SOUL TRAINER
by Robin Wallace
A personal trainer for the mind and soul, life coach and Christian minister James Vuocolo has uncovered a new age for old-time religion, and his millennial spin on Christianity may be the key to leading the old flock back into the fold.
"Jesus was the perfect life coach," observes Dr. James Vuocolo T'78, T'82, explaining why a very traditionally trained clergyman would incorporate the very new, very '90s, and very secular concept of life coaching into his practice of ministry.
Coaching, with its focus on individual well-being, self-fulfillment, and professional success, seems to represent a significant philosophical departure from what most Christians would consider the historical standard teachings of their church. But for Vuocolo, senior minister at the Redlands United Church of Christ in California, coaching did not present an alternative to Christian philosophy, but a vehicle that could transport the church back into people's lives.
"People are spiritual, but have had bad experiences with the church. There is a shift happening in our society ... away from organized religion toward individual and ad-hoc groups," says Vuocolo, who, after being ordained into the United Church of Christ in 1979, had plenty of opportunity to witness this phenomenon serving ministries in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming before joining the Redlands parish in 1994.
As churches struggled with waning membership throughout the past two decades, the Basking Ridge native says, a booming industry developed in therapy, counseling, self-help programs, and expensive seminars with such modem-day prophets as Deepak Chopra. It was clear, he says, that whatever was driving people away from the church had not diminished their need for spiritual guidance; these professions were filling a void once serviced by the clergy.
"As someone who loved the church, I was seeking a way to speak the contemporary gospel," says Vuocolo, who serves as president of the Christian Counseling Service in Redlands and as vice moderator of the Eastern Association of the United Church of Christ. In coaching, the newest frontier to be explored in the human journey for spiritual satisfaction, he saw an enormous opportunity for the church to reclaim its territory.
Like most of the nation, Vuocolo discovered coaching in a 1996 *Newsweek cover article detailing how the corporate sector was applying the concept as a management and staff training and performance- improvement tool. An unlikely hybrid of a personal therapist and an expert professional consultant, coaches seek to improve productivity and morale by harmonizing the individual goals, values, and personal fulfillment of the employee with the objectives of their company.
But unlike a therapist, who concentrates on the source and cause of an individual's problems, or an expert consultant, who assesses an organization's weaknesses and provides recommendations, a coach seeks to motivate, guiding a client to identify trouble spots and formulate a plan for reaching specific goals. More comparable to a fitness or athletic trainer, a coach remains with the client to prompt and support them through the difficult work of achieving those goals.
"I thought , 'This is what I do now,' A coach is like a minister in that we deal with the client's issues," Vuocolo says. "The minister as coach seemed a viable model for a church leader. It was a way to bridge the sacred with the secular."
A New Frontier
Founded in 1992 by Thomas Leonard, a former financial planner, Coach University, one of only a few coach-training organizations in the world, is a "virtual university" that exists entirely on-line. When Vuocolo enrolled in the intense two-year program he found himself exploring not only a new professional terrain, but also the landscape of cyberspace as well, attending classes with students from around the world via teleconferencing, automated call-conferencing classes, and email.
"Coaching is on the leading edge of technology," explains Vuocolo, who says the Internet and World Wide Web proficiency the university includes in its training is vital to the coaching industry". Most coaches and clients, he says, communicate entirely by electronic means and over the telephone, without in-person sessions.
Having completed the program in April, Vuocolo is now a member of the Coach U faculty, leading TeleClasses and hosting a monthly special interest group for fellow coaches. He is one of 2,000 trained, professional career and life coaches using such techniques as "Behavioral and Value Assessments' and "Life Mapping Courses" to challenge and nurture clients to find the healthy balance between their personal, professional, and spiritual lives.
"As much as we try to separate our business selves from our spiritual selves or relationship selves, the truth is we are the same person bringing the same values, needs, attitudes, and experience to everything we do," Vuocolo says. "A coach can help a person evaluate how they behave at work versus who they really are."
A coaching session, for example, would require a client to contemplate such provocative questions as "What five things in your life are you tolerating now?" "Do you live in a clean and orderly place?" "What three things would people say about you if you died today?" and "What have you done today to make someone's life better?"
Vuocolo currently works with clients who are pastors, business owners, executives, and other professionals who, he says, "want to take their life and work to the next levels of success." But in applying the coaching concept to his church, he is breaking virgin ground even for a field so new. He hopes that coaching, with its origins in the corporate world, can help improve church management and operations, and he believes organizational and group coaching is the future administrative style for nonprofit organizations.
"Something happens to business people on church boards," he says. They view it as a hobby, not as how they would run their business. Coaching is a way to bring the most relevant aspects of the business world to people in the church."
Vuocolo is the founder and host of a monthly group for ministry leaders who are coaching caregivers in civic and volunteer organizations. Despite these practical applications, however, there is a visionary magnitude to Vuocolo's mission.
"Most people are familiar with Jesus' commandment 'love your neighbor as yourself.' How can you do that if you don't love yourself? The clergy is notorious for taking very bad care of themselves," he says. "A better commandment is 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' A person has but one life to live. Coaching is about extreme self-care."
A coach helps an individual discover the self-love that is the key to productivity and positivity, he says, acknowledging that the church may have failed its members by not addressing their individual needs for personal happiness and fulfillment.
"Christians need to look a lot more redeemed," he says, invoking a favorite catch phrase. "We [Christians] are called to be witnesses, not prosecutors. Many people talk the talk. A coach can help you walk the walk." [END]
Dr. Vuocolo can be reached at netcoach@soulbusiness.com or
(909) 794-2136.
© 1997 Drew Magazine. Reprinted with permission.