Susan Whitcomb is founder and president of The Academies, including Career Coach Academy, Job Search Academy & Leadership Coach Academy. She brings two decades of experience to her work as an author and speaker. People come away from Susan’s keynotes, trainings, and coaching encounters with an “I can do it!” perspective, helping them tap into the awareness, attitudes, and action plans that cause a life-changing shift from stagnant or stuck to unstoppable.
Motivation
Was there an event or observation that compelled you to consider coaching as a profession?
I had been in the resume writing business for about 10 years when I started hearing about this new thing called “coaching.” At one point, I was putting on a regional careers conference with a colleague of mine, who happened to have taken some coach training. One evening, I kept her up until the wee hours of the morning peppering her with questions about coaching. Shortly thereafter, I took a “taste test” course, which helped confirm my interest, and then I started working with a client to “try out” my “beginner” coaching skills. I remember getting off of the phone with the client, joy coursing through my veins, and literally squealing out loud, “I can’t believe they pay me to do this.”
I would say that if you have a keen interest in something, pay attention to that. Obviously, I had a keen interest in coaching. When you have that deep curiosity and fascination, it helps give you the energy and commitment to muscle through the learning curve or come up with the resources needed for training or be courageous when you’re faced with uncertainty!
What might be a typical (if there is such a thing) success story in coaching?
Clients typically come to a coach to help “fix” a particular problem (e.g., a new job, a promotion, a business win, an improved relationship, weight loss). A good coach will provide support to solve the problem. A great coach will provide support to stretch the person—to leverage strengths, broaden perspectives, build confidence, and buoy the ability to execute.
Clients come away from coaching ready and able to see new possibilities and approach their work-life more impervious to negativity.
How do you maintain a positive and supportive mindset when you engage in coaching?
For me, that positive mindset comes from my faith. My goal is to be amazed at the wonder my clients’ strengths and giftings, to see them “finished”—beyond the current limiting beliefs that might be holding them back. I believe with all of my being that we have EVERYTHING we need, right now, to be who we need to be and do what we need to do. This includes the resources, the people, the time, the ideas, the courage, the patience, the perseverance.
I wrote a “Coach’s Credo” that captures the mindset to support coaching:
The Coach’s Credo
Susan Britton Whitcomb, PCC
www.TheAcademies.com
Flourish: My role is to facilitate hope, options, choice, and meaningful action. My default mode, which is pervasive and contagious, reflects possibility and potential, optimism and overcoming, broadening and building, confidence and certainty, finding a way and moving forward, trusting that there will be solutions even if they are not readily apparent.
Trust: I will create a relationship that invites honesty, vulnerability, and safety, whether the conversation tends toward heavy and emotional or lighthearted and buoyant. Trust is the springboard for honesty, and honesty is essential in order for the client to make decisions that are right and significant.
Curiosity: I lead clients to explore the future—what’s truly important to them—rather than explain the past. My curiosity gives people time to hear themselves think, to have important insights, and to see with empowered eyes. I am as interested in the right questions as I am the right answers. I may have resources, experiences, and insights to share, but my way isn’t necessarily the client’s way.
Strengths: I draw out my client’s strengths and recognize those strengths as the gateway to achieve the goals they set, meet any challenge they encounter, and bring the greatest value to the company/people they interact with. I will coach the person, not the problem, and celebrate as they learn, grow, and flourish in the process.
Strategic: I engage clients in the whole of their lives as it relates to their career, including considering how their goals impact managers, coworkers, customers, family, friends, community. I view the client’s current challenges in the context of the bigger picture, and see those circumstances as an adventurous invitation to bridge the gap better where they are and where they want to be.
Change: I recognize that clients come to coaching because they want something different in their lives, and that the “different” won’t materialize unless they do things differently—whether less of, more of, instead of, or in addition to. I expect, invite, and challenge my clients to experiment with and sustain actions that will move them toward, and not away from/delayed from, their dreams and goals.
How has coaching others changed you?
