Is this how it sounds inside your head?
Yes I can
You’re on form. You’re confident, credible, inspiring, able to deal with almost anything.
No I can’t
Self-doubt creeps in. That critical voice in your head takes over. You either shrink from challenge and confrontation, failing to address things that need to be dealt with, or you run headlong into difficult conversations, handle them badly and create more problems.
You love your work. You’re good at it, are making progress up the career ladder, delivering results, getting good reviews, feeling confident. You successfully juggle the different areas of your life.
Increasingly you’re doubting yourself. Surely you could be more effective, or have greater impact and influence? What is the point of your work? Why can’t you cope any more with the pace and ambiguity of the corporate world? Is the cost to the rest of your life is worth it.
You lead a team of people, a department or a whole organisation. You take tough decisions that affect people’s lives, navigate organisational politics and group dynamics, and lead through ambiguity and uncertainty. You lead people whose work you don’t necessarily understand. You trust yourself to do the right thing.
With responsibility comes complexity. Maybe you can’t handle the conflict. You’re overworked, stressed and emotionally drained. You’re not showing up with gravitas, authority or confidence. You’re worried about the longer term consequences of today’s actions but don’t have time to think about them. Maybe this job was a mistake.
It’s time to get some help
These issues challenge us at the deepest level, bringing us into conflict-laden conversations and exposing our vulnerability and self-doubt. They trigger us, and when we’re triggered, we default to patterns of behaviour we learnt a long time. Those behaviours served us then, but they don’t serve us now. But we can learn to respond differently when under pressure. We can interrupt those long-held habits, and learn to act confidently and competently, despite the negative thoughts.
“I have worked with Kate for a number of years. She is very professional, entirely human and approachable and we’ve been able to develop a great working relationship. Her insights and experience enable us to get great results, but in a highly personalised and flexible way, which I value. I would highly recommend Kate.”
Welcome to a more powerful you
Credibility, gravitas and impact come from having a clear sense of what’s really important. Why do you do what you do? What gives you a sense of purpose and achievement? What do you want it to be like in the team you lead?
Trust is created in the interactions you have. Do you do what you say you will? Do you have the skills you actually need? Do you admit when you don’t know, or when you’ve made a mistake? Do you take on work you know you don’t have the capacity to deliver?
All of these things create your professional reputation. Once you know what you stand for and why, your self-belief grows. Once you have confidence in yourself, it emanates from you without you having to try. People instinctively know you’re doing the right things for the right reasons, that you have a wealth of experience to call on, that you can be relied on to treat them decently. They know you will tell them the truth, no matter how hard that is to say, or hear. You will do it with compassion and respect. You will praise them when they deserve it, and you will mean every word.
And what you learn in a professional context will stand you in good stead in your personal relationships too. As a girl, you were taught to be caring and considerate, put others before yourself, look after everyone else. The consequences of not being like this often wins us disapproval from our families, so we learn not to do them. But the ability to say no, ask for what you need, admit you need help are things we need to be able to do, for our own wellbeing. And if you’re a mother, you might want to be able to role-model them for your own daughters, to break the cycle of unhelpful gendered expectations,
Let’s talk
It might feel strange to book straight into my calendar without any kind of conversation.
Actually, it’s the most efficient way of finding a date that we can both do.
There is a short questionnaire as part of the process which will allow you to tell me a bit about yourself and why you’d like to talk.
There is absolutely no obligation attached to this conversation. It’s open and exploratory on both sides.
You get to decide whether you would like to work with me and I get to check that I’m the right person to help you. If I’m not, I can recommend other coaches in my network who might suit you better.
I like to think I’m a warm, friendly person with a good sense of humour and the ability to really listen to what you have to say. I love hearing about other people’s lives, that’s why I do what I do. If you have the slightest hope that I can help you, go ahead and book that call.
“I can absolutely vouch for Kate’s ability to work confidently across the boundaries between professional and personal life, and the value that she delivers in doing so. The reality of my situation was such that without her attending to the personal challenges I was experiencing, we couldn’t have begun to make progress on the professional agenda, which was our formal brief. I’m forever grateful that she helped me to navigate that time so successfully.”
What if I’m a man?
Don’t let that stop you. The gender issues I talk about are, by their nature, broad generalisations. I work with plenty of male clients who have confidence issues or who feel their professional reputation has somehow gone awry. You’ve been conditioned to be “a real man”, just as women have been conditioned to be “good girls”. Book a call and let’s see if I can help.