Coach in the Spotlight - Tania Hummel

I have always considered myself to be a lucky person.  By this I mean that good things simply ‘turned up’ as if fated.   Bad things too, mind, but I don’t like to dwell on those… Carl Jung once said that ‘until you make the unconscious, conscious, it will control your life, and you will call it fate”.

My last role had been as Global HR Director for a large publishing company and over time, it had taken me further and further away from what I felt I was good at.  After a tumultuous few years, where I had been presented with opportunity after opportunity to learn and grow (a useful way of reframing a time full of significant and unpleasant challenges), my role was relocated to the US.  I found myself outside of the organisation I had devoted my energies to over the previous 8 years, wondering what on earth to do next.  

The only thing I knew was that I didn’t want to go back into corporate life any time soon.
For the first time ever, I had the luxury of time to think and to choose, cushioned by savings and a 9-month retainer with my former employer.   I was in dire need of some new goals, but this time, they needed to be my goals - ones I had consciously chosen for myself.  The trouble was, that I had no idea where to start.

The first thing I did was to get my house in order.  Literally.  Our home hadn’t quite fallen to wrack and ruin, but I hadn’t been around to notice how jaded and faded it had become.  Whilst project managing it’s complete restoration, I had some time to breathe, so between the fun of choosing tiles, paint and finishes, my only other priority was getting out of the house and meeting and talking to lots of people.   

Eventually, my adventures led me to the 2 day taster with the Coaching Academy.   I wanted something experiential and practical, with tools I could put into practice immediately. I already understood the basics of being a coach, having conducted many hundreds of interviews when recruiting as part of my job.

I thought I wasn’t half bad at building rapport, asking open questions and matching and mirroring.  I didn’t really know what I didn’t know, but the idea of doing work on myself whilst learning to coach others really appealed and so I chose to do the Personal Performance qualification along with the Executive and Corporate.   

I’m a firm believer that before you unleash yourself on others, you need to work on yourself, and that’s exactly what the coaching training has done for me. I learnt an awful lot about myself, my beliefs, my self-talk and how I can unwittingly sabotage my best efforts.   I also launched myself into coaching everyone I knew – if it had a pulse, I coached it, or offered to!  Fortunately, I had no shortage of volunteers and was able to earn some money from delivering workshops and coaching individuals.

From my experiences coaching a variety of individuals with mainly career-related issues, I realised that I didn’t listen as well as I could, usually formulating my response whilst the other person was speaking, and looking for the opportunity to jump in and interrupt.  Learning to stay present and focus on my client has been one of the best things I’ve learnt as it helps me choose to be mindful when I might otherwise be mindless and miss something really important. It’s been a real discovery that I can choose to be really disciplined when I want to be.

I completed both the Personal Development and the Executive and Corporate Coaching qualifications in just one year.    It’s true that I’ve burned through a lot of my savings to do that, but I knew that if I went back to a job anything like the one I’d left, it would be all encompassing and I just wouldn’t have the time. Helping people figure out what their hopes and dreams are, and then moving them to take action feels like too much of a privilege and a responsibility and I didn’t want to take any shortcuts.  

I knew when my last job ended that I wanted to earn a living in a much more rewarding way.  Coaching has given me options I simply didn’t have before.   Finding out what I wanted, and creating an action plan to get there has been revolutionary for me.  Instead of going where ‘luck’ might take me, I’ve learnt to make my own luck and I have to say, it feels good!