HALF MOON BAY REVIEW By STACY TREVENON
BUSINESS 6A · Wednesday, Jan. 10,2001
Barry Bettman is a certified professional co-active coach
who helps clients realize and zero in on their goals.
Another New Year's Day has
arrived and brought with it yet another
list of resolutions: Improve relationships.
Decide what you really
want to do. Make more money.
Advance in your career. Be happy.
Okay, fine, but how?
Half Moon Bay resident Barry
Bettman, who describes himself as a
certified professional co-active
coach, is ready to answer those questions
this new year.
From his living room office, he
offers Barry Bettman Success Coach-
ing, a fun, effective plan geared
toward helping clients define and
zero in on goals and realize their own
agendas of personal and/or business
visions.
New Year's, Bettman said, comes
only once a year, and "people tend to
blink quickly, look at their resolu-
tions and not follow through.”
But there's another way. Coach-
ing, Bettman said, is a matter of
"focusing the client forward to take
action, and learning about awareness
of their lives and businesses, and the
most important things to them,” he
said. "It's about supporting the
clients, helping them stretch further,
setting juicy goals, and helping them
get there. And celebrating the
results."
Working with the client's own
agenda, looking for results in a mini-
mum of three months, Bettman, 45,
embarks with clients on a process of
realizing both personal and
professional goals.
It hinges on a relationship
between coach and client, in which
there is clear communication,
accountability and commitment to
move forward.
Bettman might begin with a
process of taking inventory, using a
tool he calls the "wheel of life."
Clients evaluate and prioritize vital
aspects of their lives, like career,
money, health, romance, recreation,
personal growth, environment, and
friends and family, all arranged
around a wheel.
Then Bettman works with clients
in a process in which he "articulates
back," or mirrors, what the client
discovers along the way.
There's no such thing as failure,
Bettman said. Adopting a stance he
nicknames "CANI" for "constant and
never-ending improvement,” he por-
trays occasional stumbling blocks as
chances to learn.
"Sometimes in the discovery
process, it's powerful to look at what doesn't
work,” Bettman said. Also adopting a co-active
stance, in which he and the client work closely,
he follows a model made of three components: fulfillment,
or an action plan; balance, or the integrating of many
perspectives or choices; and process, based on the point at which
the client is in his other development. Client and
coach work together in an atmosphere of accountability,
or responsibility for reaching the goal, Bettman said.
The client will have homework, such as expanding in
business or taking small steps toward personal
goals. "It puts (the client) in forward.
It hinges on the big picture and what's possible there,
which Bettman strives to keep in his clients' sight, he said.
"Coaching is a hybrid between helping move the person forward
to their agenda and having them discover, learn what it's
all about for them in the process,” he said.
Bettman, who does not do consulting, works with clients
both one-on-one in person and via phone or
electronic means. Phone contacts, he said,
tend to be more flexible. He says his client base
stretches across the country, with clients in Brooklyn NY,
Southern California and the Midwest as well as in the Bay Area.
He claims his credentials from the International
Coaches Federation (ICF), an East Coast-based entity
with chapters across the country. To become credentialed
through the ICF, he passed oral and written examinations,
put in a minimum of 750 coaching hours and gave references.
He is also certified as a professional
co-active coach through the
nationally known Coaches Training
Institute and has experience through
the Anthony Robbins Mastery Uni-
versities, which focus on life skills.
He is an active member of the
American Coaching Association,
through which he has organized sup-
port for coaching for those who live
with attention deficit disorder
(ADD).
Acquainted with ADD through
his own struggle with the disorder,
which began in childhood, he says
that coaching can help those afflicted
with the disorder to focus on obsta-
cles like procrastination, organiza-
tional overload, and ways to stream-
line their lives.
"I've got a passion to help people
unclutter their lives, get on track and
be successful,” he said.
He is also a certified “Cashflow
Experiential Workshop Leader,”
which teaches participants to get out
of life's rat race and into financial
freedom in a method based on the
Robert Kiyosaki book "Rich Dad,
Poor Dad."
This three-hour workshop, he
said, teaches participants how to
identify personal blocks to financial
success and to "learn how the rich
play the game of life that the poor
and middle class haven't learned
yet."
He is also a contributing author to
the book "Get Clients Now: A 28-
Day Marketing Program for Profes-
sionals and Consultants." In this
book, he said, he penned a section on
fear and how to overcome it by shift-
ing our deeply held beliefs that keep
us from accessing the more resource-
ful sides of ourselves.
In I999, Bettman helped found
"Evening for Success” a regional
program in Walnut Creek which
teaches skills for life and business to
audiences in an interactive workshop
setting. Proceeds from the workshops
go to children's charities, he said.
Success started for the Bay Area
native in 1993, when he began work-
ing with the Robbins Mastery cours-
es. Prior to that, he had graduated
from San Diego State University
with a bachelor's degree in business,
with an emphasis in informational
systems; and logged 20 years in
medium and large companies, work-
ing in computers, marketing and
sales.
He has been a Coastside resident
since 1985. He is kicking off the new year
with two one-hour phone workshops,
which will be open to up to 30
clients. They will take place on
Wednesday, Jan. 16, and Thursday,
Jan. 23, at 7:30 p.m. respectively.
These workshops will help, partici-
pants focus on what they accom-
plished in 2000 and what is vital to
them in 2001.
He also plans personal goal-set-
ting workshops, though the dates
have yet to be announced.
To register for any of his work-
shops, Bettman can be reached at
530-582-5206 www.barrybettman.com
HALF MOON BAY REVIEW By STACY TREVENON
BUSINESS 6A · Wednesday, Jan. 10,2001