While field is becoming familiar, I still talk to audiences on cruises where no one has heard of coaching.

The best analogy I can think of is sports coach. No athlete gets to their peak without a good coach. The athletic coach is someone who understands physical, emotional and mental skills needed for peak performance, and is able to teach these skills to someone else, shaping it to particular and unique situation of athlete involved. One person needs to work on their backhand. Another needs to learn to control his temper.

When you think about it, when you’re faced with something new what do you do? Say you’ve been diagnosed with some disease you don’t know anything about. Or say you’d just been told your house had some problem you didn’t know anything about. If you’re like me, you’d turn to experts in fields, doctors and engineers, but sooner or later, you’ll start trying to find people who’ve actually experienced what you’re going through.

Someone who has beaten breast cancer may be able to tell you some very useful things about coping with it from all aspects – mental, physical, emotional and spiritual.

Someone who’s had foundation on their house settle can tell you their experience of “the battle of experts,” and, very importantly, outcome. In both cases, we want to know - How did this turn out?

There are also people who coach at meta-level. Through education, or life experience, or both, they have knowledge of how to handle transitions, for instance, or career changes. They may not know precisely about accounting, or public relations, but they understand process of choosing right career for you, how to fit an occupation to a person, how to make a successful transition, and how to teach this to someone else.

Coaching started out as “personal life” coaching, or “business” coaching, but nowadays you’ll find some coaches doing very specific work. If you look on Internet, you’ll find a Breast Cancer coach, a Responsible Recovery coach, a Marketing Coach, an Emotional Intelligence coach, an ADHD coach, The Naked Coach, an eBook coach, a Real Estate Coach, a Parenting coach, a Teen coach, and a Dissertation coach, and many more.

You’ll find a whole host of qualifications – from academic degrees, to coaching credentials, to actual life experience. And you will find a vast array of people doing this work. The majority of coaches still live in US, but there are coaches globally, and since many coaches work by phone or email, you can swing a very wide net. Great for confidentiality, too.

WHERE CAN YOU FIND A COACH?

By looking on a search engine, going to www.coachfederation.org, or asking someone you know who’s been coached. Word-of-mouth is always a good way to choose a professional in your life. Or call me (210-496-0678); I know lots of coaches!

WHAT SORT OF THINGS MIGHT YOU BRING TO A COACH?

If you’re raising an introverted child, you may learn from real lives of introverts what it is they liked and didn’t like about “growing up”.

Introverts make up about 25% of population. If parents don’t understand and advocate for their introverted children, they can get lost in a world designed by and for others. For example, introverts shy away from noise, crowds and bright lights. As you will see from our conversations with them, they often prefer quieter and more highly personalized pursuits. High school, especially, can be a negative experience because it is … noisy, crowded and over stimulating

Introverts are also very territorial. To touch their things, pat their shoulder, ruffle their hair and ask them to share a room with a sibling can be very stressful. Ideally, every introvert would have a room of their own with a door that closes. Please don’t consider this anti-social behavior. This is how introverts recharge their batteries.

In our online survey, we asked introverts what they remembered as their most pleasant pastimes and activities as children. We also asked them about their first day in school. We wanted to know how they liked elementary school and what activities they engaged in after school.

Sara-Ann said, “I liked to run around outside when there were too many people in house … like T.V. was on and someone was cooking in kitchen and there was lots of noise.”

Mark said, “I played a lot alone, read a lot and enjoyed sports...alone. I remember day dreaming A LOT.”

Ann explained, “I liked elementary school as long as I could be allowed to play alone. Whenever I was forced to play with others, I tended to become leader, ironically. My theory is that I spent so much time alone that I was able to develop play plans complete with instructions and I noticed that sociable kids had a sort of freeform way of playing which they seemed to enjoy but which would, because of lack of outlines, devolve into confrontations between them. So when I was forced to interact with them, I came with fun ideas of things to do but they were organized and other kids gravitated towards organized play. Weird, huh?”

Ann sounds like an INTJ type of introvert. Did you know there are eight different types? INTJ introverts are called “the Mastermind”. They like to move people around like chess pieces and Ann is just doing what comes naturally. Please learn more about your child’s introversion. There is much to learn.

In further reflecting on this childhood experience, Ann added, “I have a feeling that loners often appear to others as self-contained and perhaps organized because we usually have time to think things through until we come up with complete plans. People, I've noticed, like to follow those they perceive as knowing what they're doing.”

We asked introverts if their parents tried to force them to socialize. One woman, who preferred to remain anonymous replied, “My parents did pressure me to have friends. They did not understand difficulty that I had navigating through cliques and they were not sympathetic to my feelings about forced association. At a grown-up party, for example, [they’d say] "There's a girl from your class ... go and play with her.” [This] only made me want to reply, “Yes, I recognized her thank you. I see her every day and I'd rather go sit in car and read ... because if I was social, if I wanted to socialize, I would have run up to other child and said ‘let's play’! Duh.”

When asked how they felt about their teachers, this anonymous reply was typical. “I idealized and adored my teachers until older years when they made us participate in groups or paired us up to work on projects. I was a loner. I had friends but my extroverted teachers were always trying to turn classes into "mixers" hoping to keep re-capture adolescent attention.”

An introvert named Leslie had this experience in school, “As a general rule, yes. Being nerdy student type, I was a lot more attracted to teacher than a lot of my fellow students.”

As a matter of fact, many introverts become “teacher’s pet” because they are easy to manage in classroom. This doesn’t mean they are shy, however, any more than because they don’t speak up in class means they have nothing to say. Introverts general prefer writing to speaking. About elementary school in general, Glenn replied, “Elementary school was difficult.... As I progressed in grades and on to middle and high school, my grades and attitude improved. But 8 straight hours of people was hard. I remember liking story time and having to put our heads down on desk best because it was quiet.”