Our History

SmartCoach is a brain child of Jimmy Rhee who, as a young man, taught Korean Tae Kwon Do to children with discipline problems and learning difficulties. Desiring a more fulfilling life of contribution, and remembering how many of his former young students have made positive changes and became successful, contributing citizens in life, Coach Rhee decided again to work with children who face challenges. As a result of that decision, Coach Rhee resigned from his professional position (CEO of an IT firm) and embarked on a course to become a certified life strategy coach in 2007 to coach children with AD/HD for whom he had a particular interest and affection.

Despite the fact that our society views AD/HD as a disorder to be corrected, Coach Rhee wanted to develop an organization that viewed AD/HD as a gift to be claimed. He wanted to develop a program that focused on empowering the uniqueness of AD/HD child. As a result, Coach Rhee developed a program that integrated the modern behavioral theories, coaching techniques and ancient martial arts concepts. The goal of this program was to "light a fire" for children with AD/HD so they could reclaim self-esteem and learn self-reliance premised on productive behaviors essential in social, family, and school settings. This is how SmartCoach was born in 2008.

It might be interesting to read Coach Rhee’s underlying reason for creating SmartCoach in his own words: "...I have a view that life is abundant with goodness. Over the years, I have held various jobs ranging from teaching martial arts to leading a software development company. I learned from these endeavors that resources, namely, ideas, people and capital, came in abundance when I was more generous and engaged others in my passion. Whenever I was oriented to this abundance paradigm, my environment became the universe of possibility where I could simply set the context and let events unfold in meaningful bits and pieces. I realized from this orientation that even the traditional martial arts concept could be expanded to help children with limiting beliefs to gain self-esteem and become “true black belts of life,” not just kicks and punches. I am approaching this SmartCoach endeavor with the same paradigm to bring out the generative and prolific self in me, namely, to commit the newly gained insight for performing meaningful tasks..."