I'm excited to share that I am an Associate Certified Coach! Ok, this is kind of a nerdy thing that many people outside of the coaching profession might not understand, but it's pretty cool! Here's the story:

In 2018, I went through an extensive training program through an organization called iPEC. Over about 9 months, I did over 300 hours of training that included in-person trainings, weekly webinars, peer coaching circles, mentor coaching, and testing. It was INTENSE, and it truly prepared me to become a coach. After I completed the program, I became a Certified Professional Coach in January 2019.

iPEC is an accredited institution through an organization called the International Coaching Federation (ICF). ICF is the organization that upholds the coaching industry standards. After going through a coaching training program, certified coaches can go through an additional step to become credentialed through ICF. As ICF says on their website, "ICF Credential-holders are part of a self-regulating group of elite coaches who provide accountability to clients and the coaching profession as a whole. They pursue and complete rigorous education and practice requirements that provide unquestioned legitimacy to their commitment to excellence in coaching."

There are three different levels of credentials through ICF: ACC, PCC, MCC. The ACC is the first step. In order to get my ACC, I had to have:

• Completion of an entire ICF Accredited Coach Training Program (ACTP) (which I did through iPEC!)
• A minimum of 100 hours (75 paid) of coaching experience with at least eight clients following the start of the coach-specific training. At least 25 of these hours must occur within the 18 months prior to submitting the application for the credential.
• Completion of the Coach Knowledge Assessment (CKA).

​More and more clients, especially organizations, are expecting coaches to be ICF certified. And having an ICF credential demonstrates that I am committed to the ethics and standards that are expected in excellent coaches. I'm pretty proud of this, and grateful to everyone who helped me get here, especially my amazing clients. I'm looking forward to continuing my education and pushing myself to keep growing as a coach!

In my coaching practice, many of my clients are considering a career transition. The most common question people come to me with is "Where do I even start?" Especially if you have been in the same role or with the same organization for a long time, or if the desire or need for change has come up suddenly, it's completely understandable why you may feel at sea. Knowing you can and want to do something new, you may feel daunted by all of the possibilities: "Where do I go? What do I do? How do I know where to begin?"

These are tough questions! And my role as a coach isn't to answer them, but to provide a framework for exploration so that my clients can discover the answers themselves. In my experience with my clients, I have found that the place to start is often in one of these four areas:

• Values: Your values are the things that you believe are important in the way you live and work. They (should) determine your priorities, and, deep down, will probably indicate if your life is turning out the way you want it to. If you are living your values, your family, friends, and colleagues should be able to take a look at your life and reflect your values back to you. What are your values and how do you use them in your career decisions?
• Purpose: I know, this is no small subject. I promise you that taking some time to sit with a question like "Why am I here on this planet?" is well worth your time for contemplation. It's likely your job isn't (nor should it be) the sole avenue for living your purpose. But without knowing your purpose, it's hard to tell whether your career supports it or detracts from it.
• Skills: Throughout a career, we collect all kinds of things that we learned how to do. But, which of these things do we actually LIKE to do? And, frankly, are we actually good at any of them? And maybe there are things that we don't know how to do yet that we'd like to learn. Taking inventory of our skills can remind us of all that we know and what we've dreamed of knowing.
• Environment: I love to ask my clients to envision the work environment in which they thrive. I ask them to imagine, "If I planted myself here, will I grow?" And so what does it look like, sound like, feel like? When making a career transition, we can't forget how important the environment is in addition to things like salary, benefits, and convenience.

​When I meet with clients, we walk through this framework, and while we will eventually talk about all of these areas during our coaching relationship, there is usually one of these areas that stands out. I find that having one place to start makes the whole process feel less insurmountable. And by starting at that one place, it reveals all kinds of answers in the other areas.

If you are contemplating a career transition, consider which of these places might make the most sense for you to start digging in. For instance, have you articulated your values? How would you use them to make decisions around what kind of career move would be best for you? And how would you ensure that you are living your values throughout your career? If you need a coach to help you explore these questions, I can work with you to unearth the answers that are already inside of you.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the things that stop us, the things that prevent us from taking the steps to get what we really want from life. There are very real things in our external world that hold us back: time, money, access, gatekeepers, systems of oppression, etc. These things can be frustrating and harmful in and of themselves. But we also face internal barriers that compound these external barriers that prevent us from moving forward. Our internal barriers are the messages going through our heads that tell us we are not good enough, or that we should be afraid, or that we should doubt things about ourselves and our abilities that we intuitively know.

