Competency No. 5

Our Competency No 5 podcast has focused much on how to stay calm and present when we coach, lead, and live our lives. For coaches, part of that calm ties to making a living from our coaching, which requires marketing ourselves to our prospective clients. I’m no expert; but I have built a prosperous coaching business in a relatively short time from putting one piece of fresh content “out there” once a week. Through podcasting and writing essays and instructional guides or musings to help democratize communications coaching, bringing the wisdom learned to as many as possible, I’ve retained and attracted a steady base of up to 90 coaching clients. This week’s episode shares some of my tactics, approaches, mindsets towards marketing ourselves as coaches, thought leaders, and entrepreneurs in hopes it sparks creativity, trust, and awareness within you. You can read my musings on this topic on Medium here with all the hyperlinks to the essays I’ve noted. Thanks for listening this year, dear listeners! Dotun and I wish you all the best for the new year and we’ll be back the second week of January 2025. Reach out to me, your show host, for keynote speaking engagements, coaching, and training via my website, or find me also on Linkedin.  

I muse and mentor some more with MCC Coach Ben Dooley this week, getting deeper into the nitty-gritty on how to lock in, stay fully present with our coachee. We address the inevitable blunder of speaking over—so hard not to in a 45-minute session, ways to rebound earlier, and wonder: how much does this matter?We also tackle an age-old adage almost every coach in training hears as they master active listening: WAIT (why am I talking?). Coach Ben finds this acronym can make us even more self-judgmental. (He urges us to focus more on whom am I talking on behalf of?)It’s a great mentoring session, recorded with Ben and my permission, in service of any certifying ICF coach and anybody simply wanting to become a more effective, more grounded, peaceful and locked-in listener. Reach out to me, your show host, for keynote speaking engagements, group coaching, and training via my website, or find me also on Linkedin.  Reach out to MCC Coach Ben Dooley via his website, here. And you can tap his Coaching Skills Forum here. Find our earlier mentoring sessions here. 

How to choose which recorded coaching call to submit to the International Coaching Federation to certify at the Master Certified level still perplexes me. And after all this excellent mentoring, I’m feeling more conscious of where I’m falling out of mastery as I coach. Does any perfect coaching call exist? And assuming not, how much margin of error does the ICF allow? These questions I posed to MCC Coach Ben Dooley, my mentor coach, this week. I’m feeling clearer and clearer and even more inspired. Reach out to me, your show host, for keynote speaking engagements, group coaching, and training via my website, or find me also on Linkedin.  Reach out to MCC Coach Ben Dooley via his website, here. Find our earlier mentoring sessions here. 

Pharma sales executive, Jill Staudacher, appreciates the value of pharmaceutical medicines. She also finds value in natural medicine, especially now as we approach cold and flu season here in North America. (Echinacea, honey, vitamin d and vitamin C can boost our immunity really well.) In our lovely interview, we hear of homeopathic remedies and foods which can help boost our immunity and calm us down, even amidst Q4–a stressful time for many. We also swap notes (as fellow Wisconsinites and working mothers) on how to find our calm and bliss amidst Thanksgiving season, a celebration focused on creating, planning, and sharing food, but also gratitude and how to make time for ourselves and our own self care and reflection, no matter what. If you’d like to reach out to Jill for friendship or guidance, find her via her website  Refocus your Health. Want to work with me or join my podcast(s)? Write to me at hangingrockmedia@gmail.com You can follow me also on LinkedIn and find details on my coaching and trainings via my website.  

