Coaches Will Add Value In The Coming Decades

This Blog entry was written at 12:42pm Calgary time on Monday as I will not have time later in the day. Monday brings a day of travel to get to the gigs in London and Toronto. Leaving home at 7am Pacific time and arriving at the hotel in London at 11pm Eastern time makes for a long day.

I invested the day of sitting in airport lounges and airplanes working on;

– Web site upgrage writing
– Updating my plan
– Technical reading
– Power point review for tomorrow

With the completion of the web site upgrade writing and with the upcoming telephone conversation with an agent for my book there is a thrill in the air.

Technically speaking, I read an article entitled “No Rest For The Weary: The Coming Retirement Disaster and What You Can Do To Help” that was written in the latest Coachville E-Newsletter. The article was prompted by a Recent PBS Frontline Series featuring the Looming Retirement Catastrophe.

Here are all of the areas where coaches are going to be able to add value in the coming decades.
– Relationship coaches will be needed to help couples weather the storms caused by unmet lifestyle expectations during their final years, and the drastically different standard of living that they may well find themselves in.
– Career and life-change/transition coaches should prepare to offer services for those who will be re-entering the workforce, or redefining their place in it, if retirement plans fall short or fall through, or perhaps to deal with the reality of altering or scaling back their lifestyle to meet available resources.
– Family coaches can offer options to help people cope with the extra burden of extended families who may need far more support and resources than anticipated (both emotionally and in terms of basic life support issues such as housing, money and care giving), as those who were expected to retire end up back in the workforce and as those whose retirement income was supposed to pay for professional caregivers find themselves without the means to afford outside help.
– Life balance and transition coaches will be needed to guide those who planned on retiring through the process of re-orienting their life around a new reality of life-long work, and to help them find ways to view and reframe this change as a positive, rather than a negative, experience.
– Health and fitness coaches are ideally positioned to help clients build a “retirement fund” of strength, vitality and medical resilience in order to live through their “un-retirement” period in good health while preventing expensive and painful lifestyle-related debilitation, as well as to help those in their later years retain or regain the ability to work and live as comfortably as possible.
– Spiritual coaches will be called on to work with the growing number of people who will need greater spiritual support and guidance as retirement plans (or lack of planning) put them in a position of need, fear or uncertainty in their later years.
– Business and corporate coaches will find opportunities working with businesses to understand the value of older workers and the need/ability to provide a functional work environment for them, as well as helping younger professionals plan better and helping aging professionals understand their options as pressure to retire grows faster than the means to do so.
A headline and quotes in the Globe & Mail reads “Short-Handed; Making The Most Out Of Canada’s Labor Crunch
– “The way we thought about our economy for the last generation-and-a-half is no longer relevant”.
– “Everyone is able to move up a bit”.
Those that are skilled and that enjoy and love their work are going to flourish because of the less that 5% employment rates that we are experiencing now is not going to go away as the baby boomers start to retire.
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Arriving home on Wednesday evening will provide me with 14 days of creative / reflective time and personal time. Then it is game on for September with working with clients and speaking gigs.

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Traveling in the last two weeks of the summer are trying as my heart is with my love Laura and I’m very much looking forward to my return home on Wednesday evening.