This week's Coach in the Spotlight is Daniella Goldman! After a corporate career in law and business, Daniella retrained as a coach to better understand how she could help her clients to achieve even greater success in their careers. Read on to learn more about Daniella's journey!
I have always been interested in what motivates and inspires people- hence my qualifications in clinical psychology and law. After a twenty-eight-year corporate career in law and business, I wanted to understand more about what makes people operate the way they do and see if I could help people achieve even greater success in their business and personal lives through coaching. So, I started my ‘second career’ as a coach. As a former senior manager, having the option of coaching as part of my own career development would have been great, but coaching wasn’t available in the companies where I had worked at that time. Therefore, I would urge anyone in a management role to invest in themselves and invest in coaching for career enhancement, learning to work more effectively in a team, achieving job promotion and ultimate career success.
The wonderful thing about coaching is that it has validated so much of how I have lived my life so far- I will always maintain that your ‘attitude determines your altitude’ and that by having a SMART goal, you will eventually get to where you want to be. Coaching has made me understand myself even better and made me become a more active and intuitive listener. I have also found that by being a coach with extensive life and work experience, I can coach my clients with greater empathy and understanding of their present circumstances and the challenges they are presently facing.
Each day, I would set aside one or two hours to complete my coaching coursework and to practice my coaching with my fellow coaching academy students or with pro- bono ‘clients’. I also devoted most Saturdays to completing my paperwork and coursework, but it was easy to slot the course around my day-to-day day job activities, as the live online training sessions were scheduled in the evenings, or Saturday mornings.
I have really loved hearing from my pro-bono coaching practice ‘clients’ (after their coaching sessions with me) about their successes and have felt privileged when they wanted to share their various personal milestones and achievements with me.
I found the group mentoring sessions extremely helpful and insightful, as it was interesting to hear from other trainee coaches about their varied and sometimes challenging experiences with clients and how they managed specific situations, such as clients experiencing ‘imposter syndrome’. The reading materials suggested during the accelerator sessions were also especially useful in providing a greater perspective on my coaching journey.
I am a communications and business coach, and I have used coaching to expand on the current work that I do at through my business, London & Melrose. My coaching niche is to provide clients with tools and skills to achieve greater executive presence and executive impact in the work environment, as well as the ability to present themselves in front of a public audience, at a job interview, in front of a corporate board, or with the media.
I have a particular focus on careers and business development for mid to senior-level managers and have found it particularly gratifying to work with DE & I clients, clients returning to work after parental leave/career break and those wanting to reach their fullest career potential. I am honoured to soon be sharing some of my experience with the wonderful team supporting the 10,000 Black Interns Programme.
I’m fascinated by neuroplasticity and neuroscience and the research which surrounds this relatively new subject, particularly the work of Dr Caroline Leaf and her research into how our mind can continuously regenerate and develop new neural pathways, even into old age.
Life coaching is especially useful as it provides tools and skills to approach certain challenging situations differently and is a talking technique provided to the client with empathy.
If you only want to give advice, counselling, mentoring or therapy to clients - then coaching is not right for you, but if you want to help people become even better versions of themselves, or help people organise their thoughts and lives more productively through achieving their goals, then life coaching is the route for you.
Thank you Daniella for sharing your inspirational coaching journey with us!
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