While working at a large international NGO, after a meeting that included a conference call with unrealistic demands, mistrust, and a horrible boss, etc., a colleague closed the door after everyone had left, and simply and kindly asked me,
“Are you ok?”
I burst out crying, something I had never done before at work. I realized that it was all too much.
I had been to the edge of my limits before when it came to my professional life, and now, I knew so fundamentally that something had to change. The next day (I kid you not!), someone I had long admired called me and said, “I raised the money for a Director of Communications. Come on and apply.” I got that job, and it was a vital part of a healing journey that I’ve been on since the inception of how-matters.org in 2010.
I only share this story because we cannot address the hardest parts of our lives alone – professionally or personally. And that is why over the past year I have been developing my practice as a “coach” for nonprofit and philanthropy leaders.
I say “coach” in parentheses because that’s the closest description of this stream of my work, but it’s more than that. It’s deeply relational, and not transactional. To accompany people where their professional and personal journeys meet means showing up for them so that they can tell all of their truths without any fear of judgment or consequence. It means supporting people to find their own way forward.
There’s so much for us to heal from when it comes to organizational trauma and moral injury in our sector, let alone the older, more entrenched, global systems of oppression and violence we must navigate. I offer coaching to nonprofit and foundation leaders because we need individual actions within complex systems to shift hierarchical structures and dominant culture ways of working. This work is an acknowledgement that cutting ourselves off from the ambiguity, disappointment, and discomfort inherent in this work is what fuels isolation, burnout, a lack of creative thinking, and complicity in unjust systems.
As a coach for leaders and professionals in the global development sector, my goal is to welcome your unexplored or unexpressed emotions, recognize thought patterns that keep you stuck, and help you identify a way through. Along the way, I also allow myself to be affected, moved, questioned, challenged, and humbled by what I don’t know. Every single client has changed and healed me .
I don’t presume to have any unequivocal “answers” on what can heal the social good sector or shift organizational cultures, but I do know that we have to ask different questions of ourselves right now – and speak more truth to power.
Are you ready to reconnect to your deepest truths and motivations and live more in line with your personal values at work?
If you think I may be able to support you in a coaching relationship, please reach out at: email.howmatters [at] gmail [dot] com.
If you’d like to support my coaching practice (or my work more generally, including this blog), see my Patreon page: www.patreon.com/howmatters. (And while you’re at it, consider a donation to Coaching for Healing, Justice and Liberation, “the World’s Only Coaching Certification Program that has Decolonized Aspirations Led by Black, Indigenous and People of Color.”)
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