A New Week | April 4th, 2022
5 Unsexy Lessons I'd Tell Myself Before Becoming A Leadership Coach
My leadership coach kept telling me to do it. "You will be an incredible coach". So when the pandemic hit, I made the hard right turn. I knew that the societal shift to remote work was going to force leaders everywhere to confront management challenges both with their teams and in their own emotional and mental lives.
My first year as a leadership coach was full of growth. Here are 5 pieces of advice that I would tell myself before taking the leap:
Do not charge for your time. Charge for your commitment.
You bring deep expertise, a lifetime of experiences, a lot of education and you are talented at contextualizing it for your client. Don't reduce yourself to hourly rates. Think: what would you pay for you- as- a- database?Rest is a revolutionary act of productivity.
The best coaches know they need to invest in their own energy before giving it all away. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do for your clients and your business is recharge, heal, and incubate.
Use compassion, NOT empathy.
Whereas empathy is about feeling with another person, compassion is about feeling for them. Neurologically, each uses different brain resources. Compassion allows you to take a step back and avoid emotionally entanglement, helping you retain all your bandwidth to focus on the client and advancing their situation.
Get a coach yourself!
If you want to understand what it means and feels like to provide true value to a client, then get yourself a coach. Learn how they do it, work on your blindspots, eat your own dog food.
No-Meeting Mondays and the importance of breaks in between meetings.
Use Mondays to reflect on your last week's insights, check in with your clients, meditate or go for long walks, read books that help you grow, do emails, workout. Start the week from a place of abundance.
Marry the right person.
The best thing that happened to me as a coach, was to have a husband who has my back at ALL TIMES and wants to see me succeed. I call this visionary love. I can always rely on him, we run our home together, we parent equally. ❤️