My budding calling

One month before my 17th birthday I read the following metaphor: “Life is a war, we are all warriors, we throw battles everyday and we can either win or lose those battles.” - I felt such a strong resistance to these words that it pushed to my awareness a whole new metaphor:

 ‘I am not a warrior, I am a guide.
I don’t fight but I show the way forward.
I hold the lantern and people come to me, and shed the light and they start seeing their paths clearer and they choose where they want to go’

 I wrote that down in my journal and I painted the image in my mind and heart. I could say that the image is still with me but it feels more like… it is me. Being the guide that shows the way forward is my calling.

 When I told my aunt about that she called it “coaching” and I didn’t know what it was so in the following year I learned about coaching from Pawel Sopkowski at the open day of CoachWise, the first coaching academy in Poland. The event was free to attend but it took me 5 hours to travel to Warsaw from my little town in southern Poland.

I then completed ILM7 certification in executive coaching in 2013 after a year of shadowing Dr David Tee who taught the course, was my coaching supervisor and who also supervised my dissertation research: Are British Organisations ready for young executive coaches?

Nurturing my calling as a budding coach

Living in alignment with my values, with the mission and the sense of calling makes me feel peaceful. I illustrated my values and behaviours that demonstrate those values to me in the drawing below:

 It is the result of a Self-Mapping exercise from the book “Life Mapping”  by Brian Mayne. Dr Dave Tee gave me that book in 2014. He was the first one to explain to me what executive coaching is about, from Dr Dave Tee I learnt about Dr Anthony Grant, Prof Stephen Palmer, Dr Alison Whybrow and Jonathan Passmore. Thanks to Dr Tee I got involved in the Association for Coaching and helped to organise the international coaching conference in Budapest (2014).

After the Tony Robbins live event “Unleash the Giant Within” in 2015 I studied works of Napoleon Hill and arrived to this mission statement:

My pathless path as an empowering coach

Being a coach on a mission isn’t easy. For years I tried to do one-to-one coaching work, to make a business out of that and work as a coach full-time. It felt like I knew enough about how to coach but not enough about the business side to make it a success. When I let go of solo-entrepreneurship in 2018 I ended up in a company that turned me from a HR-trainee into an executive coach to the eccentric leader, a millionaire whose son races in F1. After our first coaching session he told me that “it was the most valuable conversation that he’s had in the last three years”. It was one of the most beautiful highlights of my coaching journey.

After that gig I had to take a break and reflect on my practice, my dreams, my identity again. I’ve just always been that kid who heard a lot of:

“talking to you has changed my life”

“I haven’t asked myself that question ever before”

“I have never been open like that with anybody”

I think that the innocent and pure kid in me was overly idealistic and unrealistic back then. But that’s how kids are, that’s their nature. Balancing my internal kiddo with an adult side of me was a painful process. I learnt the hard way that it is not true “to do what you love and the money will come”.

Diversifying to serve my calling to empowerment and coaching

There is another side of calling that not many people seem to talk about. That is… the fact that once you know your calling - you have to accept it. You cannot decline that calling. It is an internal imperative and directive for life, as if someone has decided for you a long time ago that there is a mission for you. As if you have no other choice but to be and do what you’re called to.

My mission is to serve. And for now,

• Coaching one-to-one has now turned into creating content that can be scaled.

• A full-time job has become the way to sustain my passion and living with the calling to contribute and empower people with power.  

My core insights a decade later, and feedforward for budding coaches

I believe that some people are born coaches and that is what they will do forever. They are like the guides that hold the lantern for others so those who come closer can see their paths clearer.

Born coaches will NOT be able to decline that calling. They might try to mask it, deny it, name it differently or find expression of it by becoming mothers, fathers, teachers, priests, artists, mentors, consultants, business leaders and so on. Some of those coaches will turn into professionals who integrate their coaching mission into their business but that takes a whole new set of skills.

Therefore if I was to give an advice to my 17-year-old self on her birthday it would be: “create content that is inspired by your life experience and way of thinking, document your challenges and victories, share stories and dreams, use technology to carry your message to those who appreciate inspiration, different perspective, positive energy and authenticity. Create your own YouTube channel and learn how to edit and publish your videos, be an actress and director in your creative outlet. Build a community and teach what you know and never ever stop learning about what makes life so wonderful and worth living”.

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Maggie Dobosz - ILM7 certified executive coach (active: 2013-2018), accredited with Association for Coaching (2015-2019). NLP Practitioner with BSc Psychology and MBA degrees from UK universities. Creates personal development content for analytical deep thinkers. Lives near Stavanger, Norway.