Category: English

People come to business in different ways.

• Following family traditions: a long line of lawyers, doctors or teachers.
• Following vanity’s call, in pursuit of status: to get a Ferrari, diamonds, a yacht and envious glances from classmates, neighbors, colleagues…
• From hopelessness and despair: when one understands that working for someone means going through agony. Either the bosses are tyrants, or the colleagues are arrogant and gossipy, or it is impossible to pass the probation period.

I am thinking about the movie JOY with Jennifer Lawrence, which can give you a huge boost of motivation to unleash your potential despite everything: opinion of others, lack of money and experience.

It is entirely possible to build a successful business based on these motivators.

But it is quite a different matter when you start your enterprise following your heart’s call.

When you understand that you want to do everything your own way, create something truly your own and see the embodiment of your own mind, creativity and ingenuity.

When you feel the potential and strength in yourself, when ideas are rushing in and you don’t want to put them aside for later.

Creating my own business, for example, allowed me to combine all my experiences, skills and convey them every day in my work with people.

But business is not for everyone. I do not know how my entrepreneurship will turn out, but I know for sure that I admire people who dare to start from scratch and only go forward.

Never give up, never surrender.

When Everest transformed into a tropical island

Recently I started working with a new client and on the third session we had a collapse (from the Latin collapsus “fallen in”). The mountain flattened into an island. Let me explain.

Often in coaching a big, important goal is metaphorically called the Everest. I noticed that quite often my new clients, not familiar with coaching, have difficulties to answer my question about their “life goal”/”life task”/”vision of yourself in a few years.”

I have realized that these large-scale thoughts are most likely intimidating. So, I use the Everest metaphor to make it more accessible. It was the case with this client. For two sessions we had been talking about the Everest, even planning staging points (as intermediate steps to the goal) and were heading towards a mountain chalet (my client was picturing it as a self-realization and comfort zone).

But something happened during the third session… Suddenly she said: “I see that I am cutting anchors from my boat and sailing to a tropical island.”

I drew her attention to the change in the metaphor, and she confirmed that from now on her goal was no longer a high, inaccessible mountain, the road the way to which was so draining.

Instead, it became a tropical island inviting for a pleasant journey.

This switch happened thanks to her insights and decisions taken between the sessions.

We have at least 7 sessions ahead of us, and I am looking forward to her new insights. I really want to sail with her to her idyllic, sunny island.

What I learned for myself as a coach:

• metaphors are good, but from now on I will be careful with imposing my own visualizations
• I will find other, more approachable and motivating ways of presenting such “frightening” information as a life goal
• The client knows better whether they want to go to the mountain or swim to the island with coconuts (to the song “Chunga-Changa”. Yes, it was on these notes that our session ended).

Good-bye maternity leave, hello new IT job!

Recently I had a mid-coaching “calibration” session with a client. I suggest to my clients to go through this retrospective around the fifth session. She had already achieved tremendous results: she switched her career and got a job offer from an international IT company.

Her path was not easy: after quitting her accountancy job at the end of her maternity leave, she went into the Unknown in search of herself. At some point, she felt the need to dramatically change her profession. She took various online courses, she worked extremely hard towards this new goal. I had the impression that she forgot to take care of herself in this race for a new career, and as a coach I pointed this out to her. She listened to me and realized that she always aspired to do everything with pleasure (to live in harmony) and the way she exhausted herself contradicted this goal.

With curiosity and anticipation, I accompanied her as she made leaps and bounds towards awareness and self-actualization, which in turn led to confidence in her choice (profession and career strategy) and finally led her to her dream job.

The first question in this session was: “How many hours of coaching do you think we spent together?” ¹ She confidently answered that it must have been around 25 hours. I was astounded since we had only worked for 6 hours thus far. She experienced our sessions as more intense, 4 times more “filling”. She also did not believe that “just” 6 hours of coaching led her to such results.

Now new challenges and achievements are ahead of her, and we have already identified the topics for the next five sessions to make her impressive results even more fruitful.

I was once again convinced that small steps, weekly sessions, and unconditional love can lead clients to undreamt-of accomplishments. My heart was smiling and it is smiling right now when I share her success story with you.

¹ Since I also acted as a consultant for her regarding her resume, career strategy and interview skills the number of hours could not be simply inferred from the number of sessions.