Coaching Sessions

“What are my needs, my convictions, my aspirations, my assets?” How often do you get to ask yourself these questions? A coaching session is a powerful tool to find your answers. Through active and attentive listening, mobilizing feedback, and a curious mindset, I can help you tap into your resources and insights, realize your potential, and feel more focused and empowered.

For a deep dive into BEYOND coaching, below is a five-minute read.
Audible format here:

A few years ago, I was catching up with a relative.

“How’s your work going, Mallika?”

My favorite question! I succinctly described the communication training programs I was creating and facilitating for companies, and my drafting services for business executives. She was wide-eyed.

“How did you learn how to help all those people?” 

That would have been a long story. I evoked some readings, research, and practices to develop my own communication.

Her “Wow, that’s super!” egged me on, so I brought up my work as a coach in leadership development and public speaking.

Overkill.

She pouted, rolled her eyes, and replied with a sigh, “It’s everywhere. I hear it from friends and colleagues:  everyone’s becoming a coach these days.”

Her comment gave me pause. Not as a slight, unintentional as it probably was. More as a wakeup call: there are a lot of coaches out there. You name the goal, there’s a coach for it: fitness, life purpose, relationships, career, wellness, business leadership, change management, parenting, personal style, grieving... And why not? Who could blame people for mobilising their strengths and swapping their jobs, annoying bosses, regular working hours, frustration, and boredom for the autonomy, meaningful impact, and relative peace of coachhood?

I’d like to tell them, “Beware of becoming a coach!” We are a strange species: shamelessly curious, we’ve gotten used to feeling and appearing ignorant. We simply do not know what our SME coachees take for granted, so we’re experts at asking questions. Stupid questions, provocative questions, probing questions to explore assumptions and experiment with mindsets. More open-ended and open-minded questions, les rhetorical and leading ones. Less pedagogy and more play. Coachees find our naivety refreshing, like that of a tourist or a child. It helps them gain critical distance and objectivity vis-à-vis themselves.

Snooping around the International Coaching Federation website recently, I found out that the global estimate of coaches increased between 2019 and 2022 by 54%, with remarkable developments in Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. 48% of us are Gen X, with the number of women coaches steadily climbing. FYI: among professional sports team coaches and orchestra conductors, women remain sparse. What gives?

When I think about that initial comment and the corroborating stats, I wonder, “Can anyone be a business coach?” After all, this is a profession with little to no regulation: no oversight boards, no standardized coaching diploma, no code of ethics, and a dizzying array of possible certifications. Just call yourself a coach and voilà ! you’re a coach.

My irritated ego spurs me to recall feedback from a CEO I’ve coached for several years: “You have such a power of having people just speaking from the best of themselves and from the depths of their heart.” Comments like this feed my gratitude and passion for this work.

Gratitude, passion... and a slight tremor. What’s scarier: the feeling of my insignificance, given the number of coaches around, or the idea that I have some special “power”?

Because when you’re in the session with your coachee, you suddenly know very little. Regardless of the knowledge and know-how you bring to the table. I can draw from numerous communication trainings and certifications that I have received through DB&A, ExeclComm, and Living School; my stage experience as a professional classical singer; my PhD dissertation on the French art of conversation from Columbia University, my bibliography ranging from hostage negotiators to neuroscientists, my body-emotion work and meditation practice, and a host of experiences branded in my visceral memory. All great credentials, all beside the point.

Coaching power does not lie in demonstrating our knowledge or know-how. It’s about transforming ourselves into the optimal sounding board. A sounding board first takes the sound in: as the coachee speaks “from the depths of their heart,” we use our unique knowledge and know-how to hear them differently. It then reflects the sound: we spontaneously formulate and deliver the questions and observations that heighten the coachee’s awareness and motivation.

So contrary to popular belief, coaches are not there to counsel, advise, or take the lead. If there are more men leading professional sports teams and orchestras, it’s probably because of a “think leader think male” unconscious bias we’re still wrestling with as a society. For individual development, the unisex power and leadership of coaching is paradoxical. People learn more effectively what they teach; we position the coachee as our teacher, so they can access their hidden insights and strengths. Explain it to me like I’m a five-year-old, and you’ll probably learn something.

How do I know what questions or prompts will work for a coachee? I don’t. I’ve learned over the years to trust my ears and sensations, my ability to understand and associate, and my intuition and mindful presence to whisper the questions to me at the right moment. I’ve also learned to believe in the potential of every coachee to find enlightenment and inspiration in themselves. Take drafting sessions: how many times have I invited a coachee to articulate an idea, painfully awaited their response, biting my tongue to keep from blurting out the answer, only to hear much better wording emerge from them?  

Coaching power lies in our ability to sacrifice our ego to the coachee’s empowerment. A passion for people, an art of listening that feels like a sport, a balance between knowing and feeling our way through the dark. It lies in our potential to make ourselves... powerless.

Gotta remember this the next time my husband calls me “school teacher.”