WHENEVER Bryce Dallas Howard teased her
dad, the actor and director Ron Howard, about how much actors are
paid, he'd say, "It's so that they can afford their therapist."
But decades after her father made it in Hollywood,
Ms. Howard, 25, is making her own way in acting, and she's
therapist-free. She sees a life coach instead. Ms. Howard, who is on
location filming "Spider-Man 3," said her coach helps her navigate the
demands of show business on her own terms, including making time for
writing and protecting a degree of privacy during press interviews
without losing her cool.
"It's not about rehashing the past," said Ms.
Howard, who said she's "really into self-improvement." She called
Sherri Ziff Lester, her coach, after a manager friend passed on her
name last year.
"With Sherri," she said, "it's, 'Let's talk about
this week.' She asks me a series of questions so that I see my
priorities and decide what I need to do."
Life coaching has become a staple on television,
with coaches helping sort out the lives of single men, ugly ducklings,
sexually unsatisfied wives and other women in shows like "Nip/Tuck,"
"The Swan," "Starting Over" and "Modern Men." Life coaches, with their
vague self-helpish title, have also come in for considerable
skepticism and ribbing. "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" just this
week devoted a sketch to poking fun at the coaching and "coachees" who
become coaches themselves.
But behind the scenes life coaches are also finding
plenty of work in the entertainment business. As their ranks swell
nationwide — the International Coach Federation says its membership
has doubled to 9,500 personal and business coaches since 2001, 56
percent of them in the United States — a growing roster is
specializing in celebrities and Hollywood.
Although the federation does not keep track of coach
specialties, coaches who devote themselves to the entertainment
business — many of them former actors, television network executives,
film producers or scriptwriters who sell their services as insiders —
say they have seen more acceptance and a doubling and even tripling of
demand for their services in the last three or four years.
Life coaches, who are unregulated and vary widely in
their training and credentials, say they help clients define and
pursue career and personal goals. The action- and results-oriented
approach, they add, is appealing in a business where so much seems
left to chance and few are prepared for success when it happens.
In a profession with a propensity for coaching — the
acting coach, the voice coach, the writing coach — there appears to be
room for one more coach, the one in charge of happiness, not to be
confused with the old-school therapist.
"The difference between life coaching and therapy is
that psychotherapy is about helping people heal their wounds," said
Phil Towle, a psychotherapist and life coach, "and coaching is about
helping people achieve the highest level of their fulfillment or
happiness or success, whether they're wounded or not." Mr. Towle's
work (at the rate of $40,000 a month) with quarreling members of the
band Metallica was chronicled in the 2004 documentary "Metallica: Some
Kind of Monster."
Performers, directors, writers and others can now
find workshops and programs with names like Center Your Celebrity and
War and Peace in the Writers' Room, and they can find certificates for
free coaching sessions in gift bags at events like the Oscars and the
Video Music Awards.
Coaches say personnel officials at studios and
production companies are also increasingly calling on them not just to
groom executives in management skills (the traditional use of
executive coaching in major corporations), but also to troubleshoot in
situations like helping a young producer handle personality and power
clashes on a production.
Scott Zakarin, 42, a film and television producer
who most recently produced the reality series "Kill Reality" on E! and
"The Scorned," the movie spawned by the show, credits his coach with
saving his company. He said he turned to a life coach, David
Brownstein, a few years ago because of confrontations and finger
pointing in his production company and now has Mr. Brownstein on call
as he strives to run his business without subsuming what he calls the
visionary nature of his work.
Mr. Zakarin, who said he knew Mr. Brownstein when
the coach was a film producer himself, said friends who have formed
their own production companies have their own life coaches to deal
with similar problems.
"Once they have their offices feng shui'd, coaching
seems to be the next thing," he said.
Penelope Brackett, a career and life coach in New
Jersey, said she was virtually alone when she started coaching
performers in theater, television and film in New York in the early
1990's. In the last two years, she said, even drama schools have
embraced the concept of "getting a life and not just building a career
or devoting yourself to craft excellence."
A former actor, director and producer who last year
published "Seven Keys to Success Without Struggle," a life-coaching
book for performers, written with Lester Thomas Shane, Ms. Brackett
said she is regularly asked to give seminars at universities like
Brandeis and Rutgers.
Life coaches, who work in person or by phone and
whose rates usually start at over $100 a session, partly credit the
increased demand for their services to decentralized and scattered
families: the life coach, some say, takes the place of the mother,
father or some other elder, who gave counsel through life's decisions
and conflicts. That many people have more than one career and are
searching for pursuits with more meaning also plays a role, they say.
