It all started with a vitamin salesman…
I’m David Steele, MA, MFT, founder of Relationship Coaching Institute (RCI), the first and largest relationship coach training organization. As a membership organization, RCI is uniquely designed with passion and commitment to provide all the training, mentoring, and support needed to help you become a masterful relationship coach with a highly successful coaching business.
I never wanted to do this. Really. But one thing led to another, and…
Here’s the crazy origin story of Relationship Coaching Institute:
Early on a cold Saturday morning in 1996, I was standing in a large circle of men for the monthly gathering of our men’s organization. At one point a youngish man in his 20s—known to me as a health supplement salesman—stepped out and proclaimed something that was so absurd and unexpected that I was shocked to my core: “I’m training to become a Life Coach, and I’m looking for a few volunteer practice clients!”
Here’s the family-friendly version of my inner dialogue: “Life Coach, what’s that? How can this guy help anyone with their life if he can’t figure it out for himself? Wait a minute — he’s going to charge people money to help them with their life? But that’s what I do and I have a degree and a license! Has this guy been sampling one too many health supplements?”
But despite the alarm bells going off inside me, I was intrigued. So I wandered over to the health supplement salesman / Life Coach and asked him what this whole thing was about. His answer was to try a session with him and find out. I agreed.
The following week, we met on the telephone (the telephone!) and he asked me some open-ended questions about what I wanted for my life. He paused long enough after each response to make me think that he had a list of questions in front of him, and was awkwardly searching for the next question to ask. It was like helping one of my kids with their homework by practicing a school assignment with them.
Still, with tolerance that I didn’t know I had, I went along with it and talked about my desire to help people have successful marriages and families, my burnout working with dysfunctional couples and feeling stuck with my current practice, and my frustrations, hopes and dreams for my practice. And as I spoke, something… weird was happening.
By the end of our unskilled and awkward first meeting, I went from feeling burned out and stuck to excited, empowered, and re-energized. It was A BREAKTHROUGH!!!
That was the moment. That was the hand-off. I was sold on coaching. If a young, unskilled, brand-new coach-trainee could help skeptical me (of all people) achieve a breakthrough, think of the possibilities! And imagine my amazement that a brand-new helping profession was emerging right under my nose and I didn’t know anything about it until that fateful Saturday morning with my men’s group. Apparently, fate sold health supplements in its spare time.
The Epiphany
I immediately signed up for coach training with one of the first and most reputable programs, and it was a revelation.
Upon completing my initial coach training I searched for specialized relationship coach training. There was none. But there were LOTS of people calling their service “relationship coaching.”
Upon investigation, all these “relationship coaches” seemed to be doing their own thing and calling it “coaching,” with no connection at all to the skills and paradigms of this fantastic new profession. Everyone just called themselves a relationship coach with no actual training in this complex and important specialty that had no training available for it anywhere. That offended my professional sensibilities, but this was the wild west of the coaching profession.
I started “coaching” my therapy clients and was getting much better results than any of my therapeutic methodologies! This was the birth of relationship coaching. Yep, just like the new frontiers of the wild west I had to pioneer, define, design and codify the specialty of relationship coaching that didn’t credibly exist at the time. I built upon my initial coach training, my 15 years of experience as a Marriage and Family Therapist and the emerging standards and core competencies of the brand new International Coach Federation. I was fortunate to be inspired, encouraged and supported by ICF founder Thomas Leonard (who created RCI’s first logo!).
Later, while thinking of my 15 years of couples therapy with past clients and how I wished I could turn back time and “coach” them, I had the biggest epiphany of my life:
SINGLES BECOME COUPLES!
After all these years helping struggling couples, in hindsight I could see that the ones who couldn’t make it work had ONE thing in common—they truly had “irreconcilable differences”; they were simply incompatible and had unsolvable problems.
Just acknowledging that there was such a thing as “unsolvable problems” was another epiphany. It became clear to me that if I really wanted to lower the divorce rate and support successful marriages and families (that’s what a Marriage & Family Therapist is supposed to do!), then I needed to start coaching singles.
Out of my desperation of knowing nothing about how to help singles find compatible partners and live happily ever after, I contacted my men’s organization and a local women’s organization for 12 single volunteers to meet in my office for four weekly focus group sessions. They opened my eyes and lit my fire.
The Birth of Conscious Dating
Deciding to go “all in,” I launched a weekly “Friday Night Social” for singles in Silicon Valley (San Jose, CA).
- I gave a short presentation on dating and relationships during each meeting.
- The Friday Night Socials grew quickly, averaging 40-60 attendees per week.
- Within 90 days of launch, I had a full coaching practice and transitioned from therapy to coaching 100%.
- I built a new business of singles events, classes, coaching, workshops and groups, established a partnership, brought on associate coaches, and registered my new business as “LifePartnerQuest.”
- I became a bit of a local celebrity and trusted support resource for local singles.
As an introvert (believe it or not) I didn’t really want to be the “star” of the show every week, so I decided to start inviting my local colleagues to give presentations on relationship topics, and word quickly spread amongst my professional community.
Fast forward 8 years to 2005, I put what I learned and created for helping singles find lasting love into the first edition of my first book: Conscious Dating: Finding the Love of Your Life and the Life that You Love.
The Birth of Relationship Coaching Institute
It was never on my radar to write a book, teach, or train anyone in anything—I thought my calling was helping my clients.
My colleagues started asking me to put on a relationship coach training for them, and I initially declined. I was a busy guy with a full practice and was having too much fun coaching my clients, leading my singles community every Friday night, and growing LifePartnerQuest.
But my conscience started nagging me. It occurred to me that my purpose and mission in life, my “calling,” is to lower the divorce rate and promote successful marriages and families. I realized that no matter how successful I became, I couldn’t do that myself. Yet another epiphany revealing my future.
So, in October 1997, I put together, scheduled, and conducted my first relationship coach training for my local colleagues and PRESTO, I that’s how I ended up pioneering relationship coach training.
Afterwards, LifePartnerQuest officially became Relationship Coaching Institute (RCI), and as they say, “the rest is history.”
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