There are a lot of ways that we develop these messages throughout our lives. We mess up. We make mistakes. We are harsh, unforgiving critics of our past actions. We start to look for all the ways these messages can be confirmed by our relationships and in our careers. We hear or interpret these messages directly or indirectly from people we know and often love. Especially for women and people of color, these messages are reinforced in the media and popular culture. They are institutionalized by what is taught in schools or what we learn in our jobs. With years of practice, we get really good at sending ourselves messages that we are not enough and too much at the same time. We are not smart, not good-looking, not worthy, not anything. We are bad people, bad friends, bad parents, bad at everything. We are too loud or too big or too small, too everything.  Who do we think we are to possibly want something else out of life? Over time, we might even come to believe these messages to be true.

The difference between whether or not these messages are true is the difference between self-consciousness and self-awareness. We do ourselves a disservice when we confuse these two things or when we let our self-consciousness get in the way of developing our self-awareness. To me, self-consciousness is the judgmental assessment of our feelings, thoughts, and behavior. We over analyze and over think until we get stuck, can't move forward, and convince ourselves of all the things we can't or shouldn't do. We listen to the messages that are overly present in the external world until they are internalized and become what we believe about ourselves. We feel self-consciousness in our bodies like the ways in which we experience stress, and that can have long term impacts on our health and wellbeing. Self-consciousness actually blocks our ability to be in touch with our bodies and what we need. Symptoms of self-consciousness look like:

• Doubt of our abilities and what we intuitively know to be true
• Impostor syndrome, where we feel unworthy or not good enough by comparison
• Fear of what people might think of us, especially if we fail but even if we succeed
• Focus on the past and all of the things that have happened in our lives to lead us to believe we can't do it
• Disappointment in ourselves for not getting what we want from life, causing a vicious cycle of these symptoms all over again
• Apathy or helplessness, where we either decide to give up or feel like we don't have what it takes to move forward

The thing about self-consciousness is that these messages are not always active thoughts. They are often hiding out in our subconscious. Rather than interrogating them as to whether or not they are true, we let them dictate our behavior so that we are passively engaging with life, rather than proactively taking steps to live the life we want.

On the other hand, Daniel Goleman and others have described self-awareness as the nonjudgmental assessment of our feelings, thoughts, and behavior. Self-awareness is tapping into what our bodies are telling us about what we are feeling. With self-awareness, we act consciously rather than passively. We raise our thoughts and feelings to a level of conscious reflection where we are able to pause and ask "Where did this message come from? Is it true?" And it's in that place in the pause where we get to choose how we react and move forward. We are now driving our thoughts rather than our thoughts driving us. Outcomes of self-awareness look like:

• Discernment in the difference between the messages we tell ourselves and who we really are
• Acceptance of who we are and what we feel
• Presence in the moment rather than dwelling on the past or fantasizing about the future
• Increased intuition and relying on multiple ways of knowing rather than one way of knowing
• Trust that we know and can understand what we are feeling
• Choice in how to respond and move forward

Over time, we can even replace those old messages that no longer serve us with messages that keep us proactively engaged in our lives. Increased self-awareness leads to greater efficacy and knowledge that each step we take is leading us closer to our purpose. The more we are able to pause and reflect on what we are really thinking and feeling, the more we are able to make conscious decisions for how to move forward, rather than letting our self-consciousness decide our behavior for us. 

The next time you are feeling self-conscious, pause. Take a deep breath. Notice what message you are telling yourself in that moment. Reflect on where that message came from. Then really challenge yourself to think about whether or not it's true. Try this several times over a week or so and notice if you start to take different actions because of your increased self-awareness.

A few weeks ago, I had lunch with my amazing, fantastic friend, Lindsay Guentzel. Lindsay and I have known each other for a while now, and over lunch we talked about how to move forward on goals, especially when life gives you so many options. Lindsay is one of those people who sees opportunity in everything. She's got this incredible energy that she uses to make things happen in her life. In November 2018, she traveled to St. Thomas to volunteer her time to help with hurricane relief efforts. She shares her amazing gifts and love of cooking whenever she can. She tells stories and hosts conversations where people feel welcome, loved, and respected. She inspires me all of the time with her outlook and the action she takes to keep moving forward.

I was thrilled when Lindsay reached out to me to have a conversation on WCCO Radio about coaching. Lindsay framed it up to essentially ask, "What's the benefit of having a coach in your life who is helping you to stay accountable to your goals?" We had a fun conversation that you can listen to on the link above, and here are a few summary points:

• Coaching is great for people who have a plan and want someone to keep them accountable; AND coaching is also great for people who have no idea what to do next, who feel stuck, and unsure of what to do. Coaching allows people to see the opportunities that are in front of them.
• Coaching is an excellent opportunity to pause and take stock of where you are at in life and where you want to go. You can re-evaluate your skills and align them to find joy at the intersection of your personal and professional life.
• Coaching can help you right-size your goals, so that what feels insurmountable becomes much more manageable. Coaching taps into your own wisdom to draw out what you want to do.
• Coaching can figure out what is the next right step that will bring you closer to your purpose. Coaching helps build your confidence to move forward.
• Coaching doesn't just help with the "doing" of life. It also helps with the "being" of life. Coaching can help create greater satisfaction with life overall.