In Hollywood coaches deal with short-term goals like
easing writer's block so that a script gets finished as well as more
encompasing challenges like hardening up-and-comers to take rejection
or keeping those who make it from losing their heads in celebrity.
"Being famous is not what it looks like on E!" said
Ms. Ziff Lester, a former writer on television shows like "Beverly
Hills 90210" and "Baywatch." "It hits you like a tidal wave, and
unless you can navigate that ocean, you will drown."
Carmit Maile, 31, the redheaded member of the
Pussycat Dolls sextet, who recently changed her name from Carmit
Bachar, said she started telephone sessions with Ms. Ziff Lester last
July to keep her focused on what she wants to accomplish. The Dolls
debut album, "PCD," went platinum, and just last week they embarked on
a national tour, opening for the Black Eyed Peas.
Ms. Maile, who said she found a certificate for Ms.
Ziff Lester's services in a gift bag given to performers at a concert
last year, added that she does not want success to keep her from
working with children with cleft lip and palate.
Ms. Maile, who had surgery for cleft palate, said
she endured rejection in show business and wants to be a role model
for girls like her who are not picture perfect. "My worry is to get
lost in the shuffle of superstardom and not make an impact as a human
being," she said, calling her coach a facilitator to help her stay the
course. "There's so much that goes on that it's easy to lose your
grounding."
Success can bring just as much soul searching behind
the camera. Jeff Davis, 30, the creator and an executive producer of
"Criminal Minds," a drama on CBS, went to a coach as he was trying to
cope, he said, with "the struggles of political fights and wrangling
of egos" that he found when his show went on television.
"I found myself going from writing scripts in a
coffee shop one day to producing a television show in the blink of an
eye," he said.
He described the difference as "working with 100
people, finding myself swamped with questions and having to become a
leader when you've hardly been doing it on your own." Mr. Davis, who
said he was referred to his coach, Mr. Brownstein, by his studio,
added, "I never had so many meetings in my life."
Through coaching sessions twice a month, Mr. Davis
got in touch, he said, with "my inner killer" and learned when to
summon it and when to be nice.
He said he also realized he wanted to create another
show, for which he said he is about to write the pilot.
The results, he said, have won him over to life
coaching, despite his initial skepticism.
"The entertainment industry can certainly use some
help, considering the number of lunatics who work in it," Mr. Davis
added. "It's literally like having a personal trainer. A life coach's
job is to push you."
But critics see life coaches as the ultimate
overindulgence.
"This is for people with too much money," said Jon
Winokur, a Los Angeles writer who included the term life coach in his
Encyclopedia Neurotica, a 2005 volume of "tics, twitches and
safety-valve nuttiness," which also includes entries like "retail
therapy."
"You can find a market or a constituency for all
kinds of insanity here," Mr. Winokur said.
The American Psychotherapy Association does not have
an official position on coaches, but Kelly Snider, speaking for the
association, said "coaches need to be responsible for recognizing if
there's a problem that must be dealt with by someone in the field of
psychology."
The International Coach Federation acknowledges that
only a fraction of its members have gone through its certification
process, which requires specific training and exams, because coaching
has become more formalized only in the last decade or so. It urges
consumers to shop around for those specifically trained in coaching
skills.
Those who pay for life coaches, sometimes at a
financial sacrifice, say they need the supportive kick in the pants.
"Life coaching has organized me and helped me do
stuff more strategically," said Ari Shine, 30, a singer and songwriter
who sees T. C. Conroy, a Hollywood coach who draws on her experience
in the music business, including work with bands as a production
coordinator. She is the former wife of Dave Gahan of the British band
Depeche Mode.
Ms. Conroy's session with Mr. Shine on a recent
Thursday took the form of brainstorming over the best booking agent
for him. During another session, with Nancy Noever, a production
manager for television commercials in her 40's who is trying to sell
her first television script, the coaching blurred the professional
with the personal.
"Weight is never where I want it to be, financial is
never where I want it to be, time management is never what I want it
to be," Ms. Noever said, as she sat on a sofa sipping from a water
bottle across from Ms. Conroy, who took notes on a clipboard. "I have
to figure out why can't I put myself first."
"Why you haven't put yourself first," Ms. Conroy
corrected, noting she could do it.
Ms. Noever plotted ways to pay attention to her
priorities — finishing the last 15 pages of her script, starting to
lose 25 pounds, getting rid of her debt — with the expectation of not
doing it perfectly the first time, as long as she set things in
motion.
"I'm much more important than a McDonald's
commercial," she said, her confidence renewed.