An excerpt from my dialogue with Paul McAleer on our podcast Designing Yourself, Episode #16: Ready Set Go (originally aired July 1, 2014), with minimal editing for readability.
Two weeks ago I was finally certified as a professional coach. I was in this yearlong certification program where I was trained to be a professional coach based on a specific methodology that is proprietary to the gentleman who started the school. Now I am trained in that methodology. It’s called Integral Coaching. And I have been in this transition from consulting to coaching for the last year plus.
In late 2012, I started wanting to shift my business away from being responsible for having the answers and giving those answers to my clients, to instead guiding my clients to find their own right answers and to build those competencies in house.
The realization about that being coaching wasn’t like a light bulb over my head, as maybe I wish it had been, but rather a confluence of different inputs that I had been getting for some time. But I finally accepted it as being true in February 2013.
By March I was trying to figure out what is the coaching discipline? and how do I learn about it so I can bring this into my business?, because I knew that that was the shift that I needed to make in the way I operated. But I also knew I wasn’t ready to make that shift because I didn’t have those competencies within myself yet.
So I decided that the right approach for me was to enter a certification program. I knew I needed this training. And so I applied to New Ventures West and got accepted, and started the yearlong program. But at the same time, I wasn’t going to wait a year until I was certified to do anything. I had to make small changes to the way I was doing business now, because once I had the realization and once it set in and I accepted this is what I need to do, this is how I have to change, it felt so wrong to do things the way I had been doing them.
It just felt inauthentic, like that’s the old me. I know better now. I’ve got to do it this new way. And yet I didn’t have the education, and certainly not the experience that I needed to figure out how to do it. So the last year has been a lot of trial and error. I didn’t pull the ripcord and say never going to do anything like I used to because that was my income stream. And I couldn’t just jump into coaching totally because I had no idea what I was doing. I’m sure I still don’t. But I have a little bit more of an idea a year later.
At the beginning, I just wasn’t ready for a lot of things. But even before I was certified, I started becoming ready for certain things. I came ready to put the word “coach” in my title. And I started doing that maybe, I don’t know, a few months ago. I started calling myself a User Experience Coach instead of a User Experience Consultant.
Now I realize that term doesn’t necessarily mean anything to anyone because it’s not a common term yet — wink, wink. But it means something to me. And it’s a great conversation starter for prospective clients who say, “What does that even mean?” User experience coach is kind of vague. But it gives me an opportunity to express how differently I approach things. Instead of “give a man a fish,” it’s “teach a man to fish.”
So eventually I was ready to use that word, “coach.” And I was ready to start talking about why coaching was important. But there was still a part of me that felt like I didn’t have the permission. I didn’t have the credibility, the readiness, to really change the way I was structuring my client projects, the way I was pricing.
I did have some one-on-one coaching clients. That was a part of my certification program. I was required to have real clients with real issues, and I saw them through full five-month-long programs. And some of them I’m still working with now.
But I wasn’t doing that more than a few hours a week. I was still very squarely focused on the kinds of UX projects I’ve always had, but doing them slightly differently. Only in preparing for the certification, maybe a month ago, when I knew it was on the horizon, I was starting to be ready to rethink my business.
Since they put the rubber stamp on it and they said, “Yes, you are in fact certified,” and I got a pretty little certificate and all this stuff, since then, in less than two weeks, I have exploded in terms of shifting my business. These are the different services I’m going to offer. These are the pricing structures. These are my target audiences.
I mean, I was really struggling for the last few months, even thinking about who I’m going to target. Am I going to target people like you and me who are user experience practitioners? Are those my clients? Am I going to target executives? Because I went into the program thinking I am going to get this certification to have more credibility with the C-suite, to help them create organizational change that creates the right climate for user experience to thrive. That was my intention. But do I really want to work with executives? What about the team stuff I’m doing now? I was so lost.
But since somebody else external to me said, “Yes, we think you are ready,” my belief in myself and my own feeling of readiness changed so much that it just unlocked all of this cognitive power, and energy and determination to get it out of me, get it put down on paper, documented. And now I feel close to ready to launching that.
My long story here is to say that I think it was a combination the conditions inside of me changing, and the external conditions, too.
An excerpt from my dialogue with Paul McAleer on our podcast Designing Yourself, Episode #16: Ready Set Go (originally aired July 1, 2014), with minimal editing for readability.
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