“I finally feel like I’m doing what I should be doing… I’m coaching… I’m building a business”. After moving through jobs and cities and schools, I feel very lucky to be able to say those words. I was talking to a b-school friend of mine not so long ago and she reminded me that I had talked about coaching when we were at INSEAD a decade ago. I’m sure we were probably sitting around campus talking about how we were going to get through the consulting firm case interviews. Part of their 5-stage interview process. Maybe we were talking about our dream job - hers was creative, graphic design, and mine was to be able to support people in realizing their potential.

My background is in operations, client relationship management and product management, primarily in the financial services and tech sectors. I learned a lot. I learned how to work in a team, with a team. I learned about the industry. I learned what it meant to be a leader. I learned how to work 18-hour days, for better or for worse. Most importantly, I learned about myself. At the beginning of my career, I didn’t know what to look out for, I didn’t know what to notice. As I progressed, I started to recognize things that I was ‘good at’ and ‘not good at’ - accepting these took time. I also started to notice things I enjoyed. The theme that emerged was my belief in supporting people to widen their own horizons. I didn’t come up with that on my own. This is a lesson my father taught me. He built his career around it in international development. It’s a value I’ve held throughout my life.

My journey through operations and product management led me to realize that I wanted my career to take a different shape. I needed to come up with a different path, like I had done so many times before. What would that path look like? I started working with a coach to help me figure it out. I found an amazing coach based on the other side of the planet. It seemed like a good match. She would offer me a different perspective, bring in her own experience in a way I hadn’t seen before. It felt different, it felt expansive, it was me and it was what my next step was going to be (although I didn’t know it at the time). She challenged me on things like the word ‘should’ and on the expectations I had set on myself. I had been told so many times that I had good ‘pedigree’. I went to good schools and I had an opportunity to work in different sized companies in different parts of the world. All of these experiences shaped who I am, how I look at career, relationships, and the world. What I came to realize is that these experiences, my ‘pedigree’, didn’t define who I am or what my career ‘should’ be.

What I soon came to realize was that I was going to build my own path. I was going to construct it with my own two hands. I developed a deep appreciation for the process coaching affords people. It enables people to grow into who they are in way that works for them. It’s about positive change. It’s about designing your path forward. This resonated with me to the point where I am building a business around it. I always wanted to build my own company, but I thought that I’d need a ‘product’ idea. I also thought I would need to find some technical expertise to build said idea. In working with my coach, I realized that I had the idea. I had something that I wanted to explore, something I had been thinking about for years. The wonderful thing about this idea is that I was the product. Me. I could build my own company. doing something I truly believe in. Turning coaching into an business endeavour that would allow me to develop my skills, my business, and my desire to help people realize their goals. So I started my exploration process into coaching. I came at it from a place of curiosity. It made things less stressful, less pressure-cooked.

I had always been curious about coaching. I didn’t know what course to take, there are so many. I finally decided on Adler for different reasons. I connected with their philosophy, it was convenient that they were based in Toronto, they are part of a Graduate School of Psychology, and quite frankly, they were the most time and cost effective. I signed up for the Foundations Course and away I went. The great thing about this exploration was that there was no risk. I wasn’t working, so I had the time, and if I decided not to pursue coaching, I could get my money back! Low risk, high reward.

After taking the Foundations course I knew and I had decided that this is what I was going to pursue. I felt it in my gut. My gut took me around the world. It meant that I got to live through so many amazing experiences. Me and my gut were going to take everything that we had learned in our career, in our education, everything my father taught us, everything my mother taught us, all our relationships, my sister, my friends, and mesh it together. I was going to coach. I was going to coach and I was going to build. I was going to be the product. Not only was I going to build myself up as a coach, I was going to figure out how to build a business around it, around me. I was going to do what I had wanted to for years.

Ready. Set. Go. July 22, 2019, after a week-long Foundations course, I launched my coaching career.