade. When he and Myrick spoke of acting, her questions helped him clarify his passion for it. What he realized was that he was always performing. It didn't have to be on stage. He was just as happy trying out characters on friends, studying people at parties for character quirks, running monologues through his mind just for the fun of it. All of Myrick's probing nudged him towards a defining moment. During one of their phone sessions, she asked: ``What's the one thing you could do to make your life start working?'' He sat up straight at his desk, holding very still, trying not to think. Long seconds passed. Then the answer seemed to emerge on its own. ``Leave New York City,'' he heard himself say. And that was how, for him, creativity came out looking like a one-way ticket on a Greyhound bus bound for South Carolina. He works at a factory there, building antique reproduction furniture, entertaining co-workers with funny voices and jokes. At night, he writes poetry. Lately, he's been reading Robert Frost. Maybe someday he'll work his way around to one of the lesser-known poems. It reads, in part: My object in living is to unite my avocation and my vocation As two eyes make one in sight.
THE NOTION OF COACHING PEOPLE towards personal and professional success was developed in the late '80s by a Salt Lake City financial consultant named Thomas Leonard. Leonard had grown weary of crunching numbers with clients. He discovered that they often elicited his advice on personal matters, and he wondered if perhaps he was putting the cart before the horse. Perhaps there was a need for a well-versed coach to help people in various professions balance not just the books but everything else in their lives. Leonard read voraciously and consulted with a circle of motivational speakers, psychologists and executives, blending all of what he learned into principles he could use with his clients. Soon he began enrolling other professionals to coach. Many were mental health counsellors and other financial consultants, both groups weary of the restraints of their respective callings. Eventually Leonard established ``Coach U.'' - a two-year, $2,400 on-line training program for potential coaches. Eight years later he is a grassroots multi-millionaire, electronically coaching a select group of clients while traveling around the country in his 37-foot luxury motor home. He's the Alpha Coach, role model to the more than 10,000 ``Coach U.'' graduates who are now practicing full or part time. Several rival coaching schools and books on the subject have also cropped up, along with an accrediting organization, the International Coach Federation, which will hold its fourth annual convention in Orlando this October. Part of the reason coaching appeals to practitioners is that all it takes to set up a business is a phone, a fax machine and a computer. Intangibles are less easily acquired. A good coach is a listener and a guide, compassionate but firm, savvy in the ways of the world but open to matters of the heart - a compatriot who wants more than anything to see you succeed, a mom and pop dedicated to your own dreams, as opposed to what they had in mind for you. It's almost like having a functional family at the other end of the line. On the other hand, there are always poseurs in a new, loosely regulated field. Anybody can set up shop as a coach, with or without a Coach U. diploma and the clients' best interests at heart. A slickly-dressed ``coach'' from L.A. showed up at a recent meeting of Orlando coaches, telling everybody that he specialized in coaching ``celebs'' - without offering any proof or mentioning any particular client. As it turned out, what he had actually come for was to try to hawk dietary supplements to the coaches. Some mental health professionals are leery of coaching, even by well-meaning people, saying it opens the door for amateurs to dabble, perhaps disastrously, in psychological practice. But coaches say they refer people with serious mental health problems to therapists, and that coaching isn't geared toward dealing with deeply troubled individuals but toward making successful lives more so. A recent coach federation poll of 210 clients showed an average income of $63,000, with 82 percent having college degrees. Not surprisingly, 69 percent of the clients were female: Women tend to be more open to coaching because they are less attached than men to the grizzled American ethic of stoic self-sufficiency. The poll also showed that 98.5 percent of these clients considered their investment worth the money. Coaching clearly suits an age of pressurized ambition, when more and more people have less and less time to make the most of lives and livelihood. Some coaches take on clients from a variety of professions while others specialize. There are coaches who work exclusively with rock bands, teenagers, ministers, doctors, cops, comics, chemotherapy patients ... and creatives. It's a calling that seemed to seek out Jaye Myrick, who wound up coaching creative people by heeding the same sort of inner cues that led Paul Garbarini to the furniture factory. Her mother died when she was 7, and her relationship with her stepmother was strained. Years later, as an adult, she saw an old home movie from that time in her life. Her family was opening presents on Christmas day in their Lakeland home. The lens remained fixed on her younger half-sister the whole time, only picking up Jaye if she happened to wander past. By then she had found a refuge: Nancy Drew under the covers, pointe shoes under the bed. She immersed herself in ballet and books and took shape