Changing Gears with Acceptance, Intention, and Grace
Welcome to Monthly Inspiration #1: Changing Gears with Acceptance, Intention, and Grace.
Earlier this month, I changed gears from art museum CEO (and part-time coach) to full-time executive coach. I had planned the change for over a year, and yet the moment I transitioned I felt like I was lost at sea. Thankfully, I had support. I reached for two new tools in my coaching toolbelt: articulating what’s going on and saboteur self-management. I read two inspiring books about managing change and discovered that my feelings were normal, universal, and frankly expected: Arthur C. Brooks’ From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life (2022) and Jan Hall & Jon Stokes’ Changing Gear: Creating the Life You Want After a Full-On Career (2021). And I worked with my own coach, who reminded me that saboteurs are always with us AND we always have a choice: to empower them and honor the status quo or tame them and move closer to what we really want.
According to the authors of Co-Active Coaching: The Proven Framework for Transformative Conversations at Work and in Life (the textbook of my coaching training program), articulating what’s going on is a coaching skill that “involves telling coachees what you notice about their words or their actions.” What I noticed about my own actions since changing gears on February 10 was that I was suffering from what Arthur Brooks calls a success addiction: “What workaholics truly crave isn’t work per se; it is success.” I was comforted to read that I was in good company with Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln. But I didn’t really see my success addiction at play until last week when I caught myself saying, “I was a CEO and now I’m an executive coach.” Did I need the former to legitimize the latter? I remembered what another gifted coach once asked me when she sensed my success addiction: “What are you if you’re not what you do?” I couldn’t answer her then, but today I know that I am my values (kindness, courage, connection, joy, and inner peace) and my life purpose (helping others feel like they belong, find their own value and purpose, and shine from within). As an executive coach, I get to honor it all.
What often derails us from our values and life purpose are saboteurs, and nothing activates a saboteur like change. So, earlier this month I leaned heavily on a second coaching tool in my toolbelt: saboteur self-management. Once again citing Co-Active Coaching, “the saboteur concept embodies a group of thought processes and feelings that maintains the status quo in our lives and our work. It is often most apparent when change is imminent or risk-taking is occurring. The saboteur often appears to be a structure that protects us, but in fact it prevents us from moving forward and getting what we truly want.” Through coaching training, I learned that saboteurs are always with us. And, thankfully, there are steps we can all take to turn down their volume, tame them, and move forward: identify your version of these voices, realize that what once protected you now holds you back, create a visual metaphor for them and reduce them to a scale that reflects their diminishing support, and symbolically put them away in a drawer you rarely use. You now have a choice: take out those tiny saboteurs, listen to their nagging voices, and stay small OR keep them stored away, step into your values and life purpose, and go for what you really want.
As I approached my transition day, my saboteurs were begging to come out of my junk drawer and be seen and heard. So, I called on my own coach, who shared that in such moments she shouts “Stop!” at her saboteurs and sees them for what they are by asking herself what’s a belief versus what’s true. What I believed in my vulnerable state was that I would fail in my new role, find little joy in it, or, worse, bring little value to my clients. What was—and remains—true is that I end every coaching call feeling excited about connecting with someone in a meaningful way and positively impacting them and those around them.
Changing gears can be hard. Managing noisy saboteurs can be even harder. But with support from coaching tools, invaluable resources, and a network of coaches, I was able to articulate what was going on and minimize the influence of the saboteurs that were keeping me small and disconnected from my values and life purpose. I turned the turbulence of changing gears into a transition defined by acceptance, intention, and grace. Having gone through it myself, I’m now even better prepared to coach you through your own transition and help you get the life you want.
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