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“Coach Potato” Hot New Craze for the Lazy and Uninspired Who Nevertheless Seek Self Improvement
A controversial figure has emerged in the field of personal and business coaching, and it appears that he’s the antithesis of all that demanding profession stands for. He goes simply by the name of “Coach Potato,” hailing from Idaho—or so he says, anyway.
Coach Potato made an unobtrusive entry, via a weathered red pick-up truck, to our meeting. This was held in his choice of a ramshackle diner. The only hint that he was the latest sought-after celebrity in the coach-o-sphere could be found in a vanity license plate that read “HOTSPUD.”
On personal growth: Coach Potato adamantly advises folks to buck the current trend to “do the one thing that scares you.” “What’s wrong with staying in your comfort zone?” he asked. “I see people contemplating bungee cord jumping, extreme hang gliding, and taunting pious Internet marketers. Holy Moly, why would you want to do this? Don’t you know 
you could get seriously injured this way? Well, with the first two anyway.” Coach Potato suggests that if you must explore risk-taking behavior, just try substituting one comfort food for another, i.e., chicken pot pie one night and maybe some mac and cheese the other. “That should do the trick—and you’ll save fistfuls of cash by keeping your life insurance premiums down!” he says.
On passion: “What is going on with all this passion? Think about it. People make bad decisions ‘in the heat of passion.’ There are even ‘crimes of passion!’ Do you think a passionate state of being is exactly a good frame of mind to make sound choices about your business? Chew on that and that’s the kind of thing that will make you, like my friends in the South say, ‘wake up where you was.’”
Celebrity-fueled trends based on the thinnest of metaphysical concepts conveyed by the frankly-weird activity of channeling have not escaped the Potato’s critical eye(s) either: “Forget this Law of Attraction! It’s a convoluted bunch of airy-fairy malarkey. You want to know a real secret? Consider implementing this: the Law of Subtraction. It’s easy, it’s a one-step process instead of four, it’s no-cost and anyone can do it.”
What it is? “Now write this down,” Coach Potato instructed. I did. “Just subtract yourself from negative situations. Let me repeat that. Just subtract yourself from negative situations. That’s all. I guarantee you that your life will be easier and more pleasant, and—dang!—there’s some way in there where you’ll make more money, too.”
Coach Potato teaches his mentees via teleseminars and never in person. “Heck, the point to this stuff is you gotta do it at home and in your pajamas! Otherwise, there’s not much reason for doing it, is there?” Tele-programs typically last twelve weeks, but the Coach admits, “My manuals for weeks three through twelve are blank. People generally lose their momentum for any kind of coaching after the first teleseminar, though some can sustain it for two.” However, he does ship out all home study materials with the advice that students immediately place them on their bookshelves, “so you won’t waste time and it can start collecting dust right away.”
When asked about his common-sense approach and why it might appeal so widely to Americans, 30 percent of whom are obese and live in households that have the tv on for an average of eight hours a day, the Coach simply answered: “Common sense? Yeah, I got horse sense. None of this miniature-ass sense that the other gurus have.”
Finally, he views family and friends as ultimately more important than finances. “No matter what, you’ve got to keep those home fries burning,” he announced with a wink. With that, he put his cup of joe back down on the counter and quickly wiped his mouth with the edge of his flannel shirt, calling an end to the interview.
Now that’s a hot potato! Thanks, Coach Potato, and here’s to the next tele-program you whip up being a “mashing success!”
graphic: iStockphoto.com
Posted by Diane Fusco in Real News on 07.20.2008 
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Gideon awoke on that day as he had on any other day and sleepily checked his email, but little did he know that this day was going to be oh-so different. Apparently, his last remaining client had canned him. In his email box was a message the client had forwarded to him that had been written by an irate person on the client’s email list in response to a sales letter which Gideon’s copy had spawned.
He walked quickly through a narrow alley, and the epiphany came just as surely as a magnificent Technicolor sunrise lit up the city of Philadelphia. Just how long were Gideon and Carolyn in that bar? That’s not important; what’s important is that, as Gideon walked towards the light, he suddenly felt lighter, aye, it was as if he even lost some physical weight in the process. He knew deep in his bones that the life of an Internet marketing copywriter was not for him. All those rules, all those crazy editors who he knew should be correcting his commas and quotation marks but didn’t because no one ever had the foresight to use editors, all those ungrateful clients depending on him to sell their useless solutions to problems that don’t really exist—that was not the real Gideon! No! He would…he would become an experimental haiku poet! And move to Omaha, Nebraska, which, according to a magazine he had just read, had become populated with hipsters. He could see himself now performing at open mics wearing jaunty black berets. Women would buy him drinks and hope he was an emotionally distraught artiste who would immortalize them in words.
If Marty Browman had it all to do over again, he surely never would have embarked on his fateful trip to Finland. He knew that Finland is a small Scandinavian country with a population of approximately 5 million who are legendary for their shyness, reserve, and love of raw salmon. What he didn’t know was that behind Finland’s fairy tale exterior lies a land just waiting to gobble up the likes of unwary Internet marketers like trolls hunting tasty goats who cross their bridge. 
Whether he evaporated from the intense heat of the sauna or was simply carried away by the strong Arctic winds remains a mystery. All that is known is that in the dark of the icy winter, at the time of the aurora borealis, the northern lights flash an eerie fluorescent green; legend has it that this is Marty, who has returned to share a sad goodbye with all his Internet marketer friends. 
