I am involved with several organizations. RESULTS is a citizen lobby group whose purpose is to create the political will to end hunger. RESULTS Educational Fund is not a lobby group, so it does the same thing through more educational means. And the Microcredit Summit Campaign is a project of the RESULTS Educational Fund. Its goal is to ensure that 100 million of the world's poorest families, especially the women, are receiving credit for self-employment and other financial and business services by the year 2005.

I have been with RESULTS for 20 years. I am actually a volunteer president. I work a bit with the current executive director, maybe an hour a week. I mostly work with RESULTS Educational Fund. I direct its major project, which is the Microcredit Summit Campaign.

It was a little over five years ago in conversations with Dave Ellis about our work that I learned about Life Coaching.

I have been a Brande Foundation Life Coaching client for a little over five years.

I have this habit of getting myself into things I don't know how to do. Anyone who's ever involved in doing things like that needs help and a coach. For example, I have degrees in music and yet I founded a citizen lobby group on ending world hunger. The connections are very limited. In the scheme of my life, I've made various leaps like that. I often need to gain fresh insight on how to make a project happen and how to make it sustain itself and be successful.

Five years ago when I began Life Coaching I was not married. I had never been married. I was in my late forties and had no children. I never owned a house and I worked way too much. Now, the balance in my personal and professional life has been altered completely. I'm married, I have a gorgeous two-year-old son and we live on Capital Hill in a wonderful house that we purchased. Things in my personal life are different now in a very extraordinary kind of unpredictable way.

Just over five years ago, after having a string of experiences, none of which truly prepared me for what I was about to get into, Life Coaching appeared in my life. At that point I had taken on organizing the Microcredit Summit. A couple of years later, in February 1997, nearly 3000 people gathered from 137 countries. They included queens, heads of state, and microentrepreneurs from poor villages around the world. They came to Washington [DC] to launch a global campaign to reach 100 million of the world's poorest women with microcredit. There was nothing much in my history that had prepared me to organize such a meeting and to organize it in such a way that people were inspired and moved very deeply. It was really through my weekly work with my Life Coach that I could see my way through to do this thing that I'd never done before. I'd never organized anything that had more than 300 people in the room and now there were almost 3000 people in the room. I'd never organized anything that had more than six or seven countries represented and now 137 countries were represented. I took on areas that I'd never taken on before and had never perceived myself doing. But I was passionate enough about the goal that I was a great candidate. My Life Coaching got me through.

Sometimes I'm not very comfortable because I'm not necessarily an easily divulging kind of guy. But I trust my coach completely in terms of the confidentiality. I often hesitate for an instant but then I realize it has nothing to do with confidentiality. It's just more a kind of shyness.

I've already talked about the Microcredit Summit and there were others. The decade of the 1990's was the decade of UN Summits. The possibility of summit fatigue was very real and yet we were not only able to launch something that was powerful but we were also able to launch a process that gave us the opportunity for real follow through. My life coach guided me through my blind spots. He helped me through the areas where I was actually ill-prepared to succeed. He helped me along the path that allowed me to succeed. It was an awesome experience.

Most people spend more time thinking about what movie they're going to see or what video they're going to rent than they do thinking about the direction of their lives. I think this is a little backwards. Life Coaching is something that you deserve to really give yourself. If you are not interested in expressing your greatness, you might not need a coach very much.