Ben Dean

 

                                PsyInsight

                                Indian Association of Health, Research and Welfare

                                12 PsyInsight, October 2010





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 psychologists several

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

teleconference all 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 companyAuthentic

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 field like 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 area and 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 issues but 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.


+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


MentorCoach Ben Dean was interviewed here by Mary

Judd, a writer, Mentor Coach and AHC graduate who

lives in Delmar, NY.

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.)