Leadership and Executive Coaching
A few years back, I launched a personal commitment to develop in a whole new arena, coaching leaders. Since roughly 2013, both my friend Jake and myself have benefitted greatly from working with a Leadership/Executive Coach to improve our self-leadership, our management, and our ability to bring the best service possible to our supporters at Nuru as well as the more than 120,000 beneficiaries and over 200 leaders we work with in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Nigeria.
To be fair, the field of coaching has had a fair share of criticism, and much of this is the result of people who have no formal training deciding that they will assert that they are coaches. When I had the opportunity to begin being coached, I have to admit I had a mix of expectant curiosity and jaded cynicism about the whole process. I mean, on the one hand, who wouldn’t want to tap into another level of capabilities to bring their very best offering to serve others. But, on the other hand, I had a little bit of anxiety that this “coaching” stuff was just going to be a bunch of navel-gazing, cheerleading, and hype. What I found was a resource far better than I could have imagined.
I worked with a coach named Andy Scantland who is the principal of a company called Upside-Partners. Andy has been great! He and his wife have become incredible friends to myself and Jamie, and he really helped me take my leadership capacity and ability to a whole other level. I truly believe that Jamie and I have both benefitted from my work with Andy, and I believe Nuru has as well. Over the course of my time working with Andy, I believe I have become a better leader, and I have become more aware of pitfalls that can hurt my performance in both work and life. I am also more physically fit, more focused, and healthier than I think I have been for a long time.
Over most of my adult life, through my time working in vocational ministry, my time serving in my tribal community, and in other arenas. I have had the opportunity to work informally in several arenas that called on me to not only bring out my best, but also to bring out the best in others. Through these experiences and as a result of working with a coach, the transformation that has taken place in my own ability to lead, manage, process, and be fully present led me to begin formal training to be a leadership/executive coach. I talked with Andy about it, and he was really encouraging! He talked to me about some of my specific strengths that would be of incredible service to others if I were to receive formal training to be a coach. He also sent me a few links to reputable training and certification programs including the program he went through with the Coaches Training Institute (CTI). I began researching, and decided that CTI, aside from being one of the oldest and most reputable coaching organizations in the world, had the kind of rigor and depth of content and training that I wanted to have for the good of this world and future clients.
After multiple encouraging conversations with Jamie and other friends, and being counseled that it would be really easy to put off the training, I decided to take the plunge and hit the ground running back in 2016. I signed up that year for a full year of training and certification with CTI. It has been an amazing journey so far, and in a few future posts I look forward to sharingsome of my reflections and learning from a few of those training opportunities.
May each of us launch out in bold ways in the months and years ahead to bring our very best offering of ourselves for the good of others and the glory of God.