Coach Express

By Robyn Logan, Strategy Director, ICA

I stumbled across a phenomenon called “Second Life” this week, some of you may have heard of it already.

Second life is a virtual community, a place you can go online and create your own character. You choose a name, a physical appearance and a personality. In short you create a “second life” and unlike your first life, which is governed by real world contraints (ie: your existing life, existing family, existing job), your second life is a life of choice. You are only limited by your imagination.

For those of you who are familiar with avatars and online gaminig or role-palying the ideas of and alternative, virtual identity is not new. (For anyone with kids - we are talking The Simms and such like.) What is new however , well to me at least, is the virtual economy idea. Mind you I had also heard on online bartering systems in the past, but what folks at Second Life have come up with is totally mind-blowing.

In this world you can become a paid up resident, buy and sell land and promote/sell your products and services. This is done using the local currency “Linden Dollars”. Linden dollars are a created currency that you can buy or sell for US dollars. Millions of Linden dollars trade hands every month in LindeX, the currency exchange headquarters. So for example today you can buy 1,000 Linden dollars for .68 cents and you can sell 1,000 Linden dollars for an estimated US$3.49. Freaky hey?

Here are some interesting stats

• Total residents: 4,298,217
• Logged in Last 60 Days 1,549,396
• US$ Spent Last 24 Hrs $1,606,694
• LindeX Activity Last 24 Hrs $ 239,088

So what can we as coaches and service professionals dedicated to personal and professional development learn from this phenomenon? I see two things - first it’s a great way to imagine a future, or imagine and alternative reality. As coaches we often work with clients to help them “create the life they really want to live” and although it is too simple to say that if your First Life were the life you really wanted to live you wouldn’t need to create a Second Life. (Second lifers are participating in a rich and multilayered imaginary space), I think we can perhaps use the concept of Second Life as a visionary tool. A way to imagine the future you would create for yourself if you could. What would your second life look like? Who would you be? What would you do with your time?

Ultimately for me, the learning in Second Life is the power of community, and in particular online communities. So if you already find yourself shaking your head at the increasing number of things you can do online and muttering “it’s another world out there”, well - now you would be right. It is indeed another world.

Read the wikipedia entry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life

Check out the cover of Business Week
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_18/b3982002.htm

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 10:54 am and is filed under Coaching Insights, Business Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.