fbpx

Companies hire life coaches to help new parents

The New York Times tells the story of Lindsay Abt, who used a life coach to help her balance pregnancy with new responsibilities at work. Her company, the accounting firm Ernst & Young, provided the coach as part of a program to prepare employees for parental leave.

“In one-hour phone sessions each month, [the coach] helped Ms. Abt think through what was important to her—being home by bath time every evening? Working from home once a week? — and how to set limits during a long workweek to make that happen,” Tara Siegel Bernard writes in “Why Companies Have Started to Coach New Parents.”

The article notes that a growing number of companies are providing employees with coaching sessions, particularly pregnant women. They hope to retain female staffers by getting them through a stressful situation.

Through a nine-month series of face-to-face classes and teleconferences, participants in UW-Madison’s Professional Life Coaching Certificate program learn to help people reach their potential and change their lives.
Through a nine-month series of face-to-face classes and teleconferences, participants in UW-Madison’s Professional Life Coaching Certificate program learn to help people reach their potential and change their lives.

“Coaches show people how to move forward in their lives when they feel like they’re at a crossroads,” says Aphra Mednick, director of the Professional Life Coaching Certificate program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Having a child is certainly a big transition, and working with a coach can help a new parent adjust to this role.”

Real-world examples

Participants in UW-Madison’s Professional Life Coaching Certificate program work toward professional credentialing as a life coach. Through a nine-month series of face-to-face classes and teleconferences, they learn to help people reach their potential and change their lives. The program is accredited by the International Coach Federation and is unique in offering a cohort model, so that students gain a sense of community.

The university also offers individual courses for those who want to learn more about life coaching or to keep their certification skills current. There are face-to-face classes such as Reflective Supervision (Sept. 8); webinars such as Cultural Competency in Coaching (Sept. 28), and online classes such as Effective Communication Skills for the Workplace and Beyond<.

“All of our instructors are practicing coaches in the field who come with real-world examples,” Mednick says. “Students learn to help clients clarify their goals, then act on them.”

For more information about UW-Madison’s life coaching courses, contact Aphra Mednick, aphra.mednick@wisc.edu, 608-265-8041.