Author: jeniwag

These days, the world seems to us to be accelerating out of control (which, to be fair, it sounds like Earth is actually spinning faster). In the face of overwhelming planetary suffering, you would think that life would slow down.

But slowing down unfortunately hasn’t been our experience. All over the world, business demands to happen as usual, even as the humans who make business possible tamp down their emotions like baristas preparing to pull perfect shots of espresso. Many of us need espresso to keep up with the relentless pace of Business as Usual During Climate Crisis, Genocide, and the Descent into Fascism.

If we must drink coffee, we’d rather sit still together for a few minutes than take it in a paper cup to go. Over the past two months, it has been a blessing and a joy to see many of your faces in our Coaching Café spaces. Opening up free spaces to coaches, non-coaches, and the coaching-curious was an experiment for us this summer, and we’re incredibly grateful we went for it.

So far, the Coaching Café spaces have welcomed people from every continent except Antarctica (side note— if you know anyone from Antarctica who is curious about coaching, please put them in touch with us). Experienced coaches, aspiring coaches, and people who are just interested in what a little coaching can do for them gathered with us to share and learn in intimate online communal gatherings. We’re especially grateful for members of our community who joined us in the middle of the night!

Ten minutes. That’s how long a micro-coaching session is during the Coaching Café. We do an exercise called Coaching without a License, where people split into breakout rooms to “try out” coaching (some of them for the first time). Both of us got to experience the benefits of what it means to be coached. Ten minutes is all it takes to reconnect to a remembrance that the sacred essence of life is right at our fingertips, and we can access that wisdom and power with just a little compassion and support from another human being.

As summer winds down, we will be dancing, coaching, laughing, putting our toes in the sand and the dirt, and trying our hardest to spend little moments doing absolutely nothing, even if it is just for 10 minutes.

With love and care,

Briana & Jenny

Happy International Worker’s Day from Global Focus Coaching! This year we are reflecting on the meaning of May Day, a labor holiday celebrated around the world that commemorates unions protests in the United States, specifically the Chicago Haymarket Tragedy of 1886, where a bomb exploded in a crowd of civilians.

Eight people were accused of setting off the bomb, and seven sentenced to death, despite some of them not being present at the riot that day. Their trial was widely criticized as unfair and politically motivated— those accused of the bombing all held similar political beliefs that the capitalism system exploits workers and should be dismantled.

Their main demand? An eight-hour work day.

To this day, the Haymarket Tragedy is commemorated with the May 1 celebration of International Worker’s Day and is a time for expressions of global solidarity and labor rights. Ironically, this holiday is no longer officially celebrated in the United States because of public perceptions that labor organizers were dangerous radicals. During the Second Red Scare at the height of McCarthyism in the United States in the 1940’s and 1950’s, the US government created a new Labor Day in September to detach the holiday from its leftist origins as a part of the idealogical project of containing communism to combat the Soviet Union.

Does any of this sound familiar? What does this have to do with you, or with the coaching industry?

For one thing, most of us are coaching within a global capitalist context. Although coaching has many cultural origins (check out our Re-telling the History of Coaching post), much of the coaching industry is embedded in the modern workplace. In many cases, coaching is offered as a benefit to employees to improve their experiences. As the coaching industry rapidly expands, we also see more people portraying coaching as a shortcut that shields you from the capitalist context, offering snake oil promises of four-hour work weeks and six-figure monthly incomes (skip to minute 8:52 of this interview with Jenny to hear our thoughts on this).

For us, coaching isn’t a secret workaround to escape from wage capitalism. We’re not interested in protecting ourselves from unjust systems while everyone else continues to be crushed by them. Many of the coaches who learn with us work with clients who are directly tackling the issue of social and labor rights.  We view coaching a much-needed human skill that has been co-opted by the capitalist system but doesn’t belong to it.  As Briana loves to note, many of the “ills” that clients bring into coaching sessions are connected to the basic struggles of existing within a modern capitalist system and the values inherent to that system. As we continue to grow our understand of the facets of the human experience that can benefit from coaching, understanding our relationship to labor and our inherent human rights is essential.

As professionals, how do we offer coaching in a values-aligned manner while also acknowledging our real material needs for our livelihood? It’s important to us that we equip our coaches-in-training with more than just small business skills. A lot of business advice for new coaches advises you what to believe, and what not to feel. Don’t feel awkward talking about yourself. Don’t undervalue your services. Believe in your worth.

Both of us remember feeling frustrated with this type of advice. When we launched our first individual coaching practices, we had no idea how to run a business (spoiler alert: we’re still learning), and a lot of the advice out there felt inauthentic to who we were and how we wanted to show up in the world. For us, that process has been a long one, and at times, a messy and uncomfortable one. One of the most important ingredients for us in finding our voice has been time. The more we practice telling our own story, the more we understand the core of our message and the more people we find who resonate with it. Real talk, though: it’s been hard work.

Coaches who are launching their own practices navigate their own relationship to labor, money, and time as they run small businesses and find other ways to incorporate coaching professionally. During our coaching program, we dive into the deep feelings around our time, labor, and money, including fear, resentment, identity, and sense of worth— not as business liabilities to gloss over or “fix but as feelings to acknowledge and be deeply present with. It’s important to us that you walk away from our programs with the tools they need for deep inquiry about your own relationship to labor.

Wishing you all a happy May Day!

In solidarity,

Briana & Jenny

Remember when that article came out in Forbes about the impact of managers on our mental health? The article cites a Workforce Institute report that revealed that our direct supervisor at work has an equal impact on our mental health as a spouse, and a more significant impact than either our doctors or our therapists.

Take a moment to drink that in. Think about how much vetting goes into selecting a spouse. There is a reason that matchmaking has a rich history around the world, and that most people don’t enter into a long-term romantic commitment lightly. In some cases, a trusted elder has to investigate the candidate’s entire family, income, connections, and upbringing. In other cases, people will live together for decades before deciding to formalize things.

Most of us don’t choose our manager. And yet, so much of our time at work (which for many people, means our time on Earth) is dictated by who our supervisor is and how they approach their role. Leaders who are unable to regulate their own stress or have poor communication skills can have devastating impacts on the wellbeing of their co-workers and on their organization as a whole.

If you’re sitting there wondering “just how big of a problem is this?”, we would encourage you to take a moment to Google toxic boss. We’ll give you a moment to process.

So what are the origins of this problem? Why are so many managers… well, unskilled, at being managers? We spoke to an HR expert in the non-profit world, who shared their assessment:

“Most of the time, people get promoted because they are good at doing the jobs of the person who they will be managing. This doesn’t necessarily translate into skills or experience as a supervisor.”

A surprising number of organizations don’t implement 360 feedback processes or other systems for assessing the efficacy of managers. This means that while managers may be accountable to their boss, they aren’t necessarily accountable to their direct reports. It’s also common for managers to rise in the ranks of an organization without receiving any direct training on how to manage people.

So what’s the solution? We would argue that investing in soft skills training for leaders is essential to promote workplace wellbeing for all employees. In fact, this systemic issue was our main motivation for creating Fundamentals of Coaching, a leadership development program that teaches essential coaching skills to help people feel the joy, alignment, and connection we all need to flourish. We believe that when people thrive, organizations thrive. Equipping more people with coaching skills can reduce harm in the workplace and support everyone’s collective wellbeing.