If you can't decide what you want from life, or you can, and don't know how to make it happen, a life coach could be the answer. Steve Pratt talks to Fiona Harrold.

FIONA Harrold is a life coach, not a guru. All the recent talk surrounding Cherie Blair's personal guru has blurred the distinction, but Harrold insists she's not in the business of telling people want to do.

"I have never encouraged anyone to depend on me for all the answers. I encourage them to come up with their own answers," says the woman who's been dubbed the Queen Bee of British life coaching. "When you believe in someone, it's the most amazing spur for them. People think 'wow, that's what I want to do'. My job is to see people's potential, to make them see it and to breathe fire into it."

She's been calling herself a life coach for five years, but "self-esteem consultant" might be a better way of putting it. She's not a therapist or a counsellor although, if she felt a client had a deep-seated problem and needed to sit down and think about it, she would recommend they take that route.

Making lists figures prominently in her method. People need to take time to put down their good points on paper to help the solution become clearer.

As a life coach, she may seem to do nothing more than impart a bit of good old-fashioned common sense to clients, but she sees her role as deeper than that. "You can't just sit there like a nodding dog and say, 'I'm listening to what you're saying'. There's something else - where do we go from here to get to grips with this thing you call your life?," she explains.

"If you're going to be successful with these things, you have to come up with some interesting insights into people. Sometimes it's just underneath the surface. They are scared of admitting what they want to do, or it's very precious to them and they've been laughed at before. Once they decide, it's like the genie is out of the bottle.

"The minute people commit to making things happen, their life becomes much more interesting in that second. It might be scary, but it's exciting. Impulsive is exciting. People play down their life to such an extent, they think it's awful when it's good."

Research shows that the British are less happy than they used to be. Harrold feels there's something self-effacing about the British people that doesn't help when trying to push yourself forward in life. "It's like going through life with the brakes on," she says.

She has "nothing to complain about" in her own life, although it took time to find her way. Not wanting to climb on the career ladder, she dropped out and worked as a waitress in London. She sang in a band and lived in a communal house. "I just hung out and loved the idea of not having this pressure of having to do well," she says. Then she trained as a massage therapist and her teacher was also a self-esteem consultant. There was no formal training. Harrold apprenticed herself to this woman, who eventually began to hand on clients.

In a way, life coaching isn't something you can learn. "That ability to motive people is something you've either got or haven't got," she says.

As well as her personal service, she took her ideas to a more general public with her first book, Be Your Own Life Coach. Now she's written The 10-Minute Life Coach, in response to people who wanted an inspirational book they could dip in and out of.

Harrold knows that having a personal life coach is financially beyond many people. The book, she hopes, set out the basics for looking at your life and determining what route to take. She also runs a six-week on-line course for £29.

Life coaching isn't restricted to personal clients. Corporations are embracing it for executives ("if they are happy, they're going to work better"). Harrold herself would like to see this confidence-boosting approach introduced in every school in the country. Using it to help the long-term unemployed and prisoners are other objectives.

"I used to be very evangelical, now I'm a bit more philosophical. There are opportunities for all of us to learn things about our life. But it's not my job to jump into people's lives and say, stop, I see the future."

* The 10-Minute Life Coach (Hodder Mobius, £10). More details about courses at www.fionaharrold.com