How launching a mentorship program got me into life coaching

By Olecia Christie

I'm not fond of titles. I much prefer character and conviction. For me, belief is the only real requirement for doing great things. A few years ago, I started using the hashtag #liveonpurpose on my social channels. I was determined to use my voice and my platforms, however small, to do some good. On a broader scale, this meant strategically aligning my goals with the person I wanted to be and the impact I wanted to make.

As a corporate communicator, I spent most of my days providing counsel to business leaders. Looking back, I realized I had stumbled into this role. I had no idea it was among the requirements for a role I had accepted to lead a small team of communicators. What began as a herky-jerky start to coaching, blossomed into a small but mighty team of advisors who planned high-impact conferences and even convinced the President to host the company's first ted-talk. Very soon, we would change the cultural landscape of an organization willing to embrace new ways of solving old challenges. We were devoted to humanizing our leaders and elevating the employee voice. The magic was, it worked.

I remember launching a mentorship program for high potentials across the organization. It was the first of its kind, so with that came all the challenges of approval and execution. But in the spirit of true innovation, we immersed ourselves as participants in the pilot project. This meant I would be randomly assigned a mentee in a more junior role within the organization. There was something remarkably exciting about mentoring, mainly because I had never done it before in any official capacity. It wasn't long before I received an email notification about my new mentee.

Jordan walked into our first session with an unusual combination of awkwardness, confidence, and unparalleled ambition. She knew exactly what she wanted but needed some help figuring out how she would get there. Six weeks of what would be one of my most memorable learning and unlearning experiences flew by. And before you knew it, we were hugging it out in the hallway as we exchanged notes of farewell and best wishes for the future. The future, in this instance, came reasonably quickly and was, as I expected, very bright.

Jordan would later go on to do great things, becoming the Vice President for Marketing and Analytics for a major corporation in Michigan. I was not the least surprised.

This would be the first of a trove of experiences that would later form my love for counsel and coaching. As a life coach, I use a unique form of talking therapy with strategic action planning and implementation to get you to a place where you are truly living on purpose.

What is Coaching?

The International Coaching Federation defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. In short, coaching is about empowering people to come up with their own answers. It requires active listening on my part and allows you to engage in the process of self-discovery.

Hit the button below to learn more about this one-of-a-kind, virtual, and in-person life coaching program.