WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO START OR GROW YOUR SOCIAL ENTERPRISE
Five Reasons Why Every Founder and CEO Should Have a Coach
Tip number 8 to fellow and aspiring (social) entrepreneurs, from my lived experience.
I am fortunate that throughout my journey as a founder of a social enterprise, I’ve had the support of a formidable coach. In the most recent years, I’ve accessed a number of coaches who have been instrumental in my personal and career development.
Coaching has helped me not only in striving for success but in times of crisis, stuckness, not knowing, growth and even in times of despair!
Here are five reasons why every CEO and founder should have a coach based on my lived experience.
No1 — We need a space to moan and get over it!
Being a founder can be lonely. For the first couple of years, when I started Micro Rainbow, I had a big dream and a big passion, but not many people to share it with!
As the organisation grew, although I had more people around me, there were still very few people with whom I could confide and explore my worries, my pressures, and my own personal challenges.
We all have friends and family we can turn to and who can be invaluable. By definition, they cannot stand at arm’s length as they are part of our story.
Coaching provided me with a safe space where I could be brutal about my feelings, about my temptations to give everything up (short lived!) and about my frustrations towards the obstacles I experienced from governments and systems that did not want queer migrants or organisations supporting them.
Coaching can be place where you can let your emotions and thoughts run free. Although I am a fan of therapy, what I find helpful about coaching is being afforded the opportunity to regroup and get past the turbulences and often emerge with concrete actions or shifts of some form.
Coaching questions that help me in these moments are:
What is really going on here?
What else is going on that you would like to say that you have not said yet?
Do you really believe that?
What do you need the most right now?
If you were avoiding something now, what might that be?
No2. We need help in connecting with our gut instinct.
There were times in my social entrepreneurial journey, especially before the inception of Micro Rainbow, when I was unsure what to do next. These were moments of uncertainty which were daunting.
I had to make decisions that could have taken Micro Rainbow in one direction or in an entirely different one, and I did not know which direction was best.
Sometimes I was stuck. At other times I had to take risks, some of which had substantial financial implications for me and my family, not knowing if I was doing the right thing.
In these moments of total stuckness (I had more than a few!), and when I had no idea what to do next, coaching helped me connect with my gut instinct. It helped me get out of my own head.
One way of doing that was daydreaming. Fifteen years ago, my head was my worst enemy. I could spend hours intellectualising a problem, the solutions, the risks, and the implications. Daydreaming helped me remove the clutter that kept my brain so busy all the time. I resisted to start with. I needed solutions and answers. How could I get them if I spent my working day dreaming?!
What I learned through coaching is that often the answer to my problems comes from a different place. It comes from a place of authenticity, of alignment with my values.
What I’ve learnt is that when you are creating something that is deeply connected to who you are, to your values and to a social cause, that process is not linear. It takes you in different directions and in doing so, it clarifies your path.
Coaching helped me get comfortable with the not knowing. It helped me realise that as long as I was connected to my higher self, I was on the path that I was meant to be on.
It also infused my brain with positivity. It trained me to be curious, open, welcoming. It trained me to ask myself “I wonder what good is going to come out of this?” as opposed to thinking “it is just going to be a waste of time”. And guess what? I learned that if you stay open and curious, something good is very likely going to happen.
Coaching questions that helped me in these moments are:
What is it that you really need to know right now?
How would it feel adding “yet” to your sentences e.g. I don’t have the solution …yet?
What does your gut say?
What would you do if you had a magic wand?
No3. It helps us pause, take a breath and celebrate success.
When building an organisation, there are millions of tasks to do and many barriers to overcome. For many of my early years I was in a “getting things done” mode. I was always looking for “what’s next?” I rarely stopped to celebrate success.
Coaching gave me the space to stop and reflect on achievements. I believed that doing so helped me build my resilience.
I remember how emotional it was to hear my coach say “Sebastian, I want to share how much I admire you and what you have achieved. You have gone from x to y to z, you created a social enterprise that is supporting x number of LGBTQI people… etc.”. I remember this mirroring back being uncomfortable and emotional at the same time. I struggled to take it in.
My drive and ambition were so excessive that I dismissed the smaller wins along the way. There was always more to achieve.
I now realise the importance of stopping to celebrate — both as a leader and as a team. For me it is about valuing hard work, believing that we are worthy of praise, building a culture of positivity and appreciation. We need these experiences in our lives.
Coaching questions that helped me in these moments are:
How does it feel hearing me recognise your success?
What do you think helped you achieve those milestones?
What have you learned along the way?
Looking back, when were you at your best? How did that feel? How can you get more of that?
No4. We want to challenge our limiting beliefs.
We all grow up believing something unhealthy and possibly untrue about ourselves: “I am not worth it”, “I am not good at numbers”, “I always mess things up”, “I never do as well as I could” and much more.
At the beginning of my career, I was petrified by public speaking. I was attracted to it and scared about it at the same time.
Before I was due to speak at an event, I remember the feeling in my stomach, the shame, the heat on my face, the sensation of dizziness, the lumps in my throat. These days, I do public speaking comfortably; I actually even enjoy it!
Coaching helped me understand what was behind the fear. For me, it was about being “seen” as a gay man and about early core beliefs of “not being good enough”. It also helped me reframe my fear and retrain my brain to ultimately let it go.
Over the years I have worked on several limiting beliefs. The process is not easy but ultimately it is liberating.
Coaching questions that helped me in these moments are:
What is the worst that can happen?
If you were seen, what would they see?
If you knew the event would go well, what would you do differently?
Imagine you have delivered your best speech ever, how would that feel?
No5. We learn skills for life, even better if we train as coaches!
After reading this article it may not come as a surprise to learn that I have become a coach in addition to, and as part of my role as CEO of Micro Rainbow. It feels like I have been coaching colleagues for over 10 years but now I have refined my coaching skills through the life-changing Wise Goose Coaching Programme.
I would recommend doing a coaching programme even if you do not want to practice as a coach. For me, it was a journey of personal exploration and healing which has helped me immensely during a period of change and difficulty. I know myself better. The skills we learn as coaches can be used at work, at home, and in the community. I do coach myself at times too.
I have benefited so much from receiving coaching that it was just a natural step for me to give back as a coach.
I now enjoy coaching founders, CEOs, social entrepreneurs, LGBTQI leaders and activists across the world or others who feel stuck and/or want to live more closely to their values. They are all a part of me.
With my coaching, my dream is that I will contribute in creating more sustainable organisations, more resilient leaders, and stronger movements. It is a privilege to support a number of incredible individuals to live in line with their values. I learn so much from each one of them and I look forward to learning so much more.
(I realise that training and receiving coaching can be expensive, but it does not need to be. There are a number of opportunities for low cost or even free coaching. I hope to do an article collecting these opportunities soon. In the meantime, feel free to reach out to me if you would like signposting).
To know more about me, you can check my profile on Medium or connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter.
