Notes From an Executive Coach - How It Started
The Career Coach
My coaching journey started when I was helping young people, especially graduates, in their careers. People needed a sounding board to help them navigate how they could make decisions around their future and present careers. I would guide them on job hunting techniques, interview skills, how to create a value proposition and help them in writing a good CV (resume). It still shocks people to this day that you don't need to put curriculum vitae at the top.
In addition to this, I wrote and spoke about how to network, negotiate salaries, career mapping and progression. One of my first speeches was called Mind The Gap, where I used travel on the London Underground as a metaphor for navigating your career.
I remember my first book on career coaching that I loved was called What Colour is Your Parachute by Richard Bolles.
It was one of the first books that got me thinking more about questions than just giving advice. Moving from a mentoring model to one of coaching.
The Presentation Coach
As I developed my skills on this I got more and more into speaking about it. At conferences - both education and business. At business networking events. Graduate meetups. I would then be asked how I was so confident at speaking. Remarks would be made about how I used humour, told stories, presented facts, and when I used them how I designed my slides.
People would approach me to ask me to run presentation skills workshops for their teams and then increasingly I would end up coaching senior leaders on how to give speeches and presentations for conferences, town hall meetings, investor calls, media appearances and more latterly appearing on podcasts.
As I continued to hone my craft I stumbled into storytelling for business. Leaning on
The Leaders Guide to Storytelling by Steve Denning,
Influence by Robert Cialdini
Resonate by Duarte and
Storytelling with Data by Cole Nussbaumer.
Leaders were doing more data storytelling in their presentations using better visuals and narratives to win business and other stakeholders.
In 2016 I was doing a workshop when a leader made a passing comment. She said that it would be good for the leaders around the table to up their game not only as presenters but as leaders as well. And from this conversation, my interest in leadership coaching was piqued.
The Leadership Coach
I started to hold roundtables and dining events with senior leaders to find out what their concerns were around their own leadership journey and the way leadership operated in their organisations.
At the same time, I started to connect with some other leadership coaches to understand how they operated. I explored a lot of the coaching models and theories around leadership development. I attended programmes and continue to do so on coaching models and applications.
I started to run workshops on leadership, specifically targeting those in middle leadership aspiring to be in executive director positions. I explored coaching models like appreciative inquiry, systemic coaching and constellations, polarity coaching and narrative/dialogic coaching. I conversed with other coaches about supervision and facing the challenges of difficult clients.
Finally, over the last eight years, I have worked with executives and their teams across major law, technology, media, food and beverage, energy and banking firms. As well as senior executives in charitable, educational and other non-profit organisations.
And so that is how I got here.
I hope to use this series to show you what happens behind the scenes of working as an executive coach. From the coaching models I use to the support I get and to the kinds of amazing clients I work with.
If you want to work with me feel free to check out more details about my coaching right here.
Until next time.
