The following is an excerpt from the CoachStart Manual.

Ten years ago, no one had heard of life, business, or corporate coaching.  Today, it is featured in The New York Times, Fortune Magazine, Oprah, and CNN.  And still, most of the world’s population has not heard of it.  Demand for coaching is expected to continue to grow and may accelerate.  What will happen when the first major movie featuring a life coach hits the street?  Corporations are jumping on the band wagon: they want to hire corporate coaches, but even greater is their desire to have their managers trained in coaching techniques, and to develop a “coaching culture” within their organization.

There are an estimated 10,000 part-time and full-time coaches worldwide (ref: ICF).  The number of people entering the emerging field of personal and business coaching has doubled in size each of the past three years (ref: CoachVille™).  Several hundred articles, TV and radio shows have been done in the past three years.  Coaching has been written about in Newsweek, Business Week, Fortune, Money, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fast Company, New Age Journal, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, Bloomberg Personal, Newsday, etc.

The number of corporations using coaching is increasing.  Fortune magazine has referred to coaching as:  “one of the hottest things in human resources” and “a grassroots movement that is spreading in some of the unlikeliest corners of corporate America, including IBM, AT&T, and Kodak.”

Coaching is strongest in the US, followed by the UK, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore, and New Zealand.  Coaching is reaching more and more countries all the time; my newsletter subscribers now come from more than 90 countries.

Improvements in technology including teleconferences, cheap international phone calls, and the reach of the internet are making it even easier for coaches to build a successful practice with low overhead.