I am not a team player; I prefer to play--and work--by myself. As a child, my most strenuous athletic activity involved carting books to and from the library. As an adult, I have pursued the solitary path of free-agency, participating in corporate teams only in the most temporary and distant ways.

So, I have never had a coach. This lack I did not regret--tending to associate coaches with drill sergeants and other people who make you do push-ups until you vomit--until I started reading about life coaches: personal trainers for career jugglers. Then I felt a twinge of self-pity for my poor, mentorless self. Because while one of the best things about self-employment is not having someone telling you what to do; one of the hardest things about being your own boss is not having someone to tell you what to do. Without a manager to promote you or cross-train you or push you to try something new, inertia sets in.

Apparently even corporate employees are having a hard time finding someone to watch over them and their careers these days. Mentors in the form of managers with a long history in an organization and deep understanding of its workings are few and far between in today's hyper-paced, high-churn business world. As a result, according to a recent article in Fortune, "workers at all levels of the corporate ladder, fed up with a lack of advice from inside the company, are taking matters into their own hands and enlisting coaches for guidance on how to improve their performance."

A coach for life

Personal coaching is more than job counseling. With work invading so many aspects of life in our wired society, performance on the job is intimately linked to personal development and family happiness. Life coaches help clients "navigate their warp-speed lives and sort through the mental clutter of the Information Age," according to a piece in USA Today. As one coach put it, people "need someone to help them make quality decisions so they can live the life they want rather than the life that is coming at them 90 miles an hour."

Life coaching was born in the 80s when young, upwardly mobile professionals (yuppies--remember them?) started asking their financial planners for advice on everything from car purchases to family planning. Today there are some 10,000 personal coaches out there, many of whom began their careers as business consultants or financial planners. Although there are coaches with backgrounds in psychotherapy, professionals are quick to draw a clear distinction between coaching and traditional therapy. Where therapists focus on healing wounds from the past, coaches work in the here and now, helping their clients to set goals and take action to reshape their immediate personal and professional lives.

"A coach is a person who holds you accountable to yourself," says a coachee quoted in the USA Today article. "A coach has no other agenda besides supporting you and helping you develop."

I wanted one.

The search

Personal coaching may be a growing profession, but there aren't a lot of them hanging out their shingles in my Midwestern locale. So I went where all of small town America goes to find exotica that only Californians (533 certified coaches at last count) can take for granted: the Internet.

Overwhelmed at first by the sheer number of people eager to cheer me on--my search at coachu.com turned up 944 coaches willing and supposedly able to help me achieve the goal of "balance in life"--I allowed myself to become temporarily sidetracked into looking for online services that might be less costly than personal coaching fees ($150 to more than $2000 per month). This narrowed my options considerably.

One that seemed promising was ihavegoals.com, a young company built around an interactive website offering to provide subscribers with "a framework for fashioning their own success." For $12.95 a month, you can access a database that helps you to make and track personal and professional goals.

I gave it a one-month trial, but found the goal-setting system cumbersome--I think I could have done better with pencil and paper--and the automated "accountability system" (e-mail reminders you write to yourself) easy to ignore. At the end of 30 days, when I went to the graph depicting my percentage of goals achieved to date, it was not a pretty picture.

Another online service I tried--this one is free--focuses on just one aspect of balance in life: housekeeping. Although spotless sinks were never high on my priorities list, after just one month of subscribing to Flylady.net, I was convinced that they ought to be.

There is no personalizing your coaching relationship with Flylady; she sends all subscribers the same 12-18 e-mails everyday. But her messages are relentless. And, with subject lines like "WHERE ARE YOUR SHOES?" (Flylady has a theory about the relationship between slovenliness and bare feet), her reminders are hard to ignore, even if you are just running through them with one finger on the delete button.

A coach of one's own

My own experience and the fact that Flylady's service has upwards of 50,000 subscribers suggest that cyber brainwashing does work. If Betty Friedan weren't still alive, she'd be rolling over in her grave at the number of "Finally Loving Yourself" testimonials Flylady receives each week from women who feel so much better now that they wear shoes and shine their sinks. My husband narrowly saved me from total Stepford Wifehood by suggesting that, instead of alphabetizing the pantry, I should tell Flylady to take a flying leap.

My next stop was The International Coach Federation, where I used their Find a Coach! service to match my criteria with professionals prepared to help me tap my fullest potential. From a list of 23, ranging from "ADD Coaching" to "Retirement Goal Setting," I selected "Balance/Integration" as the area in which I wished to be coached. The referral questionnaire allowed me to further narrow my search by the type of "professional and life experience" I wanted in my coach, and to specify that I was looking for someone certified by the ICF and willing to work with me via e-mail (most coaches seem to prefer the telephone).

The search returned 10 matches. After reading brief descriptions of each coach's background, philosophy, and methods on the ICF site, I chose 5 to "interview," writing to ask them how, exactly, they would help me achieve the aforementioned "Balance/Integration." (For tips on choosing a coach, check out this article.) Based on their responses, I would have liked to hire them all, but one in particular attracted my notice.

". . . . I would also ask you to look at your beliefs about how clean and orderly a home has to be," she wrote, in part. "I know from experience that families can be happy, healthy, and very rich in all sorts of ways without orderly closets and pantries."

It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

Over the course of three months (most coaches ask for this as a minimum commitment), my cybercoach has helped me to articulate what I mean by "balance in life" and to take clearly defined steps toward achieving it. As a result, I am doing more things that I always wanted to do and fewer things that I never wanted to do but was doing anyway (so long, shiny sinks).

All without having to execute a single pushup.

Debra Wierenga is a freelance writer and aspiring poet.