The Merchant of Just Be Happy

But neither one would move, so nothing was happening. One of the men, a lawyer who seemed to have chosen to embody a bobcat — or a mountain lion, maybe? — waited for the other to approach. The other man, a tech executive who was some sort of monkey and had rolled across the ground a moment earlier, was now still.

“The way we do anything is the way we do everything,” Ms. Beck told the two frozen men as they tried to figure out their next move. Ten other men, who were not blindfolded, looked on, shifting, waiting for their turns. They were assembled for Ms. Beck’s first-ever all-men’s coaching weekend, which she had titled “Escape From the Man Cage.”

Over the course of the weekend, which cost $3,000 per attendee and had filled quickly to capacity, the men would be led through animal tracking, fire-building and, of course, life coaching to help them figure out what was preventing their happiness: Were they living too cautiously? Too passively? Consider the crouching men. The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

Ms. Beck has offered personal and professional growth weekends like this to women for years — well, not just for women, but women are usually the ones who show up. Coaching is a nearly $2 billion industry worldwide, according to a 2012 study conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the International Coaching Federation, a trade association. And in this industry, Ms. Beck has carved out a very successful niche. She’s well known in certain female-centric circles, especially the ones who once watched “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” where she made guest appearances, or who read her monthly column for O, the Oprah Magazine.

Over the years, many women have told me that their lives have been changed by reading one of Martha’s Beck’s best-selling books — like “Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live” (Harmony) — during a job layoff or when having to cope with a newly empty nest. I have yet to hear such comments from a man.

But Ms. Beck has long believed that men are in need of attention, too. “When I tell a woman you really need to quit your soul-sucking job, she goes home, and she can tell her husband, ‘I need to quit,’ and he’s like, ‘O.K., let’s do it.’ ” she said. “If I tell a man he needs to quit his soul-sucking job, he has to go home and fight with his wife or fight with his parents and fight with his in-laws and fight with everybody, because men aren’t supposed to be happy; they’re supposed to do well.”

This won’t do for anyone, according to Ms. Beck, and she has been spreading the anti-soul-sucking message through coaching retreats at her ranch, coaching trips to Africa, corporate coaching — General Electric is a client — and, in the largest part of her work, training an army of emissaries in her life-coach training program. Telling people they are free, it turns out, can be a multimillion-dollar-a-year business.

She is as bewildered by her success as anyone else: “Everything I’ve ever taught in terms of self-help boils down to this — I cannot believe people keep paying me to say this — if something feels really good for you, you might want to do it. And if it feels really horrible, you might want to consider not doing it. Thank you, give me my $150.”

It’s hard to pinpoint when the business of life coaching began — or, rather, everyone in the industry has a different answer. It might have roots in sports coaching. Or it might have sprung from the excitement aroused by motivational speakers of the 1980s. Or it’s the natural outgrowth of the positive-psychology movement of the 1990s. Or maybe it started in ancient Greece.

Coaching includes two broad categories. There are executive and leadership coaches — they train people to be better at business — and life coaches, like Ms. Beck, who talk about leadership in one’s own life, from the home to the office and everywhere in between. There is often tension between the two, with executive coaches tending to disdain the sometimes exuberant spiritual sides of life coaches. But they often tread the same territory: how to move forward, make a change, get past an obstacle.