PsyInsight
Indian Association of Health, Research and Welfare
Interview with MentorCoach founder Ben Dean
By Mary Judd
How a Stressful Situation Led to a World Changing Career
Ben Dean is the founder of internationally acclaimed MentorCoach LLC,
a virtual university that has trained thousands of professionals to
add coaching as a practice specialty. All MentorCoach training is "virtual,"
taking place by teleconference with web and E-mail backup. Ben partnered
with legendary psychologist and past APA President, Martin E. P. Seligman,
Ph.D., to co-found Authentic Happiness Coaching LLC, a virtual University
that trained 1000 professionals, in 19 nations, in the theory, tests,
and interventions of Positive Psychology. Ben passionately believes
in the importance of undergirding coaching with positive psychological
research. The vast reach of his programs and live expert interviews
have been pivotal in moving the science from the labs to the masses.
Along with running MentorCoach and a thriving coaching practice, Ben
publishes Coaching Toward Happiness, a free eNewsletter on practical
applications of positive psychology for 131,000 global readers. He lives
with his family in suburban, Maryland.
How did you first become a coach?
Before I was a coach, I had a coach. I'd finished all my doctoral course
work at the University of Texas at Austin and worked for several years
at the National Institute of Mental Health in suburban Washington, DC.
I worked on my dissertation but my committee was 1000 miles away and
I procrastinated. My job ended and I decided I would not get a job until
I finished. But I found it almost impossible to work on. I was incredibly
stuck and overwhelmed. Even if I had one good week, I was still hundreds/
thousands of hours from finishing. Even then, it might not be approved
by my committee. I wanted to quit. But then I would have had nothing
to show for the previous 7 years. One of my classmates, Meg Meyer, finished
her PhD, so I begged her to be my dissertation coach. Thankfully, she
agreed and we met every Wednesday at 11. The first meeting I arrived
with 150 to do items and all my problems. She listened. Asked questions.
And I left with 6 things to do by the next week. I got them done. Week
after week, she coached me she was my friend, my partner, asked great
questions, watched carefully to see what I did. We negotiated 1000 shoals
and six months later my committee approved my dissertation. I think
the hours with Meg were some of the most important I've ever spent.
I knew in my bones how valuable coaching could be. This was long before
the boom in coaching. Back then, I knew no one who called themselves
a coach.
So you turned your stressor into a career of coaching?
Yes. That summer, we led a workshop on Strategies for Completing the
Doctoral Dissertation or Master's Thesis. We got a big turnout. Afterwards,
a number of participants asked me to coach them. That was the beginning
of my coaching career. Over the years, I coached a wide variety of clients.
And I got training every place I could.
How did you form MentorCoach?
I led a workshop on coaching for the DC Psychological Association, asking
twelve very senior psychologistsseveral Past Presidents of DCPAto attend.
The reaction was electric. I had never before gotten that kind of response.
They skipped the break to keep the workshop going. 100% of the participants
either wrote me testimonials, became clients, or both.
It was so rewarding sharing coaching with them that I knew I wanted
to go further. DCPA sponsored me for two more workshops over the next
five months. I then offered a six month coach training program that
was quickly filled and the MentorCoach Coach Training School was born.
I found it so rewarding showing other gifted professionals how to become
coaches. And I found it incredibly rewarding to see the good they brought
into the world.
From the start, we believed in providing our training by teleconferenceall
you need is a phone. This has allowed us to train people anywhere in
the world. It's not unusual to have people in a 15-person class from
throughout the United States, the UK, Australia, and so on.
What obstacles did you face?
I had to build a curriculum that taught individual and group coaching
skills. That was demanding. When I began, I did not have a manual. I
had to make explicit the tacit knowledge I had about how to do effective
coaching.
But much more challenging than that was to learn how to help our students
and graduates become successful. If they wanted a coaching practice,
how do you help them learn to attract clients? What should they charge?
What kind of coaching contract should they use? How do you fit practice
building to their personality. For example, how does a very bright,
but very shy and introverted coach build a practice? Someone who would
not be caught dead giving a speech or glad handing strangers. Well,
there are ways. But we had to develop them.
Finally, I had to learn to run a coaching school with a lot of moving
parts. That level of administration was new to me.
How did you move past these obstacles?
A big factor was having a good coach, myself, and a group of friends
and colleagues I could talk to. I got the best Virtual Assistant in
America, Sunny Bain, and other extraordinary people on our team as well.
And, I learned by watching our graduates. We once had an introverted
student like the one I described. Without shaking a single hand, she
built a full coaching practice and 14,000 email newsletter subscribers
inside of a year.
Finally, getting really outstanding teachers to be on our faculty is
a key; they have been critical to our success.
