This week's Coach in the Spotlight is one of our graduate coaches Lina Jankauskaite who transitioned from providing interpreting services in the public sector to becoming a life coach. She shares how this career change revitalised her life, bringing renewed purpose and energy. Join us to hear Maria's inspiring story and insights on finding fulfilment through reinvention.
Life itself led me to coaching. For over a decade, I have provided interpreting services to the public sector. It was a comfortable position, a job I knew inside out. Being self-employed, I was able to juggle my time to earn my BSc in Psychology whilst working and take some time off for the longer trips that I had dreamt of for years. However, the combination of the comfort of my occupation, lack of growth areas within it, and all the unused skills and knowledge that I carried around led me to feel unfulfilled and slightly depressed. I spent 2021/2022 going to work and coming home to retreat to my comfy seat and play Sudoku. Quite literally.
At the end of 2022, I had a wonderful conversation with a friend. A conversation about life, during which he spoke of a Life Coach he was working with. He said getting himself a Life Coach was the best decision he has ever made. He said it transformed his life. I suddenly realised that I felt so low because I wasn’t living up to my lifelong desire to make a genuine difference and that it was the source of my feeling that I wasn’t living the life I was meant to live that was getting me down. That’s when I remembered having encountered The Coaching Academy some 12-13 years previously. The rest is, as they say, history.
First and foremost, from the moment I started my coaching training, life came back into me. I know it sounds like an overstatement. But that’s the only way I can describe it. I didn’t even need to delete the Sudoku app to not go back to it; I simply didn’t have any desire any longer because, suddenly, my horizons have become so much broader. I am still baffled today at how swiftly the change happened. I could finally envisage the bridge from where I was to where I always dreamt of being, whereas previously, however I looked at it, the abyss seemed unconquerable. Since then, I started seeing opportunities around every corner and had so many firsts that I lost track of them. It’s a wonderful way to exist of which otherwise I wouldn’t have known.
Around 2010-2011, I attended a live two-day event by The Coaching Academy in Birmingham. It was not the right time, but I always stayed on The Coaching Academy's mailing list. After the conversation with my friend, I sought out The Coaching Academy, attended a couple of free online coach training taster events, saw the quality and depth that they deliver, and was left with no doubt in my mind that I wanted to embark on the Life Coaching Diploma.
It fitted in brilliantly. I could study the self-study portion of the course anytime, anywhere, and the live sessions were very conveniently ‘slotted’ with plenty of notice, allowing me to plan around them easily.
I cannot pick out what was ‘the best’ as the whole training experience truly exceeded any of my expectations. The resources presented in various mediums – written form, video, audio – cater to every preference as well as different often ‘on the go’ situations. The volume and depth of the resources is astounding. The availability of a personal mentor and accessibility of the support team, if I ever had any technical or otherwise questions, was spot on. And the trainers… Well, all I can say is that I will forever aspire to one day become of the calibre that Coaching Academy trainers demonstrated.
I use my coaching skills to assist my clients in their self-discovery. Each client is different, and the same skills can require a level of adaptation. I also found that my coaching training and skills made me a better listener and better silence and space holder in my other-than-coaching interactions.
To facilitate self-discovery, my favourite question is the one referred to as The Rocking Chair Test, ‘Imagine yourself at the age of ninety. You’re sitting in your favourite rocking chair, looking out into the horizon, and re-running the film of your life well lived in your head. Tell me about it. What does it look like?’ followed by silence. I found that this exercise can bring out all sorts of emotions. I then help the clients safely bridge the ‘now’ and the vision they created using a tool I developed and named ‘A route to decision’. It is designed to help the client to holistically weigh up the risk-reward balance in terms of what they can tolerate at any given moment of their life when deciding what (and if) actions to take to get that little bit closer to where they want to be.
The feedback is varied in its level of emotional expression, but it is safe to say that all the feedback I receive can be summed up as ‘unstuck.’ Unstuck in terms of actions my clients finally brace themselves to take, whether in their professional or personal life, unstuck emotionally, unstuck in their previously rigid self-image.
At the risk of repeating myself, I can say that the most rewarding part was that it brought life back into my existence. It expanded my mindset. It taught me how to apply my psychology knowledge, which I gained in an academic setting and didn’t quite know what to do with them in real life. It connected me with many interesting, inspiring people with whom we continue connected. It allowed me to experience what it feels like to have helped another person discover the power within them that they didn’t realise they had.
The Coaching Academy was established in 1999, and is now the world's largest coaching school.
In that time we have trained over 14,000 people to become life coaches.
We are accredited by the International Coach Federation and the Association for Coaching, and we're rated 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot.
