How I became an executive coach

Life plays with us — sometimes it gives us bitter moments, others it’s kind and unexpectedly places beautiful opportunities in our path. That’s what happened to me when I became an Executive Coach.

I practice Linguistic Empathy and I expect you to do the same. I am not a native English-speaker, my English is not perfect.

Becoming a coach – and I’ve never made a secret of it – wasn’t my first choice. Shortly after arriving in Jerusalem, I realized that continuing to work as an intercultural trainer was out of the question. Too much tension, too many moral dilemmas.

I wasn’t lacking things to do (I never have). Still, I was disappointed to have to put my career on hold. I had just started working again (the kind of work that brings in money, to be clear) after a fifteen years pause. The idea of having to stop frustrated me.

That’s when I thought of coaching. A short training (about a year on average), online, and complementary to my role as an intercultural trainer. I also thought that working as a coach would give me legitimacy and structure in supporting expatriate women who had long been part of my international community and often reached out to me with all sorts of questions.

I chose to train as a life coach, and within the program, there were sessions dedicated to specific niches: intercultural coaching (mine!!!), spiritual coaching, career coaching, etc. In truth, I didn’t find those specific sessions particularly useful. What was incredibly helpful, however, was the signal I received during practice: out of the five women I coached, all five wanted to focus on their careers. Portable ones — since they were all accompanying spouses.

That was a sign. Not only had I struggled enormously to get my professional life back on track after years of pause, and was feeling the frustration of leaving a country where I had just begun working at a good pace: I was now starting out in coaching with people who wanted to work on those same issues.

That’s how my coaching career started to develop in the area commonly referred to as “career coaching.” Later, when I moved to Jakarta and resumed my original work as an intercultural trainer, applying coaching techniques when training various managers and their families helped make those moments far more complete, professional, and empathetic

I had never set foot in so many companies in my life as I did in Jakarta. I worked as a trainer in the offices of Merck, Mars, Royal Canin, BASF, GSK, Bayer, Prudential, Heineken, Coats… And I had no idea how useful this experience would be just a few years later, when I was invited to a job interview.

One of those moments you need to pinch yourself to make sure it’s real. Because it was an interesting, stimulating offer—well-paid, with great development potential. The only problem (for me): they wanted me as an Executive Coach.

Just hearing the term Executive Coach sent shivers down my spine. I had always felt very distant from everything related to the private and commercial sector — it just didn’t feel like my world. Having spent my whole life abroad in the humanitarian field, corporate themes felt light-years away. The one exception: working with corporate managers on intercultural issues, which had always and unfailingly fascinated me.

Thankfully, the agency offering me the contract saw things differently. They believed that with my intercultural coaching experience, I was perfectly positioned to work as an Executive Coach. All they needed was my PCC accreditation from the International Coaching Federation and my experience as a multilingual intercultural coach. I told myself: let’s give it a try.

And that’s how I became an Executive Coach. After 150 sessions with managers of all levels, genders, companies, and nationalities, I’ve become much more confident — and most of all, I’ve learned so much about the dynamics within international corporate settings. I immediately understood that my experience was enough, because the issues that arise in corporate life always tie back to the theme I’ve been working on for what feels like forever: individual’s identities in relation to others.

Me—the one who thought she wasn’t cut out to work with companies, who was almost embarrassed to publish a profile in a field full of suit-and-tie (or power-suit) coaches radiating confidence in corporate dynamics—I now find myself with almost too many clients to handle. Managers choose me because I’ve lived in many countries, and for them, that’s a guarantee of deep human experience. My intercultural approach during sessions is highly valued. And my ability to pick up on nuances — honed over years of listening to people from all walks of life and backgrounds — always pays off.

I had to change my mind. And sometimes, changing your mind is a beautiful thing.

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