Here’s the story of how I became a coach, and how I almost didn’t.
Several years ago after recovering from major surgery, I was feeling good enough to do something productive.
I signed up for an online DIY goal-setting program.
It was so practical. You just plunk in your specific measurable goals over the next X months.
Mine:
- Lose 15 pounds in 3 months
- Increase my net worth by 10% in 3 months
- Spend one evening with friends each week
Next, you break that down into monthly goals.
OK, so if I want to lose 15 pounds in 3 months, that’s 5 pounds per month, a little more than a pound a week.
Awesome! I can do this! It’s just arithmetic.
Simple.
Except, it became clear after a period of time that I wasn’t meeting my goals.
So, I decided to sign up to work with a career coach.
She was fantastic. She helped me identify my values.
Mine:
- Freedom over how I spend my time and autonomy over how I get a job done
- Money to maintain a lifestyle traveling back and forth between Turkey and the US
- Making a greater contribution
- Time with family
- Beautiful working environment and a stylish wardrobe
OK, so, I guess I’ll go back to getting a job in tech I decided – there are high paying jobs there. I need that income to support my lifestyle.
I started working on my Data Science certification from John’s Hopkins.
Totally wrong for me!
Ahem … that’s how I met my husband, because I couldn’t get my C++ program to compile and he stepped in to help me.
Even though I can read code, I struggle to write it.
I could see I was getting nowhere, and I was miserable trying to use GitHub and learn R programming, and not to mention it wasn’t going to make me location independent.
I really wanted things to be different in my life.
I still had my goals – I just wasn’t reaching them.
How could I create the life that embodied my values?
While browsing Instagram, I found the coach and the program that felt like it was the right fit for me.
It spoke to all my values – more money, freedom, travel, time with family.
This was it!
And it cost $15,000.
This was more than I’d spent on anything for myself outside of my college education or my wedding – and my dad paid for those.
I signed up for a consultation to talk about the program.
Talking to the coach on the phone, it sounded like this was the right fit for me – it was going to teach me the professional skills I needed to reach my personal goals in life.
Since this was the right fit, the coach asked me if I wanted to hand over my credit card info right then and there?
Gulp.
Fear. Panic. Terror.
Let me talk to my husband, I said.
The coach offered to talk to him for me.
So I handed the phone to my husband to have a conversation with my coach about my future.
I could hear my husband asking her questions about success rates, and how many women graduate, and how much money do they usually end up making.
Blah. Blah. Blah.
And I felt humiliated.
I’d just handed my dream – and my power – over to someone else.
No doubt this someone else is someone who loves and cares for me, but if he didn’t see that I believed in myself enough to succeed in this program, he was also the one who was going to protect me from anything that might hurt me – like failure.
And when I got the phone back and talked to the coach again, she said, this is what happens when a woman isn’t in her power.
And I got it.
I didn’t believe in myself enough to come up with the $15,000 to invest in the training that was going to help me reach my goals.
And I wanted someone else to believe in me more than I believed in myself and to tell me it would be ok.
I wanted someone else to tell me that I was good enough to do it.
And I wanted someone else to assure me that if I failed – as I’d done in the past – that he’d be there to pick up the pieces.
That someone else will be there to bail me out.
I was already thinking about what would happen if I failed.
I wasn’t asking myself what I could do to guarantee my own success!
And what I got from this experience was that I needed a new belief.
I needed to have a conversation with him that was about why I was going to succeed.
Why I was a different person now because I’d learned from my past failures.
And why this was an investment worth making.
I had to give myself permission to go after my dream, and to see how powerful I was rather than wait for someone else to give that to me.
I needed to believe in myself before I could ask anyone else to believe in me.
And once I did that, our conversation wasn’t about giving me permission, but about logistical things like how we would be able to make the payments until I could get my business making money.
Once I found my power, I also found the money.
Not that I wasn’t scared, it’s just that now I had faith in my personal power to take action despite the fear.
I tapped into some savings, took some money out of a retirement account, borrowed some from family, put some on a credit card, opened a NEW 0% interest credit card.
Once I made a decision about how much this dream meant to me, and how much I believed in myself to take the training and USE IT to change my path in life, I was still scared, but also so much more powerful.
I’ve been talking to a number of women who are building tech companies and seeking funding from investors.
They’re facing challenges with their CTOs.
And these are real issues that any startup faces.
These issues must be addressed to get funding and to get your product in the hand of your users.
But no one is going to take you seriously if you don’t take yourself seriously first.
And when I tell them how much coaching costs to help them solve these issues, they tell me they don’t have the money.
I will no longer stand for this form of self-abandonment.
No investor is going to invest in you if you don’t believe in yourself.
And no CTO is going to follow your leadership if you are giving other people the power to tell you how things are going to go.
You must first see yourself as the leader and not only believe in the power of your own idea, but also in your personal power to be the leader who brings this idea to life.
I can say this with love and compassion, because I’ve gone through it myself.
This is why I created a private community for women to master their leadership skills as they build their companies.
Your ideas, and the company you are building are making our lives better.
I have a vested interest in your ideas coming to life.
If you would like to join this community to get creative solutions to the challenges you are facing and professional coaching support, please accept my personal invitation and join here.
