Without intentional growth, leaders (and humans) risk becoming stale, stuck, bored, and purposeless. Coaching and self development keeps you agile, nimble, and constantly evolving. Leadership coaching, especially when it focuses on transformational and conscious methodologies, is both a structured process and a dynamic dance that takes you on a journey of awareness, dismantling, reconstructing and expansion.
Overview of the Leadership Coaching Journey
The journey often starts with a deepening of awareness regarding your attributes, assumptions, and beliefs, facilitated by self-inquiry and frequently enriched by the perspectives of others.
We identify areas for change or enhancement to improve our lives or leadership. This involves experimenting with new behaviors and mindsets, and often confronting sticky, stuck places that require repeated experimentation, dismantling parts of ourselves, and then reconstructing them. It can lead to confusion and even sometimes feel like suffering, and this is how most human growth occurs.
With persistence and trust in the process, out of the confusion emerges a new way of seeing, being, and an improved way of living and leading—often with less reactivity and a more expansive, creative consciousness.
I’ve discovered that the combined strengths of one-on-one, peer, and group coaching create a synergistic effect that far surpasses what any single method can achieve on its own.
My Unfolding Personal Transformation
Over the years, I’ve been amazed by the transformations I’ve witnessed in clients who commit to deep individual and communal work, effecting significant changes within themselves and the collective.
This month, I want to share a bit of my personal story and how individual, group, and peer coaching continues to transform my life. I believe deeply that I can’t effectively engage in leadership coaching with others without also engaging in this deep transformative work myself.
Leaving my corporate consulting job 15 years ago to start my coaching and consulting business marked the beginning of challenging deeply-held beliefs that, while contributing to my success, were also holding me back.
A significant challenge was my perfectionism, driven by a deep-seated belief that I was never enough and always needed to do more—an exhausting endeavor that drained me. Once I addressed the underlying belief, my work transformed into a source of joy and energy, becoming less draining and more fulfilling.
The Continuous Journey of Growth
Since then, life and business have revealed that growth is an unending journey, with each new layer unfolding to pave the way for further expansion. Each new layer of growth has involved some degree of pain and suffering and ultimately has led me to a form of freedom and liberation that makes every struggle on the journey worthwhile.
The last six months have been profoundly transformative. The year started with great openings, visions, ideas, and courage along with a deep knowing that there was something bigger and more expansive to step into.
As I began to take bolder steps and delved deeper, my previous understanding of myself was questioned. The perfectionism I believed I had largely managed uncovered deeper, conflicting beliefs of being ‘too much’ and questioning ‘who do you think you are to be so big?’—aspects of myself I hadn’t realized were connected to perfectionism and had been overlooked.
Additionally, I was taken aback by the difficulty of confronting these revelations. Despite thinking I had become adept at introspection, this new layer of my psyche emerged unexpectedly, challenging my self-awareness.
Integration, Embodiment and Healing
It has been a deep journey of heightened awareness and deliberate experimentation, confronting aspects of myself I was previously unwilling or unable to see.
It all came together in a recent two-day deep retreat with colleagues where I was finally able to see and voice these beliefs openly and honestly. This powerful collective reminded me of my own power and talent for navigating the backcountry of both nature and the human soul.
Each group member contributed uniquely, providing distinct forms of support, understanding, and coaching. Furthermore, a cohesive group can sustain a broad energetic space that allows us to bring our fears and beliefs from darkness into light, helping us define what fills the space after these burdens are lifted. What do we do with this new openness? How do we stay alert and prevent reverting to old patterns?
By releasing the limiting belief of being “too much,” I am finding the freedom to embrace all aspects of myself, which in turn unlocks my true potential to step into a powerful purpose. This shift is steering me away from over functioning, enabling me to support others more effectively without sacrificing my own well-being.
This shift allows me to operate from a place of enhanced, yet paradoxically gentler, strength and deeper self-acceptance, enhancing my capacity to lead with authenticity and embrace an innate inner power.
Embracing the Full Spectrum: The Essence of Leadership Coaching
This deeper surrender and integration from mind to body to life continues to teach me that the path to knowledge and true leadership effectiveness lies in embracing the unknown and continually adapting to new insights and challenges with presence and balance.
Leadership coaching is so much more than enhancing skills; it’s about transforming your entire approach to leadership and life. As we embrace the full spectrum of our experiences—light and dark, healed and unhealed—we become the leaders this world needs, capable of guiding others through their own transformative paths.
I’ll leave you with pieces of a beautiful inquiry written by my friend and mentor, Dan Holden.
“Surrendering often gets reduced to letting go of something we have been holding on to, a move we naturally resist. It could just as easily have to do with stepping into something greater, an aspect of surrender that doesn’t get as much air time. The ‘something greater’ often requires that we become greater ourselves, larger, more expansive. Our small, singular self must be seen for the illusion which it is; only then can the true, or essential self, be considered. The resistance here is even stronger.
It is a Majesty of Spirit. We are asked to consider that we are not a self at all but rather embody a collective. We speak for many. Our strength is a composite of the collective.
What is the larger playground you are being invited to surrender into? The larger, essential YOU sees you there. Your Majesty of Spirit holds you. What will you do?”
With all my love and too muchness,