The words 'Life Coach', for many people outside the US, have negative connotations because many societies do not have the 'self help' culture the US has so successfully embraced. Casino International has discovered, through meeting Tom Fuetsch, that there's more than we thought to Life Coaching – and it involves many simple psychological techniques combined to unlock a person's real potential, sometimes by simply shifting their associations from negative to positive. But Tom explains how he works best – so read on.

Casino International: What's a Life Coach and how do you help people? How do you work?
Tom Fuetsch: In so many corporations they say that they believe in letting people communicate and they say that they want you to be creative in your job. But, those two things are really shut down to a lot of employees in corporations  – the bigger a corporation gets the more it’s regimental. If people get the creativity, they get communication and once people start creating they start feeling better about themselves which is better for them and the company they work for.
A lot of people get stuck in their energy, in their work, and they feel frustration that they're just not going any place. When they feel that way, I sit them down and I assess what’s going on in their life and then we work through it. I can then give them tools that they can use for the rest of their lives, so that before they leave they should feel much better about themselves.
Where a company is taking over another company I’ve gone in and coached individual executives so that the executives were made aware of the new culture. Quite obviously the new company didn't want the executives to fear the new culture and run and leave the company. They needed me to come in ahead of time or during the takeover and talk with the executives so that fear didn't really take over, which is especially prevalent with the times right now, with the global economy worries.
I’ve meditated since college, and it’s amazing how I clear myself out in minutes. Forbes magazine printed years ago that 95 per cent of executives meditate in one form or another. Our minds are bogged down so much with the activity around us that this causes people's energy to be drained so much. If you’re just being pulled on the negative side so much, rather than being positive and clearing out negative you will become drained. The other activity I recommend is yoga, it has become a very big thing in America, probably in the last ten years. Everybody’s doing it now because it’s such a great release.

CI: How do you start working with somebody, whether it’s an individual or a company?
TF: Basically they call me up and if they feel they want a one-on-one in particular, I have a program laid out and we set up a meeting, which I can actually do over the phone, or go to them, or they can come to me. If for example, they are in another country, they just call me and I ask them to write down different things that they can think of that are bothering them. For example, I ask them to write down what keeps coming up in their memory about their childhood that frustrates them, which sometimes gives me a key. I have a focus of different items like energy, survival and emotions, and so I’m looking for those kind of things that people have been programmed, and then I sit down and I assess it. I usually know where I’m heading before the end of the talk and so I usually bring the tools to them and see what experience is really bothering them.
Most businesses have a great person that really knows his business and you want him or her to stay; so you sit him or her down and talk with them and you work with them, develop them, you let them figure it out, you just guide them along.

CI: Can you give us a very brief idea of what you look at in your clients?
TF: There’s about seven elements of people's minds that I look into. People always worry about their survival, they worry about their emotions,  so say for example, they just broke up with a loved one or had issues with a co-worker, that grabs their energy. This will drain them because it just creates an awful lot of fatigue, frustration and depression. Another example is a boss who tells people to do something his way and they constantly get pounded as you have to do it his way – pretty soon people are sort of giving away their own self in their mind. It really goes back to the fact that you’ve got to love yourself first, then you can love everybody else.
What I’ve come across with many people, is that they are programmed from way back in their childhood, for example, in what they can achieve. If their parents said: "If you don’t do this, you're not going to measure up!" Even as an adult, it doesn’t matter how much they achieve, they’re still beating themselves up for not measuring up to those expectations.
It’s a rewarding job for me as I’m a big believer in people, it’s part of developing a team. I was walking through the casinos here in Reno, I had the Executive Vice President with me and every place that we walked into people came up to me and said, "Thank you, Tom."
Another thing that has happened to me was I was life coaching a psychologist and assessing her and then at the end I said. "How do you think it went?" She’s very pragmatic, very firm, so she says, "Well that was pretty good, I think you were pretty right on." And I said to myself, I expected more because we really made great breakthroughs. Three days later I get this text from her and she says that was awesome I feel so much better and three days after that she called me and personally told me.

CI: What is your background?
TF: I started in human resources, as my degree was in Business Administration, with the emphasis in human resources, so I’m a big believer in people and developing them.
If you look back in time everybody had a mentor whether they acknowledge it or not. Life coaching has been around, or rather the phrase has been around since 1993, so that's its  title. It’s funny, I was looking back with a friend of mine and was describing the training I did to her years ago and she said, "Tom you’ve got to call yourself life coach because that’s what they call it these days." So throughout my career I took not only my own training, but brought in trainers to train my trainers, so I've done an awful lot of coaching. So I’ve probably been actively coaching and training for about 15 years – mostly in the casinos.

CI: Are you targeting your service to any particular group?
TF: Yes, I’m going into casino areas because I know people in the business and that is my previous professional field of expertise, so I have contacts – but I do spread it around other industries as well. I also do executives in general and people in general because of the life coaching. I started in the casino business and I’ve stayed in that area very heavily. I really loved managing casinos because there were always challenges.

CI: So if a company says we want you to come in and give a talk how does it work?
TF: I’d always loved working with people one-on-one and now I do seminars also, for instance: Changing people's energy – in any work force whether it’s an assembly line workforce, a casino work force or an entertainment work force, what happens is people get monotony in their job. Because of this, they get fatigued, then I go in and talk to those groups and change that energy: I ship that energy and it goes above motivation, I give them tools so when they feel that way again they can adjust and change. It’s really been on self empowerment, it’s going back to truly owning yourself, and feeling better about yourself.
With an awful lot of people you just need to get them freeing themselves from their emotion – what you do is you bring out a whole new ray of sunshine, a different way to look at life and then by the time you’re done that issue has just been neutralised.

Find out more about Tom from his web site, www.tomfuetsch.com , or call (001) 775 747 3662.

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