How do you become a professional coach?

New horizons...

Inspiration comes ... from life and small everyday things

A few years ago I found an article in an insert to a leading Italian newspapers with the title:

“An advisor for MANAGERS” THE SCHOOL OF LEADERSHIP They are almost all women. They offer suggestions on the correct decisions. They help people deal with stress. And they know how to listen. Coaches have now become indispensable for American bosses. So much so that they are ready to take their place.

– Riccardo Romani

And it continued:

… ”Between getting the shopping and dropping her son off at school, she finds the time to explain to an important West Coast businessman how to manage a 10 million dollar deal.” ... But this is not your average Intercoach: there have been articles about her in the newspaper Usa Today and the weekly financial magazine Fortune. A leading company. A leader in what? Coaching. This is what Laura specialises in. But she is not involved in sport, rather her job consists in examining behavioural patterns that help people succeed in life. Especially people who have to deal with stress. Businessmen mainly. Directors. Chairmen. Politicians even. People who eventually have to take some time out and go back into the dressing room of life to listen to what their coach has to say before going out for the second half of a negotiation or a tricky issue at work.

…                                                                                      

Why do important businessmen prefer to get advice from women? Easy: because they can really be themselves. They leave their macho image to one side and reveal their inner selves to the coach in order to get the right piece of advice. A man speaking to a woman does not need to flex his muscles to justify his position, as would in a board meeting. He doesn’t feel like he’s competing with anyone. At that moment he’s just a regular person looking for help in solving a problem (Riccardo Romani)”.

The original article (253 kb.)

The intellect seeks, the heart finds.

– G. Sand

It was love at first sight!

Even though – like all seeds – it took time to grow: years, a sacking, the financial crash, a crisis in my own business sector. But then it came out with a bang, and at the start of a year – a long time ago now – I assessed the feasibility of getting into coaching. Just as I have always done for all my “loves” and my real, important, heartfelt choices. It wasn’t a real business plan, but it was a feasibility study. When you embrace something that is so new it’s difficult to write a business plan in financial terms, but you can do so in terms of information, principles, requirements, trends and other intangibles!

Vision without action is a dream. Action without vision is a nightmare.

– Japanese proverb

So off I went. I read and bought books, surfed the Internet, scheduled appointments and had meetings and then I made my decision. In particular, I chose a school.

And I moved forward with my choice: it was a medium-term choice, but it was the dream of an adult woman that I felt would really help me to reap the fruits of the talents God graciously bestowed, not to mention the professional experience from my first forty years. It was to be a new perspective on the world and a new possibility of engaging with the world.

I wasn’t sure I would succeed, but I liked the path and life is about paths, not goals .

Executive Coaching

In executive coaching I saw the opportunity to use my past professional experience, i.e. everything I had learned about a specific market in a variety of positions in different companies, and develop this to
offer it to the market.

In executive coaching I saw the challenge of seeing my professionalism from a new perspective and changing the way I offered it to the market.

In executive coaching I saw the opportunity to express principles / values that support / motivate me: putting my intelligence and professionalism at the service of others to help them work better. My organisational experience as a consultant and IT systems expert evolved into one to one relationships to
help individual managers / businessmen work with greater satisfaction for themselves and their companies and thus … for the world as a whole.

In executive coaching I saw the opportunity to combine my private and professional lives. Years before I had prepared a business plan for a management training company. During this process I did one of the various psychological and behavioural tests that are used in companies and I was reminded of the fact
that I am an extrovert. I realised that my true nature – as it was when I was a child – is that of an extrovert that want to engage with others. At University and when I started working in the ’80s and early ’90s I kept my instincts in check, I was an engineer, an executor… but “in the middle of the journey of my life”, towards maturity I rediscovered my true nature. It was like washing my face with cold mountain water.

In coaching – along the path of becoming a coach and working professionally as a coach– I had the chance to live my life to the full without any constraints. 

It is thanks to coaching that I am so aware of what I have achieved this year and the need to put it down in writing.

What’s the point in sharing?

It’s difficult to say where the need to put things in writing comes from … I found one possible source of this during an exercise I did at coaching school: in a lesson we were asked to read a story, the fairy tale
of the “Ugly duckling”, and then offer two interpretations of it, one for a hypothetical company newsletter - emphasising the interpretation in professional terms - and one for a personal diary - with a personal and intimate interpretation.

Here are the results of this ”exercise”.

1) The corporate interpretation - “Rereading “The Ugly Duckling” as adults”

Recently during a week-end in June in Milan I picked up an old book of fairy tales and I re-read “The ugly duckling ”. I couldn’t help comparing it to our own career paths.

Each of us has our own path and place in life which is a source of happiness. Nature,  Providence or some other force (everyone should think of the force that guides and supports them!) drives is and, ultimately, brings us to a place where we will be content.
But sometimes we start in the wrong place and try to work with others who do not share our language and values, sometimes we have doubts and are put to the test, but eventually we get there, if we continue along our path and listen to others.

And what about friends who say unpleasant things? They will also have their own points of view, but like all points of view these are necessarily limited. The world is a big place.

Try to think that your new colleague in the Admin Office that can’t use Excel could be the new CEO or that the colleague who isn’t interested in talking about clothes and shoes could be the new Marisa
Bellisario. Try to think that if you are not feeling completely fulfilled it’s not because you’re wrong, but it’s because you’re only halfway done.

2) A personal interpretation

Dear diary,

This morning at the course I read the fairy tale “The Ugly Duckling”.

As I was reading it a lot of thoughts went through my mind:

• firstly I imagined being in those very places: nature, greenery, lakes, summer, all things you struggle to find in Milan I felt the heat of the sun and the smell of the wheat and I really wanted to be on Holiday
• I felt sorry for the ugly duckling, even though I don’t have children 
• I felt a sense of solidarity with him, because I am also an ugly duckling
• I underlined the sentence on real friends who say unpleasant things … to think about: you know my relationship with friendship is “problematic”
• I felt a sense of trust at the end: for the duckling there’s Mother Nature, for me there’s Providence
• Dear diary, am I becoming a swan?

It was a seed because this exercise gave me a lot of satisfaction and I think it meant something to my fellow students who enjoyed my reading of the article for the company newsletter …

It was a seed for examining the year from two different angles: the personal and professional interpretation. 

The fruit? 

The fruit

The fruit? The true fruit of my encounter with coaching is the project for my second forty years, from both a personal and professional perspective.

When I started working you could think of a career path individually and officially within a company. In my case: a degree, a management consultancy firm: from “assistant” to “partner”, from a professional to an entrepreneur, no later than my fortieth birthday. No thought was given to what came after as if it was only your first forty years that mattered, as if you would just coast through the rest of your life.

When I eventually turned forty, on the one hand – albeit not in traditional terms – I had done what I had set out to do and I was in a position to coast through the rest of my life, but on the other hand I still had energy and years ahead of me and I was looking at a different much-changed world. So, just as I had done at twenty years of age, I had to think about a new direction to embark on and I did so without making do with a short-term solution, but rather I sought  a medium-long term project which might also entail a series of more short-term activities.

As Steve Jobs said, there are dots in your life and when you look back you can join them and see a logic in everything. I think Ican too, even though my new path, my new journey, is still too short to look back on and draw any conclusions.

It’s like having the opportunity to set off on a journey.

Setting off

With a new perspective

An open mind

Ears to listen

Hands to grasp others

The simplicity to experience wonderment

The sincerity to truly question yourself  

Without demanding anything

Making do with what little you have

To live each day as it comes

And enjoy the essential things in life …

(I can’t remember the author’s name ...)