What is Self-Coaching and How To Do It - With Sarah Brown
Jul 15, 2021Tom Bailey, founder of Succeed Through Speaking, interviews Sarah Brown.
After 30 years of corporate work, most recently as Managing Director with Accenture, Dr. Sarah E. Brown retired to focus on helping female professionals and entrepreneurs get the coaching, support, and tools they need to make and pursue career choices that will help them be happy, successful, and understood at work. She has a Ph.D. in Psycho Educational Processes and over 25 years of Talent Management experiences. She lives in Wilmington, DE, USA where she enjoys rowing and romping through the woods with her red standard poodle Maharani.
Why you've got to check out Sarah's episode:
- Discover how Sarah helps female entrepreneur and solopreneurs.
- The biggest challenge they typically face is staying on track to achieve their biggest goals when it comes to growing their business.
- How important it is to be able to decide which big goals to go after and how to take effective action without the fear, and how to push through any obstacles that appear.
- It is important to recognise you have to be able to do it yourself, but you are not going to be able to do it alone.
- Get access to a free chapter of Sarah's book which will help you figure out what makes you unique and how you can craft goals to support you and your business going forward.
Resources / Links
Transcript
Tom Bailey: Hello and welcome to Succeed Through Speaking the place for experts and entrepreneurs who want high value ideas to boost business results.
Tom Bailey: Hello, I'm Tom Bailey. And in today's episode, I'll be getting to know Sarah Brown, who is the founder of book view. She's a speaker author and the host of the KTS success factor podcast. So, Sarah, hello, and a very warm welcome to today's episode.
Sarah Brown: Thank you so much. It's great to be here.
Tom Bailey: I really appreciate you coming along and whereabouts are you based right now?
Sarah Brown: Wilmington Delaware in the Mid-Atlantic area of the U.S.
Tom Bailey: Awesome. Thank you so much. And I'm just gonna share a little bit more about you before we do get started. So, Sarah helps female professionals and entrepreneurs to get coaching, support and tools. They need to make career choices that will help them be happy, successful, and understood at work. She also has a PhD in psychoeducational processes. And over 25 years of talent management experience, the title for today's episode is What Is Self Coaching And How Do I Do It? And Sarah is going to show us how to do that in just seven minutes. So, question number one today ise, who are your ideal clients?
Sarah Brown: My ideal client is a female entrepreneur or solarpreneur.
Tom Bailey: Fantastic. Nice and succinct, which I love. And what is the biggest challenge that they typically face?
Sarah Brown: She faces the challenge of staying on track to achieve big goals for her business, because she has what we call an only, or a lonely she's at the top of a business. She has few peers and very little support and mentoring to help her figure out how to move her business forward.
Tom Bailey: Yeah, completely understood. And I guess I, it can be quite isolating up there, but what are the impact can that have on her or the business?
Sarah Brown: Well, first thing is that she doesn't develop any big goals because she doesn't know what will move the business forward, or she just can't figure it out. Or she flounders and waffles on taking any action and making a commitment to it. Or she takes action, but she's doing it while all bundled up with anxiety and fear, which winds up being totally ineffective action, or she gets completely stopped when she hits that first obstacle.
Tom Bailey: Yeah, completely understood. So, not the ideal place to be. So, what advice would you give her to get started on this journey
Sarah Brown: To recognize that she has to do it herself? But she cannot do it alone. There's a story about one of the famous presidents in the United States called Abraham Lincoln. He worked on something called the Emancipation Proclamation, which was the major step forward in eliminating slavery in this country. And when he was working on that, he called a friend of his, by the name of Leonard Stiff to help him be a sounding board. And he went up one side and down the other, and what actions should I take? What should I include? What territories should be in? How far should I go and making this proclamation, when should I do it, all of this stuff. And at the end of this process, he said, thank you very much. I have my answer. And Leonard Stiff walked out of the room. And he recalled later that he had never, ever said a word there's something that really happens when we take control of the process, but we do it in the presence of another human being. We make mammoth steps forward.
Tom Bailey: Fantastic. Great advice. And like you said, just having that sounding board or somebody to speak to, you can really help open up those loops in our brain. So given that, what do you have any valuable resources or anything that you can offer to really help people move forward?
Sarah Brown: I do. One of the resources that I have is a chapter from one of my books called let your personality be your career guide, which you can get at sarahebrown.com. And in this chapter, I can tell, I have exercises that you can use to get in touch with who you are uniquely. What your interests are, what your strengths are, and more importantly, what your needs are. And with this information, you can start to craft goals that are unique to you, and that will support you going forward. You can figure out the kinds of tasks that you need to outsource, because they're not in line with who you are. And more importantly, you can get in touch with the unique support that you need. That's in line with your unique needs.
Tom Bailey: Incredible sounds extremely useful. And that's from Sarahebrown.com and I'll put the link to that in my show notes as well for you now, quick question onto the subject of you for a moment. And that is, what would you say is one of your greatest either mistakes or failures you've made either in life or business and what did you learn?
Sarah Brown: When I was in my corporate roles, I operated for many, many years under the illusion that competence was all that mattered. If I did a good job, I was going to get recognized. I was going to get promoted and I didn't have to do the hard work of figuring out what it is I wanted asking for it. And then going after it, Now I gradually learned that competence was not all that, that mattered and that I had to do something about it, but there was still a bit of that residual thinking when I retired and started my own business. And one of it was is that I couldn't do it all myself. And there were things are just flat, one good at like marketing, It's not in line with my unique personality. So, I had to learn A: ask for help and B: don't do the things that I'm really not uniquely good at outsource it, or reframe it to be more in line with my personality.
Tom Bailey: Excellent, great advice again. And the last one from me today is what is the one question that I should have asked you that will also give some great value to our audience.
Sarah Brown: What is self coaching? Because I think that is actually one of the answers to a lot of what entrepreneurs and solopreneurs face. And by that, I mean, owning your responsibility, owning the process. And owning the mechanism by which you engage with another human being. It goes back to the story that I told you about Abraham Lincoln. He couldn't do it alone, but he took responsibility for the process. He took responsibility for driving through and he took responsibility for the outcomes. If you do that, that's why I call it self coaching. You're not doing it alone, but you are doing it yourself. You can hand the tools and the process to anyone who knows and cares about you, who can serve as your coach. And then you can get clear about goals. You can find ways around obstacles and you can get the support you need to stay on track.
Tom Bailey: Amazing Sarah such great value from your episode today. I really appreciate you coming along and sharing your expertise with this audience.
Sarah Brown: It was a pleasure. Thank you.