as a solitary, independent spirit, impatient with regimentation, enamoured of the arts. She grew up, married, divorced, married again. She tried teaching but burned out in three years at an overcrowded Alabama high school: Having no office, she had to carry her books and supplies around in a picnic basket. For several years she shifted restlessly through jobs in marketing, sales and financial planning, then moved from Atlanta to Orlando in 1989, working for three years at Disney World as a tour guide and as a Disney University teacher. Soon afterwards, looking for a job, she was introduced to Mark Powers. Powers is an Orlando coach who specializes in coaxing high-powered attorneys into streamlining their practices to make more money and cut down their hours. Nobody argues about the money. Powers has to play bad cop when it comes to the hours. He makes workaholic lawyers who do not restrict themselves to 40-hour weeks send hefty checks to causes they hate - like the $2,000 an avowed Republican recently had to write out to Bill Clinton's legal defense fund. Impressed with Myrick's directness and her background in teaching and finance, Powers steered her towards Coach U. She graduated and began coaching with no particular specialty in mind. But she soon noticed that many of her early clients had something in common. A career counsellor wanted to try tap dancing and needed help getting up the nerve. An administrative assistant worked with Myrick a few weeks and wound up taking a year's sabbatical to write. A massage therapist longed to make pottery. Myrick didn't think of it as coincidence. She took it as a hint. Since then, she has built up a $50,000-a-year practice that includes roughly 20 creative clients at any one time - half of them from Central Florida, half from other parts of the country. Dressed in jeans and a ``Coach U.'' T-shirt, flanked by the Einstein cutout and the ``You're a genius!'' monkey, she spends her work days taking 50-minute phone calls from actors, lecturers, home designers, massage therapists, would-be painters and writers, all in the midst of creative throes. Myrick is a breakthrough junkie. She has a need for the new. When she goes out to eat, she orders the chef's latest creation. She reads first novels rather than best-sellers. She gets the shakes as she pores over her favorite magazine, Fast Company, which devotes itself exclusively to companies at the cutting edge. Not that she looks like fast company herself. At 51, with curly auburn hair, motherly brown eyes and an elfin frame, she more closely resembles your favorite grade school teacher, the one who percolated with so much innocent enthusiasm that you would have felt like a creep smarting off in her class. Somehow, her noveau perkiness makes Myrick a steadying presence for her corps of jittery artists. They are intimidated by the tyranny of the blank page, the terror of creating something from nothing. She treats it like a field trip. They think they are obliged to make huge leaps forward and burn up lots of adrenalin to succeed. She says there is a better way. They can start by making their beds. It's one of the cornerstones of coaching: Neatness counts. If you want to compose, begin by composing yourself. Myrick makes clients write long lists of things that they are tolerating in their lives, from lousy relationships to messy bedrooms. The theory is that a sloppy life at any level saps creative energy. So does an inordinately busy one. The creative mind is often most fertile in moments of relaxation. Einstein used to complain, good naturedly: ``Why is it that ideas always wait until I am in the shower to come to me?'' Myrick spends a lot of time urging people to relax, take a break. ``She finally convinced me that I can give more at work if I take better care of myself in other parts of my life,'' says Janet Mednick. Mednick, a cosmetologist who works on hair and makeup for theatrical productions, says she decided to work with a coach to create more balance and success in her life. New York actor-director John Hickok used to fret by the phone and feel guilty between parts. When he told her he loved the outdoors, Myrick gave him a homework assignment: He has to camp out once a month. ``An artist has to recharge,'' says Myrick. ``Otherwise, when the time comes to create, there's nothing inside to draw on. You can't give away what you don't have.'' She is barefoot in her office, drinking green tea, her grey Persian cat, Deuteronomy, splayed in elegant abandon in her lap. The phone rings. It's her weekly session with Deborah Bevis, a motivational speaker and restorer of vintage houses who lives in Raleigh, N.C. Bevis has an office in her home, and one of her worries is that her husband, in the midst of a career change, is soon to be rattling around the house all day. The most obvious solutions available to her, Deborah darkly suggests: murder and divorce. Myrick is sympathetic and methodical. She leads Deborah through a series of questions to try and find more constructive options. ``Have you and your husband talked about this? Productively talked about it?'' ``Can you divide the house into zones - keep him out of the part where you will be doing business?'' ``What resources would you need to have for Frank to be home and out of work and not be a source of stress to you?'' ``What is it that you could gain from this experience, if you can get to the other side of it?'' Deborah calms down. Her coach hangs up. ``Creative people are very dramatic,'' she says. They are also notoriously insecure, with a tendency to overlook their own strengths and exaggerate