I chose to get coaching for the first time in 2003, soon after I started a new job.
I’d been having dinner with my cousin in New York, and she said, you have to take this job, you have to stay for a few years and you have to get promoted. You have to grow your career. Well that’s terrifying, I thought. I had no idea how to do that.
Here’s what I did know. I hadn’t been able to stay at a job for more than 4 years because the organizational dynamics and dysfunctional interpersonal goings on would get to me. If I saw hypocrisy and got pissed off, I’d quit! I’d quit without thinking or caring about the next step in my career. I’d quit without developing a plan for my work life.
I don’t need this, I’d tell myself. Freedom and integrity is more important than any job. Plus, I was a creative person who didn’t want to be a manager. Since I was smart, adaptive and could type, I knew that I could always temp – something that always put money in my pocket but didn’t advance my career. And I’d never been promoted in a job. I better find some help.
I found a coach, which proved to be one of the best things that I’d ever done for myself.
Every other week, my coach and I would talk. I’d share what was challenging me, and she 1) listened, 2) reflected back my concerns and 3) provided me with new perspectives and new ideas. She’d send me an essay on organizational dynamics and growth cycles. Or show me how what I was saying made sense, and I could take out some post-it’s, jot down my ideas and move them around until the big picture emerged.
Over the course of the years we worked together, she helped me to get through challenging times. As a result, instead of falling prey to disillusionment and disappointment, getting mad and quitting, I was able to grow my skills, get promoted, and earn more money.
For example, in 2005, I wanted to ask for a promotion. My coach talked with me about what I wanted and why, helped me to recognize and articulate my accomplishments, and then helped me think about the perspective of my boss and my boss’s boss. She helped me think about the words and phrases that I should use to translate my experiences into language that would resonate with leadership. Language that showed how I excelled and what I’d contributed.
She asked questions like:
What are they concerned about?
What will you stepping up mean your boss can let go of?
How will you describe your vision?
How can you condense your proposal so that it captures the attention of the CEO?
Well, I got the promotion. And then another, and then another one before I left. That wasn’t all I got though.
In addition to learning how to shift my perspective so that I could better understand what my colleagues wanted and needed, I also learned that there was nothing wrong with me – that I had strengths and gifts worth cultivating.
I learned that I didn’t have to blame my challenges on the people around me, but instead I could work on my own habits of thinking and behaving to help shift dynamics. She showed me how to slow down, breathe and use writing as a tool to get grounded, make connections, seek solutions and articulate what I wanted to contribute. Coaching helped me learn to listen to and honor my yearning and curiosity, a gift that I continue to cultivate and cherish.
Getting stuck is natural. It’s normal. The trick is using the stuckness to get unstuck. But how?
First of all, relax. Don’t fight the stuckness. Fighting it pulls even more energy from you.
One of my favorite episodes from the old Star Trek – the original Star Trek – is called The Empath. Spock, Kirk and McCoy are trapped in an energy field. They struggle to get out but can’t. Then Spock says, stop fighting it, the more we fight it, the stronger it gets. So they relax, totally relax, (of course Spock’s portion of the energy field disappears first) but then the others manage to relax enough too so the field dissipates.
Second, get curious. What does the obstacle feel like? Does it have a sound, a voice? If it were an image, what would it look like?
Sometimes I notice that my stomach seems to be holding the obstacle. I may notice a tightening, a gripping. What about you?
Is the obstacle telling you that you want something else? What is it? What is even more important that stops you from creating what you want?
Maybe the obstacle has a name. For me, one obstacle that steps up is the desire to be perfect. That obstacle doesn’t want me to make mistakes. It sees my potential and wants me to live up to it. RIGHT NOW.
What does the obstacle want for you? What does it fear? How old is this obstacle?
My Miss Perfect obstacle is very old, as old as I am, no maybe older? Is the obstacle as old as many generations? Miss Perfect has been around a long time. She knows that one of the nefarious traps of racism is that Black people can’t afford not to excel if we want to be taken seriously. And well, even that is often not enough. Miss Perfect worries that I haven’t lived up to my potential.
By noticing the obstacle, you may notice a need that arises.
For me, I notice a need for compassion, gentleness and self-care while I am making changes and striving to realize my potential, because making changes surfaces old patterns and doubts. And one of the ways I take care of myself is by having fun! So I take out my markers and start to doodle and color my way through my next steps.
What about you? How can you relax? How can you get curious and notice what the stuckness is trying to tell you? When you’re feeling blocked, instead of entering into battle with yourself, try using the challenges as opportunities. And like the alchemists of legend, you can turn what feels like dross and yuckiness into treasure and beauty.
Ah, that feeling of being overwhelmed. I know it well. As someone who loves to juggle many balls, there comes a point when the balls start falling! I become overwhelmed by my own enthusiasm, ambition and the golden sparkle of possibility.
So what to do?
One of the skills we learn in coaching is “naming what’s present,” which simply means being willing to articulate what we see happening, whether that be the tone of voice we notice, an expression, or the way that a process is moving – or not.
This practice of naming what’s present, done without judging, develops our powers of observation and our precision for description without judgement.