I’ve often bristled with the International Coaching Federation’s rule to establish (clearly—and in multiple ways) the topic and hopes for the coachee (our client) in every coaching call. Why? Because when you’re locked in and connected, the coaching conversation (in the real world vs. the ICF world) unfolds. Even asking the coachee to establish the topic or confirm it can feel prosaic, inserted, or forced, especially as we’ve already been talking about it. But without that established topic, the ICF gets antsy and will likely fail any recorded submission of our coaching without it. In this week’s episode and recorded mentoring session with my MCC Coach and mentor, Ben Dooley, I’m reminded that these rules become valid and worth following, not just so we can certify at that MCC level, but also to best serve our coachee. Establishing what we’re coaching towards in this moment, why, and what outcome they seek sets us both up for a solid coaching conversation. Establishing what they want and don’t want (and how we can help with that) also helps us feel more confident on how to bring value, and with that stay more present. In driving for specifics on what our coachee truly wants, we also ensure our coachee gains the outcome they seek. So while I still find it irksome, after this week’s training with Coach Ben, I’m really working to reframe how I think about the entire rule. Reach out to me, your show host, for keynote speaking engagements, group coaching, and training via my website, or find me also on Linkedin.  Reach out to MCC Coach Ben Dooley via his website, here. Find our earlier mentoring sessions here. 

About 900,000 Americans retired in the first five months of 2024, part of a “silver tsunami” of those reaching retirement age. My father-in-law Nick McCullough is one who retired a few years back, and in beautiful ways returning to the land just outside of Ruth Mississippi where he grew up. The cotton farm of his youth is now his retirement land where he lives with his Cajun wife, Crystall, my American Mum. After years of running his own auto repair workshop outside of New Orleans, Louisiana, he’s done with work, for now. In our touching interview, Nick (who’s hard of hearing, hence me booming my voice just a wee bit) reflects on his farm labor as a boy which started at six a.m. and ended at twilight. He believes growing up rural taught him how to work hard and how to think big. The very openness of the land brings peace, calm, tranquility—and a feeling that anything’s possible. And it is. Reach out to me, your show host, for keynote speaking engagements, group coaching, and training via my website, or find me also on Linkedin.  

Part two in a two-part series on maintaining presence when certifying as a Master Certified Coach, especially whilst the International Coaching Federation evaluates us. Reach out to me, your show host, for keynote speaking engagements, group coaching, and training via my website, or find me also on Linkedin.  Reach out to MCC Coach Ben Dooley via his website, here. 

To certify with the International Coaching Federation, the world’s largest nonprofit organization, coaches must submit a recording of a coaching call they deem…well, worthy of certification. The stakes and expense (and the agonizing decision on which recording to submit) goes up with our credentials. The fee to submit a recording for the Master Coaching Certification? Between $675 to $825 US. And the expense of mentoring with a mentor coach, who can review your coaching skills, adds up too. Of course, you’ve the time expense as well — coaching and then analyzing which of your calls might best adhere to the ICF’s core competencies. As of December 31, 2023, there were 2,204 active MCC credential-holders worldwide, and if you’ve been following my writings and podcasts a while, you’ll know I’m vying to join this elite, super rare group. My mentor coaches have taught me a lot on this topic — and helped remove some of the ambiguity and guess work. In this week’s podcast, part of a two-part series, I’m chatting with my newest MCC mentor coach, Ben Dooley, on my residual and ongoing blockers, and his suggestions on getting out of our own way.Part two in this two-part series lives here.  Reach out to me, your show host, for keynote speaking engagements, group coaching, and training via my website, or find me also on Linkedin.  Reach out to Coach Ben Dooley via his website, here.

Air Force contract specialist Kyana Gayden finds that it’s the small tweaks in how we spend our time that yields the biggest results when it comes to work-life balance. She also marvels in that fabulous invention: Paid Time Off, which she never had as a graduate student, and does something fun—and spontaneous—when not working hard. “It makes a difference,” she finds, “and you feel more gratitude for your job, too.”

Warning: This episode's super ad hoc. This week, I met my new mentor coach, Ben Dooley. He's a former actor (among other things) and now runs his own coaching training academy and helps coaches certify in empowering ways. (I felt so inspired connecting with him via our Discovery session, I had to hit record.) In our conversation, we hear from Ben on his first failings as a certifying MCC coach, the blockers many of us striving for that master certification face, and how to navigate the entire process when (like me) you struggle following rules and/or are super creative. You can reach Ben Dooley and learn more about his trainings via his website. Reach out to me, your show host, for keynote speaking engagements, group coaching, and training via my website, or find me also on Linkedin.