It was an honor to be interviewed by Newsday, Long Island's premier newspaper.  Following is the article:

PERSONAL FILE
FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS

In their quest for self-improvement, more people are turning 
to personal coaches for a Jump Start. 

SIDEBAR: Where to Turn (see end of text).

by Carrie Mason-Draffen
Staff Writer

WHEN DENNIS O'Sullivan, a financial planner who lives in Stony Brook, wanted to take his business to the next level, he hired a personal coach. When St. James resident Rosemarie Sforza, a Mary Kay sales director, wanted to gain more skills to develop her staff, she contacted a coach -the same coach who had worked with her husband and two of her sons.

Got a problem? There's probably a personal coach willing to help you tackle it-for a fee, of course. The search for self-improvement these days has spawned an army of personal coaches catering to a wide variety of situations.

Mentors-for-hire once gave their profession a country-club feel by catering primarily to well-paid athletes and high-level executives. But new entrants to the field are casting a wider net and redefining who answers to "coach." There's a personal coach to help you trust your intuition more, find courage, sustain a long-distance relationship, gain career satisfaction or get a newborn on schedule. And that's just the beginning.

"Everybody loves having an advocate, having a partner-mentor, whether that person is 50, 40 or 18," said Sue Seel, who has been coaching since 1996. "I do a lot of listening. I do a lot of being an advocate and sounding board just to help people move forward." O'Sullivan, one of her clients, feels she succeeds. He met Seel, who also lives in Stony Brook, at a local chamber of commerce meeting in June 1999. By August, O'Sullivan, who is a partner in the Island Financial Group- Mass Mutual, a financial-planning firm in Woodbury, had hired Seel as a coach and has met with her regularly since then.

"My business was growing and I wanted it to grow even more, and I wanted to focus on things that were important to me," said O'Sullivan, 39.

His goal was to scout more rainmaking partners and to increase his client roster. But other duties chipped away at his schedule. "A lot of times I found myself doing administrative work that was doing neither of the two, and it was costing me money," he said.

Seel helped him delegate and focus. One of the things she advised him to do was to take an inventory of what he did during the day, which forced him to be honest about how he used his time.

Now, O'Sullivan said, if he spent "80 percent of the time doing what I was supposed to be doing, it was a thumbs- up day." The two get together three times a month for about 45 minutes to an hour to talk about O'Sullivan's goals and progress. Since they live in the same area, they meet in person.

In line with most coaches, Seel said her fees range from $75 a month for group meetings by phone up to $500 a month for individual and group telephone sessions.

O'Sullivan said his work with Seel inspired him to reach out to potential clients he had passed up because he assumed they were working with other financial planners. "They weren't," he said. "Some could be a windfall to us." One indication of the increasing popularity of coaches is their trade group's rising membership. The Wash- ington, D.C.-based International Coaching Federation, which has 4,000 members, adds about 200 a month, according to its president D.J. Mitsch, who is also a coach. In addition, Coach University, the 9-year-old Colorado- based online school, estimates there are 10,000 coaches who help people sort out their personal and professional lives. And some universities have even gotten into the act. In September, Georgetown University began offering a six-month leadership coaching certificate program.

Why all the interest in coaching? When people enter middle age, as the Baby Boom population has done big time, they often consult coaches, some coaches say. "What they have found is that success has not always been fulfilling," Mitsch said. They begin to ask, "'Why am I here? What legacy do I want to leave?'" Employees may turn to coaches at a time when many employers' push to be lean has undercut a sense of job security and forced professionals to take greater charge of their careers.

"A generation ago, you had a career and stuck with it," said Talane Miedaner, author of "Coach Yourself to Success: 101 Tips From a Personal Coach for Reaching Your Goals at Work and in Life" (NTC/Contemporary Publishing, $14.95), whose Catskills-based Talane Coaching Co. refers clients to Seel. "You didn't expect fulfillment." But now, she said, "People want more than a paycheck. They want fulfillment." Coaches are careful to distinguish what they do from therapy. They don't delve into the past, they say. Instead, they look at where people are and where they want to go.

Whereas therapy is "like looking in a rearview mirror," Mitsch said, "coaching is like looking into the future." For example, baby specialist Rachael Lewis helped Aileen Zemel, who lives in Huntington, get over some of the jitters of taking care of her son while healing from a Caesarean section.

Although some people would simply label Lewis a baby nurse, a job that's centuries old, she believes she functions as much more. "Most mothers are very afraid that they wouldn't do the right thing by their baby, that their baby is so fragile they will hurt them," said Lewis, who is from Guyana and worked as a pediatric nurse in London. "They feel much more capable if they have you for two to three weeks." With Lewis' help, Zemel said she was able to coax the newborn onto a sleeping and eating schedule by the time he was 7 weeks old. The baby was fed every four hours until bedtime and at one point was swaddled and bathed only at night, as a signal that it was time to sleep.

Zemel said Lewis, who is self-employed but receives referrals from Plaza Domestic and Companion Agency in Lynbrook, helped keep her on track. Zemel recalled that one time after she fed her son, he spit up as if he was vomiting.

"You feel like such a failure," she said. But Lewis consoled her. "She kept my nerves in check," Zemel said. "She kept me very calm, whereas I could have freaked out over everything....She knew things that weren't in a book." She added, "Whether [baby coaches] are right or wrong and physicians dispute them, they worked for me." Sforza, the Mary Kay sales director, said that as a result of her son Michael's work with Seel, they gained invaluable insight into his learning style, which has helped him in college. Seel determined that Michael Sforza, who likes graphic design, learns more effectively by listening to a lecture rather than by taking notes. So she suggested that he take a tape recorder to class to record lectures.

"I found this a blessing," said Sforza, who wished she had known that when her son was younger.

As for her own coaching sessions, Sforza, 49, a self-confessed workaholic, said Seel helped her work more effectively.

"I stopped with coffee and junk food and that gave me an alertness," Sforza said. She said she also blocked off some time to exercise.

She said Seel helped her get better control of her time by throwing out unnecessary material she had to rifle through to hunt down something. "I don't have to start looking for papers," she said. "They kind of draw you down. I got more involved with people, which is my business." The result of seeing the coach for just a few months is that her sales have gone up, she said.

"I don't like to pay other people for what I can do for myself," said Sforza, who is working toward winning the Mary Kay pink Cadillac. "But I find that it's nice to have a support system because you are more accountable." 

SIDEBAR:Where to Turn

Here's A sampling of books on personal coaching published in the last year: 

"Coach Yourself to Success: 101 Tips From a Personal Coach for Reaching Your Goals at Work and in Life" (NTC/Contemporary Publishing, $14.95) by Talane Miedaner, a life and executive coach.

"Courage: The Heart and Spirit of Every Woman, Reclaiming the Forgotten Virtue" (Broadway Books, $21.95) by Sandra Ford Walston, a courage coach.

"Divine Intuition: Your Guide to Creating a Life You Love" (DK Publishing, $13.95) by Lynn A. Robinson, an intuitive consultant.

"Living Your Best Life: Ten Strategies for Getting From Where You Are to Where You're Meant to Be," (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, $23.95) by Laura Berman Fortgang, a life and career coach.

"The Long Distance Romance Guide" (Writers Press Club, $11.95) by Leslie Karsner, a romance coach.

-Carrie Mason-Draffen