Ben Dean
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.)