Certified technophobe garners 50 clients during first year as a Cybercoach! Harriett Simon Salinger
A Cybercoach uses e-mail to coach people toward the attainment of their personal and professional goals.
It all began with a credit card. Harriett signed up for a special-offer low interest rate credit card that gave her the excuse to splurge on an Apple Mac Plus computer during the late 80's. She was a math phobic who thought computers were related to mathematics. But to Harriett the computer was the way of the future, and so she felt she should try to keep up. Once a few years before, in her attempts to "keep up," she even paid a consultant $50 to sit in front of his computer so she could touch the keys and see for herself that it wouldn't bite back.
But alas, even after she plunked down the credit card and took the computer home, it sat in the box for over four months taking up a lot of space in her apartment. She was unable to hook up the computer when a friend tried to walk her through the process on the phone. Finally she hired a consultant.
But he spoke a mile a minute and used jargon that sounded like a foreign language to Harriett. Consultant Number Two didn't work out because he just couldn't understand the way Harriett thought and what he needed to do to communicate to her. Consultant Number Three, a woman, was finally able to get Harriett off and running with word processing. Harriett remained the typical unadventurous word-processing-only computer user for the next few years.
Then two years ago, a friend went into Harriett's office and announced that Harriett was living with a dinosaur. Out came the credit card again and Harriet purchased a new Apple Performa. This new computer came with America Online where Harriett discovered a whole new world. She became enthralled by the chat forums and found herself captivated into the wee hours of the night. Email allowed her to write things that she would never be able to express in person. She thought to herself, "If I can communicate like this via email, then what are the other things I can do with this computer?" The seed of possibility was planted, but Harriet didn't know how it would sprout at that time.
In late 1994, she received a letter from a cybercoach offering his services. This first known virtual coach gave Harriett a special three-month bargain program. She signed up to have him coach her into finding her niche after 35 years of being a psychotherapist and trainer in an internationally known personal development course. Immediately Harriett knew that "this is what I want to be doing. Here is this space of communicating with anyone without regard to time, distance, expectations, barriers, and other limitations. It is total freedom of communication in any way, to any where, at any time."
Within a month, Harriett had attracted her own cybercoach clients. Some of her clients' coaching programs were keeping them on track with finding a new job, getting out of debt, making a major life transition, or expanding their businesses. Now she has clients all over the country, some of whom she has never met. Her coaching time is evenly divided between phone and email contacts, based on the particular program chosen by each client.
Harriett is affiliated with Coach University and has her own Home Page there. She also teaches the art of cybercoaching to other professional coaches who want to add the online component to their services.
Even though she spends half of her professional life online and has her own Home Page, Harriett still considers herself to be a technophobe. Although she has added Excel, Quicken, and a computer rolodex to her suite of software programs, she has a bookkeeper who actually maintains these applications for her. The big difference is that " I used to pass out every time my computer went down. Now when it doesn't work, I only get upset and just call my technical consultant immediately on his pager." She actually knows how to install software now and is even fooling around with a new ZIP drive.
Harriett recently made her final payment on her credit card for the Apple Performa and also owns a Powerbook which has become her primary computer. She is having the time of her life being a cybercoach. And by the way, she also accepts credit cards for her cybercoaching services. Call her at 1.800.487.4599 or email HSSCoach@aol.com