their weaknesses. Most of Myrick's clients have had their creative impulses scoffed at by parents and friends. They've been able to patch together a semblance of confidence, but eventually the doubts accumulate. They get to one level and stop. They need help getting unstopped. ``If they knew how to do it, they wouldn't need a coach,'' says Myrick. Then she adds, enigmatically, ``But they don't just have all the questions. They have all the answers.'' Translation: Coaching isn't about imposing her own views. It's about giving the people she works with the tools to dig in and see what really drives them. The closer they can get to the bedrock of their own inherent creative impulses, the greater their chances of success. Many of her clients have an ongoing ``homework'' assignment to fill three looseleaf pages every morning with their handwritten thoughts about whatever comes to mind - heartaches, worries, inspirations, problems of the day, the weather, an observation about a beautiful flowering shrub in the yard. It's a critical, daily opportunity for them to practice saying what they want to say as opposed to what they think they should: skinny dipping for the psyche. The exercise is more than just a lark. Its purpose, says Myrick, is to free up creative drives that can be accessed by the artist down the road. Coaching is geared not towards introspection for its own sake but towards results: It's not about how you feel, says Myrick: It's about what you do. One of her clients is Emily Harris, an Orlando clothing designer who makes costumes for film and television productions. Harris became accustomed to the teamwork, the tight schedule, the collaboration on the set. But when she broke away from film production earlier this year to design her own line of sportswear, the relative isolation bewildered her. Her self-confidence began evaporating. She had all the skills to do the job; she was just uncertain of which step to take next. Myrick began working with her to clear away some of the clouds. She sent Harris to the library to research patent law as it applies to new lines of clothing. That gave the designer a notion of the big picture. Then Harris got to a point in the design of an outfit that outstripped her own expertise. In the past she'd spend days being stumped. Myrick made a simple suggestion. She asked Harris: ``Who do you know who could help you with this?'' The next day, Harris called a seamstress she'd known for years who was perfect for the job. ``It's so obvious, right? But when you are in the thick of it, you can't figure it out on your own,'' says Harris. ``Jaye's gift with artists is that she sees right through us. She has a way of grasping a situation immediately and condensing it into one sentence that changes everything.'' Myrick says her goal in all of this is to coach herself out of a job - to help her clients reach a level of such self-sufficiency and staying power that they can become their own coaches. For this to happen, she needs to lead them into a fundamental shift - like the moment when Garbarini, the actor turned furniture maker, realized that he needed to leave New York City. Myrick lives for shifts. She caught one not too long ago in the midst of a call with Melanie Hill, an interior designer who began working with Myrick a year ago to take her career to a new level. At first, Hill's goals were vague - redecorate her own apartment, consider moving away from Orlando, find more interesting designing opportunities. Gradually, Myrick helped her focus her vision. Hill came to realize that what she really wanted to do was to study feng shui, the ancient Chinese practice of decorating to enhance positive energy. She had decided she was going to go to a four-day seminar in Orlando. Myrick convinced her to go to New York City instead for a year-long series of weekend seminars with Thomas Lin-Yung, one of a handful of feng shui grand masters in the world. Then Hill made a list of cities where she wanted to set up a practice once she finished her training. New York City was at the top of the list. Atlanta came in second. During a recent coaching call, Hill said she had decided to go to Atlanta. ``That's interesting,'' said Myrick, headphones on, notepad in front of her, green tea at her side. ``Where else in your life have you settled for second best?'' A long pause at the other end of the line. Then Hill finally replied, speaking the words very slowly, amazed at her own answer. ``Almost every major decision I've ever made,'' she said. And it was true. Hadn't interior design been her second choice as a major in school, behind architecture? Wasn't Orlando her second choice as a place to live, next to Washington, D.C.? And men ... Lordie. Men, too. ``What has happened with you, Melanie, is that you compromise,'' said Myrick. ``First you compromise, then you compensate - you try really hard to make your second choice work. It's a pendulum.'' ``Yes,'' said Hill softly, taking it in, taking an awful lot in. ``That's exactly what it is.'' Myrick's voice took on an insistent edge. ``Melanie, would you be willing to start living from your first choice starting now? No more compromising? Are you willing to draw a line in the sand right now?'' Another long pause. ``Yes. I'm drawing it now.'' In her apartment across town, Melanie Hill took her pen, pressed down hard, and drew a line across her notebook. Three days later she was in New York City for her final round of feng shui classes. She spent her spare time looking for an apartment.
Copyright 2000-2008 by Jaye Myrick
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