To change any sort of behavior, I remind myself that we need to give ourselves good “P.R.”—with P.R. standing for Positivity and Repetition. We need to wire new neural pathways and we need to do it repeatedly. The positivity covers feelings, thinking, and actions—all three must be firing or we’ll undermine our success. The “repeatedly” part is often the downfall when people are trying to make changes. Because I get to work with people on a regular basis, the “repeatedly” is built into my daily routine—I reinforce what I know about coaching by being a coach (pretty cool!). Thus, the neural pathways of possibility and perseverance are hard-wired into me.
Operations
At some point you decided to teach others how to coach. What prompted this decision?
When I went to look for coach training for myself back in the early 2000’s, there were a lot of life coaching and leadership coach training programs, but virtually nothing for career coach training. Since careers/job search was my world back then, I decided (while taking my foundational coach training program) to launch Career Coach Academy (now The Academies). I was doing my foundational coach training with Christopher McCluskey and Judy Santos at the time (Christopher now runs Professional Christian Coaching Institute), and Judy Santos mentored me through the development of the curriculum as I was learning. I literally jumped in to the deep end of the waters by tackling a coach training program as quickly as I did, but I was in love with coaching and in love with what it was doing in my life, so it seemed like the right thing to do!
You’ve started businesses that include teaching coaching, writing, speaking, consulting, developing teams. Delivering these services and products required an administrative structure called a business, which also included many things, planning, organizing, licensing, publishing financial management, personnel management, legal. Were any of the tasks required to accomplish these operational duties outside of your range of expertise? How did you address these responsibilities?
Many of the tasks of running a business were outside of my range of expertise, and, outside of my comfort zone! One lesson every entrepreneur needs to learn quickly is this: everything is learnable. You can learn to be a better strategic planner. You can learn how to market. You can learn how to engage with people to close a sale with integrity and heart. You can learn how to read a financial statement. You can learn how to operate a back-end shopping cart. You can learn how to hire subcontractors and consultants. You can learn how to delegate. You can learn how to manage people. You can learn.
Marketing
The word-of-mouth referral method is reputed to be the best marketing tool available in coaching. Is this true in your experience?
Word-of-mouth is certainly a wonderful marketing tool. To that, I would add that one-to-many (you, as the expert, standing in front of a crowd of interested prospects) and one-on-one interactions (you, face-to-face or phone-to-phone with an interested prospect) are perhaps equally powerful. That said, I would also say that IF a person feels called to become a coach and run a coaching business, look to leveraging your strengths when it comes to marketing. If you love public speak, public speak to market your business. If you love to write, blog to market your business. If you love to project-manage things, create sequences and systems to market your business.
What is the second best marketing tool for your business?
[see above]
I won’t ask for your full strategy because I don’t want you to give away information that provides you with a natural advantage. But, did you develop a detailed strategy early in your business planning process, or did you allow it to evolve over time?
My Myers-Briggs personality type is INFP, so I operated “by the seat of my pants” for quite a while. As the business has grown, I’ve had to learn how to be more strategic and detailed, and I’ve appreciated how this has stretched me in my own professional development. I’ve found that working with my own business coach has been immensely helpful. My business has worked with Mike Alpert for a number of years (www.mikealpertcoaching.com — Mike is affiliated with The Brian Tracy Focal Point Coaching organization). I also know from a brain-based perspective (one of my passions) that our brains love specificity. If you tell your brain, I make $10,000 or $100,000 or $1,000,000 a year, it will set to work looking for ways to “solve” for that statement. In this regard, detail is, indeed, important.
Do you envision a time when coaching will become institutionalized? In other words, that it will have a formal employee-role in organizations. Would this be a good thing, or maybe not?
There are a number of corporations, non-profits, and governmental agencies that already employ coaching, with impressive results. My company has been doing more and more work in training internal coaches for corporations, healthcare organizations, and business schools. Every employer is looking for the silver bullet in order to have engaged and productive employees. More than any other model, the coaching paradigm can accomplish that. So, yes, I see the future of coaching growing.