How does that relate to overwhelm? It reminds me of an exercise offered by writer/coach Lynne Cazaly on what to do when you’re overwhelmed. She suggests that you redefine overwhelm. It’s easy just to say, “I’ve overwhelmed” and throw your hands up.
But what is present as you feel that overwhelm? Can you describe what’s really going on? Is it that you’re not certain what your next steps are? Did you just get overloaded with information because you’re listening to a lecture and can’t capture everything that seems important? Are you watching the news and feeling overcome with deep sadness or despair? Or as is so often the case for me, am I so excited/overstimulated by the possibilities that I can’t focus on one thing to do next?
S…l…o…w.. down and ask yourself a few questions.
Lynne created a grid with three columns to support slowing down and redefining overwhelm. The first column: What happened? In this column, you write down what actually happened that triggered the feeling.
The second column: I felt. In this column you describe as precisely as you can what you’re feeling – maybe it’s that overwhelmed feeling, or maybe you’re noticing that it’s sadness, or confusion. Specificity helps us to gain clarity.
And the third column: What was it really? Here’s where you can redefine that feeling of overwhelm and then begin to manage it, and yourself different questions.
Once you’ve gained more clarity by naming what’s present in the bundle of feeling that we call overwhelm, you can start to make decisions.
I find it helpful to use these pruning questions with the reminder that this is for the time being and the next time, I can make a different decision.
Here are some more questions that can be helpful. What matters most to you? What can you say no to? What are you doing now that’s working? Can you do more of that? If you only focused on one thing, would what that be?
When deciding whether or not to work with a coach, it’s important to think about what your goals are and what they’re worth to you.
For example, I started getting coached because I wanted to shift my relationship with my job. I wanted to bring my best to my work, understand the patterns that often seemed invisible to me (although I felt their effects), and have strategies for both being, and being recognized, as a valuable contributor.
Getting coached contributed to me being promoted multiple times, substantially raising my income, and stepping into a greater sense of myself as a creative and effective leader.
What about you? What are you wanting to shift in your life or work?
If you’re thinking about working with me, I offer a thirty minute strategy session for $125 so you can experience coaching with me.
To make the most of the call, I’ll ask you to bring a challenge that you’re facing and then during the conversation, we’ll work together to explore what’s important to you and brainstorm some actions you can take right away to get unstuck. You’ll get a taste of coaching, and you’ll gain some strategies for moving forward.
The goal of my coaching is to activate and spark people to realize the power of their own gifts.
Realizing and cultivating ones gifts means being curious to understand, “What is unique about me? What have I been given that is mine to cultivate, to listen and pay attention to and share with others?”
I am not interested in helping people just so that they can make more money, have more power, wield more authority that serves only themselves. I am not interested in individuals or companies gaining more capacity to hurt others and squeeze out the goodness from natural and human resources that rightly belong to all of us, that should flow and feed and serve and amplify and be amplified by each and every one of us.
I am interested in, and value, cherish and serve, the spirits of sharing, compassion, love, curiosity, respect, collaboration, calm, justice and awe.
I believe that when we cultivate our gifts, we end up with more than enough for ourselves and to share. I am passionate about, care deeply about humans tuning into their capacity to connect with one another, learn from one another, care for one another and for the natural world that supports us and which we depend upon.
We are bound fast to one another and yet we often behave as if our individualism is supreme.
Yes, I value the individual, I value my inner wisdom, my experiences, my interpretations of what happens to me. I value being odd, eccentric, different from my mother and father, my neighbors. I value being a Black woman able to choose to be in an interracial relationship. At the same time, I cherish my connections – to history and to the future, to Black women and Black men, to what’s happening today and the actions I take — or do not take, to the brutal enslavement of African people and the economy we live in today.
It is important to me that I coach people to activate, set in motion, organize and create their lives with awareness of their connection to other people and the circumstances that shape the lives that we’re able to live.
It’s important to me that people realize, see, acknowledge, transcend the particular circumstances that may be limiting them – the limiting beliefs, while setting in motion a world that is big enough to hold contradiction and to heal the wrongs that continue to traumatize, wound and break bodies, souls, hearts every single day.
I want to coach people in a way that helps them to be more themselves while also being more aware and connected to how they influence and are influenced by what’s going on in the world.
I know that we humans can live in a way that brings heaven to earth. That we don’t have to suffer alone, that we don’t have to be evil seeking to own and maim and control one another. That power doesn’t have to mean power over but can be power with. That we can fight and make up, that we can be free while still being conscious of our impact on others. That being politically correct means giving a shit about what’s happening outside yourself. And, yes, contradictions may be painful but we can build up the emotional and spiritual circuitry to accept the contradictions, learn, hurt and expand what’s possible.
So yes, I want people to cultivate the power of their unique gifts so that they feel whole, radiant and capable and then I want them to share it for the well-being of the world. Because we are interconnected, unable to survive without helping one another. We live in a country that was built on genocide of Native people enslavement of African people – to right that wrong, to heal, we have a lot of learning and transforming to do. It won’t be easy. We can’t do it alone.
I want my coaching to be one of the threads, one of the tools that helps to weave that new world.