How did you get involved with positive psychology?
In 2002, I was driving to a workshop in North Carolina when I got a
call from Marty Seligman. He had just published Authentic Happiness
and was looking for ways to bring it to a wider audience. We had several
face to face meetings and decided to jointly form a company, Authentic
Happiness Coaching, that would apply our teleconference method of training
to his work. Over the next two years, AHC provided training in the interventions,
assessments, theory, and practice of positive psychology to 1000 professionals
from around the world. Marty was an incredible teacher. We had the world's
leading figures in PP as guest instructors.
Even though the title involved the words “coaching,” AHC was not focused
on coach training, Just positive psychology.
I began to think about how positive psychology might be applied to
coaching. I think it is a near perfect fit. Positive psychology provides
much of the empirical base that coaching has lacked. So, it has become
a centrally important part of MentorCoach instruction. We bring in the
most significant scholars in the fieldlike Sonja Lyubomirsky, Chris
Peterson, Todd Kashdan, Mike Frischto teach. We do free interviews with
super stars like Ellen Langer, Dan Gilbert, Seth Godin, Phil Zimbardo,
Elliot Aronson, etc.
Looking back on your initial idea to form the school, develop the
program and seeing where you are today, do you feel MentorCoach has
made a difference in the world?
Absolutely! We're alive and flourishing and I believe our best work
is ahead of us. Looking back over the last 12 years, I know we've made
a difference.
First, we've made a difference in the lives of thousands of
our people in our MentorCoach Community who have become part-time or
full-time coaches, made friends, and who will tell you their own lives
have been changed by what they've learned and by whom they've come to
know.
Second, the truth is in the thousands of clients our graduates
have worked with. It's in the students with ADHD who were discouraged
and turned off to school but are now thriving as students. It's in the
people who've left jobs that were killing their spirit and moved on
to do the work they were intended to do on earth. It's in the people
whose jobs were terrible but they learned ways to reconstruct them and
make them work. It's in the entrepreneurs who successfully started and
grew their small businesses.
It's the executive who's become dramatically more successful in working
with their teams. In corporate leaders who've gotten support in making
their organizations make a difference. In one case for me, it was in
watching a brilliant, lone woman run against an entrenched male opposition
to get on a city council in a large metro areaand win. And then get
80% of the vote in her next election while making a huge difference
for her constituents. I could go on and on.
That's fantastic! Now, specifically related to stress--what are
some of the ways you think coaching helps people cope?
First, a good coach knows what she can't do. If she suspects
her client may have a true anxiety disorder, she refers the client to
a trained mental health professional. She may well continue coaching
on all the other issuesbut not on an issue that is appropriate for a
therapist.
Second, good coaches know that for clients with big, ambitious
goals, stress is inevitable. It's normal. And they have a variety of
strategies, which they would tailor to the individual client. For example:
Studies show unequivocally that regular exercise reduces stress dramatically.
Regular mindfulness meditation is extremely helpful. Studies and my
own experience convince me how valuable yoga, tai chi, and/or qi gong
are, combining exercise and meditation.
Social support is a powerful antidote to stress. Good coaches are alert
to clients with weak social support systems and find ways to help them
develop friendships. Indeed, simply having a coach, simply not being
alone can help tremendously with stress.
Breathe! The research solidly establishes that deep, diaphragmatic
breathing brings more oxygen to the blood and leads to relaxation.
Finally, I'm a believer in the power of gratitude. Writing in a gratitude
journal is a powerful way to increase emotional resilience and reduce
stress. Simply keep a journal in which you write down every night three
to five things for which you feel grateful.
Do you have a method for handling your own stress today?
Yes, many. But here's one I did not understand for years. Most stress
management techniques are ways to cope with an existing source of stress.
What I finally realized was that the most effective strategy is often
to attack the stress at its source by being proactive.
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Ben’s De-Stress tips:
• Don't be a victim. Don't spend all your time telling people
how irritating the situation is. Instead, do all you can to solve the
problem.
• If your office is too hot, consider talking to the landlord
about the air conditioner.
• If you're stressed over financial debt, sometimes it makes sense
to get in a debt repayment plan and gradually eliminate the debt.
• If you are incredibly anxious about your lack of dissertation
progress, it may make sense to turn all your energy and intelligence
to finding ways to finish.
• If you're in a terrible job, sometimes it makes sense to focus
your effort on getting a new job and leaving this one behind.
• So I ask myself, “How can I solve this problem?” rather than
just taking up yoga. (The best approach may be solving the problem and
taking up yoga.)
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MentorCoach's Ben Dean was interviewed here by Mary Judd, a writer,
Mentor Coach and AHC graduate who lives in Delmar, NY. Mary's website
is Mary Judd Communications
