For many, the new year represents a time for change, a fresh start, a chance to set new goals. Some of us vow to lose the extra pounds gained during holiday feasts. And a few of us may commit to learning a new language. Others want to land that promotion they've been seeking.

We jot down goals and share them at New Year's Eve cocktail parties. And many of us trudge to the gym five or six times during the first two weeks of January.

But eventually, the momentum slows, and old habits return like a tide.

That's why a lot of people turn to an increasingly popular choice for help - life coaches.

There are at least 70,000 life coaches worldwide, according to Coachville.com, an international coaching organization. They come from all walks of life and set themselves apart from traditional therapists in training and philosophy. There are more than 125 coach training schools across the country, like Coach University, Coach Training Institute, Coach Training Alliance, and Coachville.com, just to name a few.

Traditional therapists look back at a client's path to uncover the source of their problems, while life coaches take a forward-looking approach. They help their clients evaluate where they are now and how they can move forward, goal-oriented.

"Let's assume you're teaching someone how to ride a bicycle," suggested Debby Parkinson, a Sacramento-based life coach who has been in the business for 10 years. "You just walk along beside them while they're learning to ride that bicycle. You're telling them you believe in them, and pretty soon they're riding faster and eventually you're able to let go."

A consultant, Parkinson said, would come in and analyze the bicycle, take it apart, and then tell you how it works mechanically and how it would work better.

"A therapist would want to talk to you about, 'Have you had issues with a bicycle in your past? Have you had a bad dream about bicycles? Are you afraid of anything with wheels?' "

Parkinson said that a coach would care about those issues but wouldn't delve deeply into them. Instead, she added, a coach would be more likely to say, 'Don't you feel empowered when you're riding that bicycle?'

"It's an offshoot of life coaching," Aders said. "I helped one of our clients with a nutrition program, and helped another client get back into shape after an injury."

With her help, one client who was on 13 different medications was able to reduce that number to eight, using a program of exercise and nutrition that helped reduce her blood pressure.

She also helped several new mothers lose weight.

"They gained maybe 30 pounds in pregnancy," Aders said. "And it was after the six-week mark when they could start working out again. So I helped them get back into it, and over five months or so, they got back down to their prebaby weight."

Unlike traditional therapists, a coach does not have to have a license in order to practice. But there are agencies that offer credentials. The International Coaching Federation is one of them.

But far from remaining on the fringes of the therapy world, coaching programs have grown in popularity to the extent that colleges like Columbia University (its Business School and Teachers College has teamed up to create the Center for Coaching Excellence) are now providing coaching certification programs.

Before becoming a life coach, Parkinson worked in a direct marketing company that focused on women. As she labored her way through the upper ranks of management, Parkinson discovered that what she enjoyed most about the job was mentoring the women she worked with and helping them face the challenges that would make them more successful.

She now leads her own private practice, where, over the past 10 years, she has helped 70 clients, mostly women, who live in 43 states, Canada and Guam. Like many coaches, she holds her meetings over the phone and finds referrals over the Internet.

Coaches can specialize in any area, and they often help others with problems they've overcome themselves. Parkinson has dealt with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) in her past, and recently helped a client recognize her own ADD problems and how they were holding her back. Now that client has become a coach who specializes in helping children and adults with ADD.

The field of coaching evolved over the past 20 years from executive consulting and coaching to personal and life coaching, said Howard Bloom, president of the San Francisco East Bay chapter of the International Coaching Federation.

Bloom specializes in coaching clients in communications and sexuality. He says he got into coaching because, like a lot of coaches, he has an entrepreneurial spirit and found it a way to combine his interests while working for himself.

"I think that would be true of a lot of coaches I've talked to," Bloom said. "They find coaching to be a dynamic field. It's a way to integrate many different things."

He said he worked his way into coaching gradually, working first as a massage therapist and sex educator. When he became a coach, his specialty was defined by a "common thread" that wove through his clients. Eventually, one of his clients referred to him as a communication coach. The title stuck.

He attended the Coaches Training Institute in San Rafael which differs from schools which operate online or by phone.

His philosophy, he said, is to "look at who you are in the world and use that information to help you deepen the learning and forward the action."

But he also said that it's rare for life coaches to make their living by just seeing individual clients. He is able to do it by contracting with individual agencies and conducting workshops. Others teach.

According to the International Coaching Federation (ICF), a nonprofit professional organization for personal and business coaches, most coaches working with individuals charge from $200 to $500 per month. Corporate coaching programs can cost more, they say, and range from $1,000 to $10,000 per month.

Coachville.com's general manager of membership, Terri Zelenak, has her own practice where she coaches "baby boomers" to have a life filled with "Purpose, Passion and Pizzazz." She comes from a background in human resources; she also helped her husband run a small business.

She says that the fact that universities are offering coaching credential programs shows that industry awareness is on the rise.

According to Zelenak, Coachville.com is kicking off International Coaching Month this February by embarking on a 100-day "tour-de-ville," where David Buck, the CEO of Coachville, will stop at a different city every day and interview coaches and clients to find out what they're doing to "be unstoppable," and to get a pulse on what's going on in coaching.

At each stop on the tour from New Jersey to California, which will include a stop in Vacaville, the group will produce a telecast and put together an archival database of the successes and challenges they find in the world of coaching.

"The challenge is, for 100 days, to do something that makes you unstoppable," Zelenak said. "Whether it's to lose 20 pounds, learn Portugese, or get a promotion, for every 100 days, the challenge is to do something to make that happen."