Leadership sometimes feels like a constant act of shapeshifting.

In a single day, you are a mentor for your team, a peer to your colleagues, a subordinate to your bosses. 

You are called to be a strategist who knows the right path forward, a diplomat navigating politics with astuteness, a taskmaster who gets his team members to deliver, and sometimes even a friend trying to preserve relationships while pushing back on ideas or giving feedback.

These roles come with different complexities and priorities. To top it all up, you are called to not feel drained when you get home after all this, and be there with your family. This is the reality. 

This sometimes results in a state of internal fragmentation. Each role you play pulls a different piece of you forward, leaving the rest behind.

You feel scattered, you feel like you are constantly putting out fires, and you feel the weight of being the one who is supposed to have it all figured out.

This last part is especially true for leaders who are technically adept and have been promoted into managerial roles. Their identity and sense of value have been built on their personal expertise, on being the one who has the best answer. Letting go of this attachment and sourcing wisdom from the collective expertise of their team can be a long and challenging learning curve.

Themes like strategic communication, preserving relationships, and making politically aware decisions form a significant part of coaching.

What happens inside these coaching conversations is not as straightforward as finding a better strategy to manage these competing roles. Preceding that clarity is the seeing/perceiving the situation differently, with more resolution and nuance.

Coaching provides the safe space to explore all these, while also challenging and stretching the way you perceive and process these situations, and yourself within them. It is an invitation to stop trying to juggle the pieces of a fragmented self, and instead, to find the one, whole, and undivided self that connects through everything. 

This can show up in daily life as the difference between rehearsing a difficult conversation for hours and going in with a sense of calm clarity. Or the change from bringing the stress of your day home with you to being fully present with your family.

Without a change in perception, any change in behavior will feel unnatural and will be unsustainable in the long-term. 

With a change in how you see things, you can be more of yourself rather than be someone else, while still doing things differently. Because when things look different, then different things make sense for you to do.