Writing helps me clarify my thoughts, so I am writing about how I work and what makes me unique in my profession. The result is this…
A few months ago, I launched my own coaching and training business . I want to help leaders become wiser, more effective and purposeful, and I do that through my executive coaching, team coaching and training services .
That’s all good, but what makes me different and unique?
There are plenty of other coaches and trainers helping leaders grow in the market, so why would someone hire me?
This is something I have been thinking about a lot, and it is not easy to formulate it coherently and meaningfully, but I want to do just that in this post. Writing helps me think more clearly, so I decided to write a post to help me structure my ideas. I hope you won’t mind bearing with me while I do this.
This is how I work.
Wiser, more effective and purposeful leaders I have always enjoyed helping others learn and improve. I have been doing this in different ways since I started my career in the early 2000s, always with a particular focus on managers and leaders. When I discovered coaching, I realised it was the best way for me to continue doing this, so here I am.
This is why my work purpose is to help leaders grow, and I want to help them grow to become wiser, more effective and purposeful.
I want to help them be more effective because that’s the first thing we expect from leaders: to achieve their objectives and be good at what they do. More effective leaders help their organisations be successful, but this is not the only thing that moves me. I don’t want to help create a society where organisations are just more effective and profitable.
Profitable organisations are a net positive; they are needed for a society to thrive (I am not an anti-capitalist!), but they are not enough. I believe companies exist for far more than to make money . They have a purpose that goes beyond maximising shareholder value. They must create value for all their stakeholders: owners, workers, clients, suppliers, the community where they operate and the society at large.
We build a better society through better organisations, among many other things.
In order to have purposeful organisations that want to be positive agents, we need purposeful leaders : leaders who want to leave a positive mark and leaders who want to help others and wish to build a better world.
Having a purpose and being effective is not enough. We also need wise leaders.
There are different definitions of wisdom and different versions of what it means to be a wise leader . A wise leader has good judgement and makes the right decision more often than not, but also has good emotional intelligence, is open-minded and accepts others’ views and values, has pro-social attitudes and behaviours, looks for the greater good and not only their own interest, and last but not least, goes through life with humour.
I want to have more people like this around me. I want to have many wise leaders running our societies. It’s good for society, it’s good for everyone. That’s why we need wise leaders more than ever .
That’s why I’m focusing my coaching on helping leaders become more effective, more purposeful, and, above all else, wiser.
But how do I work to make this happen?
A wise leader / Photo from Shutterstock, licensed to author A humanist touch Almost thirty years ago, I decided to pursue a degree in Humanities and Business.
I have always been interested in history, philosophy, and everything related to the humanities, so I wanted to study them further. The business part of the degree provided the practical aspect that would allow me to find a job outside academia, in the corporate world. It was a good mix.
Since then, I have worked mostly in HR but have always kept my interest in humanities alive. I apply a humanist touch to everything I do, including my coaching and training services.
Human beings are the most complex and fascinating things alive, and trying to understand better what it means to be human is what makes me tick. That means understanding our history, arts, philosophy, anthropology, and the like. They all have something to teach us, and I try to draw knowledge from all of them.
Everything is connected, and you can link anything to the humanities. This applies especially to personal development and growth.
Coaching and training draw many lessons from psychology, but also from philosophy , management, systems thinking , and many other fields. Whatever problem people are facing today, someone else has probably gone through it already, and the possible solution is somewhere out there, waiting for us.
That’s why I like to take inspiration and write about history, philosophy and other fields, and I use this inspiration in my everyday life with my coaching and training clients.
Evidence-based approach Coaching is a relatively new discipline. It has been around for a few decades, but that does not mean that it shouldn’t be evidence-based .
Some coaches constantly spew out mumbo-jumbo and pseudoscientific nonsense. Some coaching approaches lack scientific rigour and are not based on evidence. These approaches don’t help anyone and hurt the reputations of other, more scientifically-minded and evidence-based coaching approaches.
Coaching works. There is ample research demonstrating that. But not all coaching works, and not all coaching is as effective in helping clients reach their goals.
Depending on the context and circumstances, some approaches and techniques work better than others, and some coaches are better than others.
The key is to know which is which, and for that, we need to use an evidence-based approach.
That means conducting research, testing different approaches and techniques, and then informing the coaching field so that it keeps getting better and better.
I follow this approach as much as possible.
This is why I am currently studying for a Master’s in Coaching at the University of Cambridge. I read academic papers on coaching and aim to conduct my own research to inform my practice and become the best possible coach I can be.
Integrating the different parts I recently discussed with one of my coaches what made me different as a coach. One thing that stood out was my capacity to see the bigger picture and integrate learnings from different disciplines and fields.
I am good at integrating different parts into one. That’s my superpower, or at least one of them.
I can see different, diverse and seemingly disconnected parts and make a unitary whole in my mind. I am good at finding patterns and trends.
I translate that into my coaching by integrating different techniques and tools from different coaching approaches, applying the learnings from various disciplines (management, history, philosophy…) into my coaching and training, and especially, and above all else, helping my clients look at things differently and integrate the different parts of their life stories and work problems into one big whole.
The first bit makes me a pluralistic coach. This means I am not exclusively bound to a specific coaching approach but use and combine different ones to help my clients. Flexibility is one of my values, and my priority is helping my clients achieve their goals, so my knowledge of different coaching approaches, frameworks, and tools is at my clients’ service.
Different goals call for different approaches. I will sometimes use a rather direct Solution-Focused approach and spend just a couple of sessions exploring options with my clients, or I may go all existential and spend several sessions meandering with the client on what it means to be a mortal and what values make life meaningful and worth living. The selection of the method or approach is done together with the client.
It all depends on what the client needs in each situation and session.
And don’t forget to enjoy life Everything is about enjoying life.
We are here for a short while, so we may as well make the most of it. I want to enjoy every minute of my life and try to bring this mindset to my practice.
Enjoying life is not only about eating well or pursuing hedonist pleasures. There is much more to it than that.
Having a deep and purposeful conversation with a friend or a client can be a source of joy.
Helping others is definitely a source of joy.
Learning new things is another source of joy.
Just being present and mindful with someone is also a source of joy.
There are many ways to enjoy life, and I try to keep this in mind whenever I’m doing something. I always think, “How is this helping me to enjoy life?”
Writing this post was a source of joy, too—a painful joy sometimes, but a joy nonetheless. I enjoyed it, and it helped me clear my mind and my ideas about what is important to me and how I work.
I hope you found it useful and that it brought you joy, too. If not, I apologise. After all, life is too short to spend it reading uninteresting posts.
