My first piece of advice is to find a small community of like-minded people with whom you can share your ups and downs.

The importance of community

Transitions

I joined Meyler Campbell as Faculty just as I left my full-time role in a large professional services firm to start my own business. Transitions are often when we are at our most vulnerable and so, a time when we truly need community (and I don’t just mean job transitions). Quite simply, Meyler Campbell gave me a professional and collegial new set of friends who inducted me into teaching with grace, gentleness and rigour. My meetings with them, my questions to – and brilliant answers from – the wider Faculty group during that time were not only a source of learning but made me feel proud to belong to this warm, intelligent group of people. I never looked back and have widened my circle of friendships in the Meyler Campbell faculty group and found amongst them some of my dearest friends.

Professional and personal development

I have my own company but am also affiliated with a leadership development firm – Mobius Leadership – where I do much of my professional development, as well as client work. Most Mobius facilitators and coaches train together in the deeper skills required in our work – whether energy mastery, somatic work, deep facilitation techniques, Internal Family Systems work, etc. Because we train together, we understand one another at a deeper level. We also have a common language and skill set, and know what great looks like, having seen true mastery at work through incredible teachers and our colleagues. The result is that when we work together there is a strong bond and a unique flow.

We are beginning to do more learning together at Meyler Campbell – as coaching faculty, learning  together can ensure not only continued high standards of teaching and cutting edge understanding of developments in our field, but also deeper community.

Belonging

I believe in the power of diverse groups and teams, but when they work best, people feel they belong.  I agree with one of my teachers Thomas Huebl who says there are three fundamental human rights – to be, to belong, to become. When I worked for a large strategy consultancy I loved it, but the work I did with top teams and equipping leaders to drive change was considered a bit niche. The work was needed, but not always well understood by ‘mainstream’ consultants.  It isn’t as easy to calculate the return on investment in top team coaching as it is in cost cutting or system improvement.  Nonetheless, there was a small team of us doing this work and we banded together, had lunch together, shared client scenarios to get help, and attended courses together.  That helped a lot.  We often felt pressure to prove our worth – I am not sure that always helped us do our best work.  On the other hand, it may have made us better at times and there is a thrill in an ‘us vs them’ team – for a while.  But for sure, what I will say is we had a sense of community among us that was very strong and needed.

Advice for new coaches

My first piece of advice is to find a small community of like-minded people with whom you can share your ups and downs.  For me, the purpose of communities like this needs to be about learning together because that ensures a non-hierarchical environment, but learning is not all that happens!  Small supervision groups are fantastic for this.

Kirstan Marnane

Meyler Campbell Faculty Member; spent fifteen years working with CEOs and their teams, and previously as a leader of McKinsey’s flagship Remarkable Woman Program.