​One caveat I want to make in reference to the recording is the difference between coaching and therapy. Lindsay mentions how she sees coaching is like a mix of someone holding you accountable to your goals and unofficial therapy. Many people make a connection between coaching and therapy. Sometimes that happens because people have past experience with therapy so they compare it to what they know. Other people think coaching is like therapy because we're talking about things like feelings! But, therapy and coaching are not the same and are two very different things. Through my coaching training with IPEC, we talked about the difference between therapy and coaching:

• Therapy helps clients fix problems, overcome issues, and often manage mental health. Coaches do not work on mental illness nor helping clients fix or overcome problems.
• Coaches focus on solutions. Rather than analyzing the past, coaching helps clients tap into their own wisdom to achieve success in the future.
• Therapists usually help clients figure out "why". Coaches help the client focus on "how".

I am not a licensed therapist. I am thrilled and proud to be a Certified Professional Coach! If you think you could benefit from any of the things that I talked about with Lindsay, reach out! I'd love to talk with you about what coaching can do for you.

This month, I've been coaching a young woman on the brink of a major career change. She has just found out that her job is being eliminated, and she's hoping to make a smooth transition to something new. She wants to find an organization that aligns with her values. She wants to make the right move and not just jump into the first opportunity that presents itself. We've worked on articulating her values, describing the kind of organizational culture she's looking for and thrives in, and what she wants to get out of a new role. Yes, of course, a paycheck is important, but she wants a career that is more than that.

In one of our recent sessions, she realized how much baggage from her current job she is carrying. You can see the heaviness weighing her down. She was never really given constructive performance feedback, so she's incredibly anxious about whether or how she'll know that she can actually do another job. She's already doubting her own ability before she's even started. That's the baggage she's holding onto that she picked up from her current employer.

When I work with clients who are holding onto things that they no longer want to carry, I like to do a little exercise to have them think about their baggage:

• Put it down: Where do you carry your baggage? Is it in your shoulders? Is it in your stomach? How about your throat? Our minds and our bodies are deeply connected. When we know where we feel these things in our bodies, we can build our self-awareness and then tend to those places. For instance, if you hold your baggage in your chest, close your eyes and acknowledge its presence there. And then send your breath there and see if you can imagine lifting the bag out of your body and putting it down.
• Unpack: What does your bag look like? What's in there? Don't just name the experiences and stories and feelings but give them a shape, a texture, a color, a weight, a smell. Use all of your senses to unpack your bag with your mind. Take everything out and spread it out in front of you. What do you notice? How much is there? How heavy is everything? 
• Repack: Now, ask yourself, what do you want to take with you? My favorite question from Marie Kondo is "Do you want to bring that into the future?" Same thing goes for the baggage we are carrying. Think about everything you've just unpacked. Now, imagine that you don't have to carry it all anymore. You can choose what to put into your bag. What would you pack now? What messages, gifts, treasures, and reminders would you fill your bag with instead? How much lighter is it? Where will you carry it?

Now that you've filled your bag with something else instead of the heaviness that was there before, you are reminded of what's truly important to carry with you and what is just taking up space and weight in your mind, body, and heart. Inevitably, we move on to new situations (jobs, relationships, etc) where we accumulate some new baggage. When things feel heavy, it's a good time to do this visualization again. With practice, you become better at packing your bag with just the essentials. Each time you do it, imagine saying to the things you are leaving behind, "I can't take you with me." Then pick up your bag and walk in the future.

I'm pretty excited about this upcoming webinar from Nonprofit Quarterly- Beyond Executive Coaching: How Coaching Can Develop the Next Generation of Leadership and Accelerate Organization Change. Coaching isn't just for executives! It's a really effective tool for leaders at all levels of your organization. In fact, it can be especially effective for people in new positions within your organization, or with teams who need support in working towards a common goal.

One of my current coaching clients is new to his position. He has more managerial responsibility than he's had in the past and he wants to make sure he moves his new team forward strategically and with confidence. He is incredibly competent and a great fit for the role, so he's just really looking for guidance, someone to ask him the right questions and encourage him to take the next steps. This is a great use of coaching that has benefits that will ripple throughout the organization.

I'm also coaching with a group of female employees who are working in a predominantly male industry. They are experiencing both overt and implicit forms of sexism, and when it all adds up, it's frustrating, exhausting, and defeating. I am coaching them as a team to draw on the confidence that they already have and claim their power. They have a vision of having their confidence vibrate through the walls of their organization so that no one is confused about who runs the place. Team coaching can really have huge impacts for the whole organization.

If you have been thinking about coaching for yourself, an employee, or a team within your organization, contact me! I'd love to talk about the opportunities with you. If you still aren't sure, sign up for this July 18th webinar from Nonprofit Quarterly to learn more.