A Personal Reflection on Coaching

Can anyone really tap into their full potential on their own?

In 1997, when I walked into my coach’s office for the very first time, I had no idea what this coaching stuff was all about. I was a vice president in a top communications firm. To the outside observer, I had achieved a great deal of success, and seemed assured and confident about my future.

On the inside, I was managing stress that was taking a physical toll on my personal life, I was questioning my values and belief systems, and was tired of corporate politics and dysfunction. Like many people who come to this point in their lives, I was thinking about chunking it all for a small tiki hut business in Key West, or whatever little locale seemed appealing and away from Corporate America.

During the first few sessions, I began to see myself and my professional choices with a new set of eyes as my coach asked me tough questions, helped me explore and understand my professional identity, boost my confidence, and develop new strategies to take control of my career on my own terms. At that point, career choices stopped happening to me – I was now empowered to make them happen. He also helped me see that that I had much to offer and learn by going back in to Corporate America. So with new clarity, I made my next career decision.

For the next several years, I worked with my coach on negotiating for new jobs and consulting contracts, learned to better understand and navigate corporate politics, and quadrupled my salary -- at levels I never dreamed imaginable. But the most important gift that my coach gave me was perspective. I could begin to step out and look at business and people in an objective way, and I could depersonalize my professional experiences. Through this experience, I began to be a better consultant and professional. Coaching helped me be a better and more effective leader, and to be perfectly honest – a better human being.

When my contract with one of Silicon Valley’s top technology communications firms came to an end, it was my coach who asked me what I really wanted next in my career. I had many professional choices. I was interviewing for positions all over the country. Then with amazing clarity, I realized that I wanted the opportunity to give back the same courage, inspiration and guidance that I was so blessed to have found in my own career journey.

When I told my coach that I wanted to be a professional coach, he asked me wryly if I was waiting on divine intervention. It was with his encouragement that after 18 years in the corporate arena, I enrolled in a master’s program in professional counseling the following semester. In addition to my rich corporate background, I wanted to better understand how to help people make positive change in their lives – and perhaps more important, I wanted to understand all the psychological nuances about what really keeps us living unhappy or mediocre lives.

As I work with people, I understand what it’s like to have those feelings of fear of pending failure, financial security, or thinking that after a painful layoff that you’ll never get another job – or, worse yet, have to take a job you hate. I can understand the challenge of navigating those periods of complete indecision in our lives, working through unpleasant corporate politics, managing a difficult boss, making hard work-life choices, and overcoming the inevitable barriers we all face every day in business, career and life. But I can assure you: the journey of career and life choices is quite different when you have a coach alongside you.

I never would have predicted in that first meeting that coaching would change my life so dramatically on the personal and professional front. I don’t know where my life would be without my own coach – but I am so thankful that a casual introduction opened that door in my life.

If you want to tap into your true potential and achieve whatever it is you want to achieve in life, consider coaching. Whether you work with me, or just find another great professional to work with, coaching can be transformational – if you’re ready to do the work. Coaching allows you to see parts of yourself you just can’t ever see on your own.

As the great psychologist Abraham Maslow said, "If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you'll be unhappy for the rest of your life." May coaching help you be all you are capable of being.