A Companion on Your Journey
By Gayle Dee
I invite you to come along on a reflective journey.
Flash back to the Monday after your Women Leading Change (WLC) course. Remember how you felt? You had just been a part of a special experience that brought new awareness, new friends, professional relationships and connection with a vast network of powerful, committed women. In that moment, you knew that you were one of those powerful, committed women too!
Along with this new awareness came one of your greatest discoveries.you had a new way of thinking, a new way of viewing the world around you, and choices about who you wanted to be and what you wanted to accomplish that were compelling for you. You were inspired and people around you noticed!
And there were so many new skills you learned! Powerful tools were yours with which to create a future that would be meaningful and impactful for you personally and for your organization.
But wait! There was also this unsettling concern that went something like this.”I am excited and know I can make a difference that I now see is possible for me! But, how can I possibly retain and become more skillful in all that I have just learned as I step back into my fast-paced world of work? I’m not able to be as intentional with my new learnings as I would like. How can I better sustain the future that I now see is possible?”
We’re all pretty familiar with the trial and error way of learning, right? It works, absolutely! We do it all the time and it also takes a long time. I can certainly cite my own experience in becoming a manager and the years it took on a committed path to being the best I could be for the people and the organizations I worked with.
In looking back over those 14 years, I made a difference, for sure. But I wonder how different it would have been had I had a coach as my companion on that journey! How much more would I have been able to contribute to my own development and to the people and organizations I worked with? What would I also be able to see and do today?
It’s never too late to get a coach! It doesn’t matter whether your WLC was last month or 5 years ago. You can recover and realize what you learned and cause the breakthroughs you can see are possible. A good coach is someone who is fully committed to YOU, your pursuit of personal mastery and the difference you want to make in all dimensions of your life – personal, relationships, family, work, and community. When you work with a coach, you take your new learnings, practice them with precision, and transform them into competence with velocity and focus. When you work with an IWL coach, you develop, internalize and apply your competence in Leading from Context™ to accomplish major goals and breakthrough in your work. Your career moves in the directions you choose.
Choose to be the leader you know you can be! Invite a coach to be the companion on your journey to becoming that leader.
Gayle Dee is an Coach with the Institute for Women’s Leadership.